by John Demont
I suppose it is possible: Slocum could have ended up here, blown by some particularly long and brutal winds nearly a century ago. Then decided to live out the rest of his life anonymously rather than spoil the perfect ending to his myth. At the very least his spirit endures. So does his brazen brand of confidence. You need that kind of self-assurance when you’re doing something the rest of the world—even your own wife—thinks is plain nuts. I see it all the time in Nova Scotia, where, let’s face it, just living here can seem like a demented act of faith to some people. Even growing up I understood I was amongst people who dreamt big, strange dreams. Then I met Gregg Ernst and realized that even within this obsessed bunch there were some who loomed over the rest.
Ernst packs 315 pounds on his five-eleven frame. He’s got a 22-inch neck, a 57-inch chest, and his biceps are 21 inches around. He is also a really nice guy—a hard-working father, husband and pillar of his local Pentecostal church. “I guess I’m sort of a traditionalist,” he once told me in a gentle voice that, once you knew a little more about him, seemed as incongruous as Mike Tyson’s little-boy lisp. “I like to lift things you could imagine the strongmen of ancient Greece lifting.” So he hoists cars and teams of oxen, hauls eighteen-wheelers down the highway, tosses six-hundred-pound boulders around like balsa wood. If you ask him what the big rock in his basement is for, he’ll drop down to the floor, clutch it to his chest and start effortlessly pounding off situps. He just cannot help himself. Because what Ernst has wanted to do at least since the age of twelve, when he lifted a ton of sheet metal off the ground, is to be the strongest man who ever lived.
I first read about him in a newspaper story about how he stole the show at a Symphony Nova Scotia fundraiser by loading two grand pianos and eighteen people on a six-hundred-pound elevated wooden platform and then raising the whole thing an inch or so off the ground. There’s a mule-like quality to the back lift, Ernst’s specialty. A couple of years earlier he piled 5,340 pounds onto his platform, stepped into the cutaway section, bent down and shouldered the whole thing. As always he heard a noise “like ropes going taut.” But all the muscles, bones and ligaments stayed intact long enough for him to raise the load for a second. Since then he’s had this ongoing battle with the Guinness Book of Records about whether that was the most weight anyone has hoisted unassisted. A century ago, guys like his idol Louis Cyr, the Montreal policeman who could heft more than five hundred pounds with one finger, were real heroes. But these are hard times for strongmen. He scrapes out a meagre existence for his wife and their six children by working their 280 acres of farmland and putting on the occasional exhibition of strength. It makes me kind of sad to see him on a television ad for a bar called Curly Portables, chomping on a burger and warning viewers, “Don’t make me come and get you.” But a man has to make a living. And Ernst needs his groceries: a couple of pounds of red meat and a gallon of yogurt, loads of oats—uncooked with apple juice and raisins—and huge servings of South Shore sauerkraut each day.
Sometimes I think about him training in that dark cellar that reminds me of a torture chamber, loading more and more weight onto that rack of his, hoping the body will hold up one more time. Chasing some long-dead ghost in the record books. And I think: How does he do it? Why does he do it? Which is just the sort of attitude that explains why people like me are simply not meant for greatness and others are.
Like Howard Dill, a skinny, red-haired guy in his sixties, with rheumy eyes and a chain smoker’s rasp. He looks for all the world as if he just walked out of a 1930s prairie dust storm. Not at all like the man who, as his biography, The Pumpkin King, points out, ranks as “the Babe Ruth of pumpkin growers, the Sultan of Squash, the king of Cucurbits.”
I had better admit it here and now: I once had a slight prejudice against Dill, the result of three years at a newspaper that ran one too many pictures of him posing with one of his award-winning vegetables, gourds or whatever it is pumpkins are. So it is perversely pleasant to finally meet him in person on his Windsor farm and discover he has become a prisoner of the weirdest kind of fame. “Oh, it never ends for me,” he explains inside his office. “The interviews, the newspapers, the television stations, the bus tours. The whole thing started out on a local competitive level. But little did I know what God had in store for me. That I’d win all those world championships and have this big worldwide seed business. Yes, God’s hand works in mysterious ways.”
