The Last Best Place (27 page)

Charlie MacLeod’s newsstand disappeared God knows when. But some of the other old landmarks at Senator’s Corner live on: Ellie Marshall’s Store, Markadnonis’s Shoe Repair, the Savoy Theatre where the old R&B crooners the Platters, according to a poster now hanging in the window, are set to appear. Inside Senator’s Gourmet Coffee I buy an oatcake and a cup of mocha java and ask a pleasant woman drinking iced tea if she knows anyone in my family. After a bit of back and forth we establish that my aunt Rea was her grade one teacher.

“The doctor DeMont?” she asks, referring to Rea’s son, my cousin Bruce, who recently moved to a suburb of Chicago to open a medical practice. That end of my family, it seems to me, epitomizes the Cape Breton experience: one son forced to leave in his late thirties to take a job in the States; the other, Kenneth, a tough miner who lives where DeMonts for generations have lived.

“It’s hard,” she says with a resigned smile. “There’s really no reason for young people to stay around here.” She knows. Her son’s CD is playing on the coffee shop sound system. But he is smart enough to be pursuing an engineering degree in Halifax in case the
music career sputters. The point is made. Glace Bay, to the eye at least, seems on the verge of dissolution. Outside, the old-timer under the shady tree on Commercial St. looks forgotten, forlorn. The empty storefronts and the vacant lot where the United Church used to stand suggest the latter stages of decay.

Now I’m on more familiar turf—Knox Hall, where Grampie Flash once worked. Past the site of the old stone wall, now ripped down, where everyone used to sit at night when I visited as a teen. Then up York St. towards the house where my father grew up. I’m working by memory, with no actual address to go by. All I have are images: a screened-in front porch; the kitchen, rich with baking smells, where most of the life in the house occurred; the backyard, where my father and his brothers Eric and Earl buried swordfish bills so that the insects would pick them clean to make weapons for their games of Robin Hood and the knights of the Round Table.

I look hard from across the road, but find nothing familiar. It’s depressing to stand on a hot airless street recognizing not a thing, feeling rootless and lonely. It occurs to me that this must be what it is like to have Alzheimer’s disease. I walk back to my car, start it up and begin scanning for a sign back to the highway. A couple of turns and I’m at a stoplight. A car full of teenage girls pulls up beside me. They’re singing some pretty old song that’s more my generation than theirs. When I look towards them they howl with laughter, then tear off, leaving the notes trailing behind. I can’t quite place the title. But it’s the voices that hold me there after the light has turned. I know them from somewhere. I’m sure of it.

A
ND NOW FOR THE DOWNSIDE
. I
T CAN BE A TERRIBLE BURDEN, THIS ENDLESS
search for place, connection and belonging. The quest can transform a person into something haunted and driven, a member of some lost tribe, the Flying Dutchman, the Ancient Mariner. But maybe finding that special place—then losing it—is the worst thing. Then you become an exile with a far-away stare, wandering dazedly through places you don’t want to be, searching for something that reminds you of home. I know because I’ve walked in their sad footsteps. Whenever I used to tell someone that my favourite place in the world is Nova Scotia, they would tilt their head and look at me like a terrier hearing one of those whistles with a pitch too high for human ears. They knew they were in for it now—a long, meandering treatise about the smell of the sea, the spirit of the people etc. etc. that would get so vague and hard to follow that soon even my own head would be spinning. The whole time they’d be waiting, hoping I would at least slow down enough that they could politely make an excuse and slip away. But I would just keep going, laying down my homesick rap, while the room emptied around me.

Cottages were another thing. Our family had never owned one. But I loved the theory of them. Houses would come and go. A cottage, though, was timeless—that place where you and your kids and grandkids could always return to and find it the same in 2006 as in 1956. While I lived contentedly in apartments in Toronto, my desire for home manifested itself in this weird need to own a recreational property. Not a ski chalet in Whistler or an over-priced shack up in the Muskokas. No, I wanted something on the freezing Atlantic Ocean. Two days’ solid drive away.

