The Last Best Place (18 page)

I am still paying attention as he explains how, with his grade nine
education, he learned enough about genetics to breed these monsters. He takes me through the actual growing process while we wander across his dairy and fruit farm towards the pumpkin patch. It is still early in the growing season and the pumpkins are not much bigger than the ones I am used to at the Halifax farmer’s market. But he’s always hoping that another champion will erupt from the soil. “You’ve got to remember that when I broke the eight-hundred-pound mark it was like breaking the four-minute mile,” he says. When he finally sends me packing I leave with a pile of his press clippings and his biography. In my pocket there are also a couple of packets of Atlantic Giant seeds, the same variety that generates a couple of million a year in sales from Dill wannabes around the world.

My route takes me back through Windsor, and I find myself driving by the home of Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the town’s other famous son. He was a rural judge, politician and polemicist who hit it big by creating a Yankee peddlar named Sam Slick and writing about his travels through Nova Scotia. Haliburton was the first Canadian writer of international stature; in his heyday he rivalled Dickens in popularity over in London, where he eventually bought a mansion on the Thames. But lately, back in North America his reputation has been taking a beating, sparked by an upcoming biography that found Slick’s creator to be a vicious, mean-spirited, racist, misogynist right-winger. Such, I guess, is the ephemeral nature of fame. The thing is, Haliburton just wrote books. Howard Dill is the father of the Atlantic Giant. Which is another matter altogether. He has immortality in him.

Weymouth, which sits a bit inland from the Bay of Fundy, is an elusive place, veiled in green and hidden by hills. From the hills flows the Sissiboo River, which, legend has it, got its name when a shaggy coureur de bois pointed out half a dozen owls roosting nearby and exclaimed, “Regardez! Six hiboux” or something like that. I immediately get the sense that a fresh start would be difficult here: Loyalist settlement, shipping centre, lumbering village, just driving through the town makes it clear that Weymouth’s successive pasts are ineradicable and inescapable. I had never heard of the spot until, while attending a Liberal Party convention in Halifax, I was introduced to a delightful, sturdy-looking Grit in his early fifties named Desire, or Desi, Belliveau. Right off he struck me as a straight-ahead, positive kind of guy. No surprise to hear he served as the party’s chief organizer in fiercely Liberal Digby County, as well as Weymouth’s de facto director of industrial development. We talked for a couple of minutes and he said: “You come up and see me. We’ll go back in the woods, we’ll cook some steaks and I’ll show you Electric City.”

When I arrived he was where he promised to be: running his Foodland franchise on Weymouth’s main drag. Today, it turns out, he is a little pressed for time. Instead of steaks he fills a Styrofoam cooler with sandwiches, cheese, pop and juice, ties up some loose ends in the store and leads me out into the parking lot to his halfton. We are headed back seventeen miles into the woods. First, we have to stop and get a guide, Lionel Borden, district superintendent of the local pulp mill. We climb into a heavy-duty truck, painted
green and white, the company logo on the side. With Borden behind the wheel we move from pavement to dirt road. At times, a strip of grass brushes against the undercarriage. At times we are on no road at all, just thumping across exposed boulders and through streams, the branches bouncing off our roof in a mad conga rhythm. We stop to see a weird glacial formation known as the Balancing Rock, then we just keep on going.

What was he thinking? What was going through Emile Stehelin Sr.’s mind when he came way back here a century ago to build his city of light? I can accept that the Alsatian-born businessman who got rich off a felt factory in Normandy wanted to put as much distance as possible between his draft-aged sons and the shadows of war in Europe. And that the Eudists, a hard-line French religious order building a college in Nova Scotia, at Church Point, were maybe just the ones to straighten his boys out. But all I can conclude is that he must have secretly relished the thought of seeing Jean Jacques, his dissolute older son, getting off the train at Church Point that sunny, warm July day in 1892. He wore a stylish Parisian-cut grey checked suit, shiny black dress ankle boots buttoned down the sides, a melon-shaped Edwardian dark grey hat and a high-collared pinkish shirt with wide necktie neatly held in place by a good stick pin. I wish I was there to see the faces of the dirty unshaven woodsmen and fishermen when this vision stepped out of the train. A family history written by a nephew said that they tipped their hats and smiled deferentially. I don’t believe it for a second. I see them knocking his hat off, spitting tobacco juice on
his shirt front, then shoving him into the mud to see if he cried.

