The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  Most Nova Scotians, on the other hand, still cling to the old theory that Capt. William Kidd buried his treasure there before the British hanged him in 1701.

  “That’s bullshit,” barks Dan Blakenship, striding angrily from the small museum at the back of the lot. “All of Kidd’s whereabouts were known. It’s a theory that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.” Ruddy-faced, with wide shoulders and a big blackened blister on one of his cigar-like fingers, Blakenship is seventy-two but looks a decade younger. He knows a thing or two about theories. Thirty years before, he chucked a successful career as a general contractor in Florida after reading a Reader’s Digest article about the Oak Island hunt. If he harboured any doubts about his career change, they disappeared in 1971, when a television probe lowered down the shaft sent back pictures of what looked like a chest and tools. Watching the monitor of the closed-circuit camera, Blakenship believes he saw a severed human head float across the screen, as well as a preserved human body slumped on the chest. So he was already a believer when he became field manager for Triton Alliance, a consortium of Canadian and American investors fascinated with the Oak Island legend.

  Today he is in a foul mood as he stands with some young underlings in a clearing near the entrance to the mine shaft. Two days from now everything has to be just so for the hundreds of visitors expected for the special bicentennial celebration of the Big Dig. The highlight of the event: the unveiling of a five-foot-high concrete stone to honour the six men who have died so far in the hunt. But what really bothers him is the feeling that the whole thing—the twenty years and $140,000 of his own money spent pursuing his obsession—might be for nothing. We pile into a half-ton and make the short, bumpy drive back to the compound. Outside again, Blakenship squints into the sun, plants his feet, folds his arms and tells me the tale of his betrayal. How Triton, in which Blakenship is a minority shareholder, had refused his request for the $350,000 more he says he needs to solve the mystery. How instead they inked a deal with Oak Island Discoveries, owned by a Boston millionaire and an Emmy-winning film director, which wanted to conduct its extensive scientific research of the site.

  “My partners seem to have a new theory every six months,” says Blakenship, who is on the move again, heading towards the tents erected to house the celebrations. “I’d rather tell you who it could have been. Whoever did it took many years to complete the job. We only know 10 per cent of what went on there. You have to look for someone with the time, the purpose and the drive. Who controlled religion at the time? The Knights Templar. They controlled all the wealth in Europe and the Mediterranean. They controlled all the shipping. They were looking for a new world. As far as possible you have to look at the evidence. Nolan”—a competing treasure hunter—“found a perfect symmetrical cross at the end of the island. I think there is something to it. I’m not saying it was the Knights Templar. But there’s a good possibility. I will say it has merit.”

  The most merit of any of the theories? I ask.

  “Well, that’s a strong statement,” he says, and pauses. I can hear the surf break, the wind jostling the tall oaks, just as it always has on the island. “I’ll just say it has merit.”

  Stories like Oak Island live on because they are haunting and wonderful. But in Nova Scotia even the apocryphal-sounding yarns—the tall tales—have a faint ring of truth. What is one to make of the story about the Cape Breton mortician who opened his door one day and found a couple of boys off the fishing boats with a body they’d hauled from the ocean? None of them recognized the unfortunate’s face. So the undertaker reached the novel conclusion of pumping the cadaver full of embalming fluid, clothing it in a nice suit and propping the body up in the corner in the hope of jogging someone’s memory. Nobody recognized the body though, and after eleven months he gave up and buried the corpse. It was forgotten about until he received a call from a mortician in the United States who explained that the body was likely that of a sailor from Maine who had gone missing at sea. The remains were dug up and the casket stuck on a train, bound for a proper funeral. As an afterthought, and a rare moment of professional vanity, the undertaker from Cape Breton pinned to the body a note for his counterpart handling the wake at the other end. It read: “You can open it if you want.”

  Now, true or not, I love that tale, which seems as perfectly formed, as funny, horrible and true as a Flannery O’Connor short story. Some, admittedly, are less original. Take this variation on the old ashes-as-egg-timer joke, which involves a woman I know from Lunenburg County, a widow whose husband died early leaving her to raise three kids alone. When they were all grown and gone and she was well into middle age, she remarried, a doctor who had immigrated from Scotland and was renowned for his frugality. He died too. One day a visitor arrived to make sure she was coping with widowhood. (It helps here to imagine the local dialect, the extreme lilt and emphasis on unusual words and syllables that stretches and transforms the county’s name, for instance, into Loon-an-bahg, which always sounds to me like an accounting firm in a Monty Python routine.)

  “Well you know the docta he left all his money to charity you know,” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “But you know he was a funny one. All he left me was that old Volkswagen of his. I was very angry about the whole thing. Very angry.”

  I can imagine, said the visitor.

  “Now you know things are funny. All along he told me that he wanted his ashes sprinkled on this loch back tha in Scotland. So his day did come.”

  She walks her guest towards the mantelpiece where an urn stands. Pauses, then gives a conspiratorial wink and says, “Thaas the bastard—I’ve got him now.”

