by John Demont
He leads me into a couple of dimly lit antiquey rooms, then through a doorway as he says humbly, “I thought we could talk in here.” I bet he relishes these moments: the occasion when someone new walks into the room for the first time, takes one look and fractures their chin on the floor. The thirty-foot ceilings and glistening marble floors, the exotic Asian sculptures, vases and paintings, the huge, lush plants—the likes of which I’ve never seen—the rich, ornate ship’s scroll-work hanging high on the wall. I turn, half-expecting to see Rhyno now wearing harem slippers and puffing on a hookah like some Victorian adventurer as he begins to recount his experiences in the flesh pots of Cairo. Instead, he just stuffs some tobacco in his pipe. Then begins telling me about Maitland.
A shipbuilder named Alfred Putnam once owned Springhurst. Rhyno’s chest puffs with pride as he takes me around the rest of the house and explains all the effort he’s gone to keeping it in its original shape. I nod enthusiastically, saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh … I see … Really … Wow,” as we move from room to room. There’s a caught-in-a-time-warp quality to the monarchy memorabilia, the antiques, the minutely detailed ship’s models and the huge collection of ceramic Lorenz mushrooms. But it’s the mannequins I can’t take my eyes off—big as life, and dressed in formal costume from some long-gone era. They stand nonchalantly, inclined in a variety of life-like poses in each successive room we enter. If the light came in a little differently you’d swear they could move. Then a robed figure with long, wispy hair seated facing the window does: just a small twitch of the neck and shoulders, but it is enough to send memories of every bad Psycho knockoff I’ve ever seen flooding back to me. Rhyno doesn’t register my alarm. “Sorry to be rushing you out the door,” he says, “but we’re having people for lunch.”
In spots there is an otherworldly aspect to the province—no surprise for a place to which people are drawn for some truly strange reasons. Tom Haynes-Paton has a long, white pony-tail, a gentle face, calm voice and the perfect demeanour for someone who spent twenty-five years as a missionary in Japan. Now he lives outside the scallop-fishing centre of Digby, where he runs an oriental art gallery and an immersion centre for businesspeople, diplomats and anyone else who wants a quick indoctrination into all things Japanese. Ask how he came to be on the lip of the Bay of Fundy in a freshly painted wooden house around which flute music and bright-coloured banners flicker and he has a tendency to say things like: “Because I just want to quiet the mind, achieve inner peace and manifest peace and love at a very deep level. I worked as a missionary, in the civil rights movement and human rights and community organizing. We chose to try to change the hearts of people, which is the only way to change government. But then after a long time in one of the world’s largest cities—and finally for love and love of the land—I chose to come here and live because I wanted a life of peaceful contemplation, and I felt Nova Scotia was the most peaceful spot in the world.”
He means peace in the incense burning, sitting in the lotus position with the Monks of Santo Domingo De Silos on the CD player sense of the word. Talk like this normally makes me a bit nervous. But I’m listening because I am still a bit puzzled over why this odd mix of characters seem to be finding their way here. When I ask about this he nods and says, “Have you ever heard of Pangea?” Which, oddly enough, I have. Encouraged, he explains his pet theory: that it all relates back to before the geological supercontinent—Pangea—splintered apart, when Nova Scotia stood cheek-to-jowl with North Africa and the Cornwall coast of England. His feeling, if I understand correctly, is that something undefinable radiates from those rocks that Nova Scotia shares with these other mystical areas. So it’s no surprise, in his view, that the dreamy Celts who roamed that other terrain would one day be drawn here. Just as it was inevitable that the Huguenots, whom he calls “the best that France had to offer,” would eventually arrive. Or that the other spiritual seekers who have come since would head this way.
It is all very unexpected. The elevated chat, the Zen garden, the serene-looking Mokushi Centre—a combination home and classroom—where the students sleep on tatami mats. What does one make of this gallery, with its startling collection of Japanese woodblocks, hangings, statues and calligraphy, out here off the Trans-Canada, middle of nowhere? Or the cleared space with the carpet of grass leading out to the cliff overlooking the ocean? The long poles on each side are mounted with loudspeakers like the ones you always see in World War Two prison camp movies. Haynes-Paton explains that they carry the same early-morning Radio Taiso exercise broadcast that the nation works out to back in Japan. Then he starts to do a slow, graceful martial arts movement as I stand there looking out on the ocean.
