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 lift fishing boats from the sea-floor mud like the hands of invisible giants. The world is wilder here, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. It shapes the people as only savage, magnificent places do. Home, then, is landscape—the architecture and ambiance of life. And that, therefore, is where we shall start. Nova Scotia, if there is any justice, ought to be seen first from the sea. We should all be like old-time Basque fishermen high on the mast scanning the horizon as it disappears from view behind each passing swell for our first glimpse of the highlands of Cape Breton, say, or the great harbour at the place the Mi’kmaqs called Chebucto. Mostly now you see it by air, heading east from some more important spot towards Halifax, which is what Chebucto is now called.
What do You think about The Last Best Place (1998)?
