The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  It was always a small place destined to be part of big news, as either a bit player or a central participant. “Every handful of earth here has crumbled history,” bluenose novelist Thomas Raddall once said about the city. Wolfe and the British brass feasted at the Great Pontac Hotel, emptying twenty-five bottles of brandy, fifty of claret and seventy of Madeira before setting sail for that rendezvous on the Plains of Abraham that ended French power in North America. Prince Edward turned it into the strongest fortress in North America during the Napoleonic Wars. During the War of 1812 Halifax was the centre of Britain’s North American military power.

  Everyone seems to have passed across this canvas. Two prime ministers and two fathers of Confederation are buried here. So are the bodies of 190 of the Titanic’s drowned men, women and children. Leon Trotsky, bound for the Russian Revolution, was jailed here. A quiet young lieutenant in the Royal Navy, William Edward Parry, dreamed of the Northwest Passage here. I like to picture it in the post-Waterloo days when young Joe Howe, the father of responsible government, was playing ball in the streets. Thomas Haliburton, Sam Slick’s creator, had just been admitted to the Nova Scotia bar. James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the New York Herald, was teaching school. Samuel Cunard, still years away from starting his shipping line, was a rising young merchant. Abraham Gesner, the discoverer of kerosene, was trying to make up his mind whether to be a surgeon or a geologist.

  But after the Second World War and the V-E Day Riots that left the city ruined and baffled, something snapped. A layer of Puritan repression blanketed the place, leaving it stagnant, depressed and dull, a dying port and garrison town holding on to its storied past. The city did have a brief moment in the sun when, during the late 1960s, draft dodgers and visiting actors and artists spread the word in the United States about an easygoing “San Francisco North” in Nova Scotia. Back then, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design—hailed by Art in America as possibly “the best art school in North America”—exerted an influence throughout the continental art world that defied its small size and out-of-the-way location. All the same, by the 1980s the city’s fizz had definitely gone flat.

  Which brings us to now. Make no mistake: Halifax’s spirit is still fundamentally logical and realist, as befits a city of government, universities and the military. But the city is in flux more than usual now, and out of that flux some strange things are sprouting. It is not a flashy city, a city that shouts “Look at me!” You have to be alert. When the sun breaks through, softening the hard edges of the Victorian and Georgian buildings and glimmering off the water, the city shimmers like a fairy tale. Me, I have always preferred Halifax’s veiled seductions—the half-concealed, the shadowy, the illusion that something else is at work, something you cannot really comprehend. On nights on the waterfront when only the massive bases of the piers, grain elevators and spiffy new office towers show under the fog, a sense of gravity, melancholy and romantic mystery clings to the city.

  Secret subcultures thrive all over. Even for someone like me who has spent most of his life here, strange things approach from all directions. Once, for example, I walked over to the elegant old Via Rail station, now a shadow of its former bustling self, and up some elegant stairs. There I found hallways full of small businesses—tailors, dry-goods suppliers, footwear dealers, this secret commercial world where tough no-nonsense men who looked like they never saw sunlight made a living servicing the ships and sailors who docked nearby. Another day I drove up a ramp into a derelict pier just down the way and found a flock of painters and sculptors at work high above the harbour. Who’d have thought? Just like who would have thought that the kick-boxing club down the road became a speakeasy when the bars closed, where it was possible to drink an absurdly over-priced rum-and-Coke standing inside the square ring, even bury a couple of hooks into the heavy bag if the mood suited. Across town, inside an old warehouse a friend owns in the city’s hard-nosed North End, a couple of dozen alternative bands simultaneously try to blow the doors off their sound-proof bunkers each night. Farther downtown, the digital revolution is in full swing in a forgotten office building, even though a whole squad of local technowizards who used to work their magic there were carried off to Seattle on a recent Bill Gates hiring binge. Closer to home, I once stopped into a coffee shop carrying Sam in a backpack and gaped at a dozen or so wild-haired Amazons spinning across the floor in some high-spirited, exotic dance resembling nothing I’d seen before.

