The Last Best Place (24 page)

By the clubhouse a pleasant post-coital mood has settled over the sailors and hangers-on sipping beer in plastic cups as they relive the race. “You bastard, we had ya. Lord Christ, we did. Helluvaday, though,
helluvaday!
Here, what’re ya having, beer? Chrissakes, let me get you a real drink.” From the sound system Peter Tosh exhorts the world to lively up yourself. I get a drink and wander out on the deck. My face feels sunburned and I’ve got that little weave going that always afflicts landlubbers who’ve just spent an unaccustomed amount of time aboard a boat. Leroy, who
is talking to some people on the grass, raises his glass at me in some sort of salute. Meaning unknown.

I spend a few minutes hovering around. Finally I see someone I’ve met before, an American who once told me he “did well during the Reagan years.” He winters in Florida and spends summers in Chester in a home that has been in the family for more than a century. His face wears that ruddy flushed look you so often see in photos on the walls of golf and yacht clubs. I blather on for a bit about the day’s conditions, and other subjects that seem to interest sailors. He skitters away, leaving me with the owner of a local marina. A nice guy. He stands there in the sun, this thick globe of zinc oxide on his nose, and informs me that every boat in the Chester fleet has a nickname and then runs through them. To my mind, the best one is
Turd Wave
, but I could be biased.

My bed-and-breakfast is a pleasant walk away. I change my clothes, then stroll back to the water and follow the harbour to a bar and restaurant called the Rope Loft. Rope stanchions, cork buoys, pocked driftwood, other nautica. I make for the deck and a table all to myself, then watch a boatful of latecomers stumble down the gangplank. By the looks of it they’ve had a day. Takes them a good thirty seconds to stagger the few yards from the gangplank. A man and a woman cling to each other to avoid falling down—bank execs, no doubt, here at the invitation of their regional manager, who follows with a flat frozen grin as he watches an elaborate attempt to suck up to superiors disappear amidst the hangovers and recriminations to come.

Almost eight when I pay the cheque. Up the hill to the Fo’c’sle Tavern, which is the real thing, not some nautical theme bar. The first time I was here a husky little trawlerman clutching handfuls of money growled at me like a wolverine. Tonight the big amiable bouncer says I’m early for the real excitement. So I wander back to the yacht club just as the day’s racing prizes are being handed out. Lots of warm, good-spirited laughter. Two of the recipients have to be pushed up to receive their hardware. One is so blasted he can’t even string a sentence together and just waves his little trophy over his head.

A four-piece cover band sets up at the back of the clubhouse. Then starts banging out tunes by Janis Joplin, the Beatles and the other icons of sixties rock and roll. The room fills up. A woman, mistaking me for my doctor cousin, grabs me by the arm. I try to make chitchat with a wealthy heiress, who spends the whole time searching for eye contact over my shoulder with a Johnny Depp lookalike half her age.

By now the social strata has settled. Most of the real money is at home, inside the elegant old homes I pass walking back up the hill. Inside the Fo’c’sle the stockbrokers, management consultants, lawyers, doctors and trust fund babies swarm the bar, pounding back endless glasses of draught and guvy-and-Coke. They strike me as a smug, almost boring lot. But I’m an outsider looking in. I get the impression this is their sacred place: that when they come here to crank a few during Race Week it is always when things were good, when anything seemed possible. Before divorce, corporate
downsizings, male pattern baldness, twelve-step programs and easy-fit jeans. Before the wife’s high-school sweetheart started getting mentioned in the
RoB
and Gretzky headed stateside. Before light beer, Robert Bly and nice, sensible mini-vans.

So Chester is one thing to them and another to the townies in the corner, sticking to themselves, a bit overwhelmed, maybe a touch resentful of the invading preppy hordes with their designer labels and this band they’ve never seen before, in their bar, playing a tune by someone called Hootie and the Blowfish. I lurch in their direction to hear what they think. And it is precisely then that I meet the two biggest bores in all of the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

“You want to know about Chester Race Week, this here’s your man,” says the blonde woman, whom I would put at about university age, clinging fiercely to the arm of the older guy. His face has a funny saggy quality, which could be from age, booze or indifference. Listening to this pair go on about his skill behind the tiller was just too much. I lie about having to get a refill, do a little broken-field running through the crowd of strutting drunks, and slip out the exit.

