Queenie’s going to settle down for a bit

Nearly two months on the road now and I'm getting a bit tired of other people's ideas of tidy.

I’m gong to Halifax next week to look for somewhere to live. It’s a really nice city – it has a really busy port, so it’s very nautical. It’s built on the side of a hill, so everything slopes down to the water. It has four universities and a big gay population, (Rosie O’Donnell and Cindi Lauper arrived last week on a cruise ship with loads of gay couples that got married one after another during a single day) so it’s a very right on, organic restaurants, fair trade cafes, alternative music stores, second hand bookshops type of place. Perfect. It’s about the same size as Galway. Actually, it’s a mirror image of Galway, if Galway was built on the side of a hill.

I have a job. I’m going to be working for the ***. I’m to be a researcher for them – mainy on education, environment, immigration, a few other things. I saw the job advertised in the paper and submitted a CV, more out of curiosity than anything else. Then they offered me the job on the spot. I was so surprised I took it. Then I had to talk myself into it.

Before you shout complete sell out, Queenie, I told you so, I have to tell you I'm conflicted.

On the plus side, it’s a job, it’s a good job with an excellent salary for Nova Scotia, although it is woegeous compared to my last one. It’s something I can do, I know I can do. It may help to make a difference, if what people tell me about them is true. I get a nice office high up in a building in downtown Halifax, which I reckon is a pretty good spot to watch the winter from.

Most of all, it's an opportunity to live in Nova Scotia on more than the minimum wage.

I’ve been in the Maritimes, or Atlantic Canada as they call it, for about a month now. I absolutely love it. It’s like Ireland was in the eighties, except with better weather. The roads are terrible, nobody has any money, there aren’t any good jobs around, they all moan about the government all the time. Everyone’s convinced that there’s dodgy stuff going on, with big companies buying up all kinds of resources dead cheap. The ass is falling out of the fishing industry and farming. The only difference is that the place is full of call centres. So they must have fast-forwarded to that bit of the economic cycle.

Souns great you say. The thing is, it’s all at a much slower pace than at home. Cell phones are for emergencies. Nine to five is what it says on the tin. There’s time to stand and talk in the street if you meet someone. Nice. There's a focus on organic food, on recycling, on community-building, on having time for people that we have lost in Dublin. I want to live here for a while. This job is an opportunity to do that.

On the minus side, it’s the same work as I’ve done in the past, and this year is about doing things differently. So I’m a bit annoyed with myself for taking the first job I've been offered. I have a feeling I should be trying something different. But I wasn’t coming down with job offers from anywhere else and I am not wwoofing in the winter. My friend Ray said I should look at it in terms of changing one or two variables at a time in my life, think of it as part of that experiment – i.e. same job, different people, place, context.

We’ll see. It will be an interesting experience for the six months of my probation anyway and then we’ll see what happens. They asked me to stay for a good while. But they don’t know when that will be.

Another plus was the vibe I got from them and about them. My interview was delightfully informal and they seemed to be on my wavelength. And anyone I have talked to seems to think they're a good, well-meaning group of people. Apart from hunting enthusiasts. I hitched a lift from a guy the other day who told me he had twenty two guns!! He didn’t like the ***. Having said that, he also thought Hitler had a point. He asked me how I was going to use my Irish experience to get Canadians to vote for them and I said “What about 'Vote *** or I’ll kneecap you'” and he nearly crashed the car he laughed so much.

Actually, on a tangent, one weird thing I find is that most Canadians think the Troubles are still going on and always mention it in a really sympathetic manner. Then they’re almost annoyed when I tell them it’s all over bar the shouting. And the odd bank job. Overall though, they know quite a lot about the outside world compared to their neighbours. Very few of them have travelled abroad though. It seems to be that if they make it across Canada (and a lot have) then that’s enough. Having said that, they are wonderfully open and welcoming and interested in other cultures. A bit nosy, to tell the truth, a bit like the traditional Irish B&B woman. I haven’t been alone for one second since I got here, never mind lonely.

They have a really dry wit and mostly get the Irish sense of the absurd, although not always. They are also very polite, and nobody swears. They don’t drink very much during the week – they talk about community-building a lot here and do that sort of thing on week nights. They like to go out at the weekend though.

They never stop talking though, jeez, I thought I was bad. Also, I find Nova Scotians don’t like spending money and complain about the price of everything all the time. As everything is around half the price it is in Ireland, I find this hilarious. I don’t know yet whether that’s because they don’t have much money, or whether the stereotype followed them to the new world. I think it’s a bit of both!!!

On a final note:

Today’s learning is all about relativity. On my relatively woegeous salary, I could afford a 2,500 sq foot house on two acres of Atlantic seafront, in a nice community thirty miles from Halifax. Which doesn’t have traffic problems, not really, so the commute would be a doddle.

Read it and weep boys and girls….we are being ripped off by somebody somewhere in that value chain we keep being beaten up with the Yankee stick.

