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 misunderstandingsIt 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 notAs 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.
