The Last Best Place by John Demont

Author:John Demont
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385674416
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 1998-02-16T22:00:00+00:00

Nine

Big Dreams

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO GET TO BRIER ISLAND BY CAR: DOWN A TOUGH, heavily treed strip of land about twelve miles long and half a mile wide known as the Digby Neck. It demands commitment, particularly on a gloomy, sour day when the wind churns the rain into a grim froth that makes the inside of my car seem like the last hospitable place on the planet. I have to wait a few minutes with seven other cars to board the small ferry across to Long Island. Then it’s just a short hop to a little spot called Freeport and the second ferry ride across to Westport, Brier Island’s sole town.

Here the land ends. It’s a magnificent, brooding, Gothic place. Which pleases me to no end. For this is how I always pictured it: fog-bound, battered by wild seas that smash against its step-like cliffs. Brier, I know, is a magnet for violent electrical storms, for bald eagles, ospreys, great blue herons and other migratory birds, for the humpbacks, finbacks and other endangered whales that breach in the waters nearby. This is the Graveyard of Fundy, a treacherous spot where too many vessels to count went down.

I went to Brier Island because of Joshua Slocum, even though I knew he was no saint. Definitely a pervert, probably a sadist, maybe a murderer. And Lord, he looked the part. He peers haunted and dangerous out of those old photographs, like a Bible prophet or the perpetrator of some awful crime—his gaunt face all sharp bones, wrinkles that look like they’ve been carved with a knife and El Greco eyes forever lifted to the horizon looking for sin. The time I’m interested in was before the alligators came. When he was nothing but a middle-aged failure, a near-derelict with no possessions to speak of other than the once-dilapidated, century-old oyster sloop he found sitting in a Massachusetts farm pasture and rebuilt plank by plank. Slocum got some bad directions from a fisherman as he made his way from Boston to his old home on the northeast tip of Nova Scotia in the summer of 1895. When he manoeuvred the Spray into dock at Westport he was technically completing the first leg of his three-year, 46,000-mile odyssey. But the idea of sailing around the world by himself was no doubt hatched here, watching the great vessels move by during the long hours he spent driving wooden pegs into the thick soles of handmade fishermen’s boots at his father’s bootshop. So it is no liberty to say that Brier Island is where the great adventure began.

I feel thrilled a century later to stand at the far end of Westport, in front of a small bronze plaque bearing his likeness atop a pile of beach stones. I read his book Sailing Alone Around the World—one of the greatest of all adventure stories—years ago but only now finally had a reason to come. Tightly packed near the centre of the harbour, the foundations

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