When Borden finally stops the car it is alongside a clear, lively stream. We walk past some white spruce and sugar maples towards a lake. Belliveau points to an area of scrub trees and low grass. “Now, Lionel, this is where the sawmill was, wasn’t it.” Except for our voices it is absolutely quiet. Nothing at all like the way it must have sounded and looked thirty years before electricity came to the rest of the area, when the Stehelin mill was running full out, when the locomotive
Maria Thérèse
was puffing along the tracks of the family-owned Weymouth and New France Railway, hauling Stehelin lumber all the way to the wharfs of Weymouth. When light poured from every building on the property and from the reflectors mounted on poles around the square. By then the whole clan was living in New France, which is what they called the family compound.

We walk over to the ruin of the main house, once home to the parents, the children and their offspring. We pass the site of the old cookhouse, where the workmen ate their hardy lumber-camp meals, then after a day in the woods passed the night dancing to the fiddle, mouth organ and jew’s harp. The office with the little glass wicket where they lined up on Saturday night for their week’s pay once stood over there. Near the spot where the hung-over, guilt-wracked men worshipped in Our Lady of the Forest Chapel the following morning. Desi points out the mossy rocks and the huge mushrooms growing in the remains of a stone wine cellar. After we walk a little farther, he gestures towards the sandy
beach where the casino stood and, his voice low with reverence, says, “It must have been
really
something, wasn’t it.”

The patriarch usually wore a fine waxed moustache, corduroy suits, a long coat and high, stiff collar. He was a bit of a brooder who could kill an afternoon anguishing over the big, unsolvable metaphysical questions. But he also received fall hunters and visitors from the European nobility at his home and won the nickname of the Old Gentleman for the fair way he treated his workers. Emile Sr. watched his children marry and leave the compound in search of their own lives. Everyone who left New France took some of its laughter and spirit with them. The nights grew longer and quieter for the parents, the house bigger. When the matriarch, Marie Thérèse, died, Emile couldn’t stand living there alone. One day he released a flock of white pigeons in the loft at the top of the barn, rode his old mount, Faithful, for the last time and rented a house in Weymouth.

In town Emile held on to his old ways—the French cuisine served by his black servant, good wine, long dinners followed by quiet time in the salon over coffee, liqueurs and books. The calm was broken by the declaration of World War One and the threat of military service from which Emile had tried so hard to shield his sons. Five of them were called up by the French government. The day the last of them left, the old gentleman gathered them close and gave each his fatherly blessing with a cross on each forehead and a kiss on each cheek, along with the words, “God be with you. You know where your duty lies, be sure you fulfil it
well.” Then he wended his way back home on the arm of Louis, the only son still at his side. He kept an up-to-date map of the European hostilities on his wall and every day walked with dog and cane down to the Western Union Telegraph office, where news from the front was posted in the window. He died on August 8, 1918, not knowing who won the war and whether his sons had survived.

They came back alive, but not necessarily to Weymouth. Six of them returned to Europe to live on the old family land. The ones who stayed behind in Nova Scotia tried to keep the property in the family, but eventually it was sold, changed hands a couple of times, then was bought by the billionaire Irving family of New Brunswick.

Strolling back to the truck, Borden points out a few of the old apple trees and the new-growth forest that has grown up around the last remaining signs of the Electric City. It’s so quiet, I say dreamily. “There are no birds,” he points out. “The DDT killed all the birds. Only the bugs survived.” Not long after the Stehelins left, the forest inched towards the square, cutting off the view of the lakes and the casino beach. Vandals stripped the place. Ghosts naturally took up residence—phantom trains, chain rattlers, a fiery rider on a fierce black horse who unsheathed his sword before disappearing into the old wine cellar.