  Nothing should surprise me any more. You want characters? What about the tiny old man with the mass of snow-white hair—an Austrian maestro who rides his bicycle through the streets twelve months of the year? What about the university president and classicist who still occasionally likes to get out in a lobster boat where he used to earn a decent living? What about the pair of expat Brits who publish Frank, the scandal sheet, which no one admits to reading even though everyone seems familiar with the contents of each ratty-looking issue? What about the older woman I see every day outside my house, dwarfed by the white Cadillac she drives ever so slowly beside her short-haired terrier, which is on the sidewalk taking its daily walk?

  Booze cans, bootleggers, oddballs—I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. One after another the nasty old fictions that made up the city’s lore—the wet-blanket puritanism, the religious, social and racial divisions, the old-style politics—are being tossed aside. What remains, by and large, is the good stuff that has always made the place different.

  That and how it feels so cool to be in Halifax now.

  Night in the city now. My brother-in-law John and his girlfriend, Jenny, have agreed to act as guides. Their Halifax has cardinal points. Right now we are descending some beat-off stairs redolent of sour spilt beer into a place I once knew as the Ladies Beverage Room, now magically transformed into a hip little spot called the Oasis. In my memory underage high-school kids and university students drink quarts, drug dealers do a stiff trade in the corner, downtown professionals who just hadn’t made it home from the office yet order another round. Or am I just feeling a shade out of touch as I stand waiting for the band to rev up its instruments, listening to the click-click-click of the pool balls. I shoot some mediocre stick, down a couple of big glasses of Moosehead. I scan the crowd for faces that look remotely like mine. The only people who appear as out of place as I do in my blue sportscoat are a pair of stimulant-addled greasers—maybe holdovers still unable to quite make the transition—who have turned the laser beam of considerable charm onto two Japanese teen girls, in private-school uniforms, who clearly speak not a word of English. I spend a few minutes observing this clash of cultures. Then we’re heading back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, anxious to get to the next stop.

  The crowd is a little older at the Seahorse, which is downstairs and across the street from the newspaper where I once worked. They lounge with studied cool on the threadbare sofas and the long, hacked-up benches, crowd the bar and mill around the pool tables. I buy a round from a passing waiter, shuck and jive my way through the masses. I pass some time in a heated little debate with a couple of rugby players over the gender of the seahorse in the wall aquarium. Then I see him lurching towards me … Dear God, what the intervening years had wrought: face a road map of deep-cut furrows, scary thousand-mile gaze. He is, I dimly recall, to be avoided at all costs—the type of drunken pain in the ass who always feels compelled to start mouthing off to an AHL hockey thug who has just finished downing a tray of Quevertos. I avert my eyes. He slouches past. But I still feel I’ve glimpsed the face of Christmas future.

  The ship’s bell rings, signalling last call. The crowd spills into streets shiny with rain. On the sidewalk a bunch of skinheads wail an old Beatles number with the guitar-playing busker. Next door at the Economy Shoe Shop Café and Bar, the air is heavy with burning Cubanos, they’re ordering Glenfiddich and martinis. And everywhere—down Argyle St. towards the octopus of dance spots everyone calls the Liquor Dome and up Blowers St. towards Pizza Corner, the me
cca of late-night fast-food cuisine—young hipsters stroll, in twos and threes and in big noisy groups, oblivious to the drizzle tumbling out of a sodden sky, debating where to go next to ensure the party doesn’t stop.

  I arrange to hook up with John and Jenny later on. First, though, to the Greco-Canadian Social Club, a place frozen in time, far beyond fashionability. Most of the old characters are gone now—the old stevedore known as the Shadow; Billy Carter, the black bootlegger from the North End; Hard Rock Harrigan, the lawyer and piano player; Danny Chisholm, the wild-at-heart bartender. But the game is still going in the corner, the cracked excerpt from a Winston Churchill speech still hangs on the wall, beside the photos of the annual pool tournament winners. The boys are still here. The new Halifax is great, but it is truly wonderful to sit at one of those old Arborite tables hearing the latest stories and catching up on the latest gossip with old friends.

