The Last Best Place (17 page)

She laughs a nice laugh when she tells that story. I get the distinct impression that the isolation here breeds quirk rather than insularity and that eccentricity is more a comfort than a threat. Slocum himself had shot two mutinous seamen, been fined $500 by a New York court for putting one of his officers in irons for fifty-three days and charged with indecently exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl who had visited the
Spray
while he was docked in New Jersey. But no one batted an eye at the turn of the century when Slocum returned to Brier Island to write his great book about his voyage. Some one thousand people lived here then,
including Capt. George Clements Sr., who thought he could rid the island’s gardens of insects by bringing toads and snakes from the mainland and shipping over a pair of young alligators he found on a Florida hunting trip.

Nowadays, Joys tells me, the local population shrinks to three hundred during the winter after the cottage owners have gone home and tourist operators close down. Small as it is there remains a tolerant live-and-let-live attitude here. For proof I need only cast my mind to the writer and newspaper editor from the island who left her lighthouse keeper husband not because she found life here too isolated—which
might
have been a scandal—but because she had fallen in love with Allan Legere, the New Brunswick serial killer. Her husband took her back after the zip went out of the romance. On Brier Island nobody excommunicated the woman; they just give a bemused little shake of the head when they tell the story. It really is that kind of place.

So my eyes are peeled for characters as I wander into the tourist bureau and note that 119 people visited there yesterday. Bent by now on a late lunch, I head for a small spot, the back of a house really, a few streets from the waterfront. I have a nice view of the harbour through a window. The young waitress sits at a table watching a soap opera. The cook—early twenties, I would say, wearing a soiled white apron—joins her. Instead of ignored, I feel tranquil as the rain drains from the sky and I sit in the warm room. I order a cheeseburger, cup of coffee and a piece of pie. Then I open Slocum’s wonderful book, published when he was sixty-five,
nine years before he cast off the
Spray
from Tisbury, Mass., began sailing southeast into strong winds bent for South America and was never seen again. And I read his final written words:

“I learned to sit by the wheel, content to make 10 miles a day beating against the tide, and when a month at that was all lost, I could find some old tune to hum while I worked the route all over again, beating as before. Nor did thirty hours at the wheel, in storm, overtax my human endurance, and to clap a hand to an oar and pull into or out of port in a calm was no strange experience for the crew of the
Spray
. The days passed happily with me wherever my ship sailed.”

That is the point, isn’t it. People like Slocum are haunted wanderers, constantly moving on to the latest doomed quest. The dream is the thing. The dream is where their spirit discovers itself and acquires the ability to overstep time and space. Slocum and his like need a canvas big enough to paint the grand narrative of their lives. They are looking for a wilder ride—to grip with one hand while the other flails the air like a bronco rider’s. To whoop and holler while the rest of us mumble “hip-hip, hooray.” To rocket across the firmament in a blinding blaze while the rest of us fizzle and pop.

The guy with the lock-picking tools first told me about Fred Lawrence. We were in Dingwall, a little last gasp of a place at the north tip of Cape Breton. And I had locked the keys in our rental car. My sagging spirits rise a touch when I notice this happened often enough that the inn where we are staying owned a lock-jimmying
tool worthy of a Detroit car booster. But it proves useless on our missile-proof rental Grand Am. Blessedly it took only a few minutes to hunt down a service station in Neils Harbour still open this late in the day. Half an hour later the overalled garage owner gets out of his truck and unrolls his tools like a surgeon. And as he methodically picked the lock, we somehow got on the subject of Fred Lawrence, who lived in nearby Bay St. Lawrence.

This is one of the truly forgotten corners of the province; the big, brooding landscape looks like it is straight out of
Dracula
; we are the only car on the road for miles. Bay St. Lawrence turns out to be an industrious little place. Even back in the 1930s, when there was no cash around, everyone had a farm and would trade eggs for tea and sell lambs to cover their taxes. Barter gradually gave way to a cash economy when a lot of Bay St. Lawrence men went to work at the gypsum quarry, which opened in nearby Cape North. Things got rough when the quarry closed. But Bay St. Lawrence went from being one of the poorest places in all the Maritimes to one of the most prosperous after the 200-mile fishing limit was established and the local crab fishery took off.