Lisa, a much wiser and more practical person, even bought in to this strange obsession. I’d pick up Saturday editions of the Halifax
Chronicle-Herald
at the local newsstand, then spend a good hour or so poring over the real estate ads, peppering her with stupid questions about square footage, oceanfrontage versus water-frontage and what perc-tested meant. Next, phone calls to agents on the South Shore, the Northumberland Strait and Cape Breton where I’d make like a high-roller from Hogtown, asking how far it was from this place or that to the nearest airport, where I implied I would be parking the private jet. I was convincing enough to at least get on their mailing lists. Which meant that every few weeks a brochure, enticing as pornography, would come sliding in the mail slot advertising something like “Near Peggy’s Cove 36 minutes from Halifax, desirable seafront property, house on deep, saltwater inlet. Boathouse, private wharf, large garden. Property includes 3+ undeveloped acres with lake frontage.” Then a long, elaborate fantasy about how we might finance such a purchase.

Somewhere, deep in my heart, we had to know this whole cottage thing was a non-starter. But all the time we were living away we persisted. To the point that during vacations we’d actually take an occasional afternoon and go “cottage hunting.” Nothing scientific—just drive around little out-of-the-way places looking for For Sale signs. If we saw one down some lonely stretch of road, we’d pull over and actually spend a few minutes wandering around the property. We’d peer in windows, pace off the lot for size, talk to a few neighbours. Eventually we’d jot down the agent’s number, one of us would say, “I’m gonna call them tomorrow,” and we’d drive off. We always managed to find a reason not to make that call.

It made no sense, but what does in life? You travel, stay put, move on, settle, go, die. It is all beyond your control. You want to go home, but work, love or something else stands in the way—and you find the trail grown over, the highway moved, the way back lost. You feel the need to put past and family behind you, then discover you cannot because they are in the way you walk, the cells of your skin, your twisted neuroses and your shining virtues.

Home, however you define it, is all about longing and loss, loyalty and conflict. The search turns us into mad zealots, mumbling as we stumble down blind alleys. We become like Rev. Norman McLeod, the charismatic clergyman who led a boatload of Scottish followers to Pictou in the early nineteenth century at the peak of the Highland migration. He was a bit of a nut—a moral dictator who imposed severe punishments for trivial “sins.” He found this frozen,
demanding place was not the promised land of his visionary dreams. When a letter came from Highlanders who had settled in the Ohio Valley inviting him to be their minister he accepted the call. McLeod left by ship, a bunch of his followers in tow, but hardly got through the Strait of Canso before their vessel was driven back up the coast of Cape Breton. They gave up and settled in the harbour of St. Anns. Yet it still wasn’t right. The old dream reawakened nearly thirty years later when he received a letter from a relative singing the praises of Australia. McLeod was a fierce-eyed old man by then. He boarded a boat with 135 of his parishioners and headed for Australia, which also proved disappointing, and they eventually settled in the New Zealand colony of Waipu. From there they sent back wonderful reports of this new land. Soon another nine hundred people from St. Anns built ships and joined them. They live still in the place where the old man stopped wandering, the search over. Finally.

That’s home. It attracts and repels, haunts you when you’re not even there, then breaks your heart when you return. You can have this series of connected thoughts anywhere. In a lumber camp in British Columbia, a dank, cool tavern in Boston. One day I was on the Isle of Skye, in the Scottish Hebrides, sipping on a big pint of beer outside a pub that was so close to the road that I had to lean backwards to avoid getting pulverized when the occasional truck or car came along. I was half listening to the conversation inside when I heard the words “Cape Breton.” I walked in, took a few seconds to adjust my eyes to the dimness and beheld this bearded
giant in a thick sweater, shorts and hiking boots who looked ready to fight the Battle of Culloden all over again. Within minutes he was telling me his story: how he was born here seventy-odd years ago, the son of an opera singer who lost his voice. Then moved to Halifax when his father secured a teaching post at the old conservatory and grew up on the street where we now lived. His was a nomadic, unsettled life. He ended up living in the Sierra Mountains of California. Now he was thinking about moving back to Skye, near his people. “I can’t explain it,” he said after raising his glass in the direction of a wrinkled-faced elder who sat regally across the scarred oak bar. “It may be the wrong thing to do. But it just feels right.”

