The Last Best Place Read Free

ground, unbroken forest that pushes right down to the shore and an ocean that gives everything its taste, smell, feel, language and heart. Nova Scotia is an elemental place of soft, heartbreaking beauty, but there is nothing fundamentally gentle about it: people still die when fireballs shoot through mine shafts and fishing trawlers go down in winter hurricanes. You can’t ignore waves that wipe out entire waterfronts or tides that lift fishing boats from the sea-floor mud like the hands of invisible giants. The world is wilder here, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. It shapes the people as only savage, magnificent places do. Home, then, is landscape—the architecture and ambiance of life. And that, therefore, is where we shall start.
    Nova Scotia, if there is any justice, ought to be seen first from the sea. We should all be like old-time Basque fishermen high on the mast scanning the horizon as it disappears from view behind each passing swell for our first glimpse of the highlands of Cape Breton,say, or the great harbour at the place the Mi’kmaqs called Chebucto. Mostly now you see it by air, heading east from some more important spot towards Halifax, which is what Chebucto is now called. Romantics like to think the province is shaped like a lobster. I’ve always felt it looked like a prehistoric bird, the ugly, predatory kind with a name fifteen letters long that died out couple of hundred million years ago. But maybe the best way to picture Nova Scotia is to picture Britain. Shrink it down, strip it of people. What is similar is the land: wild and mountainous in the north, the central parts shot through with the same veins of coal; everywhere good harbours providing shelter for cities and towns built along the same ocean. Nova Scotia is centuries younger than Britain, but for North America it is a doddering, ancient place. And both are damp—as likely to be foggy as raining—populated out of necessity by tea sippers and spirit swillers forever trying to drive the chill from their joints.
    The parallels are not accidental. Until 300 million years ago Nova Scotia lay near the equator deep inside a seamless supercontinent beside what would become the Cornwall coast of England. A hundred million years later the supercontinent began to split into the continents of Africa, Europe and North and South America. The main rupture finally came just east of Nova Scotia, the cosmic G-spot.
    At ground level you know why Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “This is the forest primeval” in
Evangeline
, his poem aboutNova Scotia. But from the air you’re struck by how close the province is to being submerged: surrounded by ocean, dotted by lakes, segmented by rivers. Nowhere are you more than an hour’s drive from the sea. Three-quarters of the population lives within five miles of the ocean. The coastline weaves and rolls, juts and twists. Time hasn’t done much to smooth Nova Scotia’s sharp, prehistoric edges, more than 6,000 miles of them, a coast longer than the breadth of the entire continent.
    I’ve travelled the next-best thing—all the existing highways and byways. Which means I have been truly blessed. Even on the most agonizingly dull section of Nova Scotia road—the section where you’ve got the windows down, head stuck out like a basset hound, gulping air to stay awake—a weird scene will cross your windshield and give you a jolt. You cannot, for example, drive for half an hour in any direction without passing a warning from some fringe band of religious zealots that The End Is Upon Us, a hunk of some unnameable, nasty-looking roadkill, or the remnants of a blown-out tire, which always, to my mind, hints at something truly awful. The abandoned roadside footwear has always given me pause: the pair of sneakers beneath the overpass, the tasseled loafer in the gutter, the black rubber boot on the broken yellow line.
    As for the passing parade of humans, well, Frederico Fellini wouldn’t have