Grand Pre Gazetteer

I found this in the local newspaper. I thought it was interesting, if a little po-faced:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings, but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints.

We spend more, but have less.
We buy more, but enjoy less.

We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time.

We have more degrees, but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgement, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life, but not life to years.

We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbour. We conquered outer space, but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice.

We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast food and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships.

Attack of the Medusa

Balancing Rock, Long Island. The rest of the photos are under the blog title as usual.

Long Island is a long narrow foot that pokes its toe gingerly into the cold waters of the Atlantic, its instep elegantly curved towards the mainland. It is the end of the North Mountain ridge and the centre of the island is dense with fir trees, with some hardwood sprinkled among them. They crowd to the island’s edge and peer over into bouldered coves, watching seals bask at low tide. In winter, storms tear trees up and hurl them into the ocean. There, the currents strip them slowly. Firstly, the needles and leaves, then the branches, roots and finally the bark. When it can do no more with them, the ocean flings them back onto the rocks at Bear Cove. The spring sun dries and fades them to a smooth, buttermilk sheen. They lie there until summer, when groups of people arrive at sunset, carrying beer coolers and hot dogs and warm fleeces for nightfall. The men pile two or three trees onto a roaring fire, working in groups to lever them on, while the women sit on the rocks, sipping beer and passing comments on the work. They hike in from the road, a mile or so that’s easy in the slanted evening light, trickier by starlight or in fog, or after a few too many beers. Sometimes they bring the whale babes with them. That includes me, apparently.

Whale babe…………….

Chief bottle washer I am. At the sharp end of wwoofing. Nasty little man with his nasty little business and two other summer staff he treats like muck, leaving nothing for me to do but cook for them all. I roll up my sleeves and get stuck in. I last a week before his manipulative little ways get to me so deeply I go through him for a short cut, roaring at him until I have gotten it all out of my system, much to the delight of the rest of the island. But I only promised him a week, so I kept my side of the bargain. And I did get to see a whale. For about a minute.

‘Nuff said about him. We’ll save it for the formal complaint to the agency.

So yeah, whale babe…

Fog babe more like.

Sitting in the ferocious sunshine, you suddenly get a feeling that something’s looking at you and turn round. There it is, slipped quietly in from the ocean, a deep, deep fog that cuts the island off from the mainland and from the sea. The hourly ferry honks mournfully, reminding everyone it is passing across the short mile of water that separates these villages from Tim Horton’s’, from IMAX, from Subway, from the grocery store, from the highway, from everything. Soon it creeps over you, wrapping you up in its coolness and dampness. It can last an hour, a day, a week. Everything takes on a new shape, fusses around its edges. Birds get bigger, cars softer. It’s more difficult to figure out who’s coming down the road. The fog is what protects the islanders from the relentless gaze of their neighbours. It holds all their secrets in its moist grasp and draws them back into the ocean with itself. They sink to the bottom and nourish the long, green-feathered plants living there. It is deep here, off Long Island. Deep enough for whales, deep enough for oil, deep enough for secrets.

I am living in a spooky house. It’s down the road a piece from the whale watching business, where the wwoof host lives. A kind of staff house, although we eat with him. It’s not even his spookiest house apparently. It’s the mirror image of one I drew when I was a teenager. It has two front doors. One opens onto a stairway that leads to my bedroom. The other opens into the kitchen, from which you get to the stairway through a completely unlit passageway. On my first evening, the woman who works in the whale watching business invited me to her home for a barbeque. Returning through the fog alone, many hours and many drinks later, I pick the wrong door. It took me a while to figure out how to get to my room. A bit scary because I was alone. Story of my life I thought miserably, as I finally made it to bed and realised I had no curtains.

I have two housemates. Helen is English and working here as a SWAPPER. Mykyle is from BC. He has cycled across Canada to get here. His speech patterns remind me of Andrew Farrell, if Andrew was trapped inside Denzel Washington’s body. Helen and Mykyle are at opposite ends of the human spectrum as far as I can see. I have to try and get on with both of them. Luckily, they are never together, as Mykyle is an organic vegan and eats alone. We discuss his theories on the universe, which are very strange, coming as they do from the perspective of a mathematically inclined brain that has had no formal training. As I said to him, you could be spectacularly right, or you could be wrong. But I’m never going to be able to tell you which. Maybe Keith could have a word while he’s here.

Whale watching………..

I go whale watching. I see Minkes and Humpbacks. I see a humpback calf playing around in the water, with the rest of the family watching over it. Lovely. The best moment is when I am sitting on a rock in Bear Cove, taking photos of the fog. I can’t see past shore, but I can hear a sort of watery, sucking noise that came and went every couple of minutes. It’s a whale rising and blowing. It is so close to me, feeding away, it is great. The whale watch guy zooms past twice in the Zodiac without seeing it. I laugh to myself.

