The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  We drive a few hundred yards to the parking lot, gear up our rods and slip them into cases attached to the backs of the bicycles. The uphill path is rocky and pitted with pools of water. Laurie pulls ahead but keeps looking back as I wobble along the edge of the drop. I marvel at him. I know he doesn’t mean to, but he has a knack for making people feel inadequate. Something about the way he picks his way along this lousy path, easy as if he was driving his bike through a big empty parking lot; he moves through the woods on foot the same way, never a misstep, never looking where he walks as you just try to stay upright. Adding to this perception of omnipotence is his disconcerting habit of pulling water bottles from behind rocks and hip waders out of knotholes in trees. If he stuck his hand into a log and hauled out a plate of steaming, perfectly garnished fettuccine alfredo and a nice goblet of Riesling, well, I don’t think I’d be the slightest bit surprised.

  We finally stop and lean the bikes against some trees, then walk through the woods until we come into a clearing. I cringe a little at the sight of the half-dozen anglers already working the river. I loathe having to fish in front of others for the simple reason that as a fly caster I make up for a lack of distance with an almost homicidal inaccuracy. I’m past the worst stage, when a really bad back cast left the line wound a couple of times around my head and body with the fly dangling limply off my nose. But casting for salmon remains more an aerobic activity for me. Flop that line out there; try to make it straight and pretty, if you can. Then do it again and again and again until you are ready to go home and get some physio. I spoke in elevated fashion about the Zen quality of the act, that kind of thing. Though secretly I was beginning to question the intelligence of spending what little free time I had standing kidney-deep in a paralyzingly cold stream.

  At the root of everything was one clear problem: there are no fish. As a result, the act of fly-fishing for salmon has turned into something more than a sport. Call it a metaphysical quest, a vehicle for acquiring humility, even an exercise in gear fetishism. Bringing home a mess of salmon—that had nothing to do with it. On the Chéticamp you were not even allowed to kill them; you had to set them free. But still the anglers come, drawn to a mecca where at least you have a chance of eyeballing them.

  Already present is the usual eclectic bunch: the big guy wearing the fishing hat and sunglasses is Bill, who dabbles in real estate and fishes the rest of the time while his wife makes teddy bears in the back of this trailer they drag around North America. The earth mother is Susan, a pony-tailed quilt maker from Vermont who wears a flannel plaid shirt beneath her fishing vest. The calm-looking fellow with the fourteen-foot two-handed rod is Henry, who is from Virginia, and looks far too young to be retired, but fishes here during the summers, hunts grouse in the winter and goes birding in between. The quiet guy in the park warden’s outfit is Clarence, who spends each summer making his rounds on foot alone through the Cape Breton highlands. One summer, he tells me, he did 460 miles. I notice a lot of butterflies. “Those are yellow swallowtails,” he says. He’s not fishing, just talking birds with Henry for a minute before returning to his mysterious duties.

  The Chéticamp, which originates in the highlands and runs right out to the ocean, is a strange little river. Might as well forget the usual fishing pattern: long casts, taking a few steps and covering the water. To raise a fish here you have to find the right lies in the rock-strewn current, and then deliver the fly from some awkward angle. “This is a test of precision,” warns Laurie in what for me are truly ominous words. I try a few casts and mercifully make it through the pool without hooking someone’s earlobe. I sit down and wait my turn as the others rotate in. After I run through one more time Laurie suggests we move downstream. As we do Sue manages to hook a nice twelve-pounder. Catch. Pause. Release.

  Laurie climbs up on some rocks sure as a billy goat and notices something in a section of water where all I see is brown foam. “Now this is what I want you to do,” he says, grabbing my rod, false casting once and laying a little parabola down some thirty feet away. Laurie is a stickler for presentation—the line has to land straight, and you’ve got to pull in the slack so the fly swings by on a natural arc. He smells some action now, so his commands become precise. “Put the fly over there by that rock. Okay, pull in some line. More … more … more. Let it swing. That’s it. Okay, okay. Now right over to that rock again.”

