by John Demont
THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO GET TO BRIER ISLAND 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 th
e 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.
She laughs a nice laugh when she tells that story. I get the distinct impression that the isolation here breeds quirk rather than insularity and that eccentricity is more a comfort than a threat. Slocum himself had shot two mutinous seamen, been fined $500 by a New York court for putting one of his officers in irons for fifty-three days and charged with indecently exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl who had visited the Spray while he was docked in New Jersey. But no one batted an eye at the turn of the century when Slocum returned to Brier Island to write his great book about his voyage. Some one thousand people lived here then, including Capt. George Clements Sr., who thought he could rid the island’s gardens of insects by bringing toads and snakes from the mainland and shipping over a pair of young alligators he found on a Florida hunting trip.
Nowadays, Joys tells me, the local population shrinks to three hundred during the winter after the cottage owners have gone home and tourist operators close down. Small as it is there remains a tolerant live-and-let-live attitude here. For proof I need only cast my mind to the writer and newspaper editor from the island who left her lighthouse keeper husband not because she found life here too isolated—which might have been a scandal—but because she had fallen in love with Allan Legere, the New Brunswick serial killer. Her husband took her back after the zip went out of the romance. On Brier Island nobody excommunicated the woman; they just give a bemused little shake of the head when they tell the story. It really is that kind of place.
So my eyes are peeled for characters as I wander into the tourist bureau and note that 119 people visited there yesterday. Bent by now on a late lunch, I head for a small spot, the back of a house really, a few streets from the waterfront. I have a nice view of the harbour through a window. The young waitress sits at a table watching a soap opera. The cook—early twenties, I would say, wearing a soiled white apron—joins her. Instead of ignored, I feel tranquil as the rain drains from the sky and I sit in the warm room. I order a cheeseburger, cup of coffee and a piece of pie. Then I open Slocum’s wonderful book, published when he was sixty-five, nine years before he cast off the Spray from Tisbury, Mass., began sailing southeast into strong winds bent for South America and was never seen again. And I read his final written words:
“I learned to sit by the wheel, content to make 10 miles a day beating against the tide, and when a month at that was all lost, I could find some old tune to hum while I worked the route all over again, beating as before. Nor did thirty hours at the wheel, in storm, overtax my human endurance, and to clap a hand to an oar and pull into or out of port in a calm was no strange experience for the crew of the Spray. The days passed happily with me wherever my ship sailed.”
That is the point, isn’t it. People like Slocum are haunted wanderers, constantly moving on to the latest doomed quest. The dream is the thing. The dream is where their spirit discovers itself and acquires the ability to overstep time and space. Slocum and his like need a canvas big enough to paint the grand narrative of their lives. They are looking for a wilder ride—to grip with one hand while the other flails the air like a bronco rider’s. To whoop and holler while the rest of us mumble “hip-hip, hooray.” To rocket across the firmament in a blinding blaze while the rest of us fizzle and pop.
The guy with the lock-picking tools first told me about Fred Lawrence. We were in Dingwall, a little last gasp of a place at the north tip of Cape Breton. And I had locked the keys in our rental car. My sagging spirits rise a touch when I notice this happened often enough that the inn where we are staying owned a lock-jimmying tool worthy of a Detroit car booster. But it proves useless on our missile-proof rental Grand Am. Blessedly it took only a few minutes to hunt down a service station in Neils Harbour still open this late in the day. Half an hour later the overalled garage owner gets out of his truck and unrolls his tools like a surgeon. And as he methodically picked the lock, we somehow got on the subject of Fred Lawrence, who lived in nearby Bay St. Lawrence.
This is one of the truly forgotten corners of the province; the big, brooding landscape looks like it is straight out of Dracula; we are the only car on the road for miles. Bay St. Lawrence turns out to be an industrious little place. Even back in the 1930s, when there was no cash around, everyone had a farm and would trade eggs for tea and sell lambs to cover their taxes. Barter gradually gave way to a cash economy when a lot of Bay St. Lawrence men went to work at the gypsum quarry, which opened in nearby Cape North. Things got rough when the quarry closed. But Bay St. Lawrence went from being one of the poorest places in all the Maritimes to one of the most prosperous after the 200-mile fishing limit was established and the local crab fishery took off.