Apart from whale watching and fishing, there ain’t much to do on Long Island. There are some nice trails. One leads to the Balancing Rock (see photos). The Balancing Rock is a geological freak that has ended up being quite a nifty tourist trap. Somebody told me that the locals tied a rope around the rock and tied the rope to a boat and tried to topple it into the sea fifty or so years ago. Another leads to the lighthouse. There’s a park and some nice coves.

Flour Cove is one of the prettiest. One end stretches out into a little point, with trees stepping in a line towards the sea. It’s on the west side of the island, so it has spectacular sunsets (again see photos). The other end has a lot of flat rocks that are perfect for bonfires and parties. We have one there one Friday night, going down to watch the sunset, before building a fire and hooking my laptop up to a car radio with iTunes on shuffle until the battery ran out. A couple from Montreal who were camping in the cove decide to give in and just join the party. Their Labrador, Bob spends all night trying to get the hot dogs out of the fire.

I get to know the locals a bit. They’re all very friendly. Some are a bit more friendly than others, but that’s the way it goes. They all tell me all the scandal about all the others. I feel full of secrets. I don’t repeat them to anyone. But some of them are superb novel fodder, I tell you.

One of the locals is having a messy break up with his wife. He moans about it to me a lot. I try to sympathise, try to help him talk it through. She’s having a psychotic episode, she keeps stealing his car and driving it round the island, screeching to a halt whenever she sees him. Shouting and screaming through the window. She bites him on the face one day. I am really shocked. Nobody else seems to be as shocked, although they complain about her behaviour and call her Medusa.

Pretty soon, her eyeliner-circled racoon eyes start to focus on me. I am standing on the porch of the spooky house drinking a cup of tea one evening when she drives past. Screeches to a stop. Reverses back. Rolls the window down.

“I hope you enjoy him now, cos he’s got nothing left!” she screams at me.

I say nothing. I’m trying not to laugh.
She drives off.

The next day, I am walking on the main road up to the Balancing Rock when she drives towards me. I can see by the movement of the car that she is deliberating whether to point it at me. I look at the ditch and calculate my chances. But then she’s past and the moment is past and nothing has happened.

I have moved out of the spooky house at this stage, my wwoofing week being over, and am staying for a couple of days in the house of the brother of the man with the psychotic ex-wife. The weather is fantastic. I sit on their porch sunbathing and watching the cars drive on and off the ferry. One day I am sitting there alone when she drives past on her way to her friend’s house.

She screeches to a halt again. Rolls the window down. Starts shouting at me. I have my back to her and I don’t react. Don’t turn round, don’t move a muscle. Eventually she goes away. I am relaxing back into my sunbathing when suddenly I see her car make its way up the hill towards me. I am out of my chair, off the deck and into the house with the screen door slammed behind me faster than you can say “psycho ex-wife”.

She comes into the house after me. We stand, tense, neither of us sure what to do next. Up close, she looks tired and ill. She starts the shouting thing again, but as I don’t react at all, she eventually calms down. She wants me to give him some garbled message about something he has to do in half and hour or he’s dead. I refuse. She’s a bit taken aback by this. We agree that she should leave and she does. I am shaking. I decide I should leave the island, but it is almost evening so I will have to stay the night.

Happy Birthday Queenie

My true centre is my capacity to fall in love with everything around me.
- Malvina Hoffman

They say that the lifelong challenge for Cancerians is boundary making – they have trouble marking out where they end and the rest of the universe begins. I have always felt that to be true. Picking my way through the no man’s land of my intersection with life is sometimes a problem, because even though I think we are all tiny, interconnected carbon specks, other people don’t. Which is why I love to travel. Because when I travel, I can ignore boundaries and fall in love with everything around me every day.



Today is my birthday and I am thirty-five. I am a smoker, so I reckon I’m probably half way to my next life. If I’m lucky.

Half way there. As Yoichi would say, “WOW!!”

Yoichi is the Japanese wwoofer staying here at the moment. A Murakami novel of a mind, wrapped up in a slender little frame, with big spectacles and a nifty Casio translation machine that we use to torment him. We call him Yoichi Parker because he loves jazz and plays the alto sax. He smiles quietly to himself whenever we do. He’s an ecologist. He cycled around the coastline of Japan by himself last year and built a fire every night and cooked squid and potatoes and pumpkins and ate them looking out at the sea. Now he has a girlfriend who is studying in England. His English is neither good nor bad, but he has the endearing habit of shouting “WOW!!” at completely inopportune moments. For example:

“Yoichi, I’m going into Wolfville, would you like anything from the shops?”

“WOW!!!”

“Would you like anything?”

“Yes no.”

“YOICHI, I - DRIVE – (mime driving) NOW (point to watch) - TO - WOLF-VILLE (point west towards the town). ME. (point to myself, do driving watch thing again). WOULD – YOU (point to him) – LIKE – SOME-THING – FROM – THE – STORE (point to plastic Sobey’s bag)? COCA-COLA, CHOCOLATE, POTATO CHIPS?”

