The Last Best Place (29 page)

Normally I am not one to dwell too long on the past. It can be a paralyzing thing to meet one’s history at every corner, in every closet and cupboard. Sometimes the best thing to do is just face it head on. One day in the grip of an unusual nostalgic reverie, I asked the phys-ed teacher at my old high school, which is just blocks
from our house, whether I could visit the locker-room where I once dressed as a weak-shooting guard on the Queen Elizabeth Lions “A” basketball team. I discover the interior still looks like a Jackson Pollock painting—fifty years of names layered over each other to form this psychedelic pastiche of colours. Man, I wasted a lot of time down here when I should have been in class memorizing the kings of England, conjugating French verbs and cutting up crayfish. Yes, I would be a better, brighter, more stable person today if I had never discovered this dungeon; we all would be. I have to look hard amongst the names on the walls, but find some from my years: football players who became television actors or reborn Christians, hockey players who sell cars or were shot dead in drug feuds, basketball stars who work in the dockyard or drive blue Mercedes sedans with leather interiors.

I slip into the halls of the school, which take on the soft-lens quality of a movie dream sequence, all the time waiting for the background music to swell. Summer vacation, so the place is empty. All the better to imagine the sorry figure I cut back then, clomping around in my construction boots, even though I had never done anything remotely resembling labour, and sporting jeans wide enough to blot out the sun. No doubt I will burn in eternal hell for wearing a leisure suit to my grade twelve graduation ceremony. We spent a lot of time in cars—just friggin’ around, heading for a gym to play basketball, to the Sahara for pizza and to the movies. On summer weekends we drove down the loopy stretch of highway for Queensland Beach. We’d use fake IDs to sneak into the South Gate
(now an office tower) or the Lighthouse (now a peeler bar, but still called the Lighthouse). Sometimes we’d just drive aimlessly through the streets with the windows down, the radio turned up full, pretending the dash was a keyboard. Everyone doing the Billy Preston cross-over move, crooning “Come on world/join in/come love/love train” as if those were actually the words.

Nostalgia is a truly dangerous thing. Going home to recapture your lost youth can only end badly—even in a place like Halifax, which to the eye has not changed appreciably in a long, long time. But of course it has. And thank God for that, since so much of what you so fondly remember was simply being a kid with life and the world out there ahead of you. With the wisdom of age I can now appreciate that when I grew up here Halifax’s energy lay buried, sunk beneath a provincial regard for authority and a misty-eyed longing for bygone days. This was the kind of place where you could never escape your past. Where growing up white and Protestant in the South End meant a good frat at Dal, an overpriced cottage on the South Shore and an early partnership at one of the old law firms. Once this had to be one of the most homogeneous cities on the continent.

Now look at it. Sometime between when I left and returned everyone under the age of twenty-five seems to have landed in Halifax. Along with the youth, the place has a more cosmopolitan look and feel: growing numbers of eastern Europeans and Asians stroll about; Birkenstock-shod baby boomers, here for the lifestyle, push carriages; young blacks and whites mix freely; female lovers
walk arm in arm; no one bats an eye at the middle-aged man wearing the pumps and the nice conservative blue dress. The city still has the appearance of being stodgy and staid at the top: the same old canny Irish pols running city hall and the same well-fed lawyers running the provincial government. But that’s all very deceiving, really. Halifax, for the first time in my life, has real sizzle. Something more is going on here than an influx of yuppies who know the difference between Java the computer language and a caffè latte. There’s a sense of breathless liberation out there, the type that can only come from years of pent-up repression and slavish obedience to convention.

Inside a coffee shop, say. Not one of the trendy new ones where the technonerds bash away on laptops over double cappuccinos. But in Perks, sandwiched between the ferry terminal and the city’s law courts, where on any weekday the self-styled “waterfront intelligentsia” are well into their usual groove. Halifax, technically, is a city, the fourteenth largest one in the country by last count. But spiritually it is a small town, full of places like this: bars, coffee shops and greasy-spoon diners where the clientele is fixed and the talk a loose banter based on an intimate knowledge of everyone else’s business. I’m a virtual stranger here. But even I sense things falling into their practised rhythm: the stockbroker and Tory bagman arguing golf clubs with a corporate lawyer; the president of the provincial Liberal party who stops by to pick up a paper and trade political gossip. Yet look over there—at the blues-loving Italian-Canadian judge with the Al Pacino beard and haircut, at the
writer freshly returned from Vancouver to work for one of the burgeoning film production houses ordering her morning hit, at the music promoter in the midst of putting together a summer comedy festival for the thousands of tourists who flock to the city to see what the buzz is about.

I know what you’re saying. What about the depressed, downtrodden blacks who still wallow in poverty and hopelessness? What about the paucity of women holding political power, partnerships at the big law firms and high-level executive jobs? The only way I can respond is to say that you had to grow up here, like I did, go away to give yourself a little distance, then come back. To say Halifax is emerging from the Dark Ages is too severe. So let’s just say that somewhere along the line the conservative capital of Nova Scotia rediscovered a lost youth to go with its penetrating sense of history. Maybe you can’t go home again—if home means the exact place you left behind. Because both you and it have inevitably changed. So don’t even bother looking. Just look at the place fresh as if for the first time. Consider it on its own merits; draw your own conclusions.

Opening my eyes wide I found Halifax now had charm, eccentricity and style along with a salty past. At some point the city went from being this colonial outpost port on the edge of the continent to the kind of place the rest of North America, whether it realizes it or not, fantasizes about being. I roll the words around my tongue, almost in disbelief:
Halifax the hip
. And what I wonder, staring out at the waterline through the coffeeshop window, is how did it happen?

