Shoring up
Emissions from the Bay of Funky
In July I am physically and emotionally short-circuiting. My heart is at its wits’ end. Calmly and clearly it says, you need to get out of town. My brain nods.
I book an Airbnb in Nova Scotia, then Google how to get to Nova Scotia. Oh. I book a ferry ticket, too. Over the Tobin, through Maine’s one-dollar tolls, to the Bay of Fundy I go.
The morning of departure I wake at 4 a.m. touched to realize I have the exact species of pre-vacation butterflies I used to get when I was a kid before a big family trip. Childlike emotion—good start.
I flee north. Eventually the sun joins me. Hours accrue, cell service dilutes. Cool offshore mist starts to permeate the car and I start tossing worries out the window like stripping clothes off on the way to a running shower. (Or offloading banana peels in Mario Kart.) I want to arrive mentally nude.
At the border the agent asks if I’m bringing any alcohol into Canada.1
“Yes, a bottle of wine.”
“Tobacco?”
“Pack of smokes.”
“Cannabis?”
“None.”
I think this: Freely telling the truth is an evergreen pleasure.
In Saint John there are somewhere between 75 and 200 vehicles parked in line for the ferry; I’m not good at visual tabulation. I watch four teenage girls spill out of the SUV in front of me. They walk a mutt in the seaside field. They scratch their calves with the heels of their Crocs. They squint at the horizon. They get tangled in the leash.
All of a sudden the youngest runs to the car in a fit of distress crying, “Maman, maman, maman!” A woman who reminds me of Juliette Binoche (dark hair, minerally skin, looks like she’d smell like Sancerre and tomato leaves) slams the driver’s side door. She blithely pats the girl’s head while rummaging in the trunk, a serene mother duck helming a gaggle of beautiful, feral daughters.
On the ferry this flamboyance of captivating long-haired females engulfs the corner where I’ve posted up with a ginger ale and a cheese sandwich. Maman slings down a pink fisherman’s bag filled with paperbacks and dried tamarind and the girls look at their phones, murmur, and ravage a family-sized bag of puffy Cheetos in that way thin, nubile women make junk food hot. I feel like a conspicuous extra in a Canadian Little Women.
The oldest has an inscrutable black eye—ice hockey fight? The youngest stares at me openly. When little girls do this—that is, size up grown women—I get the sense they are conducting subliminal research on femininity. I fear I am a lackluster specimen. Not a princess, not a scientist, not a spy or a supermodel... results inconclusive. And boring, I assume. She takes her gaze elsewhere.
The ferry is “a vibe.” Its upper deck is traced in plush guava-colored couches. An ocean sun warms maple paneling and pert, pinstriped curtains sashay on the windows. Paper maps are surveyed with chins on fists while baristas at the Midship Café produce Kahlúa hot chocolates. To my right, elderly Quebecois couples drink domestic beer out of plastic cups and visit loudly in French; occasionally I hear “Taylor Swift.”
I sip Canada Dry and think about the word bathymetry. My computer autocorrects Bay of Fundy to “Bay of Funky.” And all around us like a screensaver, slate-blue waves undulate on an endless loop out walls of windows, 360 degrees of sea.
My cottage is in Granville Ferry. (Side note: I love places named something or someone’s “ferry.”) Granville Ferry is a barely-there village midway up Nova Scotia’s west coast and an appendage of Annapolis Royal, a historic town in the Annapolis River Valley.
Annapolis Royal has one of the longest histories in North America and one of the highest concentrations of heritage buildings in Canada, it turns out. The original settlement predates Plymouth (1605, booyah) and the French, Acadians, Scottish, British, and Americans all took turns fortifying and de-fortifying and refortifying the fertile territory with varying degrees of regard for the Mi’kmaq First Nation.
Historic forts, ports, dams, dykes—Annapolis Royal has it all. I soon deduce it is a canon tourist destination for Canadian retirees.
Here is what I do for five days in Nova Scotia.
I see a poster for a candlelit graveyard tour so I go. I stand in a petite cemetery with ten or 30 strangers—I’m not good at visual tabulation—and learn about dead people’s lives.