“Aaaaahhhhh, you are going Ulfwill?”

“Yes. Would you like me to buy you something?”

“I come too?”

“Sure.”

I think there should be a wow here, but there never is.

Anyway, halfway there – wow.

I got up early and read my birthday emails and then Ron arrived at 7.30am and when I let him in, he had a present for me. I knew he would. I was up early to get it really, although I didn’t let on. But I could tell he was pleased I had made the effort.

He bought me a birthday cake. And thirty-five candles. So I put all the candles on the cake and when I turned round he was standing there with the fire extinguisher in his hand. We laughed till we cried.

We laugh a lot, Ron and me. Or Wrong, as I call him. Cos he likes the last word does Ron. Oh yes. He’s been married three times. He has a girlfriend now; she works nights at a call centre over near Berwick. So he really only sees her at the weekends. He mentioned the fact that he had a waterbed this morning. He’s had one for twenty years. So now of course, I cannot get the image of Ron and Arlene on the waterbed in his trailer home, which is on top of the North Mountain across the bay, out of my head.

Ron is George’s friend and he’s putting a new floor into the tofu shop this week. In return, George is going to give him an old car he has sitting in the yard. And then he’ll fix it up and give it to someone else for his winter wood supply. Everything works on a barter system here, because nobody has any cash. The completion of these transactions is the cornerstone of the social life of this community. Firstly, you have to call over for a chat about what you want. And what you can trade. And when and where it’ll get done. And then when the work starts, you both go to the lumberyard or the repair shop or Harley’s Discount Hardware to buy whatever supplies you need to get the work done. Presumably so you can agree on what to spend.

You get up early and drive over and work from eight until about four thirty because you get breakfast, lunch and a beer at the end of the day. And then you go home and do your own chores. Everyone has a vegetable garden or some chickens. You don’t go to the pub because their beer is too expensive. Maybe once in a while you go over to the casino on the M’qMaq reservation and blow whatever you have.

Ron’s last wife did that with his savings account. And then got herself a good lawyer, and made him sell the house and give her half. Which is why he’s in the trailer. And she sold his dog to someone and wouldn’t tell him who. Everyone thinks she was a right bitch. Ron won’t be drawn on the subject. I asked him whether I could be wife number four and he just smiled and said I was too mouthy.

So I cooked eggs and we made some coffee and drank it and talked about the time he was a truck driver, bringing lumber down into the states and how scary that was compared to driving across Canada. And what Newfoundland is like, because I want to go there.

Then Yoichi got up and when he came into the kitchen, he bowed to me and handed me a small package that contained a pair of lacquered chopsticks.

Then George and Anna and their daughter Heather, who are the family I am wwoofing with, sang Happy Birthday to me and we all went to do our chores. Tomorrow night we are having a bonfire and some beers, but Friday is our busiest day because we have to do the Farmers Markets in Halifax and Wolfville on Saturday, so we have to get all the produce ready. Ready to us tofu in plain, herb and smoked. Free range eggs. Apple cider. Tofu dips, burgers and patties. Soymilk. George and Anna brought the produce into Halifax and put it in the fridges for tomorrow. Heather is making burgers. Yoichi and I are planting soybeans and corn, and we have to hoe the potatoes and bank them, and try to hoe the cabbages. But it rained last night and the ground was really sticky so I gave up after two rows and went back to work in the garden.

I am clearing ground for them. First I strim the wilderness back. It’s tricky, because I am keeping the hollyhocks, the bluebells and the wild mint and parsley, so I have to precision strim, which is not easy when my glasses are covered in bits of grass. Then I go over it with a heavy-duty lawn mower and take the last of the growth out. Then I rake it and dump barrowfuls of weeds on the compost heap. I dig up all the burdock roots and the docks and the thistles. Then I go over it again with the lawnmower and George tills what I’ve cleared if he can get the rotivator in. Sometimes I have to dig it out by hand.

It doesn’t feel like work, it’s a meditation. Even though it’s backbreaking, I can do it for hours, even in the rain. Whereas Yoichi and I are united in our hatred of hoeing and will use the first hint of mist to throw them down and find something else to do. I feel very close to Paddy, my gardening friend who’s dead now. I remember evenings watching him dig out beds, weed and plant, and when I start to do the same thing; I don’t have to think about it. George and Anna say I’m a natural gardener – I have an eye for it, whatever that means. Paddy and I have long chats about the state of the earth. There are too many stones, he’s disgusted, and when I ignore one he nags me until I go back and prise it up and out. Together, we’ve cleared over half an acre in just a few days.

So yeah, halfway there. Have I learned anything? Apart from the fact that I’m mouthy!!

