Blizzard conditions elongated a long drive to White Point, Nova Scotia, with arrival in this fishing village pushed late into the night. Sunshine and morning, though, provided needed incentive to brave snowdrifts and icy wind to see what I’d come for.
Sometimes a place takes you by such surprise that you want to see it again, under any conditions.
That’s the only explanation I have for turning a five-hour drive into an eight-hour crawl through a remote part of Cape Breton, the remotest part of Nova Scotia. By the time I reached the fishing village of White Point, near Land’s End, it was well past midnight; I had already spun out five times, nearly wrecked twice, had no cell battery and very limited gas (I found out later that the gas stations close at 8pm). Upon arriving at White Point, the sign for the bed and breakfast wasn’t hanging on its hook and the lights were off across the village. Fearing I’d run off the road and into the bay, I backtracked to the top of the bluff – and found a snow plow operator about to turn back down the winding road to scrape more ice and throw more salt.
“Do you know where the Two Tittles is?” I shouted above the din, after having placed my rental car in the path of the plow. Yes, it is grammatically incorrect, since I left “B&B” off the name, but in this kind of weather, on this kind of night, every breath counts.
“Sure, follow me”, he said, and led me right back down to the house by the ocean that I thought might be the bed and breakfast. He pulled up along side the boats, spun the plow around and was gone, leaving me with silence, a roiling ocean and stars, as the storm began to abate.
“We didn’t think you were coming” said the startled owner, as I opened the side door that had thankfully been unlocked, after pounding on the door several times. “We turned the heat off in the guest room at 9, since we knew no one would be foolish enough to drive through that blizzard.”
He was still wondering the next day, recounting the story to his daughter and her husband as they came to bring by fish and chips from a local fish fry. Then he told them about how I’d set out early the next morning to visit the spot I came to see – a cemetery on the tip of the land that bore a tombstone to the unknown sailor, a cemetery I’d seen several years prior.
I didn’t know at the time, when we stumbled on the village during a summer detour off the Cabot Trail, that this was his family’s cemetery. We’d spied a tall white cross as we descended along the bay, then guessed at the road, drove until it stopped and then carried my son in a backpack out across the barren spit to the tall white cross and the cemetery that held Irish immigrants who settled in this part of New Scotland.
On this trip, I learned that the immigrants had hauled their boats up the cliff every night to keep the waves from dashing them against the tittles or the cliff, and that the families eventually moved a bit further inland as motorized boats allowed for maneuvering into a man-made harbor. One thing that hadn’t changed, though, was grinding sounds I’d heard on the cliff during that first visit, and which stayed with me during the interceding years, dragging me back to hear it again.
As the ocean flung boulders against the cliff and dragged them back again, relentlessly, on this bitterly cold winter day, I appreciated even more the tenuous grasp on life those early immigrant families faced as they tried to make a new life for themselves. White Point’s not a place of external wealth, by any means, but it’s a place where you see the continuum of life unabated for hundreds of years.
I hear they may even get cell service next summer. Maybe it’ll keep the idiot tourists from getting lost or stranded . . .