For some reason virtually every scrap of ground in the village has its own place name. Approaching town as we are means passing through St. Margaret’s Village, named for the huge Catholic church. From there the road passes a wharf, the credit union and the high school before reaching the eastern edge of the shallow harbour, known as the Pond. Since the highlands circle the town the effect is bowl-like and seems to magnify the effect of the wind
that blows like hell off the ocean. Whitecaps—Belle calls them seagulls—top the water. We pull up to a fishing boat in drydock, turn down the Ray Charles on the tape deck and ask a thick-bodied man perched precariously on a ladder if he knows where Fred Lawrence lives. He grunts “Slocum, eh?” and sends us up a dirt road past dozens of lobster traps sitting in a neat pile.

We stop in front of a roomy, grey-shingled house with blue trim around the windows. One wall is decorated with a bone-white arc about fifteen feet across, which turns out to be a whale’s rib. There’s a basketball hoop at the end of the packed-down dirt drive, a garden to the right and, off to the left, a shed bearing the name Lawrence. Inside, the shed is shadowy and smells of sawdust. Classical piano floats from a radio. A ship’s deck rises from the sunken floor like a half-buried remnant of the Great Flood. Out of the gloom walks a six-foot man with sun-burned skin, Nordic features and close-cropped grey-blond hair.

Ed Lawrence looks around fifty in his faded sweatshirt, navy sweatpants and worn workboots. Born in Maine, he saw Bay St. Lawrence for the first time in 1973, was taken with it and decided to make it home. He does not seem overly surprised to find a car full of strangers at his door. When I say I hear he’s building a boat he half-smiles. “I’ve spent my life as a commercial fisherman,” he allows, “but I’ve always wanted a sailing vessel.”

Well, not just any sailing vessel. He wanted one with the big blocks, ropes and other trappings of the old-style fishing heritage he so loved. He wanted a boat that was seaworthy enough to fight
through the North Atlantic breakers but compact enough to find shelter in the shallowest harbour. At a certain point, he just had to admit to himself, he wanted Slocum’s
Spray
. I’m mesmerized as he explains how he located and bought Slocum’s original plans. And then how he hired a Chéticamp boat builder to make the hull. For the past eleven years Lawrence has been doing the rest of the work himself, on nights and weekends, or days like today when he was out in his lobster boat at 3 a.m. but came in early because of a gale.

“Right on schedule,” he says, fondling the detailed woodwork and gleaming bronze. He recites the dimensions like some kind of liturgy: 37 feet on deck, 14 feet 2 inches at the beam, a 5-foot draft. When I ask about the name,
Double Crow
, Lawrence repeats an old rhyme: “One crow sorrow, two crows joy.” When I inquire how much money he’s sunk into her, Lawrence stops to think for a minute, as if he’s never considered the question before in his life.

“Well, let’s see … I must have $100,000 in it, I guess.”

As he says this his wife, Margrit, appears in the doorway. She wears a bulky sweater against the cold. She is another nomad: Swiss-born, Ontario-raised, she was on a trip across Canada when she met Lawrence and his obsession. “I just wish he’d finish it,” she says. “Has he told you this has been going on for eleven years?”

She laughs, but in a way that makes me think I’m edging into somewhere I shouldn’t. I ask if I can use the washroom. Once inside the house I’m reluctant to leave. The scattered toys, the immaculate plank floors, the cast-iron woodstove, the piano with
the open songbook, the view of the crashing ocean and this wild, elemental place—right now this just seems like the warmest, safest spot on the face of the earth. Back in the shed I take a couple of snaps while Lawrence shows Belle around the workshop. Then I persuade him to pose outside by his lobster traps. It’s blowing something fierce now. When I say as much Lawrence replies, “Oh, it gets a lot worse than this. We still have boats out there today.” We both look oceanwards. Even if lobster is going for six dollars a pound, the thought of being on a dickey little boat with only a few inches of wood separating me from the waves is just too much. My face goes slack with reverence. Lawrence says something lost in the winds. I ask him to repeat it. He bends closer and says, “I tell people that this isn’t the end of the world. It is the beginning.”

I suppose it is possible: Slocum could have ended up here, blown by some particularly long and brutal winds nearly a century ago. Then decided to live out the rest of his life anonymously rather than spoil the perfect ending to his myth. At the very least his spirit endures. So does his brazen brand of confidence. You need that kind of self-assurance when you’re doing something the rest of the world—even your own wife—thinks is plain nuts. I see it all the time in Nova Scotia, where, let’s face it, just living here can seem like a demented act of faith to some people. Even growing up I understood I was amongst people who dreamt big, strange dreams. Then I met Gregg Ernst and realized that even within this obsessed bunch there were some who loomed over the rest.