  It is no wonder we are the way we are. By the standards of the land my family’s stories are nothing exceptional, not by a long shot. But my personal mythology includes mine cave-ins, race riots, the carnage of Vimy Ridge and strike breakers riding down innocent people in the streets. It includes murderers and heroes, wondrous athletes and monumental drunks, geniuses and idiots, the pious and the profane.

  Then there are the words. They matter, for they are the way we deliver the myths and stories of our world into day-to-day life. Language marks Nova Scotia, a modern-day Tower of Babel where a traveller will hear Gaelic, French, English and German within a couple of hours. When all those dissonant sounds mix together the result can be truly startling—weird words that carry a world of meaning in the slightest inflection and volumes of social history in a single phrase.

  Lewis Poteet, an English professor from Montreal who summered on the South Shore, was so fascinated with the jumble of words and phrases there that he began to collect and study them. Eventually he published a South Shore phrase book, which makes a great read. If, for instance, you drive around Mahone Bay you may hear someone called a semiquibber (idiot) or flutterbug (easily excitable). You may hear someone refer to gurry (waste from cleaning fish) or a lambkiller (a severe, sudden March storm). You may hear somebody talk about moger (wretched), forelaying (expecting), being swonked (exhausted) or iglish (grouchy). When people from the real South Shore get wound up they might blurt holy snappin’ assholes, gookemole, holy old twist, kroppy doppy, hold your pickle or by the rattly-eyed Jesus. An older man might call a younger one old son and a young, green hired hand might be called nubbins. If they think a fuss is being made over something unimportant they might call it a fart in a windstorm. If they doubt what you are saying their response might be I’ll tow that one alongside for a bit before I bring it aboard. An unattractive person might be called homely as a stump fence, a drunk is all snapped up, someone with a big butt is three axehandles across the ass. And the warning Don’t stick out your bruddle at me, you’ll be mootsen someplace else means you’re in deep shit.

  Words still matter around here. This is a society where the keepers of the stories—the tribal elders—are still revered. One morning, I made an appointment to see Joe Casey, the MLA from Digby, a prosperous fishing village in the Bay of Fundy, who seems happy to talk to a visitor even if he has no idea what
I wanted. His office is in a hideous little strip mall on the way into town. Casey, who is seventy-seven, turns out to be a jolly, gentlemanly Bay of Fundy Mark Twain. He wears a navy blazer and one of those Zorba the Greek fishing captain’s hats and sits at a desk amidst the memorabilia from his varied career, the stories rolling off his lips like pearls. Quite a résumé: six times elected to the Nova Scotia legislature, World War Two naval officer, fisherman, fishplant operator, steamship pilot, raconteur. No great statesman, as a politician his contribution could be best summed up by a bill he tabled:

  MISTER JOSEPH CASEY: Mr. Speaker, I hereby give notice that on a future day I shall move the adoption of the following resolution:

  Whereas Frankland Theriault of Weymouth has been ordered by the Egg Marketing Board to keep no more than 499 hens; and Whereas the stores in Digby area have been threatened with prosecution if they continue to sell his product; and

  Whereas Mr. Theriault is semi-retired due to a heart condition; and

  Whereas he is asking only that he be allowed to continue for two years in the business, to allow him to build up a nest-egg before receiving his old age pension;

  Be it resolved that the provincial government not be allowed to enforce mandatory birth control, euthanasia or genocide in the hen house; and

  Be it resolved, to paraphrase the Prime Minister of Canada, the State has no business in the hen houses of the nation.

  He can talk: one minute he’s talking about such locals as Zippy Moses, Ernie Balser, an old couple named Torchy and Drindy and places named Bummer’s Crossing. Then without a pause he’s moved on to Jimmy Cagney and Arthur Kennedy, who used to vacation in the area, his long speech before the Indian parliament, manoeuvring oil tankers through dangerous waters and impenetrable fog and pulling drowned friends out of the Bay.

  “One night the telephone rang by my bed,” he told me. “I picked it up and a man asked, ‘Can I walk an elephant up Digby wharf?’ Thinking he was playing a trick I replied, ‘You have a wrong number. You had better call Noah,’ and then hung up.

  “A few minutes later the phone rang again and the caller asked if I were the harbour pilot or not. When I replied that I was, he said that he needed to bring a circus to Digby by ship and legitimately needed the information about the elephant. The ship on her way to Digby had docked in Yarmouth. While off-loading the animals, the ship had caught on fire. The Yarmouth fire department sprayed so much water into the ship that she rolled over. There were elephants, tigers, monkeys and other circus animals all over town. One of the elephants managed to wander well into the countryside.

