The Last Best Place (9 page)

I
DO NOT HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF DIRECTION
. L
ET ME START AGAIN
: I
HAVE A
poor sense of direction. Okay, let’s be frank—I get lost a lot. So often that it is never a surprise, so often that I have taken to building into itineraries a certain amount of time spent travelling in the wrong direction. Even in the most familiar places I routinely let my mind wander and forget where I’m going. Exciting, in a way: when I jump into a car I really could end up anywhere. Left, right, it’s all the same to me because it’s as though I’m seeing everything for the very first time. Sometimes I magically arrive where I’m supposed to be going, blissfully unaware of how I got there. That’s as close as I get to being certain of the existence of a higher power.

No matter how many times I’ve been there, I always fail to take the right turn to Antigonish, which given the dearth of other possible exits is a singularly bad piece of driving. The result: I hit town an hour after the 10,000-metre foot race, just as the pipe band championships are getting under way down at the Antigonish Highland Games at Columbus Field. I pull into the parking lot at Piper’s Pub, the town’s liveliest watering hole, where John Pellerin, the amiable
bartender/fiddler, helps me find the last motel room in town. A lovely, carefree day. Outside everyone is taking their time walking under the sun, which has finally slipped through the clouds.

I am here because Antigonish, as the local promotional literature likes to say, “is the centre of the province’s Highland Heart.” A nice phrase, and it even has the virtue of being true. While I’m talking to Pellerin someone named Donald MacDonald walks up. It is a name you run across in these parts. Just out of curiosity I pick up the phone book on the bar and open it under Antigonish (the town being too small to warrant its own directory). There I find seventeen Donald MacDonalds, one Donnie MacDonald and two Donna MacDonalds. I also run my thumb down an even dozen John Chisholms and eleven John Macleans. No wonder people in Antigonish County, neighbouring Pictou County and Scottish-flavoured Cape Breton Island are so dependent on nicknames to keep everyone straight. In the run of a couple of hours I’ve already run across Andrew “G’day” MacDonald, “Lucky” John C. MacDonald, Billy Collie Billy MacDonald, who is most definitely not to be confused with Collie Hughie MacDonald, and Ronnie “D.D.” MacDonald, whose immediate family is known as “The D.D.s”.

The layers of names often conjure up the ghosts of ancestors. John Angus Andrew Hughie MacIsaac—I create this name at random, although I have no doubt that such a person exists somewhere in Nova Scotia—could have had a father named Angus, a great-grandfather named Andrew and a great-great-grandfather named Hughie. Sometimes, the nicknames refer to a physical feature, an occupation
or where a family lives. Other times, they refer to some piece of family history. I remember a conversation with Richard MacKinnon, who teaches at the University College of Cape Breton, in Sydney, and is an expert on Celtic nicknames. To prove a point he told me about a great-uncle living in Glace Bay who tried to steal a barrel of biscuits from the mine company store during the bloody labour riots of the 1930s and ended up breaking a toe when he dropped the barrel on his foot. MacKinnon had pretty much forgotten about the whole sorry episode until he gave a lecture on Highland names at the University of New Brunswick, in Fredericton. Once finished he asked for questions. A shaky hand went up in the back of the room. “Excuse me, Mr. MacKinnon,” said an ancient, quavery voice, “but are ye one of the Biscuit-Foot MacKinnons?”

Of course, I am not the first person to discover that Nova Scotians are more or less a tribe. If, say, a person named MacIsaac came down from Toronto to a wedding they wouldn’t make it to the bar and back before somebody would be wondering aloud whether they were related to the MacIsaacs of Judique. Someone would know Merle from his newspapering days. Someone else went to father Dunc MacIsaac’s parish. Someone would have kids who were taught by Al. Someone else would have gone to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish (everyone here just calls it St. F.X.) with one of the other seven kids in the immediate family. And so the conversation would go floating on like a jazz solo until someone finally changed the subject. Tribe, you see, matters here. It is at
the root of the great events and the small dramas. I recall a stag party thrown for a guy marrying a woman from a family I knew. It began convivially enough but ended with the father of the bride and his half-dozen sons and brothers standing back to back swinging it out with the groom and his father, brothers and uncles. A couple of days later they were casting dark glances from opposite sides of the church as the couple said their wedding vows. And now they are family, even if just by marriage—which means that while the bad blood may forever linger between the two clans, God help anyone from outside dim enough to take a swing at a member of either house at some distant stag.

Blind, unquestioning loyalty definitely has a downside—“I was just doing my duty” being the last words every war criminal utters before the hangman opens the trapdoor. But it is good to know that no matter how bad it gets, there are always those who will have you. Home, as someone somewhere once said, is the one place where you can go and not be turned away. I say amen to that. It warms my heart to know that if I were on the run with the bloodhounds coming a mile back, there is always my tribe, with its boundaries and rivalries that extend beyond simple blood ties. This tribal sense of loyalty cuts many different ways. Protestants versus Catholics, Pictou versus New Glasgow, islanders versus mainlanders. You see it in fist fights after hockey games and in the way a stepdancer from Margaree will watch a guy from a few miles away move adroitly around the floor and sniff dismissively, “Oh, he’s from Inverness,” as if that explained
everything
.

Sometimes we even forget our local rivalries and it is just us versus everyone else. American writer Dorothy Duncan couldn’t quite figure out the nationality of a man she met on a steamship from England bound for Halifax. “I’m a Nova Scotian,” allowed Hugh MacLennan, the Halifax novelist who four years later became her husband. In
Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia
she wrote: “He hadn’t said a ‘Canadian’ and he obviously didn’t think of himself as a Canadian. What could Nova Scotia be like, that its people gave this name to themselves with such pride in their voices that one felt they were convinced of a superiority palpable to the rest of the world?”