It is a beautiful moment, and illuminating too, because it reinforces something I know but have a tendency to forget: we all see what we want. Horst sees a woman who keeps his life on track; I see miners dying. Most people see a Nova Scotia fishing cove, Haynes-Paton sees Japan. Religion is like that, same with politics, music, food and all the other great obsessions—including the thirst for home. Point-of-view is everything. Take Shelburne, which seems to me an unlikely shrine, but go figure. Last time through the mercury edged towards forty Celsius and the radio DJ kept screaming “Eeewwwwww, it’s boiling out there” over the loud, useless rumble of the car fan. Outside there was wind, but the hot, fevered kind that brought no relief. Maybe this was the best way to see Shelburne, anyway: have it float in the mind for a while until the need for it is almost visceral. Then drive into town like into a mirage repeating “In Shelburne it will be cool,” with all the desperate conviction of Hare Krishnas searching for salvation.
Once, I’m sure, it all must have sounded so promising. Back in the late nineteenth century, say, when an overenthusiastic land agent named Alexander McNutt petitioned the British crown for a charter to found a new city across the water, which he planned to call New Jerusalem. Hard to know whether that was ringing optimism, a salesman’s marketing touch or maybe just a horribly twisted sense of humour. I like Shelburne’s old colonial houses and buildings, the trees, the pleasant streets sloping down to the waterfront, the elliptical, rock-bound harbour. Shelburne is not hard on the eye. It’s an odd, stately little place with a whiff of terminal decline about the quiet government wharf and the tarted-up bed-and-breakfasts. It looks like how Nova Scotia once must have looked. But as for ever being the face of the future—a New Jerusalem—well, I’m sorry, I just don’t think so.
I’m not the first person to feel this way. The New England Loyalists, driven out of home and hearth for refusing to embrace independence and republicanism, should have known something was terribly wrong when they arrived in the mid-1700s, wandered into some cove and encountered as poor a piece of humanity as they’d probably ever laid eyes upon. Asked what in God’s name he was doing here he responded with the immortal words: “Poverty brought me to Nova Scotia and poverty keeps me there.” At that point there was no turning back. Port Roseway, the name the authorities had wisely chosen for the town, was the payoff for their loyalty. Soon more settlers arrived, more streets were laid out, more and more frame houses built and filled with fine furniture, silver, crystal and linen. The town grew at such an astounding pace that before long its population topped Quebec City and Montreal combined. It was for one brief moment, if you can imagine this, the fastest-growing town in the entire continent.
What happened?
It could have been disappointment over the rocky soil or the grinding ice of the winter months. Maybe they were turned off by the n’er-do-wells who crowded in brawling and wandering drunk through the streets, or the whorehouses and taverns that sprang up, giving the place a raffish, debauched air. Maybe, on the other hand, the Loyalists were simply lazy fops unaccustomed to hard labour. All anyone really knows is that before long a few people began to drift away. Then it became a flood. By 1789 two-thirds of the town was uninhabited, cattle and hogs roamed through the once-fine parlours and wine cellars. Within a decade the towns population of ten thousa
nd had shrunk to three hundred—the great failure of the Loyalist migration was complete.
The town recovered, eventually becoming a shipbuilding centre of note before the end of the Age of Sail. Today it seems sleepy on the outskirts. But we take a couple of dickey turns in the general direction of the harbour, come around a corner, and it’s as though we’ve driven into Martha’s Vineyard on a nice summer weekend—big knots of tourists, Winnebagos, even a tour bus or two choke the streets. I remember then that an enterprising Hollywood location scout had discovered that late-twentieth-century Shelburne could be magically morphed into mid-1600s Puritan New England, and the setting for The Scarlet Letter, a $40-million turkey that would garner some of the harshest reviews since Ishtar. But I guess I had no sense of the magic of Hollywood, that people would travel long distances to see a place where Demi Moore once writhed in a grain bin, Gary Oldman sweated out last night’s bender and Robert Duvall, who must have dearly needed the paycheque, skulked around in a wig and one of those Quaker tallboy hats like the world’s unhappiest drag queen.
