The Last Best Place (11 page)

Bill, which we will call him because it is not his name, worked with my wife as a systems analyst at a big Halifax outfit. Somehow
he learned of my fascination with shiners. Which led me to one of those nondescript spots I’ve driven by dozens of times. You have to have the right connections to reach here. There are no arrows pointing out the moonshine trail. No tourism department literature trumpeting the stills hidden in the hillside. Never in a million years could I have found my way. But here I was with a bunch of strangers who’ve taken me in, no questions asked. Probably because once you had an entrée you were
in
. Or as Bill warned: they’d whomp the living crap out of me if I ever squealed.

The five of them do look dangerous and tribal standing around the steel drum with the fire blazing inside as I come to a jerky stop a few feet away. They wear work clothes and stern expressions. One of them, the oldest, is already into the shine. They eye me for a second, then return to their conversation about the Battle of Culloden. Seconds later the talk turns to federal politics before they’re onto the information highway. I don’t say much, just soak in the conversation, which is as elevated as any I’ve encountered in a long time.

Suppertime before I realize it. At the old guy’s house we pull up chairs to the single biggest meal I’ve ever seen: steaks, barbecued chicken, coldcuts, a baked ham, a turkey, deep bowls full of mashed potatoes and salads, a couple of pies steaming from the oven, everything washed down with glasses of shine and Pepsi and fruit wine. Normally I’m not much of a trencherman. We’re all told that too much food—particularly this kind of food—gives you an ass like a sofa cushion and makes you drop dead at an alarmingly early age; the sheer piggish joy of gorging yourself has become a sin
right up there with necrophilia. There is no particular reason why I chose this precise moment to emancipate myself from decades of repression. But I make a fascinating discovery: inside this average-sized body, a fat man has always been dying to get out. No glazed-eyed franticness to my assault on the table. I operate smoothly and methodically as the cook keeps piling more food on my plate. I could just go on forever. When I finally lay fork and knife down and push my plate back in surrender, one of the boys lets out an appreciative laugh like deep thunder. “Christ, John. You sure can pack away some groceries.” Blink of an eye I’m holding tight on the back of the ATV, dodging branches and trying to keep my inner organs from being pulverized as we blast up the hill.

These, as I know them, are the facts about moonshining in Nova Scotia: the RCMP has no idea how many stills exist across the province; the ones they do find tend to be set up in basements, woodsheds and forest hollows by men with names like Moonshine Bill and Deepwoods Dave, who use recipes that go back a couple of generations or so. The process is deceivingly simple: start with a liquid base, which can be as fundamental as water, add yeast and sugar. Let it ferment for a week or so until the alcohol level hovers around 17 per cent. Put the mash in a cooker, which could be anything from a steel beer keg to a large tank. Place it over heat and wait for the alcohol—which boils at a lower temperature than water—to form a gas, which is siphoned off and cooled until it distills into a highly concentrated liquid. Then repeat the process.

“It all depends upon how many times you run ’er through,” says
the elder in the group, a thirty-five-year veteran of the craft whose father, ironically, spent the Prohibition years as a police officer chasing rumrunners in New Brunswick. We are sitting at a rough table in a cabin somewhere in the woods. He’s no hillbilly, a retired engineer actually, but like the others seems to revel in the outlaw life. At seventy, he takes pride in his work, distilling his product three times, once using charcoal filters, before deeming it drinkable. “The stuff that only goes through twice can be godawful,” he confides, pushing an old two-litre Coke bottle towards me.

The label has mostly peeled from the plastic, as if the contents radiated immense heat. The liquid is as bright as spring water. I undo the cap and lower my nose to the opening. My sinuses are in their usual clogged state. Even so, enough of the fumes seep in to trigger distant memories of being chloroformed as a kid so a gash on my forehead could be stitched up. He produces a tumbler, pours an inch in.

“Cheers,” I say gamely.

The others just smile as I take a sip. At a university party back in the days when people actually handed bottles around I once took a haul on a plastic jug and found I’d just inhaled a cup of rubbing alcohol. Immediately I began gasping like a beached carp. Two hours later, my mouth and lips were still numb. I think it was three full days before my tastebuds began to function again. This stuff isn’t that bad, even if unconsciously my upper lip begins to curl in revulsion. I manage to croak, “Hey, that’s good.”