It’s around twelve-thirty when I make one last visit to the yacht club on the way home. Inside, a lanky blond-haired sailor, no doubt half-crazed from too much sun and rum, steps up to the drum set and begins banging along with the band to something by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Finding his rhythm, he gets this goofy little smile as his friends cheer him on and I watch through the smoke. It is, even by the standards of the day, a nice moment.

Turning a corner outside, I run into Ben Heisler, walking on stiff legs but still going strong, off to God knows where. A white MG convertible drives by like a ghost. In the dark, waves lap the shore and the inky water planes to Europe. Somewhere in the distance there is laughter.

A couple of days later I’m back in Chester, this time with a friend. Once a left-winger for the Edmonton Oilers, Brian McKenzie now sells real estate. He used to keep his powerboat anchored in a nearby cove until the recession caught up to him. So he knows exactly what to do when we wheel up to the wharf in Chester and see a hundred or so people waiting to make the 45-minute one-dollar ferry ride to Big Tancook Island. When we pull into the Oak Island marina a few minutes later a shirtless, tanned guy with a truly monumental gut waves a greeting. Before a half-hour is passed we’re aboard a fully loaded powerboat cutting into the bay.

Our captain looks mangled and bent; horrible, horrible. He must have groaned in agony when he rolled over in his bunk this morning, searched vainly for a drop of moisture in what was once his mouth and felt the mule kick the inside of his cranium. It was still, no doubt, a little blurry. Barry—which is what we’ll call him for now—would have been suffering through the please-God-I’ll-never-do-it-again part of his hangover when he remembered that the previous night ended a couple of wharfs away with a woman throwing a drink in his face and him weaving back to his own boat for a screaming match with the wife who, by now, was back home in
Halifax. Still, it is noon and with each passing minute the night mercifully fades further into history. Helps that he is steaming away from the marina under a sunny sky at a nice fifteen-knot clip, dressed in cutoffs and a tank top, a family-sized rum-and-Coke in hand, Alan Jackson’s nasal twang blaring from the loudspeaker. He even manages a weak smile when he turns to peer red-eyed from behind his sunglasses at us, the intruders in his bout of self-flagellation.

I have never been on Big Tancook, but retain a vivid image of it anyway, pieced together from stories I’d heard. They make sauerkraut and build wonderful schooners, the fame of both having spread far beyond the area. They forge a hard but good living as farmers and fishermen. They are known to be an insular bunch, speaking a dialogue that is indecipherable, even by South Shore standards. After my day aboard
Third Wave
I became obsessed with the idea of the island out there a few miles from all this wealth. By the time we drop anchor the ferry has just docked and the main road, which arcs along the island’s main anchorage and continues up a hill, swarms with people. We step into the slipstream and follow the crowd past the small wharfs and launchways, the remnants of the old fish houses, the ruins of the underground cabbage cellars, the tables on the front lawns piled with the quilts and baked goods.

Chester Race Week may be one thing, Tancook’s annual Herring Chokers Picnic, the highlight of
their
summer, most definitely another. The old-time country band is just finishing a set of hurting music at the recreation centre at the top of the hill. I recognize the leader—Sherman “Little Buddy” Hirtle, short, round and sixtyish,
resplendent in his red shirt, string tie and white cowboy hat. As we approach he lays down his guitar and ambles towards the white hall, where awaits heaping bowls of fish chowder, biscuits, kraut, plates of herring and potatoes, tables full of homemade pies, cakes, squares and cookies and pots of tea and coffee. The crowd outside sits on benches, lawnchairs and the grass. My eyes are drawn to the cars parked near the hall, held together with string, duct tape and chicken wire, missing doors, with rusted-out skeletons for frames. I half-expect some leather-encased Mad Max reject to climb from the rubble and fire up his chainsaw. Most lack licence plates, which is no surprise, since you don’t need insurance or even mainland registration to drive on Tancook. One plate dates back to 1976 and comes from Newfoundland.

I have been on Tancook for only forty minutes but already I recognize the genre: an outlying island of unfashionable and out-of-step people, best appreciated for their dramatic art of self-preservation. I jot down a few notes. Brian appears with a woman in tow who asks if I want to meet one of the last sauerkraut makers on the island. A few minutes later I’m sandwiched between Percy and Evelyn in their half-ton. Already, I’m confused.