  Then on to Birdland, where all roads seem to lead once the Halifax night begins its raucous second act. It bears little resemblance to a place where Charlie Parker might have played, instead being this big industrial bunker where bands with names like the Odds and Ursula thrash away onstage while all around young faces stare in rapt hallucination. The last time I was in this space it catered mostly to the middle-aged divorced, and before that it was a strip club known as the Lobster Trap frequented mainly by navy swabbies. Now I fear I’m probably the only person in the room without a nipple ring. It occurs to me that I probably look to the regular clientele like an ad exec trying to score some dope in the grip of a particularly virulent midlife crisis. The entire room seems devilish, beyond black, the pitiful lights bathed in smoke and sweat, the awful guitar feedback threatening to crush my skull. The dancing is desperate, palsied, as if they all suffered from Tourette’s syndrome.

  Somewhere along the way I’ve lost my notebook, which has reduced me to writing on the back of beer coasters and a Blue Rodeo poster I’ve ripped off the wall. I wad the thing up and jam it into my jacket pocket. The Vietnamese cabbie looks nervous in the rearview.

  “To Pier 21,” I croak.

  Past 1 a. m. now, and Belle and Sam can be merciless little creatures on a morning with a couple of hours’ sleep. This is it. One more stop to hook up with my friend Doug who never likes to go to bed and then I’m outta here. Inside the gaping pier the final night of celebration for the enthronement of the new leader of the Shambahla Buddhist community, which settled here in the early 1980s, is going full throttle. But it could be any summer night, really, for Halifax is a festive city now, a place where a general sense of having a good time is shared by all ages, races and levels of wealth and poverty. I don’t know who these people are out there roiling on the dance floor to the fiddlers, guitar players and Gaelic singers. A bunch of them, I guess, are Buddhists. Many are just like us, there for the action, spinning, high-stepping and twitching through the closing number. It is “Farewell to Nova Scotia,” but a manic, uptempo version of the old standard. When it ends, the final notes bounce and echo through the rafters. Everyone pours out into the night where the air is so moist and salty that a baby could survive in it. Somewhere a buoy clangs and a fog horn wails like a banshee. I need a cab, but none appears. So I just turn my collar up against the damp, take a big breath and start walking between the street-lights that hang like phosphorous ghosts in the night air, leading me home.

  Postscript

  Paradise Is a Personal Thing

  A DREAM IS MOST OF ALL A SENSUAL EXPERIENCE. YOU MOVE SLOWLY THROUGH it as if under water; events wash over you; strange scenes and unexpected people play at the edge of your vision. Then you awake with only snatches of memory, your heart racing fearfully, an uneasy feeling that something important has happened that you can’t put your finger on.

  I moved to Ottawa. I went for career, ambition, experience, the usual misguided reasons. A city that runs on juice, power and connections. Pretty, prosperous, way friendlier than I ever expected. But strange in its own way too.

  I discovered, for starters, that the temperature is thirty-five above zero in the summer and thirty-five below in the winter. I found that people spent an inordinate amount of time watering their lawns. We moved onto a nice street with friendly people. We skated on the canal, went skiing in the Gatineaus, took the kids to the museums. We found a bar, restaurants, bookstores. Within months, though, I saw the old pattern emerging: drawn to the Halifax papers at the newsstand, ordering six-packs of Keith’s at the Beer Store. Just small things, for sure. But where does it end? At the National Arts Centre, maybe, swaying alongside the rest of the Nova Scotians as the cast of the Cape Breton Summertime Review sings “Out on the Mira.” I prayed not.

  We had held on to our house in Halifax, which, if not the cottage we’d always wanted, was at least a tangible connection. When vacation time came around we dutifully joined the wagon train east. And when a bunch of families on our street in Ottawa vowed to meet somewhere for a summer road trip I could only smile and say, “Well, I know a place.” What I wanted to say was I knew a place where salmon jump, eagles swoop and whales roll. Where pirates and saints and brawlers and believers gather. Where myth, mystery and music hover in the air. Where blunt mountains rise from riverbanks, running out to an ocean that opens to infinity. Where the past and present are interwoven and ineradicable. Where life shimmers with a high-beam vividness.

  A couple of years ago I would have started in, the wistful tone in my voice, the misty, far-away look in my eye. Now I knew better. Home, like paradise, is a personal thing. I write these words at a desk in a house one thousand miles away from mine. It is so early that it is still dark outside. But in Nova Scotia the sun is up. Someone is drinking coffee on a front porch. Head tilted hopefully towards the rising light.