He looks immensely pleased and starts pouring me some more.
Panicking, I try to divert him with a lame question about the Mounties. He waves a hand dismissively. Long as they don’t sell to toddlers, or the desperate wife of some shine-addled layabout doesn’t blow the whistle on them, he brags, he and his ilk are safe. I’m relieved to see him add a gallon of Pepsi to the glass before handing it to me. There are so many unpaid lookouts in the woods and hills, he adds, that by the time the Mounties got here there would be nothing left but a faint hint of shine in the air. That and the echo of laughter somewhere in the hills.

He leads me into a back room to show me his still. It doesn’t look like much: a blackened metal keg, a bunch of bent wires that run to the cool stream out back. You’ve got to like their spirit. I feel like a member of the James Gang, sitting in this room full of bleary eyes, cigarette haze and hockey chatter where the defiant, irreverent spirit of the outlaw lingers like smoke. I’m giddy as a kid when we pile back onto our ATVs. It’s time to ride! I’m without fear now, roaring down the hill to destination unknown. A small detour first to show me some blueberry fields. Bill cuts the engine. “Just look at that sky,” he says, tilting his head backwards for a better view of the black bowl dusted with silver. “I come out here sometimes by myself just to see that sky.”

I awake with a clear head, just before six-thirty. I hear Bill snoring down the hall. I creep downstairs and open the front door: overcast with mist rising from the grass around the cabin. If my life depended on it I could not retrace last night’s steps. I know it happened; in my jacket pocket a plastic cup smelling like a hospital
operating room tells me so. I drop it in a garbage can, leave a thankyou note on the kitchen table, back the car out onto the road and make for Halifax.

Somewhere in this mess of tapes, pens, notepads and newspaper clippings on my desk is a photocopy of a page from a book that contains this sentence: “I do not believe I have ever experienced anything more exciting than being on that sixty-foot speedboat on a pitch dark night, with cutters in hot pursuit and powerful searchlights vainly attempting to penetrate our smoke screen … only a bullet could have caught us that night.” The writer was Hugh H. Corkum; this sentence came from his autobiography. The surprising thing was not that he spent a decade working on the Liverpool banana fleet, made up of boats that sat low in the water to avoid detection as they hauled Prohibition rum, whisky and fine champagne from St. Pierre and Miquelon down to gangster speakeasies in New York. For in these parts the time-honoured tradition of running liquor has always been as much a monument to rebellious spirit as a way of putting groceries on the table. What I found most interesting—and why I had copied the page in the first place—is that Corkum, who was thrice arrested for rumrunning, wrote those words in 1989. Just after he had retired from a long, illustrious career as the fabled fishing town of Lunenburg’s chief of police.

The photocopy sat there for a long time. Periodically I would pick it up and reread it, just because I found it so odd that someone could move so easily from one side of the law to the other.
“The old rumrunners were almost folk heroes in the small communities,” a man a few years older than me with a reddish moustache and calves like those of a workhorse told me one bright summer afternoon. An acquaintance back in Halifax had put us in touch. Fred Gallup was an RCMP sergeant and a member of the Mountie Coastal Watch program, which meant he had one of the great jobs on the planet. We were in one of those fat rubber Zodiacs, flying across Mahone Bay, hitting the low breakers with enough zip to get airborne for a couple of feet before landing with a small explosion of water.

This is what Gallup and his fellow G-men do: blast at high speeds up and down this riveting coast. Once probably they would have been looking for guys like Corkum. The very landscape—the hundreds of hidden coves, harbours and islands—would have been against them, each bobbing head in a dory a lookout, each schooner blocking the way to port a delaying tactic. But running booze was tradition and beating the system. Drugs, today’s contraband of choice, are big money and local kids turn junkies on some far-away Toronto street corner. No one feels much affinity for the South American cartels that discovered Nova Scotia once Washington choked off the drug traffic into the United States. A few locals, needing the cash, hold their noses and play along, acting as mules moving the dope from the mother ship anchored far offshore to land under cloak of darkness. Even they know it is different. There is no pride in it. No panache. Just dirty money. It’s not just illegal, it’s wrong.