Caught up in the excitement, we want to walk down and take a look at the movie set pieces, which the town has maintained as a tourist attraction. But it is so crowded that we have to circle twice through the old Loyalist homes to find a parking spot near the small, tasteful tourist bureau. The windows are open and the room is actually cooled by a breeze off the water. It is quiet for a moment. Then a woman in a pantsuit made out of millions of shiny synthetic pink fibres pushes through the door. She mops her brow with a paper napkin, points to a photo album full of pictures from the Scarlet Letter film shoot and says to her husband, whom I imagine to be the Martinizing king of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., “Look, honey, there she is, Demi Moore.”
Lots of people arrive in Nova Scotia with only a vague urge or idea in mind. But many know exactly what they are doing and where they are bound, no matter how strange the purpose. By summer the woods, cliffs and headlands around St. Georges Bay are covered with flowers: lupines, wild rose bushes, others I can’t identify. At the Cape George Presbyterian Church at the very tip of the bay I walk among the gravestones for the old Highlanders, and see one for George Ballentine, who died on May 22, 1878, at age 81, that says, “Blessed are the dead who lie in the land.” It is a pleasant enough place to be. Even when one minute the grey clouds spit rain and the next they open to splashes of sunlight, with the wind off the water filling the background like a monk’s chant. Nothing frivolous about the land here. This is a place that stirs big thoughts. A place where a monk from France—his order overrun and dispersed by Napoleon’s armies—might find himself in the Year of Our Lord 1825, and give a prayer of thanks.
The good Father Vincent De Paul Merle was able to persuade only a few of his brethren to return with him to lay the foundation for Petit Clairvaux, the continent’s first Trappist monastery, a few miles beyond Antigonish. But that was then. By midafternoon on a Sunday 170 years later the monastery parking lot is full. I follow the crowd, most of them still dressed for church, as they pick their way along the path through the birch trees and the ferns until they come to a sign that bids visitors: Pilgrim; Go with Jesus his cross-borne way/to Mary, our mother, her help to pray.
From there, crosses mark the path. Among a stand of hemlock trees, we come to the shrine, a life-sized statue of Our Lady of Grace, and a spring bubbling with clean, clear water. “The discovery and blessing of the spring is credited to the third Prior of the Monastery, Father James Deportment, who came to the Monastery in 1858,” a pamphlet I picked up back in the museum says. “People called it ‘Holy Spring’ because, as they claim, quite a few visitors were helped and a few sick ‘cured’ by using this water.” I look behind me and am surprised—a line of supplicants snaking into the woods, their faces full of awe, devotion, and the child-like search for salvation.
Charles Gaines, who lives a few miles away, has seen those expressions before. Which is why the owner of the Petrocan station in East Tracadie grills me for a full five minutes before giving me directions to his place.
“Is that necessary?” I ask Gaines when I arrive.
“In a way, yeah,” he answers. “Patricia calls them the pilgrims. They just show up here. A couple pulled in some time ago from California. They just drove up the road and said, ‘We read the book and here we are.’ Then we just stood there looking at each other. I mean, it’s touching and humbling. It’s nice to know that that little book affected people’s lives in such a profound way. But I don’t have any answers for people’s lives. All I had to say went into that book.”
That book is called A Family Place. It’s a story of how Gaines’s life in America had veered out of control, of how he almost lost everything that mattered to him. Then how he found it again here, on a piece of land in East Tracadie on St. Georges Bay, where he built a summer home and discovered that rarest of things, a second chance.
Gaines is tall and handsome. He’s got a lovely wife and great kids. He hangs around with guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger (Gaines’s first novel, Stay Hungry, was made into a movie that introduced Da Ahnold to the movie-going world) and Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, who is coming for some fishing and shooting next week. He’s always had great jobs: writing books and screenplays, running a travel business that consists of taking his rich buddies to exotic locations to hunt animals and big fish. He’s rich enough to write in A Family Place that he bought his three hundred acres in Nova Scotia for no more than the price-tag of a Mercedes and see nothing strange about it.
