The Last Best Place (20 page)

I feel the senior citizens gaining on me, loud as soccer hooligans, so I start for the parking lot, then, on a whim, stop to look at the guest book. Under yesterday’s heading in lovely handwriting that takes up twice the normal amount of space is written:

Now, there’s a lot of hocus-pocus concerning Nova Scotia. For a variety of reasons the province has emerged as a kind of New Age beacon. Harmonic convergences, energy vortexes, power centres, alien sightings, renegade gurus, goofy religious movements, Nova Scotia has got them all. At times it can seem as though everyone is some kind of obsessive, a weird pilgrim here in search of some freaky shrine. I used to run into them and wonder: why? Until
something dawned that was so obvious that to utter it in public meant the risk of being handed a cap and bells: we are all gone in our own way, the searcher for contentment and connection as much as the guy atop the hill trying to channel back to a former life. So why not?

I love driving aimlessly. Travelling is more fun—hell, life is more fun—if you can treat it as a series of impulses. So I like to stop when something catches my eye. That happens all the time. I am, for instance, driving through the fog up along the west coast of Cape Breton when Belle, who is four at the time, points and yells, “Dad, Dad, Dad! Looook!” On a nice day, I’m sure Joe’s Scarecrows are a glorious scene. But today, the dozens of store mannequins in rubber masks and costumes set in a semicircle in this open field just look forlorn, even a little scary, like a kids’ playground designed by Michael Jackson. We get out anyway and walk around. I circle warily by Pierre Trudeau in army fatigues and René Lévesque, a smoke dangling from his lip. I narrowly miss knocking over an old crone in a wedding dress, then, turning, almost take off the wrinkled headset adorning a checked man’s suit with a note pinned to it saying: “Well, well, well, you finally made it to visit us. For the love of God shake on it I’m Duncan.”

One day I am passing through Maitland, another long-ago shipbuilding centre, which sits at the elbow of the Bay of Fundy a little southwest of Parrsboro. I stop into the tourist bureau where a conservatively dressed woman looks up from her desk and says, “What the hell do you want?” Actually she said, “Can I help you?” but with
such a note of surprise that an actual tourist must have been the last thing she expected to see walk through that door. I gathered up some bumf and took it out to the car, where I read that in 1831, before the big shipbuilding boom that put the place on the map, there were eleven shingled houses in Maitland, four of which were taverns. Maitland still has a well-preserved store, an old Norman Rockwell barber shop and a vintage courthouse, as well as a startling number of ornate, preserved-in-aspic homes. The literature identifies the houses as “gems of Greek Revival, soaring Gothic Revival, Second Empire, Classical Revival (Cape Cod) or Classical Revival (Colonial) styles.”

Down the highway a couple of hundred yards is a sign that says Springhurst. I park in the small lane and look the place up in my literature. The home, I learn, was built by Harris Neil, a local builder. It’s designed in a Victorian Gothic style “with a front facade that features a two-storey central bay flanked by ground-floor bay windows and bracketed gables over the second-floor windows.” I had been forewarned that Roy Rhyno, the village amateur historian who lives here, sometimes likes to greet people at the door in eighteenth-century costume. But today the small man with the glasses sports a pair of shorts, tube socks, sneakers and a white and green T-shirt advertising the Maitland Heritage Festival. He’s slightly bow-legged, but sturdy, the type of resolute soul you’d run into on some isolated hiking trail cheerfully whistling the strains of “Colonel Bogey” as he chugs along. A man, it quickly becomes apparent, with enthusiasms. “I used to teach history at one of the local schools,” he
explains as he ushers me into the low-ceilinged original kitchen. “That and architecture are what interest me.”

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 thousand 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.”