The Last Best Place Read Free Page A

to give casting calls in Nova Scotia. Just get behind the wheel, hit the road and say, “You, you, you, you’re all hired.” Not long ago on the outskirts of Halifax I saw a mad man in a good suit sitting on the grass island between the divided highway babblingcheerfully in the burning midafternoon sun. Once someone in a Halloween mask driving a rusty Cadillac played chicken with me for nearly twenty miles east from Yarmouth before flipping me the bird and driving off. Once I spent a sweaty half hour as the lone male in a car full of women behind a bunch of Hells Angels who slowed to a crawl and gestured jacking off until they got bored—at least I hope that’s what made them stop—and roared off.
    In Nova Scotia instead of the landscape being a backdrop to the daily pulse of life it’s the other way around. Hit the road and you realize this implicitly. Go west, say, from Halifax. Past Herring Cove and Portuguese Cove, Ketch Harbour, Cape Sambro, Pennant, Terence Bay, Prospect and Shad Bay. Beyond East Dover, West Dover, Peggy’s Cove, Indian Harbour and Seabright. Through Queensland and Hubbards, Bayswater and Blandford. Past the chi-chi new homes of the stockbrokers, developers and doctors who commute to Halifax and past the sturdy wooden jobs built a century ago by prosperous lobster fishermen. Drive by the shop of John Little the blacksmith, who composes jazz on his forge and reconstructs dinosaur skeletons in New York museums, and the place where Elisabeth Mann Borgese, the daughter of Thomas Mann, lives with her special citations from the United Nations for her work helping to save the world’s oceans, and with the Irish setters she’s taught to type and play the piano.
    Then you reach Mahone Bay. Shift your gaze seaward to the tufted islands, which have been there since the Ice Age, when glacial till was moulded by the moving ice into oval hills called drumlins.Nova Scotia has 4,500 islands, which may be the largest proliferation in the smallest space anywhere in the world. A waitress at the Chester Yacht Club once told me that Mahone Bay had 365, “one for each day of the year.” But the truth is there are about seventy-five if you count every rock. I enjoy the names, like Big Duck, Little Fish, Mark, Lynch, Mountain, Saddle, Snake, Graves, Flat, Quaker, Meiseners, Clay, Birch, Grassy, Frog, Sand, Ironbound, Mason, Rafuse, Star, Woody, Love, Round and Marvins. Most of all I enjoy just looking at them, because like most people I have a thing for islands. They can be pretty or dramatic. They are perfect metaphors—“no man is an island,” “the island within.” And fantasies, from a twelfth-dynasty Egyptian story about a castaway and Plato’s account of Atlantis to every soft-porn movie going.
    Tides also have a way of capturing the imagination. You realize this after making the big turn up around Digby Neck into the Bay of Fundy. These are waters than turn back muscular river currents and form waves for joyriders to crest. They are, in the truest sense, a genuine wonder. Regular as clockwork, twice every twenty-four hours and fifty minutes, 100 billion tons of water—as much as the entire Gulf Stream, two thousand times the St. Lawrence—pour into this 200-million-year-old rift valley cradled between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It is a funnel really, seventy-five miles wide between Yarmouth and Maine, narrowing to a mere twenty-eight at Cape Chignecto. Near there the world’s highest tides—rising and falling more than fifty feet during spring—occur when the sun and moon are aligned to exert maximum pull on the earth’s waters.
    I got this last bit of information from Harry Thurston’s superb book
Tidal Life
. It is an immense help to me because I do not live in a Newtonian world. Cause and effect means about the same to me as the thought of God sitting on a mountaintop somewhere. I have no idea who turned on the lights. Or why. I look at the fishing boats stuck in the mud, drive by again a