  I cast again and again and again. Then I feel a tug. A fish! Now what? The chances of actually hooking one seemed so slim that I had long forgotten the suggested technique for setting the hook. I haul like a powerlifter—the classic novice’s mistake—and the line pulls free. Laurie grimaces. “Okay, let’s go again, the same spot.” Half a dozen casts later I feel the fish again, wait a moment, pull back—and lose him again. Laurie pulls off his cap in despair, mumbles something I can only assume is some ancient Gaelic oath. I wait for him to hurl his cap to the ground and start jumping up and down on it like Yosemite Sam. Instead he lets out a long sigh, smiles at me with infinite patience and says, “John, do you think maybe this would be a good time for a break?”

  Fishing guides are the most gentle folk. I have met damaged, cigar-chomping Vietnam vets, former freedom fighters in Czechoslovakia who gave up being accountants to take sports full-time, wealthy Americans who guide part of the year and paint landscapes the rest. I don’t know much about Laurie, other than he went to St. F.X., played some hockey and lives on the family land on the outskirts of Chéticamp. And, of course, that he is drawn to rivers and fish. “My main goal is to stay out of cities,” he says as we share a couple of ham sandwiches he pulled out of God-knows-where. “I can’t live in a city. I don’t have any use or need for them. I spend the rest of the year in British Columbia. I’m working on my plumbers papers. I live in a tent, just my sleeping bag, a rented car and a Coleman stove right through the winter. Usually I eat in town. That’s what it takes for me to live here for four or five weeks. There they have steelhead and sea-running rainbow trout. But I’ve yet to see anything like the Atlantic salmon coming up to take the fly. It is all wicked, all great.”

  This is what he sees: all the problems and magic of life distilled to the challenge of fooling a fish into rising to a manmade fly and then momentarily pulling it from its world into ours. That is how he finds contentment. It never comes easily.

  Once, the Vidyadhara, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a chubby, smiling guy with big ideas and intemperate habits whose heart gave out when he was in his forties, made his way through these same rolling wooden hills. He was twenty-four years out of Tibet, which he fled over the Himalayas when the Communist Chinese invaded. Not your average Cape Breton tourist: his youth was spent preparing to take charge of a series of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet. Without a country he roamed around India, England and Scotland before landing in Boulder, Colo., then blossoming as a New Age centre, where he established his loose brand of secular Buddhism. To this day his followers still cannot explain why he decided to move the worldwide headquarters for his church to Halifax in 1986. Or how he came to be up here following the same bumpy, winding road past sparse farmhouses and vacant fields beyond headlands tapering off to cliffs, beaches and green, icy waters. But he saw something here as he passed through a clump of hardwood to the spot where a series of colourful banners now flutter like a flock of birds and an oddly angled building with grey weathered shingles stands next to a small vegetable garden where three middle-aged people quietly work.

  Setting up an appointment to visit Gampo Abbey, the main training and meditation centre for Trungpa Rinpoche’s followers, is not hard. Somebody at the Vajradhatu Buddhist Church in Halifax gives you a fax number. You zip off your request. Then one day an androgynous voice from a person identifying themself as T. Palmo will be on the phone saying they would be happy to see you. “Just call when you arrive.”

  T. Palmo sits behind a desk in a small, well-appointed office. She is, I would say, two inches taller than I am. Her hair is short and steel grey
. She wears an orange tunic and a long wine-coloured robe that reaches the floor and partially covers her big, sturdy-looking feet. She has a nice smile and a disarmingly frank manner.

  The first thing she tells me is that the nun who normally runs the abbey is on sick leave with chronic fatigue syndrome. This strikes me as a strange affliction for a Buddhist spiritual leader; only good breeding prevents me from bringing it up. She writes her name for me: Alika Pietrzy Kokski. She is Polish, a clinical psychologist from Warsaw who arrived in Canada in 1967 when her ex-husband landed a teaching post at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

  “We had lived all over the world, in Brazil, Africa and Edinburgh,” she says. “I had everything most people would want—a Mercedes, a swimming pool, clothes from Paris—and I was very unhappy. I did not know then that happiness is a state of mind. I just felt there was something more. I began training with the Gestalt Institute in Toronto. I trained with native Americans. Then I trained on an eight-week program in Buddhism in 1975. I had no doubt that this was the path for me. Then I met Trungpa Rinpoche in Vermont. That’s how it all started.” She was ordained in 1982 and has been a nun for thirteen years. The path, as the Buddhists like to say, is not an easy one. Just temporarily taking the robes of a monk or nun means living in Gampo Abbey for at least six months. Another eighteen months of work and study and you can take a novice’s vows. A year later and you are allowed the full vows of a monk.

