Nova Scotia Read Free

made
my personal discovery of Nova Scotia, and having moved here and
staked my claim on a five-acre homestead at Lawrencetown Beach, I
can say in all honesty that I have also found myself.
        When I immigrated to Nova Scotia, it was clear in my mind
that a geographical move would enhance my life. My goal was to
become a Nova Scotian and it was secondary that I need also become
a Canadian. I didn’t mind all tghat much really, given the fact
that my allegiance to this coastal province was so strong that I
was ready to swear allegiance to any flag or queen necessary. Hugh
MacLennan once mentioned to me that as recently as the 1950s,
passengers disembarking from ships in Halifax Harbour were asked by
the customs men if they were foreign, Canadian or Nova Scotian.
Hugh had always answered the latter and I can understand why. Every
state or province undoubtedly nurtures loyalty to its soil, but a
land nearly surrounded by water and steeped in a history of the sea
suggests kinship between the salt in the blood and the salt in the
air.
        Because I live a rural life, I like to think that I am more
closely linked with the past than those who live in cities. I’m not
a historian but I live inside the history that is this place. My
200-year-old farmhouse is a window into the past. One day when I
was cutting through a wall to put in a new door, I uncovered an
alarming fact. I discovered that my house was built those two
centuries ago with wood that had already been used before. Whoever
had fashioned this home, above this once lonely stretch of salt
marsh, sand dune and sea, had been a scavenger like me. Some closer
investigation reveals that it was not a mere barn that had been tor
n down to provide the sills and beams, but the lumber recycled here
was the wood of a sailing ship, ravaged by a storm and left
stranded on the beach. My house was once a ship. And with the
original captain long dead, I’mr the only one here to sail her on
into the twenty-first century, complete with the aid of satellite
dish, online information networks, fax, modems and
call-waiting.
        Historians often speak with some despair of this province as
a place that has been out of step with major industrialized
development and the inherent blessings that come along with that.
There is for me, however, great comfort in this thought that the
world has passed us by. Now I can live here with fewer frills,
fewer distractions, a limited amount of noise and observe the
madness from a distance.
        But this is also a province of people who still long for the
good old days, the Golden Age of Sail, that sort of thing. Not far
from where seventy-foot schooners once sailed their way along this
coast on serious business, I now scoot along with the wind in a
mere plaything of a sailing ship, less than five metres long with a
hull of fibreglass and a Dacron sail. I’m a novice in the hands of
the wind and grow to respect its many moods as I tack east and
west, learning that the quickest route from point A to point B is
not necessarily a straight line. *
        In my immediate neighbourhood, whole headlands have been and
gone in a matter of decades. Human history has made only a little
dent in this community on the Eastern Shore, a mere thirty-two
kilometres from the city of Halifax. But the sea has carved and
scraped the coast with such serious intent that cartographers might
just as well start all over with their work of aerial mapping every
five years. The sea has created the history of this place more than
colonial politics, more than Confederation and even more than all
the demands of the twenty-first century. To live by this powerful
North Atlantic is to be intimate with the dreams and fears of
seafaring men who sailed this coast and also to laugh with the
gulls or shudder with the pounding waves at the many facets of the
ocean.
        Wind and water and wave. Three of the great personal and
literary influences in my life. I share a passion for the