The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  “That’s what you should be writing about,” a cousin of my father’s—whose children are known respectively as Old Foot, Big Foot, Red Foot and Little Foot—scolded as I left the reception after the funeral. And I had to agree. My past is my inheritance. There are the ancestors in whose lives I hope to find the secret of my own. There is the land where I seek to find the grown-over road behind to help me navigate the dimly lit path ahead.

  I am the only member of my family not born in Cape Breton. So my first significant memory of the island involves a high-school basketball tournament and a night billeted on the floor of a Sydney high-school gym. Instead of sleep, a marathon two-on-two tournament that ended at 3:30 a.m. with a dislocated index finger. We were knocked out of the tournament early—slaughtered by a ratty-looking bunch from the neighbouring coal town of New Waterford who ran our legs off and played a game so different from ours that we might as well have been from different planets. I knew something was terribly amiss when their centre, a feared intimidator in big-city Halifax, threw an elbow at an opponent. Shoulder-length hair flying, the Cape Bretoner turned without missing a beat and tried to drop kick my teammate in the head. It was altogether the strangest thing I’ve ever witnessed on a basketball court.

  Not that we cared. This was about being sixteen, on the road and finding yourself in this strange place where girls you’ve never seen before actually seemed to find you interesting. We made a nocturnal trip to the bootleggers in Whitney Pier, the home of Scottish, Jamaican and Italian steelworkers. Which was where I finally understood the meaning of an old exchange I’d been hearing for years between my parents: Are you from the Bay, Boy?/No, I’m from the Pier, Dear. Our hair was still wet from the shower as we ordered beers at a jovial little lounge on the edge of town. Then the day moved into evening like a slow dream. Only one image sticks clearly with me: watching the television and seeing Smokin’ Joe Frazier being seized by panic and starting to run—truly a sad sight—with George Foreman in lumbering pursuit. After that it’s all blurry and spinning around, the frigid rush of winter night air, a window breaking and a teammate trying to cart my suddenly paralyzed body across an icy field as the Mounties approach.

  Prudently I pick this moment to fast-forward—I’m a parent now, for God’s sakes—to the here-and-now, a summer day that begins with rain, then turns hazy and hot as I drive slowly through the Sydney streets. Sydney, it must be said, is not one of the great cities for sightseeing. To be frank, whole parts of it are seriously ugly. It does have a pretty little park with duck ponds to commend it; down around the harbour can be nice; the new office and shopping complex, the hotels and entertainment centre add an air of modernity. But head in the wrong direction, past the steel plant and the tar ponds, say, and you can drive for long without seeing a sight that lifts your heart. That is its legacy, the price it has always paid for its very existence. Looking at it dispassionately, some might say Sydney and the other towns of industrial Cape Breton appear an anachronism, without hope in this age of the information highway and the global economy.

  I am looking today for the sad, drab building where I once lived. This was almost a decade after the indignity of the Riverview High tournament. I was then a newly minted university grad with my first job: sports reporter at the Cape Breton Post, a position I owed entirely to my father’s cousin, Gordon “Moose” Mercer, king of a local mini-conglomerate who ate lunch every weekday with the paper’s editor. Home was a windowless basement bachelor in a converted beauty salon. I survived on botched recipes from the Joy of Cooking and smoked meat sandwiches from Abe’s Deli. My shift ran from 7 p.m. until 2 a.m. and consisted mainly of typing up slow-pitch softball scores. The challenges were not overwhelming: once I figured out the dozen different substitutions for the verb “to hit” (crack, line, whistle, belt, smack, drive, hammer, wallop, clobber, rap, crucify and, my personal favourite, ding). After I just threw up my hands and admitted that I never was going to get all the different MacDonalds, Rudderhams, MacNeils, MacKinnons and Abbasses right, things were pretty relaxing.

