The author patrolling the lawless streets of Halifax Credit 1

PROLOGUE

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Up in the Old Cemetery

Walking Among Ghosts—The Ambiance of History—A Fine Specimen of Manhood—Geography and Fate—Portentous Signs—Hard Slogging—The Great Migration—The First Peoples—The Men in the White Robes—Human Narrative—Melancholic Beauty—Forever in Flames—Time, Take Me by the Hand

I can’t recall the moment when I first understood that I was on this earth. I do remember, though, when I first realized where I lived—the place I have now lived most of my life, and where I fully expect to be buried. It was dark. No one seemed to be around—which does not necessarily mean it was late, since it has long been my experience that no matter where you roam in the province of Nova Scotia it is usually mostly empty.

What was I doing out there on the loose at the age of six or seven? Everything and everyone I knew—friends, school, the fields where I played and the church where I worshipped—was bound up in a few city blocks in Halifax, the provincial capital. My parents were as on the case as any, but parents were parents in those be-back-when-the-street-lights-go-on days. It is possible that I was like a puppy that had crept tentatively outside when somebody left the door open. I really cannot say. I just know that it thrills me to think about this burst of freedom all these years later, so I must have felt much the same way then, crossing a wide avenue that was said to run halfway to the border of New Brunswick, the next province west.

I would have been moving quickly, for that is how I did everything in those days. The air was sultry. If fog was coming it was still a ways off. But the street lights, houses and occasional car all had a magnified brightness. Sounds—the rustling of trees, the buzz of an electrical transformer—expanded to fill the air. Time, which for me at that age unspooled at a languid pace, had slowed to a crawl, as it does when something special is happening. Wind rocked the chain on the gate to the Camp Hill Cemetery, although that could have just been my senses vibrating, for I was—and remain—a believer in things unseen and entities and eminences floating in the air. Stories just drifted into my head then, as they did to any kid with a fanciful mind. You saw something and you imposed a narrative, not because you felt it was fantasy but because you thought that it must be true.

I had no inkling then that people who had done things lay buried there: privateers, soldiers and merchants, enemies of Confederation and near-prime ministers. Folks who at one point started banks and breweries, shipping empires, the modern-day oil business and other necessities of life. Heroic figures who, because of a moment’s actions, lived on long after they had fed the worms, and figures whose shameful deeds meant their names too would endure. Heralding the working life that would follow, I just walked right up to the wrought-iron fence and peered in. I tried to be quiet, since people seemed to be breathing in there. It would be another fifteen years before I attended my first funeral, so it is possible that by then I’d never actually been inside a cemetery and, therefore, could have been in search of spirits. I was looking for something; I do know that.

From where I stood I would have seen obelisks and squat gravestones that, if I’d been inside the gate and could have walked right up to them, I would have noted were covered in lichens and the grime of time, the inscriptions so worn away as to be indecipherable. It is possible that I heard voices—from the bloody scalpings and the terrible explosion, from the massing troops and warships, from the sirs and ladies carried through the muddy streets in gilded carriages, from the strutting pirates and the unfortunates who arrived here from the Highlands, the slums of London and the torched loyalist settlements of the Thirteen Colonies—rising like a collective moan. But I think I would have remembered. What I do certainly recollect is a pleasurable feeling that, half a century later, I recognize as the ache of nostalgia, even though at such an age I had nothing to be really nostalgic about.

The sensation cannot have lasted long. There was a noise. I turned, I’m sure without looking, and hightailed it, running as fast as I could, staying under the street lights all the way home, which was really only two city blocks but seemed like so much farther. I have no inkling of what happened next. Whether my absenteeism had repercussions or whether I just slipped back into bed without anyone noticing that I’d gone AWOL, I cannot rightly say. As I recount it now it all sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? And I would have considered that maybe I made the whole thing up. Except for the desire to return to some hazy previous time. I remember it still. It’s really never left.

—

I was born in the spring of 1956 in a hospital a few blocks from where I wandered that night. But genes have memory, so Nova Scotia and I go way back. My people are come-from-aways; unless your veins carry Mi’kmaq blood, that’s true of everybody in this province. We have been striving folk from the start, working in the mills and mines, going to war, leaving the countryside for jobs that kept our faces clean in the glittering mecca of Halifax, vamoosing without a backward glance to parts unknown, sometimes just staying put. I’ve done my best to shake Nova Scotia. I’ve lived in Ottawa twice, and in Toronto and Calgary. But the tidal pull of the place has always been deep and emotional, beyond logic. Once, my wife and I were this close to heading somewhere exotic and far away. Then, good jobs opened up in Halifax and that was that, because, for better or worse, it seems I will have no other place.

