The Last Best Place (8 page)

“Jaysus, that’s great. Only be a sec,” he said breathlessly, slamming the door behind him. “Last time I saw her it didn’t end so good. But here goes.”

We sat down, our legs dangling off the end of the wharf. An idyllic scene with the boats bobbing and the ropes creaking with the strain. Then, the slam of a screen door and a dog barking. We turned
our heads and saw the great lover himself puffing down the trail being pursued by the longest, foulest string of curses I’ve ever heard lashed together in a single sentence.

We never did find out what happened in there. But I like what the whole scene said. I like that kind of brazen, foolhardy optimism, that willingness to trust in pure wit to keep your head above water, even when there’s not a hope in hell you can pull it off. Hard places like Nova Scotia bring out that side of people. To live here you need a sense of lasting tradition, loyalty and common purpose to go with a reckless imagination and rebellious spirit. You also need a healthy dose of self-reliance and a mile-wide streak of pride, the hallmarks of the true survivor. I have a friend who was president of a consulting business in Toronto until he bought a chunk of gorgeous Nova Scotia oceanfront in a place called Musquodoboit to build his dream house. A few months after he moved in he saw a half-ton pull into the next-door driveway. Since the owners were away Ross walked over to investigate. My friend is well over two hundred pounds, has a face like Sean Connery and the bearing of someone who holds a third-degree black belt in karate, which he does. He politely asked the man in the oilskins walking up from the beach if he knew the owners. “I’m a lobster fisherman,” was the reply. “We go where we fucking well want.”

My friend was puzzled by the encounter. But I take the fisherman’s point: life can be hard in Nova Scotia. Who can endure if defeat or demoralization creep in? Nova Scotians fully realize that luck is for other people and that they have to make their own
breaks. Sometimes they even do. Otherwise they shake their fists at the gods and at the rest of the world. They yell and curse, brood, dance, fornicate and fight. Because what else is life for?

Nova Scotia is a place where the full scope of humanity seems to fit onto one small stage. And if there is such a thing as the Nova Scotian identity, its soul lies in the sum total of values that exist distinctly in its multitude of people and places. Cape Bretoners, my people, might as well be from another planet as the mainland. Yet even within that small island there’s a mind-boggling diversity, the gentle-spirited folk on the gorgeous west coast being as different from the hard-bitten stoics of the industrialized southeast as is humanly possible. Back on the mainland, one minute you’re listening to an Acadian shopkeeper ramble on animatedly in French, few miles down the road it’s the skirl of the bagpipes and an unblinking stare from some craggy Hebredian face. Hour later you’re in some old Loyalist homestead staring at one of those wall hangings embroidered with
There’ll always be an England/England shall be free/If England means as much to you/as England means to me
. Or you’re down on the moody eastern shore, one of the more depressed spots in the province, with its undercurrent of violence that manifests in anything from race riots to random shootings. Then, before your head has a chance to stop spinning, you’re in Lunenburg County, still populated by the descendants of the original Protestant farmers from France, Switzerland and southwestern Germany.

There’s room for everyone. Reminds me of what Mark Twain
said at the beginning of
Huckleberry Finn:
“In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.” We are all different and we are all connected. I didn’t always understand that. But now as I plunged back into my old life I finally did. Identity is landscape, history and mythology. It is roots and genes. It is a lot of different things, like a Cajun gumbo. The recipe is essentially the same; what changes are a few of the ingredients, the proportions, the spices. It may taste a little different every time, but it’s still unmistakably gumbo. It could be nothing else.

Universal truths are, of course, hard to come by. Nevertheless, there are things you should know right from the start about Nova Scotians. Not all of them, of course. The newcomers are adding new flavours to the mix, changing it as the province changes them. But I cannot speak for those people. For now I want to talk about the ones who have been here longer.
My people
, about whom a few broad statements are possible.

Despite the inordinately large number of scholars, scientists and big thinkers risen from their midst, Nova Scotians retain a loud contempt for anything that smells intellectual. Because of circumstances, they tend to defer to authority by bowing and scraping to politicians in Ottawa, to the rich, the church, the big corporations headquartered elsewhere. A habit that has gotten them nowhere and is broken only, it seems, by intemperate action, whether long, unwinnable labour strikes or massive protest votes that only alienate the government in Ottawa.

They look at the world through flinty eyes. Which is fortunate, perhaps, since it prevents them from falling too often prey to shysters, con artists, religious saviours, economic miracle workers and other cheats who gravitate to desperate places. (They leave that to the bureaucrats, so willing to shovel taxpayers’ money at sad, doomed heavy water plants that make no heavy water, gold mines that find no gold, oil fields that yield not one barrel of crude.)

They have a penchant for intrigue and scheming—which explains why they rule the world of business, the media, the armed forces and the church once unchained from this small pond. No wonder partisan politics is such a sport, religion and pastime, and Nova Scotians make the wiliest politicians in the land. The world is just different down here, a place where until recently a payoff to the governing party ensured not only that you would get a liquor licence to open a bar but also that any competitor who wanted to open a watering hole nearby would not. There are brand-new roads that go nowhere and gleaming wharfs in villages where no one fishes. If a visitor from some far-away place asks about the incongruity of such a thing the answer usually comes back, “That’s just Nova Scotia politics,” and somehow they understand.