  For a second I am worried that just showing up here for a visit means that I’ve inadvertently committed myself to three months in the lotus position. For time did sound like it passed slowly at Gampo Abbey. Today is Sunday, for example. That means up at 6, meditation from 6:30 till 7:30, breakfast, free time, more meditation from 8:30 to 11, then complete silence until noon. After a vegetarian lunch the afternoon is spent working in the gardens or around the site. Another meditation session from 5 till 6, a vegetarian dinner, then more meditation from 7 until 8. Everyone is in bed and prohibited from saying a word from 10 on. “Everyone follows the given Buddhist precepts—refrain from killing, lying, stealing, sexual activity and taking intoxicants or drugs,” Palmo says, adding, with a faint smile, “The local people think we are strange but harmless.”

  No kidding. As we walk through the hall she introduces me to a huge, bald, menacing-looking man in robes, the abbey’s financial officer. I can just imagine him pulling into the service station at nearby Pleasant Bay, rolling down the window and saying “Please fill it up” to some high-school altar boy who thinks Protestants are exotic. Today the only noise in the abbey is the wind, which roars off the Gulf of St. Lawrence, bending the trees sideways. T. Palmo, who suffers from emphysema and moves with difficulty, shows me the spacious kitchen, the well-stocked library, the simple, pleasant rooms where the nuns and monks live.

  I am asked to remove my shoes before entering the shrine room. Inside are the sacred texts, bowls of offering water, the Tibetan gongs and cymbals. From there I can look outside and I see a woman meditating on a bench overlooking the curving bay and the ocean. I ask Palmo if she’s found what she was looking for here. “It is very personal,” she says with a shrug. “I am happy. All of life is preparation for death anyway.”

  I look back out the window; the bench is empty. All I can see is, well, everything. To some the view may be a blank space. To the Buddhists, and the other seekers who end up here, the air vibrates with possibility. It shows where they’ve been and also where they are going.

  Eleven

  Home for Sale

  LET ME BE CLEAR ON THIS: I HAD TO LIE. THERE WAS NO WAY AROUND IT. Otherwise I would have been ripping down the highway heading southwest from Halifax with no place to start. And even for this whole deluded enterprise that would have been unthinkable.

  “So, Demo, you have done some sailing, right?”

  “Absolutely, Leroy,” I responded before launching into this long line about how I crewed with the Murphy brothers back in the early 1980s, and how we came second in the Maritimes in some obscure regatta series. Which was true. There was, as I saw it, no reason to tell the skipper of Third Wave that I had been mere ballast—170 pounds of flesh and bone to keep the boat from capsizing. That if, under the rules, they could have used a tackling dummy or maybe a boulder instead of bringing me along they would have.

  “You know your way around a boat, then?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. And at the very least I can follow orders.” I tried to inject what I imagined was a devil-may-care quality into my voice. “Shit, you don’t have to worry. I won’t get in anyone’s way.”

  So now I was a yachtsman, competing in a series of races held in the pretty little village of Chester. I like the sound of being a yachtsman. It calls up visions of bow to bow on the high seas, popping spinnakers in gale-force winds, coming about as million-dollar sailboats speed alongside, then back to the harbour at dusk for a tray of rum-and-Cokes, tall, family-sized drinks reclining on some rich guy’s deck, while supermodels in Thurston Howell III hats giggle as they play croquet on the lawn below. So what if Leroy let me come aboard only for one day? I am still a yachtsman; that is my story and I am sticking to it. Because I seriously doubt that a person can spend a day in a better way than on a Philadelphia stockbroker’s boat zipping along at foolish speeds through gorgeous Mahone Bay. But also because I am on a subversive mission—to see if it is really possible to buy home.

  It would be easy if that were the case. Just find a place that suits your desires and then, if you have enough money, open up the chequebook. An interesting question to consider in Nova Scotia where it takes, let’s see, three or four generations living here before your family are not considered newcomers and where all manner of rich Germans, well-heeled Americans, Ontarians with too much disposable income have recently arrived on their individual quests. At some point the newcomers may run the risk of spoiling the very nature of the place they came in search of. But Nova Scotia is probably just too far from the rest of the world to make that a worry. Right now the issue is more immediate and fundamental: the nature of connecting with a place and its people. In other words, finding home, then holding on to it.