Like most kids who grew up here, what I first learned about Nova Scotia I learned in a classroom, seated at a little wooden desk with iron legs and a top that lifted open, revealing the scribblers, pencils, rulers, scissors and rubber-stoppered glue bottles stored inside. My memory is that the cover of the history text then used in Nova Scotia’s elementary schools was adorned with the province’s coat of arms, which, along with reminders of its Scottish roots, featured a Mi’kmaq man, a mythical unicorn and a bare arm and laurel sprig, meant to represent the conquest of hardships to be met here. I must have liked what I read in there, because it stuck with me. New information got added in the formative years that followed, even though I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. But I watched our two channels of Canadian television. I’d hear some folk song or some old relative talking.

History really just seemed to be in the ether in this place where ambiance was everywhere: the fog, the air, the silence, the buildings that seemed to hide more than they revealed, the broody nature of the people, myself included. There was something else, too. If you paid attention, the past was here and now in this province, where it retained a power over human lives and destinies, unlike in other places I’ve lived and got to know. Looking at time in a linear A-to-B fashion didn’t even make sense here, a place where once-upon-a-time and the present are so intertwined that they seem inseparable, existing in some new dimension.

This book began as an attempt make something of that old feeling of walking among ghosts, of being haunted by history that took place before I was even born and being transplanted back endlessly into a past that may or may not have existed. To get to the bottom of what I think I know about this place and how I feel about it. To understand, I suppose, how Nova Scotia somehow finally became Nova Scotia and, by extension, how I became me.

It was, by and large, a sweet idea because for a long, long time writers have been rambling around this province and making notes about what they think and see, who they meet and whatever adventures befall them. One of them is buried up in the old cemetery, on the southern side, under the shade of a hydrangea tree. Joseph Howe was just twenty-three at the moment I have in mind, which may sound young to own a newspaper, but not if you had already been in the business for a decade, if you were already a poet of sorts and knew the trade of the printer as well as that of the post-office clerk. Not if, with a partner, you had already bought one paper and, disposing of that, recently become the editor and sole proprietor of a weekly broadsheet called the Novascotian.

Howe’s trio of half-brothers from his father’s first marriage were said to be fine specimens of manhood, tall, well-built, splendid in appearance. Howe was not. There’s a photograph of him from what I assume to be the days when he was a spent force: he sits slumped supine in his chair. His hair—which one historian described as standing straight up as if electrified by the energy within—is as tangled as his eyebrows. His head, as disproportionately large as an Easter Island statue, seems to sit directly atop his shoulders. Yet it was said, of an earlier point in Howe’s life, that when his face glowed with the inspiration that burning thoughts and words impart, and his great, deep chest swelled and broadened, he looked positively nobly and kingly.

That is the man I choose to picture setting out in 1828, along one of Nova Scotia’s two great roads, which only meant that they were sturdy enough to carry stagecoaches drawn by four horses, such as the one in which Howe rode. He was, even then, a man who loved women and parties. Who, after a day on the political stump, would pull off his jacket and dance with the young folk into the wee hours. Who could hold his own with a visiting earl or talk animal husbandry at the kitchen table of a farmer out in the borderlands. Who could not write other than to mark an X to sign his name. A man who, after a long day’s work at the printing shop, would, on warm summer evenings, sometimes trot down to a waterfront market slip, hurl his clothes to the ground and plunge into the harbour for a starlit swim, thereby raising his esteem in my eyes.

Howe’s mission on this trip, as befitting a man who described himself as possessing a restless, agitating uncertainty, was multidimensional: to keep creditors at bay—he was perpetually in debt because of bad business decisions and his willingness to front loans to credit-unworthy friends—and keep his business and household afloat by collecting what he could from existing subscribers to the Novascotian and finding new readers wherever he could; but also to take the temperature of the province, and then write a series of sketches in his paper about what he had learned.

Gingerly I walk in his footsteps; every scribbler does here. I’ve been cognitively aware of him since my junior high basketball team was pummelled by some tough kids from a school carrying his name, which also adorns streets and public buildings around Halifax. Joe Howe’s statue stands heroically on the lawn of the provincial legislature. His very words about the journalist’s trade—When I sit down in solitude to the labours of my profession, the only questions I ask myself are: What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?—makes every reporter here bow their head unworthily.

When I began working on this book I was a columnist at the paper that brought Nova Scotians the news that the Titanic had sunk, but, from the looks of things, might not be telling them anything for much longer. While there was still time, I was supposed to mull the big and small questions about this province. Whenever possible I was supposed to slam my car into drive, exit the Halifax city limits in a cloud of dust and have a look around like a latter-day Joe Howe. I was supposed to cup my chin in my hand and consider the past and, with furrowed brow, ponder the future of a place that, depending upon your perspective, seemed as imperilled as the paper for which I worked.