No “aw, shucks, it was nothing” here. Dill has an ego the size of one of his pumpkins. This is a man, after all, who also claims that the first-ever game of hockey was played on a pond on his 250-acre property back in the 1800s. Then adds, “Who in the heck cares in Japan where the game of hockey was created? But there are thousands of people over there growing Howard Dill’s Atlantic giants.” He has a point. Moreover, he has passion. It may be for pumpkins, but I can forgive a person almost anything if they have passion. I find my preconceptions melting away. I listen intently as he brags about all the pumpkin-growing championships he’s won and all the half-assed celebrities who have taken up the hobby in recent years: Eddie Albert, members of the Texas Hunt family, Raymond Burr, even Earl Morrall, the old Baltimore Colts quarterback.
I am still paying attention as he explains how, with his grade nine education, he learned enough about genetics to breed these monsters. He takes me through the actual growing process while we wander across his dairy and fruit farm towards the pumpkin patch. It is still early in the growing season and the pumpkins are not much bigger than the ones I am used to at the Halifax farmer’s market. But he’s always hoping that another champion will erupt from the soil. “You’ve got to remember that when I broke the eight-hundred-pound mark it was like breaking the four-minute mile,” he says. When he finally sends me packing I leave with a pile of his press clippings and his biography. In my pocket there are also a couple of packets of Atlantic Giant seeds, the same variety that generates a couple of million a year in sales from Dill wannabes around the world.
My route takes me back through Windsor, and I find myself driving by the home of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the town’s other famous son. He was a rural judge, politician and polemicist who hit it big by creating a Yankee peddlar named Sam Slick and writing about his travels through Nova Scotia. Haliburton was the first Canadian writer of international stature; in his heyday he rivalled Dickens in popularity over in London, where he eventually bought a mansion on the Thames. But lately, back in North America his reputation has been taking a beating, sparked by an upcoming biography that found Slick’s creator to be a vicious, mean-spirited, racist, misogynist right-winger. Such, I guess, is the ephemeral nature of fame. The thing is, Haliburton just wrote books. Howard Dill is the father of the Atlantic Giant. Which is another matter altogether. He has immortality in him.
Weymouth, which sits a bit inland from the Bay of Fundy, is an elusive place, veiled in green and hidden by hills. From the hills flows the Sissiboo River, which, legend has it, got its name when a shaggy coureur de bois pointed out half a dozen owls roosting nearby and exclaimed, “Regardez! Six hiboux” or something like that. I immediately get the sense that a fresh start would be difficult here: Loyalist settlement, shipping centre, lumbering village, just driving through the town makes it clear that Weymouth’s successive pasts are ineradicable and inescapable. I had never heard of the spot until, while attending a Liberal Party convention in Halifax, I was introduced to a delightful, sturdy-looking Grit in his early fifties named Desire, or Desi, Belliveau. Right off he struck me as a straight-ahead, positive kind of guy. No surprise to hear he served as the party’s chief organizer in fiercely Liberal Digby County, as well as Weymouth’s de facto director of industrial development. We talked for a couple of minutes and he said: “You come up and see me. We’ll go back in the woods, we’ll cook some steaks and I’ll show you Electric City.”
When I arrived he was where he promised to be: running his Foodland franchise on Weymouth’s main drag. Today, it turns out, he is a litt
le pressed for time. Instead of steaks he fills a Styrofoam cooler with sandwiches, cheese, pop and juice, ties up some loose ends in the store and leads me out into the parking lot to his halfton. We are headed back seventeen miles into the woods. First, we have to stop and get a guide, Lionel Borden, district superintendent of the local pulp mill. We climb into a heavy-duty truck, painted green and white, the company logo on the side. With Borden behind the wheel we move from pavement to dirt road. At times, a strip of grass brushes against the undercarriage. At times we are on no road at all, just thumping across exposed boulders and through streams, the branches bouncing off our roof in a mad conga rhythm. We stop to see a weird glacial formation known as the Balancing Rock, then we just keep on going.
