A writer returns to Nova Scotia, and finding it almost unrecognizable, sets out to capture the essence of his ancestral province--a place as strange and wild as anywhere on the continent.John DeMont visits places as diverse as a Buddhist abbey; the first free black settlement outside Africa; an i...
Let me illustrate. Late morning on a mild fall day; the year is 2007, which means the airwaves bulge with hos and booty, George Bush and Paris Hilton, get-rich-quick and hours-long erections. The icecaps are melting. Governments everywhere seem mean and dim. Yet there stands Calder—greying hipste...
If his neurons seemed hyperactive, they had reason to be. In his mind, he pictured hangdog kids gazing at empty cereal bowls. He saw seniors, their porous bones softening on the spot. He visualized bakers, feet up, reading the day’s Chronicle Herald as their mixing bowls sat idle. He imagined cof...
Nova Scotia is an elemental place of soft, heartbreaking beauty, but there is nothing fundamentally gentle about it: people still die when fireballs shoot through mine shafts and fishing trawlers go down in winter hurricanes. You can’t ignore waves that wipe out entire waterfronts or tides that l...