Time was of the essence: the contraction of newspapers and magazines and the slimming down of television and radio stations, along with the ascent of a type of media that demands that the world somehow be contained in 140 characters, means the days are numbered for ink slingers with the licence to see things for themselves, to draw their own conclusions and, rightly or wrongly, tell their own version of events. But all we can do is what we can do.

A few things, after all this time here, I do know: it’s easy to see how our geography made us who we are. How jutting out into the Atlantic, being perched on the periphery of the country and hanging off the very edge of the continent as we are, allowed this small stretch of land to catch all sorts of traffic from so many faraway places, some of which arrived intentionally, some of which just washed up here. We’ve been a bit player in the big story. We’ve been the battlefield of warring empires and the great prize in the conflict for a continent. We’ve seen some good days. We’ve had some wealth. We know this because we can still glimpse hints of it, outside of Halifax in just a few bricks left over from a wall, or an old B and B gussied up for the tourist trade. These at one time were the homes of industrialists, we’re told. Great heroes at one point trod those floors, it is our understanding, stared into fires over the rims of their grog cups and contemplated their next decision.

Those were different days. Halifax—with its greater concentration of PhDs per capita than anywhere in the country, its navy, universities and government—was just dandy. But it had evolved into an independent city-state. The outlying areas, the countryside, are where the teeth-gnashing was loudest. The day I walked into the Chronicle Herald newsroom in 2011, a paper mill that had long been the economic lifeblood of the proud town of Liverpool closed for good. The malaise was deeper than the slump in newsprint markets. Anybody could see that the troubled rural economy was causing things to unravel. One day in Berwick, the apple capital of Nova Scotia, a couple of twenty-year-olds doused a local homeless man with gasoline while he slept in a bus shelter, flicked on a cigarette lighter and set him aflame. At the other end of the province, where for generations my people had been punching in at the coal pit and steel mill, I discovered that the only shift change at J.A. Douglas McCurdy Sydney Airport was when the latest rotation out of the Fort McMurray oil sands disembarked from an airplane and the next crew bound for Alberta filed on. My dad and uncles, perhaps in that over-romanticized way that I have inherited, used to talk about the lovable oddballs who once roamed the streets of Glace Bay when they were growing up in the tough coal town. I thought about that one afternoon a few blocks from the old Demont hacienda as I passed a knot of hard-looking young guys who, to a person, fixed me with empty thousand-mile stares.

The portentous signs were everywhere. In Yarmouth, a boom-town during the Great Age of Sail, the best hope for the future seemed to be a heavily subsidized ferry that brought tourists for a few months a year. One day I pulled into New Glasgow, which Howe called a thriving little village and which, a century ago, was hailed by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier as soon to be the Birmingham of the Country. There, in the downtown of a place where good people live, I walked along one of the main streets and started totalling up the For Rent signs until I just stopped counting.

I wasn’t the only person who noticed. One day, the smart president of a tiny Baptist university in a pretty little town unveiled a report on the state of things in this province entitled Now or Never: An urgent call to action for Nova Scotians, which laid out, as bluntly as he dared, the extent of the province’s economic and demographic woes. There was nothing in it that expert panels around here hadn’t been saying for a long time. I waited, we all did, hoping to hear about a new way forward. The problems were deep, the news noncommittal. Nova Scotia, compared to just about anywhere else in the world, was a great place, there’s no denying that. But it is hard slogging here. It always has been. That, as much as anything, is the story, even if it is only one part of the story.

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The first humans, we now know, came here by foot across a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska at a time of lower sea levels during the last Ice Age, then lurched down the continent through an ice-free corridor east of the Rocky Mountains. Oral history and archaeological evidence indicate that around ten thousand years ago a people who would become known as Mi’kmaq inhabited the coastal areas of Quebec’s Gaspé peninsula and the Maritime provinces east of the Saint John River. The Mi’kmaq have an old story, passed down from generation to generation, about how a young woman once dreamed that she saw a small island floating in towards the land. The island held some bare trees and a few men, including one dressed in garb made of white rabbit skins. When told of her dream, Mi’kmaq wise men were baffled. But the next day at dawn, they saw a small island near the shore. There appeared to be trees on the island and bears climbing among their bare branches. Alarmed, the Mi’kmaq grabbed their bows, pulled back the strings on their arrows, and then stopped when they discovered that the shapes in the trees were actually men. The strange humans lowered an even stranger canoe into the water, jumped in and paddled towards shore. One of the men was dressed in a white robe. He approached the Mi’kmaq making signs of peace and goodwill, raising his hand, in a pointing gesture, towards the heavens.