What was he thinking? What was going through Emile Stehelin Sr.’s mind when he came way back here a century ago to build his city of light? I can accept that the Alsatian-born businessman who got rich off a felt factory in Normandy wanted to put as much distance as possible between his draft-aged sons and the shadows of war in Europe. And that the Eudists, a hard-line French religious order building a college in Nova Scotia, at Church Point, were maybe just the ones to straighten his boys out. But all I can conclude is that he must have secretly relished the thought of seeing Jean Jacques, his dissolute older son, getting off the train at Church Point that sunny, warm July day in 1892. He wore a stylish Parisian-cut grey checked suit, shiny black dress ankle boots buttoned down the sides, a melon-shaped Edwardian dark grey hat and a high-collared pinkish shirt with wide necktie neatly held in place by a good stick pin. I wish I was there to see the faces of the dirty unshaven woodsmen and fishermen when this vision stepped out of the train. A family history written by a nephew said that they tipped their hats and smiled deferentially. I don’t believe it for a second. I see them knocking his hat off, spitting tobacco juice on his shirt front, then shoving him into the mud to see if he cried.
When Borden finally stops the car it is alongside a clear, lively stream. We walk past some white spruce and sugar maples towards a lake. Belliveau points to an area of scrub trees and low grass. “Now, Lionel, this is where the sawmill was, wasn’t it.” Except for our voices it is absolutely quiet. Nothing at all like the way it must have sounded and looked thirty years before electricity came to the rest of the area, when the Stehelin mill was running full out, when the locomotive Maria Thérèse was puffing along the tracks of the family-owned Weymouth and New France Railway, hauling Stehelin lumber all the way to the wharfs of Weymouth. When light poured from every building on the property and from the reflectors mounted on poles around the square. By then the whole clan was living in New France, which is what they called the family compound.
We walk over to the ruin of the main house, once home to the parents, the children and their offspring. We pass the site of the old cookhouse, where the workmen ate their hardy lumber-camp meals, then after a day in the woods passed the night dancing to the fiddle, mouth organ and jew’s harp. The office with the little glass wicket where they lined up on Saturday night for their week’s pay once stood over there. Near the spot where the hung-over, guilt-wracked men worshipped in Our Lady of the Forest Chapel the following morning. Desi points out the mossy rocks and the huge mushrooms growing in the remains of a stone wine cellar. After we walk a little farther, he gestures towards the sandy beach where the casino stood and, his voice low with reverence, says, “It must have been really something, wasn’t it.”
The patriarch usually wore a fine waxed moustache, corduroy suits, a long coat and high, stiff collar. He was a bit of a brooder who could kill an afternoon anguishing over the big, unsolvable metaphysical questions. But he also received fall hunters and visitors from the European nobility at his home and won the nickname of the Old Gentleman for the fair way he treated his workers. Emile Sr. watched his children marry and leave the compound in search of their own lives. Everyone who left New France took some of its laughter and spirit with them. The nights grew longer and quieter for the parents, the house bigger. When the matriarch, Marie Thérèse, died, Emile couldn’t stand living there alone. One day he released a flock of white pigeons in the loft at the top of the barn, rode his old mount, Faithful, for the last time and rented a house in Weymouth.
In town Emile held on to his old ways—the French cuisine served by his black servant, good wine, long dinners followed by quiet time in the salon over coffee, liqueurs and books. The calm was broken by the declaration of World War One and the threat of military service from which Emile had tried so hard to shield his sons. Five of them were called up by the French government. The day the last of them left, the old gentleman gathered them close and gave each his fatherly blessing with a cross on each forehead and a kiss on each cheek, along with the words, “God be with you. You know where your duty lies, be sure you fulfil it well.” Then he wended his way back home on the arm of Louis, the only son still at his side. He kept an up-to-date map of the European hostilities on his wall and every day walked with dog and cane down to the Western Union Telegraph office, where news from the front was posted in the window. He died on August 8, 1918, not knowing who won the war and whether his sons had survived.
