This was the third unit of the Lynch Shows playing the Causeway Shopping Centre. The little show that started with nothing more than an ancient steam-powered Merry-Go-Round had grown into one of the biggest carnival outfits on the continent. It now employed over four hundred, had the newest and biggest rides found anywhere, was running four separate units at times with forty-three trucks, sixty concession stand trailers and forty-five semis, clocking well over 400,000 kilometres in a single season playing the circuit throughout the region. It was bigger now than its founder, the late Bill Lynch, could have imagined when he started it. Despite the massive expansion over the years, it remained loyal to Lynch’s ethos of a Maritime-run carnival by and for the people of Atlantic Canada. The Bill Lynch Shows became a beloved institution in Atlantic Canada, at once the centre of cheap thrills and some of the greatest works of charity ever witnessed in the region. Everybody knew the Bill Lynch Shows by the 1970s and everybody wanted them to play their town.
But the great Maritime success story was on its way to being snuffed out and sold to Ontario-based Conklin Shows. Renowned carnival impresario Patty Conklin had built the largest outdoor amusement outfit in the world by this time with his son Jim recently assuming control of the company. The younger Conklin was always looking to expand the business and snapping up the famed Bill Lynch Shows would have been a jewel in Conklin’s carny crown.
Within two hectic months, the famed tradition would be within a handshake of changing forever. Lynch’s dream would be shattered, small towns everywhere would have a hole shot through their spirit, and four hundred or so malnourished transients would be cast off to return to whatever dark corner of the region they crawled out of. None of this would have happened as a direct result of the Port Hawkesbury death, but because of the implications of it and the terrible feelings of guilt and remorse that would pervade for months on the show. The province would ultimately clear the company of any criminal negligence in the mishap, but the sore feelings, depression and anguish were more difficult to treat.
The whole outfit took it hard, but only a handful of them knew then the significance the event would hold. Current king of the carnies and chief boss Clarence “Soggy” Reid took the death on the Paratrooper to heart and handled it the way men sometimes handle insoluble conundrums: by drinking heavily. Soggy was Lynch’s heir after all and he started to feel the burden weighing heavy in his chest. Although he had worked on the show for over twenty years, this was his first full year as sole owner and it was beginning to look more and more like the last. At the very least it was the end, Soggy thought, of whatever it was Lynch was talking about when he called the carnival “escapism, make-believe, the search for relief from the monotony of everyday living.” Well, not anymore. A man was dead and that was real. The innocence seemed to be lost forever. There was no escaping the cold grasp of death.
The final truth is that death has always been an element of the Maritime carnival, even from the beginning. That it had been avoided this long on the show may have only added up to a coincidence. Not because of any carelessness on the part of the workers, but fifty years of hurling people through the air brings its own uncertainties. Carnies are naturally superstitious people and any sign of misfortune would be warded off with a prayer to the great glittery god of amusements. They knew the doomed nature of tempting fate and were content to avoid it at any cost, which meant taking the job seriously enough to be sober and mindful when it came to constructing the rides and completing checks routinely. But the spectre of death has always been lurking around the midway, like a malevolent accomplice in the very celebration of life the carnival created in towns throughout the Maritimes. There is something truly frightening about the magnificence of life as it spins through the sky and it has nothing to do with loose pins or defects in locking devices. This was the first death on the carnival, but it wouldn’t be the last.
McNab’s Island, 1890s
It was always by early evening, when the shades of summer sky started to contrast and clouds turned to little puffs of cotton candy, that any individual on McNab’s Island realized the only relief for the pressing joy that welled up inside them was more dancing, more drinking, more food, more music, more anything that would keep this celebration going.
Exactly what the thousands of revellers were celebrating was never made clear, but if you were part of the party on McNab’s in the late 1890s, you understood and need not worry about specifics. More became an attitude rather than a motto and why was a question nobody asked. There was something clean and exhilarating about being on the island at dusk on a beautiful late June day. It was like a sparkling swirl of cosmic energy strung everyone together for a short spell, there between the spruce trees on an island nestled at the mouth of Halifax Harbour that flirted with the ocean and beyond. It made you feel small in a wholly human way, but a meaningful component of something much larger and it was nice to be a part of that.
The orchestra would blare on from the grandstand, fiddlers and horn-blowers keeping up the momentum of their audience, the bodies of men and women on the hill accentuating ghost notes with their limbs as the smell of food mingled with night in the branches above. Children were giggling all around, engaged in innocent games of hide-and-seek and foot races. Young men were winding down a baseball game in the distance as the gentle summer air gave way to a mild breeze off the ocean, creating a night atmosphere for the island all its own. It hung in the darkening sky, low above the heads of the picnickers and dancers in the light from the lanterns, as if it could be poked by a curious finger, the still painted backdrop for the show that was now contained to this one lonely island.