Well, I’ve learned that I can do a lot of things, most things in fact, but I suppose the one thing I can’t do is be happy unless I feel that my work is in some way helping the earth or the people who live on it. I know this sounds appallingly right on, but I can’t think of another way to say it.

I’ve tried to fit in with the way things are done. I’ve really tried. Because people I care about want me to. Because it’s easier to live in a city and have an office job. Because for a long time I thought I was making a difference. Because I wanted to be successful and respected and well regarded. Because the work that makes me happy doesn’t bring wealth, or even financial security. But when I was wealthy (relative to the rest of the planet I was) and successful and a city girl I was miserable and lonely. As my sister Gypsy said in an email today, living in a city is such an inhumane thing to do to yourself after a certain point.

Even though I’m eking out my money and worrying about it constantly, even though I’m dirty and covered in mosquito bites, even though I haven’t been to the pub in two weeks, even though nobody bothers to acknowledge my job applications because I don’t have something I don’t know I don’t have, I am mostly blissfully happy. I am surrounded by people who are closing ranks around me because I make them smile (and hoe their pumpkins!). So maybe I was right to get out of the cul-de-sac. And although I am only reversing out of it yet, carefully, carefully, some days I feel like I’ve made the right choice.

But it’s all on a knife-edge still. Every day I panic at some point and want to pack my bags, run to a city, get an office job and have my old life again. But that is not what this year is about. This year is about learning new ways of living.

The most important thing I’ve learned in my two weeks in this community is that everyone knows their worth, their potential contribution to the overall work that needs to be done, whether it’s farming, caring, building, or whatever. Everyone hates the multinationals and shops local as much as possible. Everyone avoids tax through barter. Nothing is thrown away. Everything is recycled, reused, composted. Not because Bono told them to do it. Because they can’t afford to buy new. I can’t afford to buy new at the moment either. So I have to learn to trade. And in order to do that I have to determine my worth. My potential contribution.

As Ron would say, that’ll take some figurin’.

As Yoichi would say, WOW!!!!

Just after I posted this, I got an email from the *** offering me an interview. How ironic.

The Farm on the Hill, Grand Pre

Photos of the farm and some sights in North West Nova Scotia

Bearley’s House Blues n Rib with Ed the Hawg Dawg

Ocean Train and Halifax photos link under the title.

I was sitting on the terrace of El Med, a local Lebanese restaurant. I had finished what I could of my Binna Plate and was smoking a cigarette, trying to decide what to do next. It was pretty early for a Friday night. Only eight thirty. Nothing was going to happen before ten in Halifax. Across the road was a beggar I had photograph earlier. He was a big, gone to seed meathead, with an orange yellow coiff and a short, black back and sides. He was dressed like a punk. He held a sign saying ‘Out of work supermodel’. On the reverse side it said ‘seeking sugar mama’. He was from Toronto he had told me, over in Halifax for a holiday. His girlfriend got too stressed out he said, so he’d told her, baby, I gotta go away for a couple of weeks until you calm down. But he’d bought a bus ticket and he was going home to her Sunday. I hoped he’d have a bath before he got on the bus.

A pony-tailed, bearded man in a leather jacket, who had been sitting in the open window of the restaurant, moved with his bottle of beer out onto the terrace and sat smoking a cigarette too, pretending he was not looking at me. Eventually the beggar, who had a dreadful smoker’s cough, hacked long and hard enough to cause heads to turn and the bearded man used the opportunity to say something. I didn’t quite catch it so I leaned forward to hear it better.

Ed the Hawg Dawg

“I said, he can afford to buy cigarettes”, he raised his voice a little. He had a very strong Nova Scotian accent. A kind of drawling Dorset twang I think, but I haven’t quite pigeon-holed it. We had the usual first five minutes when I met someone. Where ya from? Why ya here? Where ya been? Where ya going to? That kind of thing. He talked about a trip he’d made to BC. I often find that with Canadians. On hearing I am travelling, they launch into a long narrative about their last trip. It’s part of their one-upmanship. They’re universally conversationally competitive, actually, nearly as bad as Americans. Or Irish people.

This guy was no exception. He had driven across Canada with a camper van full of weed in November and hadn’t been stopped once. For a bearded man with a long pony tail in a camper van with BC plates that must have been a miracle.

“You stayed off the TransCanada”, I said.

“Oh no, I rode it the whole way”, he answered. He introduced himself as Ed. I introduced myself as well. He was a Harley Davidson mechanic. He liked Van Morrison. His dad had sold the business so he was working for another guy. I could tell that rankled with him.

The waitress, who was an all-Canadian prom queen blonde – Type II: chunky legs – came out then and started tidying away the chairs. I paid my bill, but had a half a bottle of beer to finish, so I invited myself over to Ed’s table. He asked me to watch his jacket, then took a clear plastic bag with a large packet of skins surreptitiously out of his pocket and disappeared into the washroom for ten minutes. I sat and finished my beer and thought about stealing the jacket. I like to play these games with myself.

