The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  What a showoffy bunch! A young, dark-haired woman steps onstage and does a dignified little step. Once she leaves, a hefty middle-aged lady jumps up and turns up the heat a notch or two. “That’s Jackie’s mom,” a man standing beside me up by the rafters says. “She’s one of the best stepdance teachers around.” Then Spoon Boy takes over. Gerry Deveau of Belle Cote is no boy; he’s middle-aged, a steeple-jack I’m told. He also plays spoons. He plays them off his thigh, on his knee, elbow and back of his fist and off his noggin. I’m waiting for the hook to materialize from offstage. Then it dawns on me: I’m in the presence of greatness, of a sort. In the front row, five middle-aged women who have to be sisters sit there impassively, only their bouncing feet revealing their pleasure. A couple of old girls in the front get up and prance around. “Drive ’er, Gerry,” yells a young guy over and over again. One of the spoons goes flying into the audience. Deveaux breaks into this strange little jig and the crowd goes wild.

  Throughout the concert I catch glimpses of David MacDonald bustling here and there. At intermission he stands still long enough to announce, in a fashion, the other upcoming dances in the area. “Who’s up at South West Margaree? The Gabriel? Who’s up at West Mabou? Judique? What about Inverness? Anybody know who’s at Glendale? Jeez, am I actually going to have to prepare for this?”

  For the finale the stage is filled: Dunn, both MacIsaacs, Chiasson and a skinny kid I seem to recognize. Wait one minute, that’s the groundskeeper. He must be all of fifteen, can’t even grow sideburns. Can play, though. They run through jigs, reels, strathspeys—I have no idea which is which—effortlessly, without a break. From where I sit I see one of Archie Neil’s legs twitching as the bows fly. He’s clapping madly like everybody else at the finish. Everyone piles outside. A few men stand in clusters in the parking lot sipping from mysterious bottles. I cool off with an Orange Crush and fall into conversation with a couple from some Ontario town. Warm now, with a full moon over the mountains, which seems to perfectly suit their reverie about the big-band dances they used to go to during the war years.

  Back inside, Dunn and the others are already at it. The action on the dance floor baffles me: partners divide, come together, parade to the end of the room, then part again—men on one side, women on the other—holding hands and doing these little solos, back straight, head unwavering, feet moving faster than bejesus. Within the discipline of the form there is room for individuality: a shuffle of the shoulders, an elaborate little arm movement or dip of the hips, some flashy footwork—these are the hallmarks of style.

  “Basically every little place around here has their own step,” explains Jim MacDonald, a thinner version of brother Dave, who works the pop stand. “There’s a Whycocomagh Set, a Mabou Set, a Judique Set, a Margaree Set. Every set has three figures—two jigs and a reel. During the jig you just stand there shuffling your feet. The reel is a lot more intricate. But it’s still easy: toe, heel, toe, hop, toe, toe,” he says, demonstrating. When I look as confused as ever he claps me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. A lot of people just walk through it.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried,” I say. “You won’t see me out there. Not a chance in hell.”

  A whippet-thin teenager materializes on the dance floor floating with startling lightness and speed. Someone tells me he is Joel Chiasson from Chéticamp, maybe the best stepdancer on the island. Cries of “Atta boy, Jo-el” and “Yeeehaw!” carry over the music. When he finishes a cheer goes up, but he’s already at the pop stand asking Jim MacDonald, “Ya got any 7-Up?”

  By the time I turn back, the dance floor roils with old-timers, high-stepping teenagers, middle-aged ladies in Minnie Pearl dresses. A few feet away I hear a lanky, white-haired senior who looks like he just walked off a golf course say this is the third dance he’s been to tonight and the third time he’s had to change his shirt. He’s right: sweat drips off everybody. I feel a hand on my arm and—oh my God!—Hilda Chiasson is asking would I like to join her in an Inverness Set.

  Now, I love music, and am coordinated enough. But when the two elements come together on the dance floor, well, I just don’t know, somehow I’m instantly back in high school shuffling like Quasimodo around the gym, certain that everyone in the room is staring gape-mouthed. But before I can think of an excuse I’m out there.