This powerful loyalty touches everything. But nothing more than politics, Nova Scotia-style. This is high comedy and low cunning, payoffs and paving jobs, conspiracy and collusion. An old-time whiff of the rum bottle, a timeless hint of Tammany Hall. No different, I guess, from how things were a couple of centuries ago, after London ordered Gov. Charles Lawrence to create a legislative assembly for Nova Scotia. I sometimes imagine how politics was played back then: the partisan county sheriffs who let only voters supporting their candidates cast ballots, the “houses of entertainment” where thousands of pounds were spent plying voters with beds, food and booze, the merchants who jostled for power by forcing their debtors to vote for them, the local heavyweights who simply got together and selected candidates with the understanding that they would be uncontested on election day. “Where elections were fiercely contested, however,” historian Brian Cuthbertson wrote in his learned and amusing book
Johnny Bluenose at the
Polls: Epic Nova Scotian Election Battles 1758–1848
, “there could be much fraudulent voting, drunkenness, epic battles to gain possession of the passageways leading up to the hustings, intimidation of voters, and great expense to candidates.”

The party in power made no difference. So ingrained was patronage that even Joseph Howe, the champion of responsible government, lobbied for political appointments. When Edgar Rhodes, a Tory, stepped into the premier’s office in 1925, he faced a pile of nearly two thousand unanswered letters and telegrams from people looking for work. Some of them read like this: “I am writing you to see if there is any possible chance of your giving me some kind of permanent position this year. There are seven Tory votes in my family, and we have always been good Tories, not people who have turned their coats at every election like some of our Tories in this town whenever they wanted a job. And it is pretty hard on a young fellow to be supporting a government that can’t do anything for him.” Or this: “I am a poor widow of ninety years of age. I am writing to ask you if you would be kind enough to send me a nice little check to last me through the long, cold winter. I have supported your government in the past.” Or the one that came from Dartmouth nearly a year after the election: “As this is 5 June, 1926, I’ve written your government asking for work and got no satisfaction. This is the last letter I intend writing. Now there are six voters in my home. We all worked and voted for the Conservatives at the last election … but I didn’t work for thanks. I want something for my husband, and if I don’t hear of anything
from you by the end of next week, I intend to work and vote for some other party that will give us work.”

I do not want you to think badly of us. Animals, after all, look at each other a little funny when the water hole starts to dry up. Politics has always been more than a hobby in a place where prosperity, even survival, means allying yourself with the party in power. In Nova Scotia politics makes jobs magically materialize then disappear into thin air. It makes landlords rich and highways appear where only dirt roads once existed. It ruins careers and spawns men who seem stranger and larger than life. And of course it creates theatre—great, great theatre. I left Nova Scotia during the John Buchanan years. From afar I read about MLAs going to jail over expense account fraud, scandals involving mechanized toilet seats, a Halifax building known as the Green Toad and the premier’s own blossoming financial problems, which were so extreme that at one point he was living off his credit cards. Buchanan—who once while on the campaign trail declared that “elections should not be fought on issues”—barked like a dog in the historic legislature to silence opposition critics. Then an obscure deputy minister who felt he was the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas—seriously!—sat down at a routine committee meeting and accused Buchanan of accepting kickbacks and directing government contracts to friends and political allies. The RCMP investigated and cleared Buchanan of any wrongdoing. But he was gone by that point anyway, rescued by a Senate appointment from Mulroney like one of the last out from the American embassy in Saigon.

As an interim replacement the Tories chose dairy farmer Roger Bacon, the Yogi Berra of Nova Scotia politics. He was prone to calling life a “three-way street,” summing up the problem of unemployment by noting, “If those people weren’t unemployed, they’d be working today,” and standing before a national TV audience after Buchanan’s surprise resignation and saying “we was all shocked.” A sane man, he didn’t even run for the party leadership. For rebirth the Tories turned to Donald Cameron, a humourless dairy farmer from near Pictou who claimed he would do away with political patronage, then a couple of years later ended up taking, of all things, a Mulroney patronage position as Canada’s trade representative in New England.

Which brings us to the here-and-now. In today’s Halifax
Chronicle-Herald
I read about the latest on the $200-million originally slated to improve a stretch of highway not far from New Glasgow, which federal public works minister Dave Dingwall and provincial transport minister Richie Mann have shifted to build some new roads in their own Cape Breton ridings. Then I saw the latest installment in the saga of the patronage-swilling grassroots provincial Grits, who are so despondent that Premier John Savage hasn’t handed over the usual paving jobs that they’re trying to run him out of office. As I put down the paper I was sure that right then somewhere in the province a political IOU was being called, a palm was being greased, a handful of men—and they are always men—were sitting in a quiet room, cigar smoke curling towards the ceiling, forever plotting.

I’m into it now—the part of the province that makes Nova Scotia truly and forever New Scotland. Nova Scotia, as I’ve already stressed, is full of countless life forms. But, up here, along the Northumberland Strait, a kilt is still de rigueur and the pipes assault the senses in stores, malls, schools, just walking down the street. Here the story of the
Hector
, which arrived in 1773 with the first shipload of 180 Scots, carries the same resonance as the saga of the
Mayflower
does in Massachusetts. The destitute pioneers arrived, expecting a land of cleared farms. What they got was a spot with such impenetrable forest that when John MacLean, the most renowned Scottish bard to come to North America, settled at the tiny hamlet of Barney’s River in 1819 he called it “a place contrary to nature.” In his “Song of America: the Gloomy Forest” he poured out the sorrow and bitter disillusionment he felt at having succumbed to the “tempters” of emigration and their “fables” of life in Nova Scotia. Elsewhere he wrote: