The Last Best Place (16 page)

“Oh, it’s not an issue yet. I think part of it’s that this area has really started to gain confidence in the last twenty years. You used to hear about Scottish fiddlers. Now they refer to them as Cape Breton fiddlers. There is a new confidence in our own culture rather than simply seeing it as borrowed from something else,” he explains. “So far there is nothing to be alarmed about, but a lot to be alert for. We hope we can keep the water slides off the Cabot Trail. We realize this could turn into Disney Land with kilts if we don’t watch out.”

He has to get back to this week’s column. On the way out I grab the latest copy of the
Oran
, which I take the time to read leaning against the car: last week Inverness County council was preoccupied with why the streets of Mabou hadn’t been repaired for this year’s ceilidh and with formally adopting the daisy as the official flower of the county. There’s a long story about a Gaelic summer camp for kids; a piece about a break-in at the Aberdeen electrical station, which urges the culprits—who may have received electrical burns—to see a doctor because “electrical burns may seem to be minor, but in fact they are usually worse than originally perceived.” There’s an item on a school reunion during which the alumni reminisced about “school fights and black eyes and broken hands.” There is an ad for a chemical-free see-through shirt, which
covers the entire upper body “to protect against all biting insects; black flies, mosquitoes, tics, no-see-ums.” I see notices for Lewis and Marion MacLellan’s fiftieth anniversary in Dunvegan. I learn that $30,000 would get you 150 acres in Little Narrows, that the DeVries family had arrived from Montreal to open their cottage, that Mrs. Agnes Dennis of Orangedale and Mrs. Catherine Cameron of Whycocomagh had recently turned ninety, that Malcolm MacKay of the Ottawa area enjoyed “mackerel, eels, gaspereau and homemade maraghs” on his recent visit to the area and that a lady’s watch and pair of glasses had recently been found on Inverness Beach.

It reads like a poem about an imaginary place, where time stands still and the world is unsullied and pure, calling to restless souls as if from a dream.

T
HERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO GET TO
B
RIER
I
SLAND BY CAR: DOWN A TOUGH
, heavily treed strip of land about twelve miles long and half a mile wide known as the Digby Neck. It demands commitment, particularly on a gloomy, sour day when the wind churns the rain into a grim froth that makes the inside of my car seem like the last hospitable place on the planet. I have to wait a few minutes with seven other cars to board the small ferry across to Long Island. Then it’s just a short hop to a little spot called Freeport and the second ferry ride across to Westport, Brier Island’s sole town.

Here the land ends. It’s a magnificent, brooding, Gothic place. Which pleases me to no end. For this is how I always pictured it: fog-bound, battered by wild seas that smash against its step-like cliffs. Brier, I know, is a magnet for violent electrical storms, for bald eagles, ospreys, great blue herons and other migratory birds, for the humpbacks, finbacks and other endangered whales that breach in the waters nearby. This is the Graveyard of Fundy, a treacherous spot where too many vessels to count went down.

I went to Brier Island because of Joshua Slocum, even though I knew he was no saint. Definitely a pervert, probably a sadist, maybe
a murderer. And Lord, he looked the part. He peers haunted and dangerous out of those old photographs, like a Bible prophet or the perpetrator of some awful crime—his gaunt face all sharp bones, wrinkles that look like they’ve been carved with a knife and El Greco eyes forever lifted to the horizon looking for sin. The time I’m interested in was before the alligators came. When he was nothing but a middle-aged failure, a near-derelict with no possessions to speak of other than the once-dilapidated, century-old oyster sloop he found sitting in a Massachusetts farm pasture and rebuilt plank by plank. Slocum got some bad directions from a fisherman as he made his way from Boston to his old home on the northeast tip of Nova Scotia in the summer of 1895. When he manoeuvred the
Spray
into dock at Westport he was technically completing the first leg of his three-year, 46,000-mile odyssey. But the idea of sailing around the world by himself was no doubt hatched here, watching the great vessels move by during the long hours he spent driving wooden pegs into the thick soles of handmade fishermen’s boots at his father’s bootshop. So it is no liberty to say that Brier Island is where the great adventure began.

I feel thrilled a century later to stand at the far end of Westport, in front of a small bronze plaque bearing his likeness atop a pile of beach stones. I read his book
Sailing Alone Around the World
—one of the greatest of all adventure stories—years ago but only now finally had a reason to come. Tightly packed near the centre of the harbour, the foundations of its oldest houses dug into the side of the hill, still exposed to the grandeur of the elements, the
village seems eerily isolated. I feel alone here at the water’s edge, even with a couple of tourists from Saskatoon, also paying homage at Slocum. How, in God’s name, must he have felt setting off from here to try to become the first person to sail around the globe singlehandedly, in a boat not appreciably bigger than my Toyota Corolla? In his book he sounds chipper and confident—maybe because he was a desperate man with nothing to lose, maybe because he was a bit insane. Pure, undiluted courage is not something with which I’m well acquainted; I feel brave ordering a dish with three chili peppers beside it on a Szechwan menu. What he did is so startlingly amazing, so far beyond my frame of reference.

It does not surprise me that he began here, in the province where he was born “in a cold spot, on coldest North Mountain, on a cold February 20.” For there has always been a frontier feel to this, the oldest place on the continent. Once you hit here you’re out of room; there is nowhere else to run. So, along with the decent, hard-working folk, Nova Scotia has always gathered every sort of migrant, hope chaser, roughneck, trickster, incompetent, misfit and failure. It is a place for Big Dreams in all their forms. They are starker here and often more perverse. Just because in such a place they have to be.