  It begins innocently enough. I manage to make it through the promenade part and the spin thing without maiming myself or any of the other dancers. Everyone smiles indulgently when it comes time to switch partners and I end up going in the wrong direction for two choruses before I can get turned back around. Then the reel, when the men and women step back to separate sides, hold hands and solo. This is where you’re supposed to break bad. Jim MacDonald’s voice echoes through my head. You just stand there shuffling your feet. I try to do it, all right. But what in God’s name is happening? I’m picking up speed at an alarming rate, my feet weaving faster and faster, sliding back and forth like, I imagine, a Celtic James Brown. Sweat pours down my spine. I am prancing around on my toes with every muscle in my body tensed, and my calves start to ache.

  It’s as if I am in some bizarre spirit world—let’s call it the Land Without Rhythm, the place occupied by Baptists, Reform Party members and just about every white male who never owned a motorcycle. Where “Shake Your Bootie” is always playing. Hilda, fanning herself with a piece of paper as she floats easily about six feet away, watches with growing alarm. When we come together again she lies badly about how well I’m doing. The tune finally ends and she says something about being warm. “See, nobody was looking at you,” she whispers as we head for the sidelines. Hilda, I got news for you!

  I stumble towards the pop stand to replenish lost body fluids. The giddy feeling—or maybe it’s the sugar buzz from all that pop—is still there a few minutes later, behind the wheel in my car. The fog is so thick that the high beams don’t even cut through it. Otherwise not a light anywhere. I realize I am probably lost.

  Stands a lone man, out on the highway.

  PART THREE

  Show Me the Way to Go Home

  Be the current against us, what

  matters it? Be it in our favour,

  we are carried hence, to what

  place or for what purpose?

  Joshua Slocum

  Eight

  The Last Best Place

  I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW TO FIND IT, THAT SPOT WHERE THE AFTERNOON LIGHT looks the way you always imagined it should. Where the most heartbreaking strain of music you’ve ever heard floats from nowhere through an open window at two in the morning. Where your rhythm perfectly matches the ebb and flow of life—as if all along you’ve been dancing a dance right for just one partner, then turned and saw them at last saunter out into the spotlight. All I can say is that you know when you are there.

  I am not talking about the place where you were born. Or the pleasant, pretty and prosperous spot you like to head to when you can dump the kids for a long weekend. What I’m talking about is something totally different. A combination of things, really. Take a bunch of notes and shake them up. They come out one way it’s Duke Ellington, another it’s Ornette Coleman. Mystery and magic either way. But everyone must find their own way according to their needs and desires. Then maybe you’ll make it home.

  At least this is my theory. More so now than ever, because I know that in Nova Scotia as the century hisses and clanks to its end I’m not alone. At times it can seem everyone here is from somewhere else. There are new faces, names and bloodlines: Germans, Swiss, Irish, Americans, Japanese, frothy New Agers and hard-headed businesspeople, movie stars, farmers, poets, inventors, carpenters, software designers. Summer people are one thing. The ones who make a bigger commitment—the true come-from-aways—are not here for career advancement: this is still a place that lost its organizing principle with the disappearance of the fishery and the coal mines. So what draws them is something totally different. Something with no relation to real estate prices and the kind of hooey about striking it
rich that got the original settlers to Nova Scotia in the first place.

  This is not an original thought. Nova Scotia has had a thing about it for the longest time. One day I was in Cape Breton heading inland where water stroked the shore of Great Bras d’Or lake. A partially cloudy day where the sun comes from the sky in weird beams, laying hallucinogenic shapes across the wooded roll of the hills. On an overcast day the land darkens with power and drama, but this afternoon I was engulfed by light and shade, angle and nuance.

