“Within these new townships, what do I see? I see the black pitheads, the coal wheels are turning.”
Sydney sits at the far Atlantic end of Nova Scotia, tucked between the fingers of Cape Breton’s lobster claw shape.
Today’s special at Swiss Chalet is a quarter chicken and ribs, which the waitress recommends unreservedly. She does, perhaps, reserve some enthusiasm for the Breton Light beer. I order it anyway. She was right.
We’re two of six-ish patrons in this dimly lit outpost for a 9 p.m. dinner. Any road trip with Ben is marked by arbitrary detours more than adherence to Rand McNally, and tonight we were pulled off route by a novelty fiddle and a tractor-trailer parade.
People here are friendly, the cruise ship port bustling, ice cream a draw on a night considered warm by local standards. But clouds hang on a dated skyline, marks of poverty difficult to miss on the streets. This town isn’t thriving.
Coal was discovered here under Louis XIV, neatly packaged into a monopoly under George IV. Cape Breton’s wagon was thus hitched, its soul sold for a proud industrial heyday that peaked somewhere around the Second World War.
And then, in solitude with innumerable Appalachian communities, it ended.
Coal built Carnegie’s Gilded Age status but ripped scars through the Americas, rural towns beaming with hope before collapsing into generational failure, here the bright green Sobeys sign unable to divert eyes from the curious absence along Victoria Road, where a steel mill once simultaneously put food on tables while feeding the neighboring, gelatinous creek with sludgy runoff.
“Beyond these great waters, what do I see? I see the great mountains climb from the coastline.”
I’m unsure what the Canadians are celebrating this year, surely not the 250th birthday of their chaotic southern neighbors. But for some undisclosed reason, national park tickets today are free.
We’re driving into the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, on the fatter finger of the lobster claw, and the park ranger is giddy – no, giggly – at our entrance. It’s rainy and perhaps she’s not had sufficient entertainment today. Regardless she’s not charging us the usual fare.
We’re in desperate need of gas and food, having traveled the Breton Trail now for what seems like hundreds of kilometres from the 30-second ride on the Englishtown Ferry without passing civilization. Or a Tim Hortons. By extension, we are grumpy.
From the highway at Ingonish, a narrow, rocky finger pokes into a protected bay, a haven from the wild Atlantic. The frigid Labrador Current wrests moisture from the warm Gulf Stream, coating the deep green landscape in a sinking, thick fog. We hike out from this safe and cozy portion to the tip, the end of the world, where leafless hardwoods lean at 20-degree angles, cliffs give way to crashing seas, gulls bravely hunt through white-capped waters.
A side building at the Keltic Lodge offers a cold biscuit with its tasty chowder, this time not with the Breton Light, and we revive, a bit cheerier as we glance out, the fog rising, steep shorelines emerging.
“Looks like it’s going to be a pretty day,” the bubbly, if overly optimistic waitress suggests. “But you boys sit here as long as you like.”
Next door the main building of the Lodge sits empty; the Canadian government has assigned it to the budgetary back burner. Mold grows, leaks sprout, and the repair bill has reached $70 million on the building alone, while a narrow bend in the access road is eroding into the sea.
One must reasonably assume the 75-year-old lodge will be torn down.
We hike paths and trek highways through the highlands, switchbacks opening to expansive views. The natural beauty, the surprises around each turn, ranks portions of the experience worthy of Lewis and Clark; though at times, given the lack of food, coffee and toilets, I fear creeping hints of the Donner Party.
Occasionally a distant, French-language station comes across the FM receiver, but otherwise there is no music, are no visitor centers or restaurants or gas stations or gift shops or hotels or Tim Hortons. Just Ben and me and these two lanes, never three.
“And the foreign-owned companies, force us to fight, for our survival and our rights.”
Talk with locals, listen to the local brand of country music, read the history. There’s more than a little fight in these folks. They’re pissed at Halifax, at Ottawa, at coal industrialists, at their plight in general – and for some there’s a view they could do it better on their own.
I generally roll my eyes at separatist movements. Such is the prerogative of someone who lives in the places that never feel forgotten. But here I try to get it:
The only access to the mainland is via a bottlenecked, two-lane causeway, at times subject to complete closure when the swing bridge allows ship traffic to pass through. It carries Highway 104, which has been widened into an expressway from New Brunswick through the country, but a plan to extend the expressway to the island never seems to find funding.
Further back, in 1967 the private owner of Sydney’s steel mill threatened closure. Rather than allow a death blow to its most impoverished region, Nova Scotia nationalized the plant, promises made of managing an orderly transition to a new economy. Thirty years later, there was no plan for an orderly transition, and having wasted $3 billion on an unprofitable venture, the province unceremoniously pulled the plug.
To compensate, Halifax sends Sydney a flat $15 million per year, ostensibly fulfilling the social contract to ‘equalize’ the deindustrialized island.
And this seems to be the province’s approach to its eternal poverty problem at Cape Breton. Benign neglect which throws dollars indiscriminately to placate a fiery population, but without scaled improvements in infrastructure or a badly needed strategy to transition its economy.
The region’s crown jewel, the Breton Trail, is one of the treasures of the Maritimes, a sight to behold if one ever hears of it, figures out the complicated logistics and finds his way along the 4.5-hour drive from Halifax.
Presumably the $3 billion invested in the Sydney steel mill would’ve gone a long way toward building a highway or railroad, developing a cruise ship port, renovating the part-shuttered Keltic Lodge, advertising the Trail or, by God, building a Tim Hortons somewhere along the route.
“In soft summer breeze or in wild winter winds, the home of our hearts, Cape Breton.”
At Baddeck we dine on the tidal Bras d’Or Lake, watching sailboats glide by in the gentle wind. For an August evening it’s particularly fresh, and the cheery waitress offers blankets.
“They work miracles,” she claims, and she’s not wrong.
The town isn’t a pretentious place, small and tidy, scenic and, like the rest of the island, notably friendly. There’s a free restroom at the downtown intersection and it’s spotlessly clean.
We take an order of moules frites for the appetizer, a hearty plate with hard bread, paired with generous glasses of a generic red wine, marked “BIG FRIGGIN” on the menu. Again, unpretentious.
Surely my feelings are bolstered by the natural beauty, I’m sure in some way partial to folks who seem genuinely nice and, like me, love their left-behind hometown, maybe emotions flaring a touch from the big friggin’ wine, but I’ll leave here cheering for Cape Breton.
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