It was difficult to determine at times the adults from the children in this cloud of excitement. On the east end of the picnic grounds, cinders showered through the aura as the steam-powered Merry-Go-Round made its turns, the wooden horses running counter-clockwise laps pulling two-seat chariots between emanations of steam. A calliope, positioned in the centre of the platform, whistled its haunting symphony as an eager crowd lined up for a spin on the fantastic machine, each of them certain the ten cent fare was a small price to pay to complete the mythic journey from this world of everyday realities to the other.
The Merry-Go-Round became the nucleus for the feverish comet that was McNab’s Island. At the outset there was nothing particularly striking about it. It was ancient then, an old-fashioned rickety wooden contraption that rested on wheels which ran on a circular track. The horses were not suspended by poles, but rather on sweeps protruding out from the centre underneath the gapped boards. This meant the twenty-four horses in rows of two did not pounce vertically as they do on more modern carousels, but instead circled the track stationary. Still, on those hot summer nights, nothing could have been more sublime. The equine sculptures were not merely running in circles; they were running straight through the imaginations of everyone who took a turn on them. The Merry-Go-Round was the last touch the island needed to divide itself completely between two worlds. Across the harbour, reality sat waiting for vindication, but here on the north end of McNab’s – on Findlay’s Picnic Grounds – the real world was replaced with something more sensual, something only imagined during the week, but which had taken form here. It was written on the faces, heard in the air and felt through vibrations in every direction. The awe-inspiring spectacle of people basking in the wonder of life was a thrill like no other. It felt like the entire populations of Halifax and Dartmouth were on this island, dancing and whooping it up in the summer air, celebrating some newly interpreted version of the Golden Age.
The party had started years before, up the hill from Findlay’s at Woolnough’s Pleasure Grounds. Halifax restaurateur Charles Woolnough had recognized a need for a permanent facility for picnickers and opened up a portion of his property on the island to the public in 1873. McNab’s had been used as a recreational site as far back as the 1760s, when men would travel to the island’s sheltered confine
s to hone their skills at an early form of a ring-toss game called quoits. Woolnough knew the history and was sure to include an area for that pastime on his grounds as well as space for football, while also installing dining and dancing pavilions. The 1840s saw a massive spike in leisure interests as city residents took full advantage of their own little ocean playground. On some afternoons picnics on the island reached a roaring crowd of over six thousand people. The successful civic picnic for Governor General, Lord Dufferin, in 1874 cemented the island’s reputation as the capital of earthly delights within the city. Shortly after, local newspapers were filled with ads and notices of picnics to be held at Woolnough’s for the rest of the summer season. The Halifax Steamship Company cancelled runs to Bedford in order to accommodate the tremendous demand from “bathers and beer-drinkers” determined to revel in their own slice of the new paradise.
But by the 1890s, James Findlay’s Picnic Grounds were attracting more visitors than Woolnough’s, due in part to the better location on the Halifax side of the island. There was more of a carnival atmosphere at Findlay’s that included games, snacks, drinks and of course the old Merry-Go-Round.
Down the gentle slope from the picnic grounds, between the hundreds of beached rowboats in Findlay’s Cove, the twentieth century was washing ashore in the black harbour night. But the spectre of the past is never really that far away in the Maritimes. Across the cove from the grounds sat Hugonin Point, the site of a mass grave of cholera victims less than thirty-five years earlier. Thirty-five years was not a long time for a place to transform from infected graveyard to fashionable mecca. There were still people alive in Halifax who remembered the S.S. England pulling into McNab’s Cove with over four hundred sick passengers on board in April 1866.
The prognosis was grim for those infected by the dread disease in the nineteenth century. Once stricken, victims would have twelve hours or so to suffer through gangrene, vomiting and purging, followed by a discoloration of the hands and feet, dehydration and the inability to urinate before collapsing and expiring with their arms and legs twisted up in contorted terror. It was hard to fit them in coffins after that and cleaning up the feces that poured out of them on collapse was a burden, too.
Fearing an outbreak in the city, port authorities ordered the ship to anchor in McNab’s Cove on the Halifax side of the island. It was on its way from Liverpool, England to New York but was forced to detour after passengers and crew felt the first rising waves of the illness. The infected passengers were transferred to a surplus naval ship and quarantined off Findlay’s wharf, while the remaining eight hundred passengers were detained on the island, where some took up residence in buildings used for workers constructing Fort Ives while the ship was fumigated and the sick treated. A lot of passengers and potential cholera carriers camped out on land that would eventually become the site of Findlay’s Picnic Grounds and that little island paradise. But in April of 1866, that land was a hellish purgatory where the strong fought the sick and elderly for food when it arrived from the mainland. The shelters proved inadequate and the passengers’ clothing not sufficient for spring in Nova Scotia. Eight hundred mean, half-crazed and cold cholera carriers running around McNab’s stealing food and beating the weak was enough incentive for most of the island’s dozen or so inhabitants to flee. Some didn’t come back. Eventually, soldiers were dispatched to the island to restore order. The passengers were moved to the southern tip of the island where they were guarded from trying to make a break for the city. Within two weeks, the ordeal was over and an estimated two hundred cholera victims were buried on the island in different locations. One gravesite is located at the south end of the island at Little Thrum Cap and the other graves were dug by criminals from the city prison on land overlooking Findlay’s.