I’ve felt the same way too many times to recount. Like everyone I felt an urge to cast off the shackles of home, even if the shackles were largely self-imposed. The push and pull mean the soul and emotions are forever in conflict. Sometimes it is easier to see this in others than in ourselves, which is why one day I found myself in the vivid little hamlet of Blue Rocks just outside Lunenburg. I first heard of the place from a doorman at the Halifax newspaper where I worked. He possessed a great wreck of a face—all broad planes and huge gloomy features as expressive as an Easter Island statue. Chugging purposefully towards Blue Rocks for the first time, I discover he looked just like the little village where he was born.

I’m trying to imagine how the village might have looked nearly seventy years ago. The road was probably rutted dirt rather than blacktop. But the boulder-strewn landscape, the churches, square
wooden homes, weathered fish houses and wharfs seemed timeless. I have no idea if the two men I have in mind ever laid eyes on each other. But if they did, it could have happened at the end of a ramshackle wharf where the fishing buoys are stacked like toys.

Art, no matter how you define it, bubbles from some pretty unlikely wellsprings. But I still find it truly wonderful that at the same moment as Marsden Hartley, one of the great painters of the twentieth century, was locked away painting his solemn landscapes, he could have stuck his head out of his studio window and heard this noise—to his ears perhaps not even quite human—which would have been the first tentative yodels of Hank Snow, on his way to becoming the singing ranger of the Grand Ole Opry.

Maybe the two never did speak. But here in this unlikely place—in the strangest of juxtapositions—their life-lines briefly crossed. Not in some fleeting way, though. Blue Rocks, for one, meant innocent, unrestrained love and a sense of home that had always eluded Snow. For the other life on the South Shore was a deep wound that scabbed over but never totally healed.

By the time he arrived in Lunenburg, Hartley was sick, beaten-down and, at fifty-eight, old beyond his years. He was coming off a miserable winter in New York, living on sixty cents a day and one decent meal a week, which his dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, bought for him. So down and out was he that he had to destroy more than a hundred paintings and drawings because he couldn’t afford to rent a storage vault. Somehow he scraped together enough money to head for Bermuda, where he spent several months recuperating
and painting a series of tropical-fish fantasies. He decided against returning to Gloucester. Mass. . the picturesque fishing village where he spent most summers, because he disliked its “summer art colony” set and because it was too expensive. Then he remembered his friend Frank Davison—a novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Pierre Coalfleet—and how he often talked about his hometown of Lunenburg. When he arrived he missed his friend by a single day. Hartley found Lunenburg dull, its citizens gauche. Taking the advice of a taxi driver, he went up the coast four miles to Blue Rocks. There he found the Masons. And much more.

Hartley was a wanderer. He was born in Lewiston, Me., in 1877, and had just turned eight when his mother died. Three years later his father remarried, moved to Cleveland and left the son with a married sister. “From the moment of my mother’s death,” he wrote, “I became in psychology an orphan, in consciousness a lone thing left to make its way out for all time after that by itself.” Thus the quest began. He was searching for something, perhaps seeking an idealized version of Maine, the birthplace where he could no longer live because of the painful memories there. So he studied in Cleveland and New York, returned to Maine to paint its flat mountains and at twenty-two mounted his first one-man New York show. In later years he lived in Berlin and Munich, spent time in New Mexico, lectured on Dada in Paris and painted in a Cézanne-like manner in Aix-en-Provence, never living longer than ten months in a single house. Hartley found temporary solace from the burning loss of his father in the arms of a series of young
German army officers in decadent pre-World War One Berlin. But that comfort evaporated when one of his particular favourites died in the early days of the conflict.