Who would notice? There was an Indian couple sitting in the window of the restaurant. They might. The beggar across the street might, but he wouldn’t care. The waitress? She was down at the serving hatch talking to her boss. In any case, I never actually steal anything. I just think about how I might do it.

Ed came back. Sat down again. Drew luxuriously from his beer. Placed it carefully back down on the table. I let him do this a few times and then asked what’s to do here on a Friday night. Turned out he didn’t really know. He lived about thirty kilometres outside of town. Only came in now and then to see what’s going on. We sat another while. I started to tie up my backpack. He coughed and asked would I like to go for a walk? That knocked me for six. I thought about it. It probably just meant a walk. Not like in Ireland. He seemed nice enough. He wasn’t very big, I reckoned I could kick him in the balls if needs be.

We walked up town. He lit the spliff he'd rolled in the washroom right on Barrington, Halifax’s main drag. I was a bit nervous, but nobody batted an eyelid. All the same, I suggested we walk down to the Waterfront and turned him down Blowers, which is the skateboard kids end of town.

We made our way down to the waterfront. Halifax is a serious of walks uphill to the town and downhill to the water. The wind had died down and there were all kinds of people sauntering up and down the wooden boardwalk that extends the length of Halifax downtown. Ed asked me what I thought about the city. I shrugged non-committedly – it’s guaranteed to wind them up when you do that. He started telling me about the different boats that come in and out of the port. Cruise liners and old sailing ships, and posh yachts and big game fishers and all kinds of freight boats, and of course the good old navy patrol boats. I made a smart comment about the importance of the Canadian navy, making sure no Yankees get across that maritime border. He wasn’t impressed.

Sharing a waterfront bench for an hour

“Those boys save a lot of people, you know. And they look after the buoys, and keep an eye on the weather and just look out for people generally”, he remonstrated. I kept schtum after that. At this stage, we had gotten down to the centre of the Harbourfront, where a bright yellow tugboat painted up like a cartoon character, which I had noticed earlier, was moored. On the land side, there was a little circular pavement area, with cafes and takeaways on all sides. I spotted a bench and made for it. Ed pointed out all the motorbikes that were parked neatly around the circle. There were about twenty maybe.

“Is this the biker part of town”, I asked.

“Sure is”. He was triumphant. Pleased I had chosen this bench, even though it looked out to sea. We sat watching people go by. It was very pleasant. I looked at the bright yellow tugboat, wondering if you could hire it for a wedding reception. It would be a perfect venue for a rave. Ed burbled on, recounting his version of the history of Halifax, which was low on detail. I was able to fill in a few, having read up on it in my Rough Guide. Ed didn’t really like that. He swiftly changed tack. Got onto that great stalwart of Canadian conversational one-upmanship – the winter.

I reckoned I could do a Nova Scotia winter.

“I’ve camped in the Andes you know”, I said. “I know about cold.” He wasn’t impressed.

“Maybe your Halifax winter, but down in Yarmouth where I’m from, you’ve got your freezing fog.”

“Freezing fog?”

“Oh yes, first you’ve got your rain, and then you’ve got your snow, and then you’ve got your freezing fog. And it freezes the snow. The snow falls, and then it tries to melt, but your fog comes and freezes it right up again. You can see it happening if you look out. And after you look out at the snow for a long time, eventually you can see it stops freezing in the fog, and starts to stay a little bit soft, and you know that soon it’ll be raining again and it’ll be spring.”

“Is that what you do in Yarmouth in the winter, sit and watch the snow melt?” I asked. We both bubbled over with laughter suddenly, as we got the same picture of Ed sitting behind a frosted up window, putting warm pennies up against the glass to see how the snow’s doing.

The talk turned to motorbikes. I admitted I knew nothing about bikes. Ed tried to get me to turn round to point out various bikes to me, but I figured he was trying to show me off to the biker guys, so I feigned complete disdain.

He talked bikes some more, until finally I decided that I had to interject in order to be able to steer the conversation away at some point. I considered asking him the stalwart biker dude question (so, have you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), but decided against it. It would probably involve a long, complicated explanation of a book I’d found irredeemably boring. So I asked whether there were any Canadian bikes. He said sure, Bombardier. I said I always thought they were French. Ed tried to get me into a long argument about it, but as I didn’t have a clue he ended up arguing with himself and finally stopped, frustrated.
“Are you sure they’re made in France?”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about bikes.”

“Well why did you say they were?”

“I thought I’d take a stab at it”, I said. He looked at me for a long minute. I could see his thought processes clicking away behind his eyes. Then he looked at me anew. I could tell he’d made some sort of decision about me. As I had made up my mind about him two minutes after I’d met him, the idea that it had taken him over an hour amused me.