  The newspaper office was full of quirks. So ancient looking and down at the heels that I imagine my grandfather would have felt at home. (A couple of old-timers in the composing room had actually worked with my grandfather at the Gazette.) The place smelled of vile vending machine coffee and industrial cleaner. When I arrived to punch in, a wire machine clucked away in the back room and a couple of stragglers from the day shift hammered at vintage Underwoods. Eccentrics and oddballs, I would later learn, walk all newsrooms, which are what we have instead of institutions.

  Yet even by those loose standards the Post seemed special. Other staffers told me the real characters—the sports writer who pounded back rum-and-Coke all night, passed out on the typewriter keys, then arose with the alphabet imprinted on his forehead to rattle off the rest of his column—had moved on. An amazing thought for a rookie breathing the newsroom’s musty rarefied air for the first time: the city editor looked and sounded as though he could put in a shift hauling slag at the steel plant without too much bother; the sports editor, who owned a bunch of harness racing trotters, had betting theories so elaborate they would make Stephen Hawking’s head swim. A colleague in the sports department once turned on his tape recorder back in the newsroom. Instead of an interview with a journeyman NHLer on summer vacation we were treated to the unexpected sounds of he and a girlfriend in flagrante.

  Yes, it was a fun place to be when everyone else was asleep as I tentatively tapped away on my first stories. Outside the newsroom, though, I was laughably out of sync with my surroundings. Trying to adapt to the unaccustomed shifts, I developed insomnia and often couldn’t sleep until six in the morning. Since I was carless and really knew no one anyway, it got to the point where I’d wake at three in the afternoon and just stay in bed reading until it was time for another culinary surprise before the next shift. On my two nights off—one was Saturday evening, since the Post published no Sunday edition—I’d go to the racetrack or show up at the bar by the pizzeria and nurse a couple of beers by myself.

  I never got my bearings. Running was a good example. Since then I’ve shuffled across the Rockies, lurched along the Grand Canal in Venice, stumbled through the hallucinogenic heat of Abilene, Tex. Sydney, though, was the ultimate adventure. One day, early in my stay, I cut through the Whitney Pier area. My joints and muscles felt nice and loose; I was breathing rhythmically. Everything was going fine until I happened by a house where a few guys about my age were drinking beer on the porch. “Hey, b’y, you’re not from the Pier,” one said as he bent down to pick up a rock the size of a loonie. Then all three of them were pegging stones at me as I high-tailed it down the road, looking over my shoulder like a stray dog someone had just put the run on.

  The humiliations just seemed to keep coming. Couple of weeks later I was cooling down after my workout when a member of the Sydney constabulary appeared.

  “Can I please see some identification,” he said.

  I was wearing a pair of green hospital orderly pants—then the rage as workout garb—which meant that all my pockets could hold was my apartment key. When I said I didn’t have any his eyes narrowed into little slits.

  “I just moved here,” I said. “I work for the Post.” I looked down at my greens—and it dawned on me. “Really. Honest. I’m not kidding. Call the paper. Go ahead, they’ll vouch for me.”

  “Now just settle down, son,” he said. Jesus, he thinks I’m going to run for it, he’ll blackjack me or something, I’ll wake up in a room with white walls, surrounded by people dressed like the Marx Brothers.…

  Now it makes me lonesome to cruise by the Post’s old home, where at noon every day the pensioners, pogey collectors and steelworkers on the night shift used to gather for the day’s edition. Some time ago, Thompson Newspapers built it a shiny new headquarters a couple of blocks away, which local chamber of commerce types hailed as the signal of the city’s rebirth. A better symbol of Sydney, in my opinion, stands acro
ss the street, where a tavern that seemed old fifteen years ago lives on bedraggled as ever. For this is one of those towns where just surviving is victory enough.