Know this about Slocum: he was just sixteen when he shipped out in the British merchant marine, and twenty-five when he walked the quarterdeck of an American coaster as captain. His honeymoon was a voyage to the salmon-fishing grounds off Alaska. Most of his children died at sea. So did his first wife, as
their ship lay in the Plata River off Buenos Aires. He married a cousin, Henrietta, from Nova Scotia. On one of their first voyages together, back to South America, the crew mutinied and Slocum had to shoot one crewman and wound another. On the same voyage the crew caught smallpox and the ship, whipsawed by crosswind and currents, broke up on rocks, leaving the Slocums stranded in a foreign land. Salvaging what he could, Slocum built a shelter for his family on the beach, which is where they lived for the five months it took him to build a thirty-five-foot “canoe” he christened
Liberdade
. They needed fifty-five days to cover the 5,500-mile voyage home.

They ended up in Boston, broke with no prospects when a sea captain friend offered to give him a “ship” that needed some repairs. First time he saw the derelict oyster boat lying in the pasture he thought it was a joke.
Spray
was inscribed upon her faded nameplate, but her age and parentage were doubtful. It took him thirteen months to hew the timbers and put the planks in place, to tar and paint the exterior. The job cost him $553.62. When he launched her in April 1893, Slocum wrote, “She sat on the water like a swan.” Returning to Westport two years later, he reminisced how he and other boys used to hunt on dark nights for the skin of a black cat to make a plaster for a lame man. And he recalled Lowry the tailor, who enjoyed his tobacco and was also fond of his gun, a combination that was almost the end of him when “in one evil moment” he put his lit dudeen in the coattail pocket where he carried his loose powder. He stayed long enough to overhaul the
Spray
once more, “then tried her seams, but found that even the test of the sou’west rip had started nothing.” After a couple of false starts, his log for July 2, 1895, read: “9:30 a.m. sailed from Yarmouth. 4:30 p. m. passed Cape Sable; distance, three cables from the land. The sloop making eight knots. Fresh breeze N.W.” He was fifty-one years old with only a tin clock for navigation. He planned to circle the globe heading eastward. But in Gibraltar, he heard about pirates in the Mediterranean and backtracked to South America. To avoid going around Cape Horn, he tried to cut through the Strait of Magellan, only the worst sailing waters in the world. After seven attempts and more than two months he finally broke through to the Pacific, shouting “Hurrah for the
Spray
” to the seals, seabirds and penguins. From there he headed for the Samoa Islands, where he met the widow of Robert Louis Stevenson. Reaching Australia, he dropped anchor and stayed for ten months. He resumed his course across the Indian Ocean to the tiny island of Mauritius and then on to South Africa.

He sprinkled carpet tacks on deck before he slept and awoke to the screams of pirates who crept aboard in the dark of night. He nearly drowned trying to free his vessel from a South American sandbank. Stricken by food poisoning and lying delirious in bed, he once saw the ghost of the pilot of Columbus’s ship the
Pinta
at the
Spray’s
wheel. But he kept going. “I felt a contentment in knowing that the
Spray
had encircled the globe,” he wrote after crossing his boat’s outward-bound track. At 1 a.m. on June 27, 1898, he dropped anchor at Newport, R.I.

It’s spitting rain as I drive along a battened-down main street and pull up to one of the few modern-looking buildings in town. Inside is a gift shop and well-stocked general store as well as a place to sign up for a whale-watching cruise. A slim woman behind the gift-shop counter, with dark hair and high cheekbones, tells me I’ve missed the last one today. I just snap my fingers, grimace and say, “Dammit.”

Her name, it turns out, is Judy Joys. She tells me R.E. Robicheau Ltd., her father’s store, used to be located across the street. But that was before the Great Groundhog Day Storm of 1976, with its tidal waves and 130-mile-an-hour winds. Raymond Robicheau was working in his office when a neighbour ran in, grabbed him by the front of the shirt and started hauling him towards the back door. They had just crossed the street when the wall of water struck, blowing out the front of the building, leaving the rest to collapse and disappear in the wake. Joys was living in Vancouver when the big wave hit. So she only heard second-hand how her sister ran down with their father’s old army rifle to scare off looters. And how the townsfolk later showed up with money they owed her father, even though all the store’s IOUs were washed away in the storm.

The rain keeps the tourists away, giving her time to lean her elbows on the counter and tell me about how wonderful it was growing up here. She tells me about the 6 p.m. curfew for the last ferry run of the day from the mainland and how her family left their house unlocked, even for the two or three weeks they were
away on vacation. She talks about the old characters who sat on the wooden bench by the pot-bellied oil stove in her father’s store. Over there would be kind-hearted Franky Buck, who was bent permanently double, legend has it, after contracting syphilis as a young man. He committed suicide in his eighties by walking off the end of a wharf. Next to him most days was Ace MacDormard, his face browned and wrinkled from decades on fishing boats, hand-rolled cigarette stuck permanently to his lower lip. Ole Ace had incredibly bad luck: a son and two nephews who died at sea, a house that burned to the ground, a boat that went up in flames and another that exploded while he was gassing up, blowing him onto a nearby wharf. But in his eighties the old roué was still donning his reflector sunglasses, hopping behind the wheel of his huge gas-guzzler, which he had painted royal blue with the same flat gloss that he used on his boat, and taking the ferry to the mainland to visit one of his girlfriends.