“Before you start I said last year I was never going to have any more interviews any more in my life,” says the husband in a slightly accusatory tone. “What happened there was a fellow I talked to him and he published something I never said, some hurtful things. He said that I was supposed to say that all of the other factories, their kraut tasted like straw. I wouldn’t say anything like that about
anybody. So I said I’m finished with interviews.”

“I felt really upset about it, you know what I mean,” says Evelyn. “We’re just little. We just do this as a hobby. We’re not that big, you know.”

Hoping to cool the old guy down, I ask Percy who showed him how to make sauerkraut.

“Who? From the time I could walk and talk, my father and grandfather. My father and grandfather planted cabbage through the years and it just felt natural to grow it. This was the way people made a living. It was part of their lives and their livelihood. When I grew up it was fishing and farming. I fished entirely for a living from the time I was fourteen until I was forty-nine, then I went to work on that ferry. I’m seventy-seven now. I worked there until I was sixty-five. These last twelve years we plant cabbage and make sauerkraut.”

His weather-ravaged face relaxes a bit as he tells me the old way of making kraut. How they sow the cabbage seeds, then transplant, fertilize and spray them until they grow to fifteen to twenty-five pounds. How they ferment them for twelve days in salt water. And how they finally pack them in open pails—ten, twenty and thirty gallons large—before sale. “It’s something special, like the Lunenburg sausage, passed down from generation to generation,” he explains. “But now only Arthur Stevens and myself do it. We’re the last of the Tancook kraut makers.”

As I thank them and take my leave, the music is starting up again. From halfway up the hill I turn back for a last look at what
they see: the hang-dog cars, the once-thriving farmland overgrown with briers, the population of a thousand now shrunk to a few hundred, the working-aged men who’d be on welfare if not for UI. Onshore, if you’ve got the name and the money, maybe you can buy home. Here maybe even that is not enough. Evelyn’s words echo: “This is a little island and a way of life. This is where I was born. It is home; we think it is special.”

Being over-dressed happens rarely to someone who wears what I do—someone who, if the occasion really demands, will upgrade from casual to dress jeans. But here I am, luminous in my chinos and linen jacket in the midst of this sea of topsiders, golf shirts and Bermuda shorts. There are many social gaucheries, of course. But short of admitting to membership in the United Aryan Brotherhood, over-dressing is up there. Truth is, wear a Grateful Dead T-shirt or one of those Rasta tea-cosy hats to a Chester cocktail party and people will probably think you’re somebody’s software genius son, or a movie producer scouting for a spot to stand in for Martha’s Vineyard in their new Hollywood romantic comedy. Wear a sportscoat to Tim Moore’s open house on the last day of Chester Race Week, on the other hand …

“Lose the jacket and you’ll be fine,” whispers a sympathetic woman I know slightly, today sporting jeans and a faded denim shirt instead of the power suit and pumps she wears back in Halifax. We’re nursing beers on Moore’s huge back lawn, standing as far as possible from the huge fat-spitting barbecue. Her
boyfriend, a yacht outfitter who crewed on
Third Wave
, tells me how their bad luck ended when I stepped off the boat; overall, they’re second on the week, and they had a great crew party at Binky’s house, which culminated at midnight with the bunch of them driving golf balls from his lawn onto the fairways of the Chester course next door.

Moore’s party really marks the end of Race Week and, in a way, the end of summer in the village. Soon the beautiful people will be gone and Chester will return to its normal, everyday self. Right now, though, cars clog the lane leading to the house; a gaggle of kids frolic in the pool; most of the adults stand out back drinking wine and beer, trying to fit their mouths around monster hamburgers while they ooh and aah at the thirty or forty boats tacking out of the bay, directly in front of them. It all seems so perfect, the sharply coloured sails billowing in the wind, the sun, the ocean, the healthy-looking, happy people taking their leisure. I sink down in a chair on the sweeping verandah, next to a balding guy with a grey beard, sunglasses and a blinding shirt hanging over his shorts. Jose Valverde Alcalde moved from his native Spain to Canada in 1964 to teach art at the University of Calgary. Now he lives half the year near Barcelona and the rest of the time in Chester, where he fuses hot Spanish colours with images of the South Shore in his brilliantly coloured paintings. We chat for a minute. Then he excuses himself. “I have to take some pictures of the boats,” he explains. I watch him walk away, his shirt floating like a spinnaker in the breeze.