  Emigration, as usual, seems to be draining the area dry. And the threat that the subsidized steel plant and uncompetitive coal mines could evaporate hangs like factory smoke over Sydney and the surrounding towns. Yet there’s a quiet endurance in the people that over centuries has helped them withstand the ravages of mine and plant closures, of company strike breakers, of famines, fires and cave-ins. In spite of the uncertainty, in spite of the dearth of prospects, in spite of having the highest rate of cancer in the country, in spite of living next to the infamous tar ponds—the mere mention of which drives environmentalists the country over into apoplexy—most people never really leave this poor, doomed, angry place. Sure, they move away. But those who do spend the rest of their lives as the banished, crowding into Caper Clubs in Boston and Toronto desperate for any scrap of gossip about home.

  “It’s impossible to explain, eh,” Rankin MacSween explained as we drove towards Whitney Pier one day. He’s a lanky six-four, a bald, grey-bearded man with piercing eyes and a bass voice smooth as molasses. His is a familiar story. He grew up a few miles outside Sydney, headed for St. F.X. like all good Catholics from the island, then on to Ottawa to finish his criminology studies before starting a career with Corrections Canada. When his mother got sick he came back and never left. “I used to come over here when I was growing up and go to Fred Thomey’s, this bar,” he remembers. “There was never a set cover charge. You’d come in and he’d hold up five fingers, which meant five dollars, and you’d hold up two, kind of negotiating, see. Then he’d hold up three fingers and if you paid it, in you’d go. The bar was the same way. You’d order a beer and it would be a different price every night. It was a tough spot. There was a fight every couple of hours. There’d be knives and everything. It’s a real wonder no one was ever killed.”

  Yes, he explains, there was a time when Whitney Pier was a thriving place and this street on which we are driving was full of businesses, stores and life. It’s tough for everyone around here now; nobody has a sense that things are ever going to get any better. But the people of the Pier don’t really care. “A real estate agent tells me that this is the strongest market anywhere in the area,” MacSween adds. “Whenever a home comes up in the Pier someone is always ready to buy, because the people who grew up here always want to live here.”

  Cape Bretoners are not unique in this regard. Nova Scotians, no matter where they are from, believe in roots. They must, because so much about this place makes not a whit of sense in the economic view of things. Anybody can do well in Toronto, where a guy who isn’t fit to cut bait down at the fishplant tools around in a four-wheel-drive and berates the Filipina nanny over the car phone. In fundamentally illogical places it takes real talent and cunning to survive. But they hold on anyway, because home does not come without a price and those lucky enough to find their place have to pass a test of faith in order to stay.

  There is nothing downtrodden, in contrast, about Lunenburg. It is a rare place, with a harbour like a painting, a string of brightly coloured storefronts and block upon block of rambling, whimsical houses with widow’s walks and oversized dormers built from a local design known as the Lunenburg bump. Beautiful enough that the United Nations recently designated it a world treasure. This is no museum, not yet anyway, even if the centuries of plundering the oceans, which always supported the area in high style, are finally drawing to a close. You just have to walk down the street to know that Lunenburg is never going to be some holiday spot for the idle rich like nearby Chester. Oh, sure, the people themselves are changing: more and more transplanted book publishers, authors and software designers who live here full-time, working by fax and modem and running up monster Fed Ex tabs. Someone in the county tax office told me that last year fourteen hundred tax bills from the area went to property owners back in Germany. But the independent flavour of the place comes from the locals—the descendants of the Protestant farmers from France, Switzerland and southwestern Germany. Tough kids raised to work on fishing boats aren’t going to willingly stoop to being waiters or clerks. They aren’t servants. Look one of them in the eye and you’re staring at the genetic result of 250 years of being on your own, wondering if the next storm will destroy everything you own and when the fish will finally disappear.