This is mostly a book about what has happened to this place after the men in the white robes arrived. What has occurred since then is every bit as complicated and multidimensional as one might imagine: the overwhelming of the First Peoples and the arrival of a mélange of pioneers who carved out pockets of the wilderness; the random acts, unexplained mysteries and conspiratorial plottings; the mixture of shameful achievements and noble failures; the rapture and misery, the twists of destiny and the hard-heartedness of fate.

It is no inspiring, forever-onward-and-upward-yarn of a place and its people, either, for Nova Scotia has never been straightforward. The province’s motto, Munit haec et altera vincit (One defends and the other conquers), acknowledges as much. So does the way the rest of world sees us—for a long time as a place of new starts, even a promised land, but more recently as a locale of shimmering geography, filled with people in out-of-step industries with last-century skill sets—which is so at odds with how we see ourselves: as a place forever on the cusp of something big. A place that still has much to teach the world about how to live even as it struggles, as it always has, to find a way forward.

The human narrative that explains this place and its people far better than mere events—its biography rather than its history—is, in my own stumbling way, what I went searching for and what this book is about. It is a tricky story to tell for a number of reasons. This has always been, by and large, an empty place. It seems forever in flames and yet, for long periods of time, not much seemed to happen. Economically, it would be hard to argue that Nova Scotia has really worked out. Yet around here we’re always reminded of how great parts of this province have been from time to time, and how great—with the right circumstances and a little luck—they could be again. There’s also a poetry to this small place that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on, other than to say that it is as beautiful as it is melancholic and, impossible as this might seem, that is heightened by the hardships and perpetual disappointments faced by those who call Nova Scotia home.

It’s an old thing I try to do here. The notion goes straight back to the days of Joseph Howe. I have tried to boil things down. I have sifted through ruins, because everyone who walked here before has left their mark on this land. I have considered the legends, which tell of a Nova Scotia that never was, but somehow must have been. I have contemplated the past, even though it is never really past. I have tried to give you a sense of how we got where we are and what, for a person who lived here, it was like. Consequently, I have had to make choices, which means some things and people get less coverage than they deserve and others more than they might seem to merit. Someday it will be somebody else’s province and somebody else’s story, but for now this is my explanation of Nova Scotia. And so I would direct you to a line I’m fond of from a poet named Ilya Kaminsky: Time, my twin, take me by the hand through the streets of your city. Then I would ask, well, are you ready? Shall we?

Actors recreate a gathering of the Order of Good Cheer at Port Royal. Credit 2

ONE

Creation Song

Travelling Light and Free—To the Order—Du Boullay—The Father of New France—Blood Lust—Mosquitos Thick as Fur—Naming the World into Being—Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France—The One Great Winter—The People—Flames Along Fundy

Behind the paper where I worked in the smallish twenty-first-century Nova Scotia city of Halifax, there’s a little side street adjacent to some raised railway tracks where trains run with less and less regularity. Back there, if you looked hard enough through the trees and scrub, you could see a camouflage-green pup tent with a tarp across the entrance held in place by some chewed-up blue twine. I would periodically go sniff around back there, in theory looking for something to write about, but really just curious to meet the occupant, most likely a victim of globalism, PTSD or just plain bad luck, but who I prayed was there of his own volition, not because he had run out of places to shelter. Since I was brought up to give people their space, I never picked my way up the little incline and flipped open the makeshift flap to introduce myself. I just stood outside, politely asking if there was anyone in there. Nobody ever said anything, even though I had the sneaking feeling that the durable person who laid their head there was perhaps somewhere nearby watching me.

Then, one day, I discovered that the tent was just gone, as if the occupant had been some figment of my imagination. It made me feel bad not to have done something to get him in out of the cold, to show him the sociability of God-fearing people with mortgages, Netflix accounts and acid reflux. But I would be lying if I did not say that I also savoured the notion that he/she was out there, somewhere, travelling light and free, living by their skill and wits, as unconstrained as an old-time Mi’kmaq warrior.

I was due somewhere else that day and rain threatened. But I left the Halifax environs distracted, my mind making an abrupt leap to years earlier, when I lived in Toronto, childless, without a mortgage or even a car, in those days when the disposable income and personal freedom curves briefly intersected. Back then my pals and I had a ritual. Every so often we would head to some fine eatery. We would peruse the menu and ask the waiters pensive questions about the wine list. Then, assuming that the day’s deadlines had