  Chester is the kind of spot where you need a cover story. Otherwise, try sidling up to some zinc-nosed member of the idle rich at the bar at the Chester Yacht Club and babbling about your thrilling job behind the cheese counter at Sobey’s and see how far that gets you. Me, on the other hand, I am a yachtsman. Which means something else altogether. The peculiar thing is that Chester, for all its antique social system of caste and privilege, looks like a bit of a backwater on the way in. Two-lane blacktop shaded by trees, a few signs advertising motels and gift shops with the usual bogus nautical names. The voice on the car radio promises “highs in the mid-twenties, with moderate seas and a light chop on coastal waters.” Is that good or bad for sailing? I drive along a narrow road, over a twisting hill and—Wow, it’s like I’ve suddenly descended into this cool, shaded garden. I slow down. Wind jostles the branches overhead, letting fingers of sunlight filter through. Manicured hedges line the narrow, quiet streets. Behind all the foliage I glimpse grand homes with signs and brass plates bearing elevated names like Morning Tide, Pinecroft, Westerleigh, Sand Castle, Over the Way. I pass a rambling white three-storey bar-restaurant, the Captain’s House, which I read somewhere is all that’s left of the grand hotels from the old days.

  Nearby I park my rust-encrusted 1988 Toyota next to a lot full of Bimmers, Saabs and Land Rovers. I love my car for the simple reason that it looks like it has nothing to lose. If the owner of a Jaguar, say, arrives at one of those traffic circles where everyone is supposed to alternate turns and sees my thing coming across, well you just know who’s going to be slamming on the brakes. So I’m fully prepared for somebody’s butler to come out and put the run on me. Nothing happens, though. Which I take as a fine omen. I walk past a plaque from Norwegian seamen who convalesced there during the war years and step up into the stand where the Chester Brass Band performs. Fro
m here I can see the artless old yacht club, the tufted Ice Age islands that dot the bay, and the narrow neck of the Peninsula, an exclusive little lick of land that separates Front Harbour from Back Harbour.

  Exactly a year earlier I stood here taking in the same view. Then I took a little walk over to where Charles Ritchie lived. Now there was a man: a suave, witty diplomat who walked in the world’s highest circles as the ambassador to the United Nations and London during the golden years of the Canadian foreign service. I knew him more for his Governor General’s Award–winning diaries, within which I seem to remember him writing the sentence “In the afternoon I dined on capon and read a pornographic book in the library.” At eighty-seven he was bald and so cadaverously thin that I could see his ribs through his white dress shirt. Yet sitting there amongst his books, bony knees crossed, mind dancing like wind chimes, he was exactly what I expected. “There’s a timeless quality to this place, a most agreeable rhythm of parties, entertaining and informal visits which you find yourself falling into,” he told me. Most of all I remembered how he hated the way old age was cutting into his partygoing. When I left he was arguing good-naturedly with his housekeeper about the time. “No, my dear, your watch is fifteen minutes slow,” I heard him say as I let myself out. “It is twelve o’clock. Which means it is time for my glass of wine.”

  But he died a week ago; mortality even in this timeless place. It is only a short walk along the water to a comfortable wooden house called the Quarterdeck. Desmond Piers leads me inside. Everyone I asked said I should visit him because he is the man to see about Chester’s social history. The perfect omniscient narrator, I was told, charming, wise, the ancient keeper of all its secrets. Piers has summered here every year since 1916, except during World War Two, when as a rear admiral he commanded destroyers and won the Distinguished Service Cross during the Battle of the Atlantic. He had an even better life afterwards: chairman of the Canadian Joint Staff in Washington, Canada’s military representative to NATO and the principal military adviser to the Canadian ambassador in Washington. Piers, I learn, is eighty-two. He wears his wavy hair combed back and has the tan and smile of an old-time Hollywood leading man. Today, he sports a yellow short-sleeved shirt and green pants and looks like he just shot a quick eighteen at the Chester Golf Club.