Daybreak is the time down here. When the morning fog still cools the air and no one else is around down on the waterfront. Then, as the mist clears, and the outlines of the harbour emerge as in a Polaroid snapshot, I like to picture the scurvy-ridden British pioneers arriving, the booty-laden privateer ships that plundered all the way down the eastern seaboard coming to dock, and the Second World War convoys massing before leaving for Europe. I sometimes like to come down in the early morning and stare into the same green waters as the admirals who once plotted Britain’s campaign to hold on to the New World. From here I can see the spot where a German submarine torpedoed a Canadian minesweeper and the place where the French steamship
Mont Blanc
and the Belgian steamer
Imo
collided, causing the biggest manmade explosion the world had seen until the horrors of Hiroshima. I can see the spot where the Pony Express news packet from Europe was dropped over the side of a Cunard steamer onto a boat at the harbour entrance and then passed to a rider on shore who galloped through town towards Digby. I can throw a rock to the beach where the makeshift gallows once stood, the bodies dangling in the air as a warning to all who entered the great, long harbour.

Halifax is a long time coming. There is nothing flimsy about it. Wander around awhile and you have a sense that it is firmly planted on the ground, that its wooden homes and brick buildings can withstand anything the North Atlantic can throw at it. It is built to
last. Here, in a place with 250 years of rollicking, myth-laden life, the past so overlays the present that history is vibrant and alive. You get the sense that it comes from a tradition, a sense that begins with the name—stodgy, upright, just reeking of Empire—but is just as evident in Government House, the Lieutenant Governor’s residence, and the other old buildings, now occupied by the people and preoccupations of the present, but where I’m certain the ghosts of the past still lurk.

Once it was reputed to be the wickedest town in North America, full of whorehouses, waterfront blind pigs, marauding press gangs, duels, drinking bouts and gambling dens. A murder ten years after the Red Coats arrived illustrates the wide-open frontier feel to the place: three gentlemen, Lieutenant Collins, Captain Sweeney and Dr. Johns, spent the night boozing at the house of one John Field and then went in search of whores up on Barracks St. Johns and Sweeney testified that they knocked at a door and “inquired for Polly.” But since they were pounding on the wrong door, Polly was unavailable. When, according to one chronicler, “they waxed strong over this flouting of their legitimate desires and diversions the householder, one Lathum, discharged a musket and killed Lieutenant Collins. Captain Sweeney promptly called the town guard and the spirited Lathum, a baker, was tried and hanged.”

The hangman at the time was probably a character known as Tomahawk who lived in a lonely hut at the city’s farthest North End. He was a busy man, since in those days a person could be strung up for stealing a sheep or anything else worth four shillings.
Say this for Tomahawk, though, he had a heart; he hated his work so much that he drank himself to death trying to dull the pain. And here’s a story that will warm your heart: some young lads discovered his body. Instead of calling the undertaker, they threw a noose around his neck and dragged it across the street to the ruin of a blockhouse. There they pitched what was left of old Tomahawk into the latrine. For years his bones lay there, a persistent attraction for the curious townspeople who often came for a peek at the remains.

It was always a small place destined to be part of big news, as either a bit player or a central participant. “Every handful of earth here has crumbled history,” bluenose novelist Thomas Raddall once said about the city. Wolfe and the British brass feasted at the Great Pontac Hotel, emptying twenty-five bottles of brandy, fifty of claret and seventy of Madeira before setting sail for that rendezvous on the Plains of Abraham that ended French power in North America. Prince Edward turned it into the strongest fortress in North America during the Napoleonic Wars. During the War of 1812 Halifax was the centre of Britain’s North American military power.

Everyone seems to have passed across this canvas. Two prime ministers and two fathers of Confederation are buried here. So are the bodies of 190 of the
Titanic
’s drowned men, women and children. Leon Trotsky, bound for the Russian Revolution, was jailed here. A quiet young lieutenant in the Royal Navy, William Edward Parry, dreamed of the Northwest Passage here. I like to picture it in the post-Waterloo days when young Joe Howe, the father of
responsible government, was playing ball in the streets. Thomas Haliburton, Sam Slick’s creator, had just been admitted to the Nova Scotia bar. James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the New York
Herald
, was teaching school. Samuel Cunard, still years away from starting his shipping line, was a rising young merchant. Abraham Gesner, the discoverer of kerosene, was trying to make up his mind whether to be a surgeon or a geologist.

But after the Second World War and the V-E Day Riots that left the city ruined and baffled, something snapped. A layer of Puritan repression blanketed the place, leaving it stagnant, depressed and dull, a dying port and garrison town holding on to its storied past. The city did have a brief moment in the sun when, during the late 1960s, draft dodgers and visiting actors and artists spread the word in the United States about an easygoing “San Francisco North” in Nova Scotia. Back then, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design—hailed by
Art in America
as possibly “the best art school in North America”—exerted an influence throughout the continental art world that defied its small size and out-of-the-way location. All the same, by the 1980s the city’s fizz had definitely gone flat.

Which brings us to now. Make no mistake: Halifax’s spirit is still fundamentally logical and realist, as befits a city of government, universities and the military. But the city is in flux more than usual now, and out of that flux some strange things are sprouting. It is not a flashy city, a city that shouts “Look at me!” You have to be alert. When the sun breaks through, softening the hard edges of the Victorian and Georgian buildings and glimmering off the water, the
city shimmers like a fairy tale. Me, I have always preferred Halifax’s veiled seductions—the half-concealed, the shadowy, the illusion that something else is at work, something you cannot really comprehend. On nights on the waterfront when only the massive bases of the piers, grain elevators and spiffy new office towers show under the fog, a sense of gravity, melancholy and romantic mystery clings to the city.