Parking the Moose by Dave Hill

Author:Dave Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

7

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA

Axe Crazy*1

I FIRST BECAME AWARE of the charms of Nova Scotia through my friend Mike Belitsky, a drummer from Halifax who now plays with the excellent Toronto-based band the Sadies. I briefly played bass in a band with Mike in New York City’s East Village, way back in the post-grunge nineties—a simpler time when we both had effortlessly incredible if infrequently washed hair and it seemed like anything was possible.

Anyway, when we weren’t busy rocking with authority in some dank practice space somewhere, Mike would thrill me with tales of his exotic hometown. He made Halifax sound like some seaside paradise where pickup hockey games would break out on almost every street corner at the drop of a toque, salmon would leap right out of the water into your fish-loving arms if you even looked in their direction, and walking around with an axe wasn’t considered weird at all.*2 To be fair, Mike didn’t necessarily describe it that way, but he did mention something about salmon and the fact that he, like most Canadian guys I’ve met, grew up playing hockey, and that was enough for me to jump to my own conclusions.

As these things often go, however, I eventually left Mike’s band to try and tear rock ’n’ roll a new one with a band of my own, and with that, my dreams of one day seeing Halifax in particular, and Nova Scotia in general, for myself slowly faded. When I began work on the definitive book on Canada written by a non-Canadian, however, I knew it was time to make things right and be sure to visit what the guy at the car-rental desk in the Halifax airport told me was also known as New Scotland, something I probably should have figured out for myself before I got there, as it was pretty much hiding in plain sight, but whatever.

Oh, and before we go any further, I suppose I should also mention that Halifax figures heavily into my very existence in that it’s where my great-great-grandparents Timothy Blake and Ellen Leydan first arrived in Canada from Ireland before settling in Clinton, Ontario. So, aside from all that stuff I just mentioned about my buddy Mike, by visiting Halifax I would also, in effect, be living my family history.

“Isn’t that a lot of pressure, Dave?” you ask.

You’re damn right it is. But I didn’t get where I am today by taking the easy way out, so I threw a couple pairs of underwear in a bag and hopped on a plane.

Anyway, as always with these strategic hits on Canada I’ve been making in the name of researching this important book, before I hopped a plane to Halifax, I tried to figure out at least some plan of attack for my visit—the things I should probably make a point of seeing, how I might blend in with the locals, and what strange laws might be on the books that I should avoid breaking.

As fate would have it, I

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