They came back alive, but not necessarily to Weymouth. Six of them returned to Europe to live on the old family land. The ones who stayed behind in Nova Scotia tried to keep the property in the family, but eventually it was sold, changed hands a couple of times, then was bought by the billionaire Irving family of New Brunswick.
Strolling back to the truck, Borden points out a few of the old apple trees and the new-growth forest that has grown up around the last remaining signs of the Electric City. It’s so quiet, I say dreamily. “There are no birds,” he points out. “The DDT killed all the birds. Only the bugs survived.” Not long after the Stehelins left, the forest inched towards the square, cutting off the view of the lakes and the casino beach. Vandals stripped the place. Ghosts naturally took up residence—phantom trains, chain rattlers, a fiery rider on a fierce black horse who unsheathed his sword before disappearing into the old wine cellar.
It feels strange to be here, at the site of this magnificent failure that went the way of so many of the bizarre, grandiose schemes hatched in this province. I like the panache and vaingloriousness of it, the mythic quality of the whole enterprise. The trail seems longer and tougher going out. At one point we stop, pull off the road and have our lunch. Then we are back at the parking lot and civilization, saying goodbye to Borden and sliding into Belliveau’s truck. He wants to give me a quick tour of the area before he gets back to work. As we drive he tells me about the thickness of the fog on St. Marys Bay and the cold water “no good for anything except lobster.” He tells me about Digby County politics and what makes a good rappie pie and the vagaries of the grocery store business. He explains that Weymouth, with its Loyalist beginnings, is mostly English, making it a bit of an aberration on the French shore of the province. It also has a black community, small and dirt-poor like many of the rural pockets throughout the province. He points to a tiny structure off the road. “See that yellow house, the bungalow? That’s where Sam Langford was supposedly born.”
Now there’s a familiar name. Langford started his boxing career in Boston as a lightweight, then moved up to welterweight, middleweight and light heavyweight before finishing as a heavyweight. Here’s how the Marquis of Queensbury, son of boxing’s patron, described him: “Excepting only [Jack] Johnson, no heavyweight in the world could have stood up against the Boston Tar Baby in a finish fight. A freak was this amazing negro—fourteen stone of whipcord muscle and bone under a jet black skin—a neck as big as another man’s thigh, a chest like a barrel, arms so grotesquely long he could scratch his ankles without stooping—and he stood five-foot-four in his bare feet. But it was his reach—84 inches—that made him the devastating fighter that he unquestionably was; in a word—a human gorilla.” Georges Carpentier, the light heavyweight champion of the world, dodged him. Middleweight champ Stanley Ketchel ducked him. Sam
e went for the great Jack Johnson, who outweighed the Nova Scotian by thirty-five pounds and whomped him something awful when they met near the turn of the century, but was still worried enough not to sign for a rematch. Consequently, Langford had to settle for a bunch of lesser titles, the Welsh middleweight crown and the heavyweight championships of England, Spain and Mexico, winning the last one despite being legally blind at the time.
But I remember him more from an old black-and-white photo. It was taken in a New York ghetto rooming house where an enterprising reporter found him alone, penniless and almost blind. His once magnificent, now ruined body was covered in a mouldy bathrobe as he sat wearing dark glasses in a rocking chair. I was just a kid when I saw the photograph. But it haunts me still. Big dreams, I suppose I realized even then, do not necessarily end in triumph. Not by a long shot. Which is why it is such a sublime surprise when the unexpected does happen.
‘Folk Art,’ reads the hand-painted sign near Camperdown, sending me inland through forest, past farmland until it’s the end of a dead-end road. The car door slams, then nothing but sweet country silence. In a studio smelling of wood chips and paint, a brightly coloured yard-high stick fisherman, eyeballs bulging a foot out of his head, stares at me. “This is the scallop shucker here,” explains its creator, Ransford Naugler. “He reached down to shuck the scallop and he flipped up the top to look in and the scallop shocked the scallop shucker, because the scallop already had his boots on.”