For some reason virtually every scrap of ground in the village has its own place name. Approaching town as we are means passing through St. Margaret’s Village, named for the huge Catholic church. From there the road passes a wharf, the credit union and the high school before reaching the eastern edge of the shallow harbour, known as the Pond. Since the highlands circle the town the effect is bowl-like and seems to magnify the effect of the wind that blows like hell off the ocean. Whitecaps—Belle calls them seagulls—top the water. We pull up to a fishing boat in drydock, turn down the Ray Charles on the tape deck and ask a thick-bodied man perched precariously on a ladder if he knows where Fred Lawrence lives. He grunts “Slocum, eh?” and sends us up a dirt road past dozens of lobster traps sitting in a neat pile.
We stop in front of a roomy, grey-shingled house with blue trim around the windows. One wall is decorated with a bone-white arc about fifteen feet across, which turns out to be a whale’s rib. There’s a basketball hoop at the end of the packed-down dirt drive, a garden to the right and, off to the left, a shed bearing the name Lawrence. Inside, the shed is shadowy and smells of sawdust. Classical piano floats from a radio. A ship’s deck rises from the sunken floor like a half-buried remnant of the Great Flood. Out of the gloom walks a six-foot man with sun-burned skin, Nordic features and close-cropped grey-blond hair.
Ed Lawrence looks around fifty in his faded sweatshirt, navy sweatpants and worn workboots. Born in Maine, he saw Bay St. Lawrence for the first time in 1973, was taken with it and decided to make it home. He does not seem overly surprised to find a car full of strangers at his door. When I say I hear he’s building a boat he half-smiles. “I’ve spent my life as a commercial fisherman,” he allows, “but I’ve always wanted a sailing vessel.”
Well, not just any sailing vessel. He wanted one with the big blocks, ropes an
d other trappings of the old-style fishing heritage he so loved. He wanted a boat that was seaworthy enough to fight through the North Atlantic breakers but compact enough to find shelter in the shallowest harbour. At a certain point, he just had to admit to himself, he wanted Slocum’s Spray. I’m mesmerized as he explains how he located and bought Slocum’s original plans. And then how he hired a Chéticamp boat builder to make the hull. For the past eleven years Lawrence has been doing the rest of the work himself, on nights and weekends, or days like today when he was out in his lobster boat at 3 a.m. but came in early because of a gale.
“Right on schedule,” he says, fondling the detailed woodwork and gleaming bronze. He recites the dimensions like some kind of liturgy: 37 feet on deck, 14 feet 2 inches at the beam, a 5-foot draft. When I ask about the name, Double Crow, Lawrence repeats an old rhyme: “One crow sorrow, two crows joy.” When I inquire how much money he’s sunk into her, Lawrence stops to think for a minute, as if he’s never considered the question before in his life.
“Well, let’s see … I must have $100,000 in it, I guess.”
As he says this his wife, Margrit, appears in the doorway. She wears a bulky sweater against the cold. She is another nomad: Swiss-born, Ontario-raised, she was on a trip across Canada when she met Lawrence and his obsession. “I just wish he’d finish it,” she says. “Has he told you this has been going on for eleven years?”
She laughs, but in a way that makes me think I’m edging into somewhere I shouldn’t. I ask if I can use the washroom. Once inside the house I’m reluctant to leave. The scattered toys, the immaculate plank floors, the cast-iron woodstove, the piano with the open songbook, the view of the crashing ocean and this wild, elemental place—right now this just seems like the warmest, safest spot on the face of the earth. Back in the shed I take a couple of snaps while Lawrence shows Belle around the workshop. Then I persuade him to pose outside by his lobster traps. It’s blowing something fierce now. When I say as much Lawrence replies, “Oh, it gets a lot worse than this. We still have boats out there today.” We both look oceanwards. Even if lobster is going for six dollars a pound, the thought of being on a dickey little boat with only a few inches of wood separating me from the waves is just too much. My face goes slack with reverence. Lawrence says something lost in the winds. I ask him to repeat it. He bends closer and says, “I tell people that this isn’t the end of the world. It is the beginning.”