The Last Best Place (21 page)

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.

We drive a few hundred yards to the parking lot, gear up our rods and slip them into cases attached to the backs of the bicycles. The uphill path is rocky and pitted with pools of water. Laurie pulls ahead but keeps looking back as I wobble along the edge of the drop. I marvel at him. I know he doesn’t mean to, but he has a knack for making people feel inadequate. Something about the way he picks his way along this lousy path, easy as if he was driving his bike through a big empty parking lot; he moves through the woods on foot the same way, never a misstep, never looking where he walks as you just try to stay upright. Adding to this perception of omnipotence is his disconcerting habit of pulling water bottles from behind rocks and hip waders out of knotholes in trees. If he stuck his hand into a log and hauled out a plate of steaming, perfectly garnished fettuccine alfredo and a nice goblet of Riesling, well, I don’t think I’d be the slightest bit surprised.

We finally stop and lean the bikes against some trees, then walk through the woods until we come into a clearing. I cringe a little at the sight of the half-dozen anglers already working the river. I loathe having to fish in front of others for the simple reason that as a fly caster I make up for a lack of distance with an almost homicidal inaccuracy. I’m past the worst stage, when a really bad back cast left the line wound a couple of times around my head and body with the fly dangling limply off my nose. But casting for salmon remains more an aerobic activity for me. Flop that line out
there; try to make it straight and pretty, if you can. Then do it again and again and again until you are ready to go home and get some physio. I spoke in elevated fashion about the Zen quality of the act, that kind of thing. Though secretly I was beginning to question the intelligence of spending what little free time I had standing kidney-deep in a paralyzingly cold stream.

At the root of everything was one clear problem: there are no fish. As a result, the act of fly-fishing for salmon has turned into something more than a sport. Call it a metaphysical quest, a vehicle for acquiring humility, even an exercise in gear fetishism. Bringing home a mess of salmon—that had nothing to do with it. On the Chéticamp you were not even allowed to kill them; you had to set them free. But still the anglers come, drawn to a mecca where at least you have a chance of eyeballing them.

Already present is the usual eclectic bunch: the big guy wearing the fishing hat and sunglasses is Bill, who dabbles in real estate and fishes the rest of the time while his wife makes teddy bears in the back of this trailer they drag around North America. The earth mother is Susan, a pony-tailed quilt maker from Vermont who wears a flannel plaid shirt beneath her fishing vest. The calm-looking fellow with the fourteen-foot two-handed rod is Henry, who is from Virginia, and looks far too young to be retired, but fishes here during the summers, hunts grouse in the winter and goes birding in between. The quiet guy in the park warden’s outfit is Clarence, who spends each summer making his rounds on foot alone through the Cape Breton highlands. One summer, he tells me, he
did 460 miles. I notice a lot of butterflies. “Those are yellow swallowtails,” he says. He’s not fishing, just talking birds with Henry for a minute before returning to his mysterious duties.

The Chéticamp, which originates in the highlands and runs right out to the ocean, is a strange little river. Might as well forget the usual fishing pattern: long casts, taking a few steps and covering the water. To raise a fish here you have to find the right lies in the rock-strewn current, and then deliver the fly from some awkward angle. “This is a test of precision,” warns Laurie in what for me are truly ominous words. I try a few casts and mercifully make it through the pool without hooking someone’s earlobe. I sit down and wait my turn as the others rotate in. After I run through one more time Laurie suggests we move downstream. As we do Sue manages to hook a nice twelve-pounder. Catch. Pause. Release.

Laurie climbs up on some rocks sure as a billy goat and notices something in a section of water where all I see is brown foam. “Now this is what I want you to do,” he says, grabbing my rod, false casting once and laying a little parabola down some thirty feet away. Laurie is a stickler for presentation—the line has to land straight, and you’ve got to pull in the slack so the fly swings by on a natural arc. He smells some action now, so his commands become precise. “Put the fly over there by that rock. Okay, pull in some line. More … more … more. Let it swing. That’s it. Okay, okay. Now right over to that rock again.”

I cast again and again and again. Then I feel a tug. A fish! Now what? The chances of actually hooking one seemed so slim that I
had long forgotten the suggested technique for setting the hook. I haul like a powerlifter—the classic novice’s mistake—and the line pulls free. Laurie grimaces. “Okay, let’s go again, the same spot.” Half a dozen casts later I feel the fish again, wait a moment, pull back—and lose him again. Laurie pulls off his cap in despair, mumbles something I can only assume is some ancient Gaelic oath. I wait for him to hurl his cap to the ground and start jumping up and down on it like Yosemite Sam. Instead he lets out a long sigh, smiles at me with infinite patience and says, “John, do you think maybe this would be a good time for a break?”

Fishing guides are the most gentle folk. I have met damaged, cigar-chomping Vietnam vets, former freedom fighters in Czechoslovakia who gave up being accountants to take sports full-time, wealthy Americans who guide part of the year and paint landscapes the rest. I don’t know much about Laurie, other than he went to St. F.X., played some hockey and lives on the family land on the outskirts of Chéticamp. And, of course, that he is drawn to rivers and fish. “My main goal is to stay out of cities,” he says as we share a couple of ham sandwiches he pulled out of God-knows-where. “I can’t live in a city. I don’t have any use or need for them. I spend the rest of the year in British Columbia. I’m working on my plumbers papers. I live in a tent, just my sleeping bag, a rented car and a Coleman stove right through the winter. Usually I eat in town. That’s what it takes for me to live here for four or five weeks. There they have steelhead and sea-running rainbow trout. But I’ve yet to see anything like the Atlantic salmon
coming up to take the fly. It is all wicked, all great.”