28/6/96

Nova Scotia: Where the Foghorn

Answers Wake-up Calls

By: SAM ORBAUM

We were driving along the craggy Nova Scotia coast, just us and the petulant seabirds; or maybe it was when we slipped out of reality for a couple of hours visiting a perfectly preserved 1816 farm; it could have happened while strolling around jaunty little Halifax: Anyway, at some point, someone in our entourage of Israeli journalists shook his head and averred that there was nothing here to attract our vacationing hordes away from Turkey.
    I do believe he meant that as a negative.
    Nova Scotia is, for those who don't want to go abroad together with half the neighborhood, a wonderful get-away-from-them-all sprawl, a peninsular thumb jutting off Canada's Atlantic flank.
    Nova Scotians, fiercely proud of what they've got, love to share it. Their perception of tourists as individual guests, rather than mass invaders, is sincere. The mayor of Halifax holds an open-house tea reception for tourists, five times a week. The city's Jews open their homes to kashrut-observing tourists.
    These are incredibly friendly people. I mean, they wave and smile at passing tour buses, for goodness sake! We walked by a country inn and watched some old codger energetically cleaning a window and then noticed he wasn't holding anything. He was waving at us.
    Even the ghosts are genial. Nova Scotia, as befits a maritime crossroad, brims with ghosts, legends, superstitions, salty tales and mythic tragedies. Edna, a 10-year-old 19th-century ingenue, inhabits Room 3 of the Boscawen Inn in Lunenburg, as did, for a night, my colleague from Ma'ariv. He later reported that she was lovely company.
    My fellow-Israelis were horror-stricken about the Boscawen for a different reason. No phones! No TV! No remote control!
    I don't know -- call me weird -- but I liked it. Nothing electronic, automatic, controlled, conditioned or computerized. The only purely modern compromise in my room was a smoke detector. There's something sensuous about waking up in a lacy canopy bed on a misty morning, to the eerie waaaa of a foghorn, with gulls flapping about outside the window. An elegant mansion built as a dowry for Edna in 1888, the Boscawen has preserved Victoriana for less gracious times.

LUNENBURG IS a picturesque fishing town with an inherited angst that soaks its history. With only 3,000 inhabitants, it has lost 1,000 men to the sea since its founding in 1753. Every building has, on its upper story and facing the port, a window called a widow's watch, from where fishermen's anxious wives would watch the ships come in. Many didn't.
    The area has beaches, golf courses and charming villages throughout, and a visit should include a couple of hours at Lunenburg's Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic. On the waterfront, next to the berth of Canada's famous Bluenose II schooner, the museum is fascinating even for the most confirmed landlubber. The exhibits are evocative, there are hands-on activities, and the plunge into history is anything but dry. Eye-popping sea yarns come to life at dockside, where weathered old captains and fishermen recall the ones that got away -- both fish and men.
    We darted inland for a few hours, driving through stretches of an unusual crop: Christmas-tree farms, vast green seas of perfectly shaped firs.
    We stopped at the Ross Farm Museum for a look-see at the rural colonists' lifestyle circa 1816, when the province was still being settled. There's a wide range of rural skills of interest to dumb city slickers like me, everything from making barrels to milling and blacksmithing to sampling homemade goodies. And you can hug an ox if you like.
    But like a flock of gulls, we sensed the sea, and returned to it. Nova Scotia is one of those noble places buffeted by man's indomitable yet hopeless desire for rapport with the sea. It is evident throughout the province. Drive along the meandering seaside route and you pass through gnarled fishing villages, each with its steeple, its stacks of lobster traps, its bobbing boats.
    The most famous is Peggy's Cove, a tiny hamlet of less than 90 souls. The place makes you feel stalwart: Chicken Little should have come here to chill out. Perched upon huge balloon-like rocks is a dauntless little lighthouse, the sea, the sky, the wind, and you. (Okay, so there is an adjacent parking lot, and a fabulous seafood restaurant and knickknack shop, but who sits on the edge of the Earth and looks inland anyway?)
    Further along the seashore route is Wolfville (which locals pronounce "Woofle"), in the Annapolis Valley. It's a pretty town, with minor bits of historical interest (it's the site of Longfellow's poem "Evangeline"). But it has one great claim to fame: Here exists one of the planet's most remarkable curiosities -- the highest tides in the world.
    Nova Scotia actually bends slightly under the immense weight of the 14 cubic kilometers of water that flow in every day. At mid-tide, the flow equals the combined flow of all the world's rivers and streams. High tide, which happens every 12 hours and 25 minutes (because of the moon's changing position in its orbit), can be as much as 16 meters higher than low tide. We strolled along the ocean floor while the shoreline was a couple of kilometers out; we didn't stay out long enough to race the ocean back.
    While you're here, don't miss the chance to get in some whale-watching. The Bay of Fundy is home to more kinds of whales than anywhere else in the world, and you can watch them frolic on remarkable expeditions departing from numerous fishing villages. The best time for such a voyage is August and September.

NOVA SCOTIA is a little place with a huge heart, with many small amounts of much to do and see.
    In a day you can tour the Halifax Citadel fortress -- the symbol of Canadian nationhood -- then watch the humpbacks, load down on a world-class meal at a country inn, maybe catch a hockey game or a bagpipe competition, and finally, if you've had enough for a day, go to sleep with a ghost.

(Box 1)

The day the city was incinerated

     Two of the worst maritime disasters happened in this region: the Titanic went down, and Halifax went up.
    Some of the Titanic's dead are interred in Halifax.
    But that was, for locals, a distant event compared to the day World War I came to town, on the morning of December 6, 1917. The entire north end of the city was destroyed in the Halifax Explosion, the greatest man-made cataclysm until Hiroshima.
    A ship fully loaded with explosives collided with another in Halifax Harbor, and blew with such force that its anchor landed two miles away. Two thousand Haligonians were killed and another 3,000 injured, most of them blinded.
    The city's Maritime Museum includes a display of the disaster.

(Box 2)

A climate for confusion

    A word about the weather: It's bizarre. As our guide said, "You don't like the weather? Wait five minutes." She wasn't exaggerating.
    It rained. It stopped raining. It was cold. Foggy. Then we stripped off our shirts because it was bloody hot. Then cool, humid, dry, foggy, cold, foggy, bloody hot, it tried to rain and couldn't, then it came down in buckets, stopped, and by the end of that day if our guide had said we could expect a sunny night I would have believed her.