Ed stretched his legs out a bit and puffed his chest out a bit, and started telling me about how he never usually came down here, because all the guys would pester him for advice about their bikes. Apparently, there is some damn tv show where they do up bikes in impossible ways and say it’s possible. And then those guys come in the shop the next day and Ed has to tell them it’s not possible. Not for two hundred bucks anyway.

I figure it is the Hawg equivalent of Changing Rooms. I wondered aloud whether he shouldn’t have his own tv show. He preened. He didn’t think so though, he didn’t like those guys. But Ed could tell it like it really is, I persisted, be the biker’s mechanic, not some smooth tv guy who didn’t know how to handle a form wrench, or whatever it was he had been wittering on about earlier.

Ed considered this for a while. I watched him considering it. I love watching men think about something. They always move their head in a deliberate way that implies they are physically turning something over in their minds. I guess that’s where the phrase comes from. It’s something that was very male, and I often find it useful to mimic (only in work of course), if I want a man to think I am taking his views seriously.

He eventually decided against it. I suggested that he just tell guys that if they wanted his advice to come see him in his shop when he could charge them for it. Be upfront, you know. He liked that. He started to look around, wondering whether he could try it out in front of me.

I sneaked a look at my watch. We’d been sitting here for over an hour and no one had come near them. Dang, he was stupider than he looked. I sighed inwardly. I really wanted to go for a pint, but we’d have to run the biker gauntlet now, which meant one of two things could happen. Either nobody had noticed him, sitting here facing the sea with me, in which case they would descend like locusts when we stood up. Or, more likely, he was bragging to me, and the subsequent lack of locust type attention would injure his ego and he’d sulk for the rest of the night. Just as I was figuring out how I could save my time and his ego, he suggested walking on a bit.

We stood up and turned round. Holy smoke, there were over a hundred bikes parked in the circle. Not too many guys though. Only a couple of clusters. Ed headed straight for one of them, looking over his shoulder to check I was following. I did, at an angle. Well chosen, too, as none of them appeared too overjoyed to see him. A sudden surge of anger flowed through me. He wasn’t too smart, but he was a nice guy. He’d spent his evening trying to tell me what he knew about the harbour. He’d patiently explained the inner workings of Harley Davidson motorbikes. He’d even told me about winter in Yarmouth. I streamed on past him and half-turned, folded my arms and looked impatiently uptown. They looked over at me and then back at him. I tapped my foot a couple of times. Looked annoyed. He made the international gesture for ‘women, what can you do’, then loped over to me. I could tell he was happy enough.

“I think we should go for a pint”, I said.

A series of minor misunderstandings

It took us about forty minutes to find a suitable bar. Firstly we walked uphill from the waterfront. It’s a steep climb over three short blocks in Halifax. Nothing there. Ed said there was a place down a piece, so we walked over. I could feel the backs of my calves tighten. “Are we going downhill again?” I must have sounded a bit moany because Ed acted all affronted. I could feel his back stiffen as he walked along beside me. He must have had a cranky girlfriend one time, I thought. “I was just asking”, I said, “not complaining.” He didn’t answer. We found the bar he was looking for. The door opened onto a long hallway. Loud techno music thumped from behind the bar doors at the far end. There was a bouncer. We ventured in a few steps, then simultaneously turned and ran out of the place. That broke the ice a little bit.

“Do you mind if we go check my bike. I left it parked near the restaurant.”

“Sure.” He turned us onto another street. Now it was my turn to tense up a little. It was a bit dark and I didn’t know where I was. I tried not to let it show. Let the moment pass, girl, I thought, just be ready for the next one. He could feel my nervousness but he didn’t say anything. We walked on in silence. We were walking uphill again.

“Goddamn it, Ed, we’re going uphill again.” He started to laugh.

“Not able for it?”

“I told you, I’m a hill walker.”

He looked at her measured tread up the hill. “Yeah, maybe, you got the stride for it anyway.”

Far from a fucking hill walker’s stride you were reared, I thought as I stretched my legs into the slope for the third time that evening. Trust me to find the only man in Nova Scotia who couldn’t find a night out in a party town. Finally, we crested, back on Barrington again, and I sighed happily. I knew where I was again. I felt safe again. We walked down the street a little and then he stopped.

“There she is, she’s still there anyways.” He nodded across the street. I could see the outline of a motorbike in the dark. He didn’t bring me over to it, as I had expected. I wondered why. He stood for a moment.

“Do you have a place to stay?”

“Not yet”, I said.

Much to my amazement, he took a step backwards.

“I mean, I have a hostel, but I don’t have an apartment yet”, I said.

His relief was comical. I think our Ed got taken to the cleaners by a lady friend one time. Or maybe more than one time. I started to laugh at him, and he got a bit embarrassed about how rude he’d been. Then he rushed out a spiel about how the restaurant was down there if I wanted to go on my way, he gesticulated to his left. And there was a blues bar he knew down there, he gesticulated to the right. Then he stood there. Waiting for me to decide, I suppose.