  I was imagining a day like today, mosquitoes just starting to come up, a man with thick dark hair and unkempt beard standing beside a slim woman with gentle eyes—stone deaf so she couldn’t hear the gulls overhead, the loon in the distance somewhere—on the deck of the steamer cutting across the inland sea. Baddeck, the little village where the vessel stopped en route for Newfoundland, was “possessed of a gentle, restful beauty,” the woman, Mabel, wrote in her diary. She turned out to be downright restrained next to her husband. When their steamer ran aground after leaving the village, he returned to Baddeck, where he spent the rest of the holiday at a hotel lazing away the days on the big verandah and the cool evenings in a corner bedroom overlooking the bay. From there he saw a massive headland called Red Head and above it the rounded hill, which he christened Beinn Bhreagh, Gaelic for Beautiful Mountain. There Alexander Graham Bell built home.

  Nowadays Baddeck is edging more towards Cape Cod than Cape Breton. Jack Nicholson, Paul Simon, Farley Mowat and Billy Joel own places up here. So supposedly does Paul McCartney. The main street has more than its share of chi-chi shops and restaurants—even a spot for a nightcap; the luxury yachts and cruisers, most of them flying the Stars and Stripes, sit motionless on their moorings; a brand-new golf course is being landscaped nearby. Baddeck, with its curious contrasts, has it all. There are the beautiful old clapboard houses and hidden gardens and there are the tiresome T-shirt shops. There is the elegance of the Bell museum and the cheesiness of motels on the outskirts of town. There is the Alexander Graham Bell Club, originally called the Young Ladies Club and founded by Mabel to give the women of Baddeck some mental stimulation, and there are the pony-tailed hippies who came in the sixties and seventies and stayed.

  Once there was little more than the view, which prompted Bell to make his famous statement, since reprinted on virtually every piece of promotional literature that has come spinning out of the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism. “I have travelled around the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes and the Alps and the Highlands of Scotland; but for simple beauty Cape Breton outrivals them all.” Inventing the telephone made him rich and famous. He was living full-time in Washington then to take advantage of the U.S. patent laws, but he was a Scot from Edinburgh and found the social whirl distasteful and the summer heat intolerable. So Baddeck, with its lovely white-painted buildings, its rugged hills and deep blue waters, must have been a revelation that first day.

  The gates to Beinn Bhreagh, the estate he built, are closed to the public, but a good view is possible from the road outside. Having no idea how to describe it, I fall back upon the words of James Lamb, a former naval officer, newspaperman and author who lives nearby and wrote that Beinn Bhreagh is “a marvellous mixture of architectural styles in the Scottish baronial fashion, encrusted with turrets, balconies, stained glass and ivy-draped stonework, and capable of accommodating up to twenty-six people, in addition to a considerable household staff.”

  This was no summer home. Bell begrudged every moment spent away from Cape Breton. The estate teemed with life—the members of his huge clan, the brilliant young engineers whom he gathered around him to work on his inventions. He played the Scottish laird up at Beinn Bhreagh, rambling through the hills in his tweeds and knickerbockers, fishing from the comfortable houseboat he had built. Usually, though, he worked. Bell was “not a professional inventor like Edison,” said notes at Baddeck’s truly wonderful Bell Museum, “but a very independent amateur, experimenting for the pure joy of knowing … [He] was always more interested in possibilities than in realities and tended to lose interest when experiments reached the stage of commercial application.”

  But Lord, the ideas the man had. No sooner had he arrived than he set about trying to develop a ewe that would bear several lambs at once. At Beinn Bhreagh he explored ways of providing drinking water through condensation and experimented with transmitting sound under water. When President McKinley was shot by an anarchist he developed a surgical probe to find the bullet. (It was unsuccessful.) When an infant son died of a breathing defect he developed an iron lung. He had staff round up the household cats and drop them out of windows head-first onto piled-up mattresses—a practice of which I heartily approve—to test one of his notions that leverage could be exerted against thin air.

  Bell was our Leonardo. Here, for thirty-six amazing years, his genius reigned. Nowhere in the world was like Beinn Bhreagh; maybe nowhere before or nowhere since. What amazing things people once saw just living around here. There were days when the skies seemed to magically fill with giant red silk wedges and rings. The kites he used to probe the idea of moving weight through air had names like Diones (Bird of Omen) and were so big that one monster, called Frost King, lifted Neil MacDermaid from Baddeck thirty-five feet into the air at the end of a rope. One day people could have looked out their windows and seen the Cygnet, the largest and most sophisticated of all Bell’s kites, being towed by a steamer 168 feet aloft. On February 23, 1909, they could have seen the Silver Dart lift off from the ice of Baddeck Bay, the first aircraft to fly in the British Empire. In the fall of 1911 they could have seen the cigar-shaped hull of HD-4, a hydrofoil he had designed with Casey Baldwin, his surrogate son, thunder down the bay at a speed hitting 70 mph—the fastest man had ever travelled on water.

