The Last Best Place (2 page)

Life here has never been easy—about what you would expect of a place born of ill-advised colonial ambition, dependent for its very existence on a sea that swallows sailors and fishermen of all nations with terrible equanimity. The French did finally hack lives out of the wilderness. The English followed, scattering Germans, Swiss and the Dutch to counteract the French presence and, they hoped, to wean the Acadians from their ancient Catholic faith. When that failed they herded the French onto ships and resettled them in English colonies to the south, leaving the land for the Lowlands Scots and the farmers, fishermen and merchants of New England to gobble up. Next came the Loyalists from the rebel American colonies and thousands of Highlanders, dispersed by the Clearances.

The miracle, I always felt, was that so many stayed. Who can blame the ones who took one look at the frightening mass of trees that ran right down to the icy water, raked a hand through the lumpy, rock-filled soil, considered the stories of the bloodthirsty savages waiting in the wilderness and kept on going right down to New England? By the end of the nineteenth century the ambitious, the adventurous and the young were gone. The mines and shipyards had closed. The forests had reclaimed the once-cleared land.
Abandoned farms and homesteads rotted in the damp. You can see them everywhere still, the fallen-in cellars and decrepit apple trees that mark these lost dreams.

That left us.

For against all odds, somehow the place hung on. Despite its doomed economy, in spite of being out there on the edge of the continent, people came, built families, homes and businesses, fought, attended church and went spectacularly mad. My people are the French, Scottish and English yeomanry of smalltown Nova Scotia. We are a tribe of miners, teachers, musicians, athletes, housewives, lawyers, janitors and businessmen. We are Baptists and whisky drinkers, of high morals and low cunning. We are men and women named McKeigan, Briers, Brown, Lamond and Levy whose names can now be found on tombstones in places called Glace Bay, Sydney Mines, Windsor, Halifax and Chester Basin. My realization that Nova Scotia is fundamentally different from everywhere else came a week after my wedding, when Lisa and I headed down the road to Calgary, where bumper stickers read “Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark” and where a mayor with a gut like a sumo champ raised his popularity a couple of points by bleating about how Maritimers on the dole were raising the crime rate in his city.

Let the fat man talk. Calgary and then Toronto made me Nova Scotian in a way that I would not have been had I not left. Cringe to think about the way I stood around at parties, this mystical, faraway look in my eye like King Arthur reminiscing about Camelot
as I went on about my home. I defended the dubious honour of Nova Scotia’s politicians as each successive scandal hit the national press. I lit into a slack-jowled paper pusher from soulless Etobicoke who spent an expense-account lunch droning on about “the lack of a Maritime work ethic.” I actually found myself standing at a bar late one night before a woman with three nose rings, extolling the virtues of Rita MacNeil.
Rita MacNeil!

Then I realized something essential:
that
(Nova Scotia) was still home and
this
(Calgary and Toronto) still away. And thus it would always be, even if I couldn’t articulate why. I knew that Nova Scotia was in some respects the perfect fantasy spot. There’s the inspiring geography for starters, the highlands, the valleys, the jigsaw coastline and preternaturally powerful tides. There’s also the matter of being at the end of the line, something about the endless, mystical promise of the ocean and of being precariously balanced between the New World and the Old. Some people are just drawn to places where life is close to the edge and to the elements. So along with the sober and the ambitious, the place attracted the losers and misfits with nowhere else to run, the crazed dreamers with ideas too big for more conventional places, the obsessed romantics convinced that they’ve finally found truth.

Is it any surprise that people and things are just a little out of whack here? In Nova Scotia horses live in bungalow basements, barroom drunks sleep standing up, motorcycle riders use socks for gloves. I know of a man who keeps his casket and tombstone in the living room and his favourite cat in the deep-freeze. Let’s face it, any
place that can accommodate the same French stock that spawned the Ragin’ Cajuns of Louisiana, wild-eyed Scottish Highlanders and stubborn Loyalists who preferred allegiance to the British crown to independence is big enough to ensure that fantasies never wear out. Even the Gaelic name, New Scotland, seems to extend back into a distant romantic haze.

My Nova Scotia, when I thought about it truthfully, was less an entity than an abstraction. I knew that a whole big world and all the good jobs were elsewhere. I just needed the
concept
of Nova Scotia out there on the horizon, in case everything went to ratshit. Except now I was on this plane heading back to Nova Scotia terrified that reality would spoil the memory forever. That the whole concept was no more than a fiction of a feverishly wistful imagination. That you can’t go home again.

I knew that so much
hadn’t
changed since we left. Province House still seemed to be run by crooks. Miners, fishermen and steelworkers were still facing extinction as their industries died and the flood of federal money that kept the place afloat was inexorably drying up. But in my absence the province had become a demographic paradox: a place whose population is essentially stable yet seems suddenly to consist mostly of people who were born elsewhere. On any day in Nova Scotia a traveller might encounter a Hollywood actor, an old Haight-Ashbury flower child, an adventurer from Ceylon, a novelist from Ireland, an avant-garde composer from New York, the world’s strongest man or a holy man from Nepal. Where did all these Germans come from? What about these
Buddhists everywhere? Who were these downshifters, back-to-the-landers, spiritual seekers who opened restaurants that used cloth napkins and flogged software to Silicon Valley while looking out on the Bay of Fundy? Who were these people who overpaid for exposed headlands where the winter westerlies got up to 100 mph and the waves wore away a foot of shoreline a year? What was going through their minds when they started up cosy, doomed bed-and-breakfasts in neglected corners of Cape Breton and the Annapolis Valley?