  “Early next morning an elderly lady looked out of her pantry window and saw an elephant in her garden. She immediately called the RCMP and said, ‘Officer, there is the strangest animal in my garden that I have ever seen and you will never believe what he is doing. He is reaching down with his tail and tearing up my cabbages by the roots and guess what he’s doing with them!’ ”

  He has so many tales you want to hear them all and remember them all. This province buzzes with voices that, once heard, linger. Ron Caplan could not let them go. He was a gangly, long-haired book designer deeply unhappy with his life in Pittsburgh when he arrived in Cape Breton in 1970. The local culture fascinated him—the Celts, the Acadians, the Mi’kmaqs, the Jamaicans who arrived to work the Sydney coke ovens, the Italian miners. He took a run at a magazine of oral culture and history, published from his home in Wreck Cove, population sixty. According to the first issue, Caplan’s baby would be “devoted to the history, natural history and future of Cape Breton Island.”

  One day I scanned a bunch of back copies at a library in Halifax. Here’s Willy Petrie, the diviner, talking about what happens when he’s gripping a forked stick and it nears water: “I can’t hold it. I can brace my two feet, I can’t hold it at all. It’ll twist, keep on twisting, I can’t stop it. Keep on turning on the end. You just put the prongs across your hands this way. And if it’s gonna go it’ll go down, you can’t hold it. It don’t have to move my hand, and it’ll twist turn right in my hand. If I’ve got one anyways big or something, jeez, if I tried to hold it it’d tear me to pieces, the strain on me, the terrible strain on me in trying to hold it.”

  I liked Marguerite Gallant, ninety, of Chéticamp reminiscing about being thirteen days on the hospital critical list when someone named Leo came to visit and her saying to him: “After I’m dead I will follow you to the Point. And you will see my soul on pebbles, on grains of sand, on little pieces of straw—any place you look. I will be in front of you in fifty different shapes.”

  I was particularly taken with Bob Fitzgerald, who ran the telephone exchange in Dingwall, considering some of those who lie buried in the soil of Cape Breton: “They were tremendous people. We don’t have anything like them. And God bless your soul, I have nothing but respect for them, yes—the most profound respect for them. Every one of them. There’s no more left like them and no more to come like them. All you need do sometimes, if you have a little imagination, is roam through the countryside and let your imagination run wild. And you’ll travel some of the old farms in this country and you’ll stop and look at some of the great rock piles here and there—and how many, when they look at them, how many stop and think of all the sweat and toil and tears it took to put that rock pile there? How many think of it? Very, very few. But if you drive along by one of those old farms some time, and you see one of those old rock piles, just get out and walk over to it and see the thoughts that will go through your mind—and picture the old slaves that dragged those rocks and stones from all around, the land that’s cleared, and piled them there. We don’t have no more people to work like that today. Somebody’ll say we got wise. No, we got foolish. They were the wise people. They had to be.”

  PART TWO

  My Kind of People

  I grew up a bluenose,

  as Nova Scotians are known,

  supposedly after the colour of

  potatoes grown there.

  Robert MacNeil

  Four

  These Are My People

  IT WAS FALL WHEN I MOVED BACK TO NOVA SCOTIA. DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME, and the long evenings were over. When sundown came you felt the first shudder of winter out there somewhere on the horizon. I was joyfully overwrought, a newly released prisoner running down the street without even feeling the pavement under my feet. Every building, patch of grass, shadow flickered with meaning. Memories snapped by like pictures on a deck of cards. Strangers met my exultant eyes, seemed to smile then look away. These are my people! my heart cried.

  I knew I was being foolish. I knew that since I recognized no one, no one must recognize me. But I simply could not rein myself in. My spirit soared as I stumbled down the sidewalk. Any minute a couple of white-jacketed attendants were going to slap a straight-jacket on me and drive siren screaming to the mental hospital across the harbour. I didn’t care. It was fall, my favourite time. I felt eighteen again, like I had just emerged from the shower on a Friday night after a basketball game and my friends were waiting at the Midtown Tavern.

  There is no such thing as an identity crisis in Nova Scotia; that is maybe the hardest thing for newcomers to understand. While the rest of the country may whinge about the nature of being Canadian, we know who we are, bad as that might be. Not only that, we celebrate ourselves; we revel in our distinctiveness even as the gulf of difference between us and the rest of the country, the continent, the world narrows. The demographic tidal bore into the province may bring cash, jobs and strange new people, but this place holds on to its essence. Its identity. Its character. Even people who live here tend to forget how different we really are. I certainly did, wistful as my memories of Nova Scotia were while I was one of the temporary displaced living away. Very least, I should have remembered our wedding night, a week before we left for Alberta, bound down the eastern shore to an inn called Camelot in a cab owned by a company that probably made as much bootlegging rum as getting people from A to B. Our pilot: a wi
ry little guy with a Junior B league haircut who begged us to stop for a suspicious-looking delivery inside the Halifax city limits. He tore ass once we hit the highway. Somewhere beside the moonlit ocean he asked would we mind stopping while he said hello to an old girlfriend. A bit much to ask a couple on their honeymoon, but we laughed and said what the hell.

  “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.”