Ernst packs 315 pounds on his five-eleven frame. He’s got a 22-inch neck, a 57-inch chest, and his biceps are 21 inches around. He is also a really nice guy—a hard-working father, husband and pillar of his local Pentecostal church. “I guess I’m sort of a traditionalist,” he once told me in a gentle voice that, once you knew a little more about him, seemed as incongruous as Mike Tyson’s little-boy lisp. “I like to lift things you could imagine the strongmen of ancient Greece lifting.” So he hoists cars and teams of oxen, hauls eighteen-wheelers down the highway, tosses six-hundred-pound boulders around like balsa wood. If you ask him what the big rock in his basement is for, he’ll drop down to the floor, clutch it to his chest and start effortlessly pounding off situps. He just cannot help himself. Because what Ernst has wanted to do at least since the age of twelve, when he lifted a ton of sheet metal off the ground, is to be the strongest man who ever lived.

I first read about him in a newspaper story about how he stole the show at a Symphony Nova Scotia fundraiser by loading two grand pianos and eighteen people on a six-hundred-pound elevated wooden platform and then raising the whole thing an inch or so off the ground. There’s a mule-like quality to the back lift, Ernst’s specialty. A couple of years earlier he piled 5,340 pounds onto his platform, stepped into the cutaway section, bent down and shouldered the whole thing. As always he heard a noise “like ropes going taut.” But all the muscles, bones and ligaments stayed intact long enough for him to raise the load for a second. Since then he’s had this ongoing battle with the
Guinness Book of Records
about
whether that was the most weight anyone has hoisted unassisted. A century ago, guys like his idol Louis Cyr, the Montreal policeman who could heft more than five hundred pounds with one finger, were real heroes. But these are hard times for strongmen. He scrapes out a meagre existence for his wife and their six children by working their 280 acres of farmland and putting on the occasional exhibition of strength. It makes me kind of sad to see him on a television ad for a bar called Curly Portables, chomping on a burger and warning viewers, “Don’t make me come and get you.” But a man has to make a living. And Ernst needs his groceries: a couple of pounds of red meat and a gallon of yogurt, loads of oats—uncooked with apple juice and raisins—and huge servings of South Shore sauerkraut each day.

Sometimes I think about him training in that dark cellar that reminds me of a torture chamber, loading more and more weight onto that rack of his, hoping the body will hold up one more time. Chasing some long-dead ghost in the record books. And I think: How does he do it?
Why
does he do it? Which is just the sort of attitude that explains why people like me are simply not meant for greatness and others are.

Like Howard Dill, a skinny, red-haired guy in his sixties, with rheumy eyes and a chain smoker’s rasp. He looks for all the world as if he just walked out of a 1930s prairie dust storm. Not at all like the man who, as his biography,
The Pumpkin King
, points out, ranks as “the Babe Ruth of pumpkin growers, the Sultan of Squash, the king of Cucurbits.”

I had better admit it here and now: I once had a slight prejudice against Dill, the result of three years at a newspaper that ran one too many pictures of him posing with one of his award-winning vegetables, gourds or whatever it is pumpkins are. So it is perversely pleasant to finally meet him in person on his Windsor farm and discover he has become a prisoner of the weirdest kind of fame. “Oh, it never ends for me,” he explains inside his office. “The interviews, the newspapers, the television stations, the bus tours. The whole thing started out on a local competitive level. But little did I know what God had in store for me. That I’d win all those world championships and have this big worldwide seed business. Yes, God’s hand works in mysterious ways.”

No “aw, shucks, it was nothing” here. Dill has an ego the size of one of his pumpkins. This is a man, after all, who also claims that the first-ever game of hockey was played on a pond on his 250-acre property back in the 1800s. Then adds, “Who in the heck cares in Japan where the game of hockey was created? But there are thousands of people over there growing Howard Dill’s Atlantic giants.” He has a point. Moreover, he has passion. It may be for pumpkins, but I can forgive a person almost anything if they have passion. I find my preconceptions melting away. I listen intently as he brags about all the pumpkin-growing championships he’s won and all the half-assed celebrities who have taken up the hobby in recent years: Eddie Albert, members of the Texas Hunt family, Raymond Burr, even Earl Morrall, the old Baltimore Colts quarterback.