I started walking towards the blues bar, which was in the same direction as my hostel anyway. I was dying for a pint after all that walking. He scurried after me.
”I don’t know what it’ll be like”, he said, all defensive again, “I’ve only been there the one time.”

“Jesus, Ed, what kind of women do you hang out with?” I said. “It’s not a problem if it’s not a nice bar.”

“Well, just so as you know.”

They were standing outside it. Bearley’s House Blues n Rib. It looked pretty seedy. It had its own car park, which is code for redneck here in Nova Scotia. I had walked past it a few times and there were usually a few people sitting outside on plastic garden furniture, smoking Du Maurier and drinking Blues, which is what I wanted to be doing, but there was no one there now. Ed seemed deflated at this.

He seems to have had more than his share of disappointment in life, so quickly did he rear up against it. People like that usually irritated me, but tonight I was feeling more forgiving. I figured I’d show him how Irish people do a Friday night.

“It’ll be fine, come on.” I plunged in.

A pint or two. Or not

As we walked in a girl sitting at the door announced it was four bucks cover charge. I paid. We walked in and sat at the bar. The place was Italian. Full of middle-aged couples. The women all wearing low cut tops and high high mules. The men with colourful shirts straining against their bellies. Mostly they were sitting at little low tables in front of a small stage. It was set up for a blues band – a saxaphone, a keyboards, two guitars and a drumkit. There were no signs of activity around the stage.

The barman was a big burly Italian, who like every other Italian I have met in Canada, talked like a cast member of The Sopranos. He ignored us for a good ten minutes. Ed wasn’t very good at getting his attention. Finally, I gave him a long stare and he came over after the obligatory minute.

I ordered a pint of Keiths, as it was the only tap I could see that wasn’t an import beer. Ed wasn’t impressed. “That stuff’s real cheap”, he said, “it’ll blow your head off tomorrow if you drink enough of it. What time are you getting up?”

“I have to be at the market to meet my farm family at eleven.”

“Whoo hoo”, he crowed, “you’ll be sorry!”

Canadians think anything over two bottles disappearing down a woman’s throat is a mad night on the beer. They also think eight am is early. I haven’t bothered explaining Irish women’s ability to hold liquor and work the next day. He ordered a bottle of something or other, I can’t remember. My pint came, and as usual, it wasn’t a pint. It was something in between a half pint and a pint. I made the fatal error of asking the barman how much the glass held? He glowered at me and stalked down to the end of the bar. I could hear him bitching to the waitress about me.

“I think I fucked up, Ed.”

“I reckon ya did. They don’t like it when you point out it’s not a pint.”

“I wasn’t pointing out, I just want to know what the measure is.”

“It’s a pint.”

“But it’s not.”

“Exactly”

Exactly.

We took our time because we knew it would be a while before we got served again. I watched the waitress. She was a blonde too, with tight ringlets that fell to her shoulders and bright red lipstick. She had a strange accent, like a gangster’s moll in a low budget movie. She fiddled with her nails all the time and complained to the barman about how bored she was. I wondered whether they were really Italian, or whether they just all wanted to be.

Finally we got served again. I made Ed pay for a second round, as I had paid us in. He didn’t seem to mind so much. He didn’t tip the barman, in retort for my pint that was not a pint. The barman remonstrated with him loudly. I was just thinking I’d like a cigarette when he asked me did I want one. He led me upstairs into a small pool hall that filled a mezzanine above the bar. To my amazement, there were tables and chairs and ASHTRAYS there. Inside. In some bars in Halifax there are smoking rooms and in some there are not and I can’t figure out why. Ed tried to explain but he wasn’t making any sense.

We lit up and the band came onstage and started playing the blues. They were pretty good. Some of the couples got up and started dancing.

“This is a great bar, Ed, good choice.”

He thought about it for a while.

“Yeah, it is fur sure.” He clinked my bottle with his. I think he was having a good time.

“Say, you want to go for a ride on my Harley sometime?”

SCORE QUEENIE!!

“Sure Ed. Not right now, though.”

“No, no, I just got one helmet tonight.” Not to mention the fact that he was biccied. We finished our drinks. He put his hand in his pocket, somewhat reluctantly this time. “You want another one?”

“It’s my shout”, I said, sliding off my stool to go and get them. Ed looked like he’d died and gone to biker heaven. A woman who got her round in. His face was a picture. Actually, what I wanted to do was make sure the barman got a big tip, as I wanted to be able to drink here again. Twenty percent did it, he seemed mollified. He even asked me where I was from.

When we finished and left around midnight, Halifax was in the middle of a thunder storm. The music was so loud we hadn’t noticed. We stood in the pouring rain outside on the street as Ed fished around in his many pockets for a business card. I still have it. One of these days I might go for a ride on a Harley. Down to Yarmouth, to look at that fog they get down there. In the meantime, I hope there’s a hawg dawg somewhere that is beginning to believe that not all women are on the make.

Bless him.