All of this was not heavy in the minds of the revellers who would show up for a good time at Findlay’s near the turn of the century. The brush had grown over the unmarked graves burying the stink and the gnarled limbs. That kind of gloomy stuff could make a person introspective and Findlay’s was certainly not the place for solemn contemplation. It was a place where human desires were satisfied, if only for a few beautiful hours.
The raging parties caught the attention of the local temperance movement, who protested the consumption of alcohol on the island. In a tidy bit of fire-and-brimstone hyperbole, one member of the temperance movement, a man by the name of John Wesley, condemned McNab’s and anyone who set foot on the pleasure grounds in a local religious newspaper.
A curse is in the midst of them: the curse of God cleaves to the stones, the timber, the furniture of them! The curse of God is in their Garden, their Walks, their Groves; a fire that burns to the nethermost hell! Blood, blood is there: the foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood!
He went on to conclude:
McNab’s Island is more frequently a place of Drunken Riot than any other place in the vicinity of Halifax; therefore, Churches & Temperance men should not patronise it either as individuals or societies.
Although the threat of eternal damnation was spelled out for them in capital letters and exclamation marks, people continued to take their lonely, tired, bored souls to the island for revitalization. There was something liberating about celebrating life in wholly secular, fleshy abandon.
In any case, greater atrocities than drinking had taken place on McNab’s if anyone was willing to remember. About a kilometre south from Findlay’s cove was Sherbrooke Tower on Mauger’s Beach, a strip of beachfront that juts out from the rest of the island. On the other side is the infamous Hangman’s Beach where executed military personnel were strung up in gibbets as a warning to all ships that entered the harbour. That practice began in the 1780s and lasted well into the nineteenth century. A kilometre in the other direction of Findlay’s Picnic Grounds sits Indian Point, so named for the natives who were exiled there in the 1760s in an attempt to diffuse growing tensions with European settlers in Halifax. That was the official reason, but the island was for all intents a prison for the natives who would occasionally swim to shore to attack the citizens of Dartmouth in retaliation.
But here at Findlay’s on this late June night on the eve of the twentieth century, the party was winding down for the week with wistful regret. People were piling into their rowboats and sailing back across the tenebrous harbour to the cities, back to the real world. Late stragglers were jumping on the last ferry home to greet responsibilities in the morning: work and school, bills and decisions. In short, the dull routine of life.
The new century would change McNab’s once and for all. The island between the cities, at the mouth of the harbour that stretched beyond, the place where at one time anything could happen, would be almost entirely abandoned a couple decades into this fresh century and erased from the collective memory like a long-dead relative whose face recedes more as the years wear on. The ferries would cease running services to the island, individual weekend excursions would be scrapped and McNab’s left to sink.
But as the past has a way of lingering in the Maritimes, it would be lurking under the surface for years to come. The party was no longer confined to the island; it was about to embrace a larger audience. The vital spark of McNab’s Island in those days was destined to burn in all corners of the region because of a curious twist of fate that would bring a new lighthouse keeper and his family to the island in the spring of 1905.
A Young Man Named Lynch
Matthew Lynch was a solid, hard-nosed Maritimer with salt water running through his veins. Born at Falkland Village on the western shore of Halifax Harbour in 1865, he spent his early life at sea in different pursuits that included conducting wreckage operations in the Atlantic and other diving activities. At the age of forty, he accepted a position to maintain the two-year-old McNab’s Island Rear Range Lighthouse and quickly fell in love with the little island, a place he would call home for the rest of his life. It was clear to L
ynch the position would afford him the opportunity to continue living by the sea where his heart had always been. What wasn’t as clear was the effect it would have on his children.
Lynch’s four children grew up on the island, afternoons interrupted in the summer by good-time carousers wandering through their backyard on their way to Findlay’s Pleasure Grounds, which happened to border their property. His youngest son William took a special interest in the festivities that occurred on the island during the summer months and for a boy, this kind of mirthful human revelry was worth exploring. William and his sister Gladys held weekly religious conversions, depending on which church was holding a picnic on the island that day, in order to participate in the different Sunday School races. On a few occasions the religious fraudsters were discovered and ejected from the grounds, but that hardly discouraged the young Lynch children. There was always a way to have fun on McNab’s in those days, especially for kids. The party was always raging and if it had to end early one day, that was fine, there would be another, better party the next. Quietly marvelling over the celebrations of life also proved a worthwhile exercise in expanding the Lynch children’s imaginations on certain evenings.
Growing up with your backyard the centre of bacchanalian revelry for an entire city could have any number of psychological effects on a kid’s personality over the years. Jay Gatsby never had any children, but if he had, they would have been troubled souls: crazy on the punch and inevitably developing the quixotic illusion that life is something to be frittered away in pursuits of pleasure and entertainment, without ever asking why.
Under the Electric Sky Page 2