  These are people who for generations have travelled the sea lanes of the world on trawlers, frigates and cargo ships. Always they come home. In many ways Henry Demone, chief executive officer of National Sea Products, once the planet’s biggest seafood company, and still Lunenburg’s biggest employer, is typical. We’re both French Huguenots, caucasian, roughly the same size and age. There the similarities end. While my clan seldom likes to step off terra firma, his father, Earl, started out as a hand on one of the last of Lunenburg’s famed saltbank schooners and eventually became the captain of NatSea’s imperious fishing fleet, once arguably the largest in the world. Henry wielded a mean filleting knife on the gutting line, where he worked summers in high school. After university he moved over to the corporate side at NatSea, then headed to France as the president of a French seafood importer and distributor. Eventually, he came back to run NatSea, which saw its glory days disappear along with the fish.

  “One day Rena and I sat down and talked about it and realized that we didn’t know anyone in either of our families who had ever married someone from outside of Lunenburg County,” he mused over coffee one day. “It’s kind of insular in that way here, I guess. But it makes for a strong Lunenburg County character. There’s a strong work ethic here and a kind of privacy here. People do tend to resist change somewhat; we say that within our company. If you’re trying to do something new it will probably happen quicker in the United States or Newfoundland. But in the end the people of Lunenburg County will probably do it as well if not better than the others.”

  At the crest of a hill on the outskirts of Sydney I turn back and look at a neatly trimmed graveyard above the dark satanic mills of the steel plant. Here, the scene seems to say, people live tough, bleak lives, die and are buried amongst their own in rocky soil that after generations of toil is theirs. But beyond, a stationary ferris wheel, the most visible piece of a travelling circus troupe, brightens the landscape. And I remember that irony is not unknown in these parts. Cape Bretoners, to steal a phrase I once saw used about the Spanish, are masters of the cosmic shrug. Like other people from hard places they take nothing short of mortality too seriously. They realize that life fundamentally is a cruel joke, but it is all that they have. So they tell stories.

  Much is made of the place’s isolated oral culture, how sitting around the kitchen table telling yarns instead of growing fat and stupid before the TV has enabled the traditions and old stories to stay alive. I believe it’s as much because they find the whole thing so profoundly funny, in a black sort of way, that they just have to laugh. It is deeply therapeutic. Think of it as a glorious, profane celebration of existence. For out of these shared stories the pulse of life can be heard, like a drumbeat through time.

  My brother and I grew up hearing stories about our family’s island. We heard stories about cave-ins and colliery strikes, about the company store, owned by the British Empire Steel Corporation, which owned everything you ate and wore, even the house where you lived, about struggling to stay off the dole during the Depression years and about the cooperative movement, which my great-grandfather helped spawn so that the miners and their families could take a bit of control over their lives. We heard about magnificent athletes, of shell-shocked war veterans wandering the streets and the locals who left to make it big. We heard stories of murder, betrayal and just plain bad luck. We heard about the striking miners who built an effigy of my grandfather, complete with the long fur coat he used to wear as an inspector in the colliery and draped with an R.I.P. sign as a warning. We heard of the old country club behind the Sydney Mines police
department where the English-born miners and their families met for a few pints and to sing the old dance-hall songs. We heard about the bootleg coal mines—essentially holes dug in people’s cellars—and Freddy Lewis, the coal company cop who would peer into basements on the lookout for wrongdoing. About Murphys 49, the famous moonshine made out in Reserve Mines. About the semi-pro baseball players who roomed at my grandparents’ home. And about Senator’s Corner in Glace Bay, where Commercial St., Union St., Main St. and Upper Main St. all converged, where during the war years the townsfolk gathered to gossip each night and where every day my grandfather picked up his Boston Post and walked the six blocks home without lifting his head from the paper.

  Charlie MacLeod’s newsstand disappeared God knows when. But some of the other old landmarks at Senator’s Corner live on: Ellie Marshall’s Store, Markadnonis’s Shoe Repair, the Savoy Theatre where the old R&B crooners the Platters, according to a poster now hanging in the window, are set to appear. Inside Senator’s Gourmet Coffee I buy an oatcake and a cup of mocha java and ask a pleasant woman drinking iced tea if she knows anyone in my family. After a bit of back and forth we establish that my aunt Rea was her grade one teacher.