  I checked into a nice room in a lodge across the bay from Bell’s place and walked to the café for one of those starry-night-on-the-lake dining experiences. I sat squinting into the darkness up at where I calculated Beinn Bhreagh stood. Everything about Bell appeals to me: the obsessive way he worked until 4 a.m., alone in his study, encircled in cigar smoke, stopping only to tramp through the hills on particularly windy nights, which reminded him of Scotland. The way when a distinguished scientist came to visit they would sit long into the night on the verandah, overlooking the sea, their smokes glowing in the darkness as they chatted. I concentrate hard on the darkness spread out before me, as if the wink of their cigars might still be visible on the far hill. Somewhere behind the gate into the estate is the boulder marking the tombs where Bell and Mabel are buried. In summer the old house still crawls with his offspring. So you get the picture: Beinn Bhreagh is something beyond itself. Something more than money, pleasure or graceful tradition. A monument to joy and life.

  Isn’t that what these newcomers are looking for in Nova Scotia? Certainly there are few moments as pure or sweet as discovering there is something else. That where you are is not where you have to be. Harry Taylor came from Maryland. “I worked for NASA throughout my career as a space scientist. I was an explorer, in a sense,” he tells me. A few miles past Yarmouth, I just had to stop the car when I saw the sign for the Duck Pond Inn, Space Barn Museum. From the back door walked a white-haired man with a long, sad face alongside a small woman with a pleasant but distracted manner—Harry and his wife, Tina. When they lived in Washington he built instruments that flew on rockets and satellites to study the earth’s environment and observe the planets. Then, though Harry won’t go into details, something happened. “After many years of service and some other stories that we may not want to get into I was looking for a change of venue” is how he puts it. “There was big-city sprawl, crime, drugs and so forth. I was looking for a little more quiet in my work situation due to some disappointments. So we both decided to look around for a place that we could work on and develop and still have a relaxed situation.”

  They looked around the east coast of the United States, usually finding things t
oo pricey or too crowded. People suggested either Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia, so in 1987 they headed for Canada. When they arrived at the southwest corner of the province, the fog was so thick that for the three days they literally couldn’t see the water. They took the ferry back to Maine, woke up the next morning to a gorgeous summer day with the weatherman predicting a week of it and decided they hadn’t given Nova Scotia a real chance. “That day we got back on the ferry,” he says, “drove up this road and saw this house.”

  They moved the next summer and spent three years renovating the place top to bottom. I am inside now, walking around the neat displays of space food, space suits, models of space ships and all kinds of other space stuff. We have the place to ourselves today, but bus tours visit, as do classfuls of local students who listen to Harry expound on rockets and space exploration as well as global warming, ozone variation and other things that concern him. “I’m trying to tell a story,” he explains to them, “and the story is not just about the past. Most important, it’s about the future, it’s about where we’re headed.”

  Outside again, Harry tells me that Tina is sick; he is not sure how much longer they will be able to keep the inn and museum operating. “Come again,” he says just before I drive away. “Yes,” Tina says, waving, “come again.”

  This hint of mortality hangs over me for a ways. But the more I think about it the better it is to picture them here, where they want to be, finding a new life and meaning at this stage in their lives. Their very presence confirms it: escape is possible. And, as usual whenever my thoughts drift along these lines, I think about this little parable from The Maltese Falcon, one of my favourite books and movies. Sam Spade tells about a man satisfied with his well-ordered life who is one day nearly killed by a falling beam. To adjust his life to random possibility the guy, Flitcraft, leaves his well-ordered existence behind and sets up a new life, which in time becomes just as ordered as his old one. “But that’s the part of it I always liked,” Spade explains. “He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”