I sort of understood. For people like these, Nova Scotia meant wide-open spaces when most people live in cramped communities. It suggested freedom from dirt, crime and urban blight. It still resonates with a haunting echo of the past when pockets of this ageing continent were still virginal. Had the dreamers, the terminally deranged, the spiritual seekers and every hippy still in captivity found something more important? Did Nova Scotia somehow fulfil the yearning of the times? Had they found their special place here on the end of the continent?

At this point, I really had no idea. All I could do was speak for myself. Which I did by turning to the drunken plumber beside me and saying, “From Nova Scotia.”

“Ah,” he sighed, flopping back in his chair. “Then you’re going home too.”

T
HIS IS A BOOK ABOUT A CONCEPT THAT ORIGINATES IN THE SOUL, SO
I
DON’T
want you to be put off by ancient rocks and hard, barren soil, mountains that stretch into the sky and mines that bore deep into the ground, unbroken forest that pushes right down to the shore and an ocean that gives everything its taste, smell, feel, language and heart. Nova Scotia is an elemental place of soft, heartbreaking beauty, but there is nothing fundamentally gentle about it: people still die when fireballs shoot through mine shafts and fishing trawlers go down in winter hurricanes. You can’t ignore waves that wipe out entire waterfronts or tides that lift fishing boats from the sea-floor mud like the hands of invisible giants. The world is wilder here, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. It shapes the people as only savage, magnificent places do. Home, then, is landscape—the architecture and ambiance of life. And that, therefore, is where we shall start.

Nova Scotia, if there is any justice, ought to be seen first from the sea. We should all be like old-time Basque fishermen high on the mast scanning the horizon as it disappears from view behind each passing swell for our first glimpse of the highlands of Cape Breton,
say, or the great harbour at the place the Mi’kmaqs called Chebucto. Mostly now you see it by air, heading east from some more important spot towards Halifax, which is what Chebucto is now called. Romantics like to think the province is shaped like a lobster. I’ve always felt it looked like a prehistoric bird, the ugly, predatory kind with a name fifteen letters long that died out couple of hundred million years ago. But maybe the best way to picture Nova Scotia is to picture Britain. Shrink it down, strip it of people. What is similar is the land: wild and mountainous in the north, the central parts shot through with the same veins of coal; everywhere good harbours providing shelter for cities and towns built along the same ocean. Nova Scotia is centuries younger than Britain, but for North America it is a doddering, ancient place. And both are damp—as likely to be foggy as raining—populated out of necessity by tea sippers and spirit swillers forever trying to drive the chill from their joints.

The parallels are not accidental. Until 300 million years ago Nova Scotia lay near the equator deep inside a seamless supercontinent beside what would become the Cornwall coast of England. A hundred million years later the supercontinent began to split into the continents of Africa, Europe and North and South America. The main rupture finally came just east of Nova Scotia, the cosmic G-spot.

At ground level you know why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “This is the forest primeval” in
Evangeline
, his poem about
Nova Scotia. But from the air you’re struck by how close the province is to being submerged: surrounded by ocean, dotted by lakes, segmented by rivers. Nowhere are you more than an hour’s drive from the sea. Three-quarters of the population lives within five miles of the ocean. The coastline weaves and rolls, juts and twists. Time hasn’t done much to smooth Nova Scotia’s sharp, prehistoric edges, more than 6,000 miles of them, a coast longer than the breadth of the entire continent.

I’ve travelled the next-best thing—all the existing highways and byways. Which means I have been truly blessed. Even on the most agonizingly dull section of Nova Scotia road—the section where you’ve got the windows down, head stuck out like a basset hound, gulping air to stay awake—a weird scene will cross your windshield and give you a jolt. You cannot, for example, drive for half an hour in any direction without passing a warning from some fringe band of religious zealots that The End Is Upon Us, a hunk of some unnameable, nasty-looking roadkill, or the remnants of a blown-out tire, which always, to my mind, hints at something truly awful. The abandoned roadside footwear has always given me pause: the pair of sneakers beneath the overpass, the tasseled loafer in the gutter, the black rubber boot on the broken yellow line.

As for the passing parade of humans, well, Frederico Fellini wouldn’t have to give casting calls in Nova Scotia. Just get behind the wheel, hit the road and say, “You, you, you, you’re all hired.” Not long ago on the outskirts of Halifax I saw a mad man in a good suit sitting on the grass island between the divided highway babbling
cheerfully in the burning midafternoon sun. Once someone in a Halloween mask driving a rusty Cadillac played chicken with me for nearly twenty miles east from Yarmouth before flipping me the bird and driving off. Once I spent a sweaty half hour as the lone male in a car full of women behind a bunch of Hells Angels who slowed to a crawl and gestured jacking off until they got bored—at least I hope that’s what made them stop—and roared off.