It feels strange to be here, at the site of this magnificent failure that went the way of so many of the bizarre, grandiose schemes hatched in this province. I like the panache and vaingloriousness of it, the mythic quality of the whole enterprise. The trail seems
longer and tougher going out. At one point we stop, pull off the road and have our lunch. Then we are back at the parking lot and civilization, saying goodbye to Borden and sliding into Belliveau’s truck. He wants to give me a quick tour of the area before he gets back to work. As we drive he tells me about the thickness of the fog on St. Marys Bay and the cold water “no good for anything except lobster.” He tells me about Digby County politics and what makes a good rappie pie and the vagaries of the grocery store business. He explains that Weymouth, with its Loyalist beginnings, is mostly English, making it a bit of an aberration on the French shore of the province. It also has a black community, small and dirt-poor like many of the rural pockets throughout the province. He points to a tiny structure off the road. “See that yellow house, the bungalow? That’s where Sam Langford was supposedly born.”

Now there’s a familiar name. Langford started his boxing career in Boston as a lightweight, then moved up to welterweight, middleweight and light heavyweight before finishing as a heavyweight. Here’s how the Marquis of Queensbury, son of boxing’s patron, described him: “Excepting only [Jack] Johnson, no heavyweight in the world could have stood up against the Boston Tar Baby in a finish fight. A freak was this amazing negro—fourteen stone of whipcord muscle and bone under a jet black skin—a neck as big as another man’s thigh, a chest like a barrel, arms so grotesquely long he could scratch his ankles without stooping—and he stood five-foot-four in his bare feet. But it was his reach—84 inches—that
made him the devastating fighter that he unquestionably was; in a word—a human gorilla.” Georges Carpentier, the light heavyweight champion of the world, dodged him. Middleweight champ Stanley Ketchel ducked him. Same went for the great Jack Johnson, who outweighed the Nova Scotian by thirty-five pounds and whomped him something awful when they met near the turn of the century, but was still worried enough not to sign for a rematch. Consequently, Langford had to settle for a bunch of lesser titles, the Welsh middleweight crown and the heavyweight championships of England, Spain and Mexico, winning the last one despite being legally blind at the time.

But I remember him more from an old black-and-white photo. It was taken in a New York ghetto rooming house where an enterprising reporter found him alone, penniless and almost blind. His once magnificent, now ruined body was covered in a mouldy bathrobe as he sat wearing dark glasses in a rocking chair. I was just a kid when I saw the photograph. But it haunts me still. Big dreams, I suppose I realized even then, do not necessarily end in triumph. Not by a long shot. Which is why it is such a sublime surprise when the unexpected does happen.

‘Folk Art,’ reads the hand-painted sign near Camperdown, sending me inland through forest, past farmland until it’s the end of a dead-end road. The car door slams, then nothing but sweet country silence. In a studio smelling of wood chips and paint, a brightly coloured yard-high stick fisherman, eyeballs bulging a foot out of his head, stares at me. “This is the scallop shucker here,” explains its
creator, Ransford Naugler. “He reached down to shuck the scallop and he flipped up the top to look in and the scallop shocked the scallop shucker, because the scallop already had his boots on.”

My friend Dan Callis likes taking photographs, angling for salmon, playing the congas and smoking cigars. He also likes folk art—not the awful cutesy stuff but the real thing. He says the Naugler brothers are it: collectors from California to Israel own their stuff; gallery owners from New York leave with their van shocks sagging under the full load. I’m no judge. But these guys do have eyes. Of that I feel sure, walking past the country-western combo made up entirely of bears, the lion tamer with the lion chewing on his leg, the strange shapes and colours and designs. I feel as if I’ve drunk too much coffee.