to build up a nest-egg before receiving his old age pension;
Be it resolved that the provincial government not be allowed to enforce mandatory birth control, euthanasia or genocide in the hen house; and
Be it resolved, to paraphrase the Prime Minister of Canada, the State has no business in the hen houses of the nation.
He can talk: one minute he’s talking about such locals as Zippy Moses, Ernie Balser, an old couple named Torchy and Drindy and places named Bummer’s Crossing. Then without a pause he’s moved on to Jimmy Cagney and Arthur Kennedy, who used to vacation in the area, his long speech before the Indian parliament, manoeuvring oil tankers through dangerous waters and impenetrable fog and pulling drowned friends out of the Bay.
“One night the telephone rang by my bed,” he told me. “I picked it up and a man asked, ‘Can I walk an elephant up Digby wharf?’ Thinking he was playing a trick I replied, ‘You have a wrong number. You had better call Noah,’ and then hung up.
“A few minutes later the phone rang again and the caller asked if I were the harbour pilot or not. When I replied that I was, he said that he needed to bring a circus to Digby by ship and legitimately needed the information about the elephant. The ship on her way to Digby had docked in Yarmouth. While off-loading the animals, the ship had caught on fire. The Yarmouth fire department sprayed so much water into the ship that she rolled over. There were elephants, tigers, monkeys and other circus animals all over town. One of the elephants managed to wander well into the countryside.
“Early next morning an elderly lady looked out of her pantry window and saw an elephant in her garden. She immediately called the RCMP and said, ‘Officer, there is the strangest animal in my garden that I have ever seen and you will never believe what he is doing. He is reaching down with his tail and tearing up my cabbages by the roots and guess what he’s doing with them!’ ”
He has so many tales you want to hear them all and remember them all. This province buzzes with voices that, once heard, linger. Ron Caplan could not let them go. He was a gangly, long-haired book designer deeply unhappy with his life in Pittsburgh when he arrived in Cape Breton in 1970. The local culture fascinated him—the Celts, the Acadians, the Mi’kmaqs, the Jamaicans who arrived to work the Sydney coke ovens, the Italian miners. He took a run at a magazine of oral culture and history, published from his home in Wreck Cove, population sixty. According to the first issue, Caplan’s baby would be “devoted to the history, natural history and future of Cape Breton Island.”
One day I scanned a bunch of back copies at a library in Halifax. Here’s Willy Petrie, the diviner, talking about what happens when he’s gripping a forked stick and it nears water: “I can’t hold it. I can brace my two feet, I can’t hold it at all. It’ll twist, keep on twisting, I can’t stop it. Keep on turning on the end. You just put the prongs across your hands this way. And if it’s gonna go it’ll go down, you can’t hold it. It don’t have to move my hand, and it’ll twist turn right in my hand. If I’ve got one anyways big or something, jeez, if I tried to hold it it’d tear me to pieces, the strain on me, the terrible strain on me in trying to hold it.”
I liked Marguerite Gallant, ninety, of Chéticamp reminiscing about being thirteen days on the hospital critical list when someone named Leo came to visit and her saying to him: “After I’m dead I will follow you to the Point. And you will see my soul on pebbles, on grains of sand, on little pieces of straw—any place you look. I will be in front of you in fifty different shapes.”
I was particularly taken with Bob Fitzgerald, who ran the telephone exchange in Dingwall, considering some of those who lie buried in the soil of Cape Breton: “They were tremendous people. We don’t have anything like them.
Be it resolved that the provincial government not be allowed to enforce mandatory birth control, euthanasia or genocide in the hen house; and
Be it resolved, to paraphrase the Prime Minister of Canada, the State has no business in the hen houses of the nation.
He can talk: one minute he’s talking about such locals as Zippy Moses, Ernie Balser, an old couple named Torchy and Drindy and places named Bummer’s Crossing. Then without a pause he’s moved on to Jimmy Cagney and Arthur Kennedy, who used to vacation in the area, his long speech before the Indian parliament, manoeuvring oil tankers through dangerous waters and impenetrable fog and pulling drowned friends out of the Bay.
“One night the telephone rang by my bed,” he told me. “I picked it up and a man asked, ‘Can I walk an elephant up Digby wharf?’ Thinking he was playing a trick I replied, ‘You have a wrong number. You had better call Noah,’ and then hung up.
“A few minutes later the phone rang again and the caller asked if I were the harbour pilot or not. When I replied that I was, he said that he needed to bring a circus to Digby by ship and legitimately needed the information about the elephant. The ship on her way to Digby had docked in Yarmouth. While off-loading the animals, the ship had caught on fire. The Yarmouth fire department sprayed so much water into the ship that she rolled over. There were elephants, tigers, monkeys and other circus animals all over town. One of the elephants managed to wander well into the countryside.
“Early next morning an elderly lady looked out of her pantry window and saw an elephant in her garden. She immediately called the RCMP and said, ‘Officer, there is the strangest animal in my garden that I have ever seen and you will never believe what he is doing. He is reaching down with his tail and tearing up my cabbages by the roots and guess what he’s doing with them!’ ”
He has so many tales you want to hear them all and remember them all. This province buzzes with voices that, once heard, linger. Ron Caplan could not let them go. He was a gangly, long-haired book designer deeply unhappy with his life in Pittsburgh when he arrived in Cape Breton in 1970. The local culture fascinated him—the Celts, the Acadians, the Mi’kmaqs, the Jamaicans who arrived to work the Sydney coke ovens, the Italian miners. He took a run at a magazine of oral culture and history, published from his home in Wreck Cove, population sixty. According to the first issue, Caplan’s baby would be “devoted to the history, natural history and future of Cape Breton Island.”
One day I scanned a bunch of back copies at a library in Halifax. Here’s Willy Petrie, the diviner, talking about what happens when he’s gripping a forked stick and it nears water: “I can’t hold it. I can brace my two feet, I can’t hold it at all. It’ll twist, keep on twisting, I can’t stop it. Keep on turning on the end. You just put the prongs across your hands this way. And if it’s gonna go it’ll go down, you can’t hold it. It don’t have to move my hand, and it’ll twist turn right in my hand. If I’ve got one anyways big or something, jeez, if I tried to hold it it’d tear me to pieces, the strain on me, the terrible strain on me in trying to hold it.”
I liked Marguerite Gallant, ninety, of Chéticamp reminiscing about being thirteen days on the hospital critical list when someone named Leo came to visit and her saying to him: “After I’m dead I will follow you to the Point. And you will see my soul on pebbles, on grains of sand, on little pieces of straw—any place you look. I will be in front of you in fifty different shapes.”
I was particularly taken with Bob Fitzgerald, who ran the telephone exchange in Dingwall, considering some of those who lie buried in the soil of Cape Breton: “They were tremendous people. We don’t have anything like them.
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