They are violent and clannish, which makes for good soldiers but bad enemies. Nova Scotians have always been a rowdy, rough lot, a band of hockey-rink brawlers, after-the-dance scrappers, sucker punchers, rock throwers. It is no exaggeration to say that more great boxers have come out of industrial Cape Breton and the North End of Halifax than the rest of the country combined. It is also no exaggeration
to say that while there is probably more life on a Saturday night within a square block of New Waterford than in ten miles of Toronto there are probably more dislocated knuckles and flattened septums too. They make them tough here. As an example I offer up a guy I used to see at the Y who owed some money to some bikers from Montreal. They took him to the Angus L. MacDonald bridge, held him over the side and threatened to drop him off unless he paid up. Normally this ploy worked. But our man said something to the effect of “drop away.” The bikers looked at each other in puzzlement, stood him up. Then shot him in the knee.

That is not an untypical story. Nova Scotians are no more crime-prone per capita than other Canadians, making them in a global sense next to saints. But who can match the strange, lurid nature, the pulp fiction quality to stories glimpsed on the local evening news and heard in everyday conversation? Opening up a newspaper around here is like cracking a Jim Thompson novel: page one might include a story about the former premier charged with a raft of sexual assaults. The court briefs on page 5 might include the details of a case involving a former crown prosecutor—who was engaged to a woman, even while he was married to someone else who lived a few blocks away from his fiancée in the same subdivision—now being charged with embezzlement. Buried on the same page might be the latest on the war in Moser River: a poisonous little town on the eastern shore where a gang of white trash had been terrorizing the local folk. On another page might be a short story noting that a man had been found guilty of an elaborate hoax
to fake his own death by pretending he had been hauled into the ocean by a wave from the much-photographed and visited rocks of Peggy’s Cove. I kid you not.

They like their faith in big doses, their heroes doomed and larger than life. They play card games called Tarabish, drink gallons of boiled tea, smoke cartons of cigarettes and down any sort of alcohol they can raise to their lips. Not much has really changed in that regard. “There are 1,000 houses in the town,” a Halifax settler wrote home to Britain in the 1750s. “We have upwards of 100 licensed [drinking] houses and perhaps as many without licence, so the business of one half the town is to sell rum and the other half to drink it.”

Nova Scotians think the kitchen is the only place for a party. They call everyone Buddy, label anybody who doesn’t tuck a napkin into their shirt “big feelin’,” call anything that they liked “some good” and anywhere that is not Nova Scotia “away.” They have a dark sense of humour, stemming from the fact that catastrophes are what is funny, and if Nova Scotians see more humour than other people, it is perhaps because more things go wrong here than anywhere else.

They tend to treat money with little respect—the quintessential example being the legendary Halifax rummy who spent most of the million he won in the lottery during a vicious month-long drinking binge before giving the rest to his buddies and charity. Conversely they can be cheap, even the rich ones—of which there
are a surprising number. Partly that’s just an almost pathological desire not to appear showy. Which is why a visitor would have no sense that behind the facade of those big understated houses in old South End Halifax are interiors that drip shipping and brewing wealth, that the great houses looming on the hill in Yarmouth are still furnished with treasures brought back from the Orient during the days of the windjammers, that in bank accounts in small towns throughout the province low-key fortunes still moulder. Roy Jodrey, the sharpy from the Annapolis Valley, may have made millions investing in apples and pulp and paper. But he liked to fly economy to stay one of the boys. Once some friends got him a ticket in business class so he could sit with them. “He planted his fatness in his roomy seat,” his biographer Harry Bruce wrote, “glowered at the cabin’s luxury, squirmed guiltily and grumbled to no one, ‘The people of Hantsport will know about this before I even get home.’ ”

When it comes to sex they are a surreptitious, darkly randy lot. I have a friend who in his early twenties was carrying on an affair with an acquaintance’s aunt. Once, in the middle of the night he climbed an elm tree in the hope of getting into the second-floor bedroom of the house she shared with her nephew and his family. Now my friend once separated his shoulder playing hockey and periodically it pops out of place, sometimes at the worst moments—like when he is thirty feet up a tree at 3 a.m. It’s damn painful too. Which, I suppose, was a good thing in this case, because a neighbour heard his agonized moans and called the fire
department, who dispatched a hook-and-ladder truck. They detreed my friend as his lover and her family watched from the window in sleepy-eyed disbelief.

Thus it has always been. Why else would the name Ada mean so much to generations of Halifax males? True, Ada McCallum may have been no Doll Tearsheet, the madam who operated in Halifax during the early 1940s, wore a fur coat and smart dresses, patronized the best shops and restaurants and set her girls up in snug flats and apartments or in secluded cottages well outside the city. She might not even have had quite the clout of Doll’s successor, Germaine, the Paris-born boss at 51 Hollis St., which was directly across from the back door of Government House, the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. (According to legend, a respectable South End burgher once died in the arms of one of her girls. Germaine made a couple of discreet phone calls and some of his friends showed up and carted the body to the steps of the respected Halifax Club. The press dutifully reported that he’d collapsed and died entering his beloved haunt.) Even so, Ada, who once had as a boyfriend an editorial executive at the newspaper where I worked, lived out her final years in the company of an eccentric gentleman of leisure from Iceland who claimed to be a graduate of the London School of Economics and a one-time concert pianist. When she died in 1986 at the age of seventy-eight—leaving the operation to some of her kids—the newspapers celebrated her career, remembering her as a “beautiful, socially accomplished woman”
who, after becoming a madam, still hobnobbed with unsuspecting admirals, generals and South End snobs.

These are my people
. They all are. Because we are all connected in bigger or smaller ways. A frightening thought sometimes, in a tavern or mall somewhere or staring down from the visitors’ gallery at the provincial legislature during Question Period. But what do they see when I pass by, still giddy about having moved back home? A man wearing a goofy expectant look. Nodding at people he has never met before. As if to long-lost friends.