We tour the property. He wears shorts and a grey T-shirt and moves well even though he had both hips replaced a couple of years back. “Life is always serving up these wonderful symbols,” he says. “If running your hips into oblivion at age fifty isn’t telling you that your life has gotten out of control, I don’t know what is.” He and Patricia moved to Ireland after university in Alabama, had kids, built a little “walled garden” that kept everything bad out. They returned in the late 1960s. His books sold well. Then came what Gaines calls the “dumb country-boy-goes-Hollywood syndrome.” His next novel was a commercial and critical bust. Gaines knew that it had all come undone the moment Patricia walked into the hotel room and found him with a friend’s wife in his lap blowing some kind of animal tranquillizer up his nose. She asked for a divorce; the wall had crumbled.
“We saw Nova Scotia as a refuge,” he explains as we peer out at the bay, “a place where we could come and put our lives back on track, a place which still held deeply and fervently the overall ethos and the values that had disappeared from our lives. It gives Patricia and me our walled garden back. A place where we can come four or five months each year and get back in touch with each other.”
We head towards the tiny, impeccably built cabin. It’s only big enough for two for the precise reason that they want only the right kind of visitors—people who are willing to live in tents and won’t get in the way of their work and sublimely simple lives. All of which makes “the pilgrims” a little unnerving. Even if Gaines can sort of understand why they come. “The book strikes a chord with a lot of professionally driven North American men my age who had gone through the 1980s and wound up losing touch with everything that was important to them,” he explains. “I turned back the clock. They want to believe—they have to believe—that is possible.”
All pilgrimages, ultimately, are private affairs done for personal reasons that make no sense to others. So maybe it is not even worth trying to explain what I was doing there standing in the middle of the highway at 5 a.m. just outside Chéticamp at the entrance to the Cabot Trail. Some weather is coming this morning. You can feel it in the air. A calm, I guess, but a forced one, as if the world is holding its breath for what is to follow. Maybe later today les suětes will come screaming down from the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, churning up dust storms and sweeping the land of everything that isn’t nailed down. At its worst—in winter 1993, say, when it blew the roof off the hospital—the winds can reach 150
miles an hour. Sometimes they just come roaring out of nowhere. A day like today, maybe, when the red, white and blue Acadian flags sag in the windless sky, and the clouds threaten rain.
I am dead tired. Since we don’t have an alarm clock, Robert, the owner of the Parkview motel where we were staying, agreed to wake me at four-thirty. Back in the room I laid out my stuff for the morning—rod, waders, jeans, flannel shirt, an alarmingly healthy looking lunch of fig newtons, apple juice and fruit. But Belle and I have to share a bed and she wants the answers to the big questions of the universe. “Uh, Dad, um, can a cheetah run faster than Donoban Dailey? Daddy, where are we going tomorrow? Daddy, can you please stop snoring, please, Dad? Dad, what happens to a fish when you catch it? Dad, do numbers go on forever? Dad, what does God look like?”
I mumble things that make little sense even to a four-year-old. Out of desperation I fake sleep and finally actually doze off. It seems like just minutes have passed when I hear Robert spin into the parking lot, sending gravel flying. A half-moon hangs in the sky. As it brightens I can see the outline of the highlands. I hear the river, thousands of birds singing wildly somewhere, and the drone of the mosquitoes dive-bombing my head. Punchy from lack of sleep, I turn some of my lunch into breakfast, lie down on the steps of the motel office to nap, then jump up and run through some karate katas in the middle of the empty highway.
When he finally arrives, Laurie MacDonald apologizes for being late: someone had borrowed the mountain bikes we needed to make it up the long trail to the fishing holes. He’s a compact thirty-year-old with long blond hair and hawkish features. Last time I saw him was on the Margaree River. Lisa and I were working one side of the river when up popped Laurie’s head from some grass on the opposite bank. He waved a greeting, then silently packed his sleeping bag, pulled a canoe into the water and disappeared around the bend like the ghost of some long-ago frontiersman.