“They dump it anywhere: on a hidden beach, in the woods where a couple of guys are waiting in all-terrain vehicles. They’ll find a couple of small wharfs that anyone else would think are no use whatsoever,” Gallup says, pointing to a pair of decapitated piers. “Sometimes they’re quite brazen about it. It’s frustrating. But we have so little manpower there’s not a lot we can do. Some people say we get 20 per cent of the dope that comes in, others would say only 2 per cent. It’s like squeezing a balloon. Squeeze one part and it just pops out somewhere else.”

Yet, despite the immense odds in the dealer’s favour, their ships hit ice, they get drunk and talk too much, they draw attention to themselves with their funny accents, flashy yachts or by paying for their clams and chips with a hundred-dollar bill. Or sometimes they panic, like the faint-hearted group who dropped $525-million worth of hash on a secluded beach near the hamlet of East Berlin because they thought a couple of locals rowing by in a dory had spotted them.

Yet they were Pablo Escobars compared with the ones who tried to land 500 pounds of Moroccan hash around here a few years back. Imagine, such lousy sailors that they had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and still couldn’t get close enough to shore for the dropoff. Eventually, one of them set out in rubber dinghy; a fisherman found him stranded on the rocks near Port Mouton with a broken toe and, for some unexplainable reason, a guitar strung over his back. By now the Winnebago he was supposed to rendezvous with was gone. He checked into a motel in the area—owned by a retired
RCMP officer—then skipped town, conveniently leaving behind his passport and drawings of the boat, clearly showing where the dope was stowed. It gets even more pathetic: a month later he resurfaced with a partner in an old camper van with a dilapidated boat slung across the roof. The Mounties tailed them to a small cove, watched as they dropped their boat in the water, then shrunk back in disbelief as their engine exploded and went up in a fireball. The pair swam back to shore, hopped dripping-wet into their van, drove a few miles and walked into the thick woods. When they staggered into the clearing, lugging their waterproof bags full of hash, the Mounties were standing there with their cuffs out.

Gallup had cut the engine to tell me these stories. As we sat there bobbing in the waves, another Zodiac, full of Mounties and Revenue Canada agents, pulled alongside. Someone had noticed something strange behind an island on the furthermost end of the Bay.

“Hold on,” warned Gallup. “I’m just going to ease this out a bit.”

Then, a Miami Vice moment as he pulled out the clutch and we joined them in a tight little formation thundering in tandem eastwards. Ten minutes later we rip between some medium-sized islands, then slow way down. Steering with one hand as he raises his binoculars with the other, Gallup keeps a running monologue as we near an anchored black scow. “Look at that hook on the forward spar, what does he use it for? Does he use it for offloading while at sea? What kind of radar is that at the front? Jesus, is that a seal? No, it’s a dog.” He pauses. “What’s he doing sitting in a cove in the middle of the bay by himself?”

The other Zodiac goes in first, pulling up alongside the boat, the boarding party scrambling aboard. “We can’t get you too close in case shit happens,” Gallup warns. He picks up his radio and asks for a check on the ship’s identification. A crew member, or maybe the owner, walks out on deck. He looks in his thirties, long hair, wearing a black T-shirt and sweatpants. He lights a cigarette, takes a few drags and flicks it into the ocean. A few minutes later a woman’s voice comes across the radio saying something I can’t make out. “Negative,” Gallup mumbles, looking a little embarrassed. “Ah, well.” The guy on the black boat, who I guess was just minding his own business, waves at us as we begin a big, lazy arc back in the direction from which we’d just come. It is five minutes before Gallup speaks again.

Last time I drove through Yarmouth I was twenty-two and flat broke, coming back from Boston with a couple of Red Sox games under my belt. I remembered absolutely nothing about the town. But now I can see it’s an old place, by North American standards a town of great character. For better or worse, the nostalgic glory of its shipbuilding and shipping heyday—when Yarmouth was the richest shipping port per capita in North America—is what remains locked in place. Recent history has been malicious: the fishery collapsed, a regional airline that used to stop here pulled out, a tin mine closed, so did a textile mill. Now there is even talk about the ferry to Maine cutting back on its trips.