A woman in the 19th century had two sets of twins and one set of triplets and then died at age 32. I am 30. Empirically, her life was more productive than mine.
An 18-year-old British solider in the 18th century wrote his mom a letter that said I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.
A priest led mass every single Sunday except two for fifty years.
A woman came to Annapolis Royal as a 10-year-old slave and her great-great-great granddaughter became the mayor.
Also, people made moose nose stew.2 And our tour guide does too, to keep the legacy alive. He knows a guy in British Columbia who keeps him in moose noses. Whole freezer full. His wife doesn’t *love* it.
It’s a stormy night, textbook spooky graveyard conditions. When an especially garish lightning bolt ricochets off the bay an older man on the tour turns and croons “Oooh” right at me, like a cartoon ghost. I have no idea why he does it. It is so funny.
Later, I see him pee on a tree in the cemetery. Often what I credit as charm is inebriation. Or psychosis.
I cruise long highways with all four windows down and the sunroof open—airing my cranium—while chain-smoking Du Mauriers and thinking repeatedly that there should be a Formula One race in Nova Scotia.
Instead of blind hills, the roadside signs warn of “blind crests.” Other signs mark coves, of which the province is replete. Parker’s Cove, Delap Cove, Sandy Beach Cove, Smiths Cove, Seal Cove. My favorites: Flour Cove, Mink Cove. The most unimaginative and true: Beautiful Cove.
I penetrate downtown Annapolis Royal on a Saturday afternoon. I admire a pink marble patio set at an antique store that costs $1,500 and weighs about 1,500 pounds. The shopkeeper asks if I’m interested and I say I should probably get a house before I get a patio set for it. He nods.
“House first.”
A troubadouress starts practicing or performing (hard to tell) in regrettable earshot of my lunch. She has a beat machine but she’s largely indifferent to it. She opts for high notes only, her voice constantly on its tip toes. I munch on Vietnamese summer rolls and contemplate her lyrics:
“We’re given earth and water and fire and air, hugs and kisses and beauty everywhere”
“Can’t you see we’re like sheep? We do as we’re told but we’re living asleep”
And then something about “shove it up your ass.”
She sings about four songs before I realize it’s the same song.
I go to church. The Annapolis Royal First United Baptist Church is between pastors, as I’m sure you’ve heard. A man is en route to being ordained but it is apparently quite the holy journey. When it’s time for announcements, he takes to the pulpit wearing a neck brace. He tells the congregation that he recently got food poisoning.
“Bachelor eating food he shouldn’t… spoiled meat...”
Long story short, he passed out on the way to the bathroom, fracturing his C1. Hence the brace, which will be on for six to eight more weeks.
When I realize he could have just as easily addressed the injury without including the part about the rancid meat and the—one must now infer—harrowing journey to the bathroom, the devil begins to tug at the corners of my mouth. My eyes are closed because I am focusing, but for that moment it is not on God.
I take two ferries to an island to take a Zodiac three miles out into the Bay of Fundy to watch two whales eat lunch. After a while you start to feel silly; gaping at someone who for their part is just really into their food. Still, it’s a marvel.
On the ride back I will my pores to absorb as much sea spray as possible and think about how bodies make waves, too (breath, orgasm).
I watch the Perseid meteor shower. I sunbathe, read Wordsworth, swim in cold bay water, nap, then do it again. I enjoy a plate of Digby, Nova Scotia’s world-famous scallops. I consume the sunset every night like it’s the soup de jour.
Life regains some of its “chewiness” (to paraphrase Robert Gruden vis-à-vis Oliver Burkeman). I Slow Down. My brain feels 1% more like it did before my cellphone torched it. Time is toothsome, for awhile.
And up ahead, blind crests.
At the risk of cancellation: my favorite Canada bit. (My boeuf with Canada is faux. I love Alice Munro, Norm Macdonald, Matty Matheson, Andy Shauf, Strange Brew, Molson...)
The technical gastronomical term for moose nose is muffle, and includes the moose’s “gargantuan upper lip and nostrils.” Would you try it? I would try it.