It sometimes takes a hurricane to bring you home.
Having lived mostly in Halifax for 31 years, and repeatedly praised it in print as beautiful, dramatic, exciting and, all in all, the best damn hometown I'd ever known, I betrayed it in June 2002. For reasons involving money, children and grandchildren, I decided to settle down in Moncton for good. The house I bought there was not only charming but, by Halifax standards, as cheap as dirt. Only a 15-minute walk from what passes for a downtown in Moncton, it sat among streets blessed with a fine mix of old folks, young families, well-loved flower gardens, happy dogs, crafty cats, cooing doves, street hockey, curbside basketball and whistling letter-carriers.
Never in my life have I had better neighbours. One fragrant Friday evening, I sat for the first time under the glorious blossoms of my flowering crab tree and sipped single-malt whisky. Across the street, Craig White stepped outside to play his bagpipes. He was good. So good I remembered the title of a novel by American writer John Cheever: Oh What a Paradise It Seems. Thank you, Moncton.
More than a year after I turned my back on Halifax, however, and just when I was feeling vaguely sentimental about it, Key Porter Books of Toronto offered to put me up for a night at the Radisson Suite Hotel in the old port. All I had to do in return was give a public reading from my new book, Never Content: How Mavericks and Outsiders Made a Surprise Winner of Maritime Life. At 3 p.m. Sunday, September 28, 2003, at Halifax's Word on the Street Festival, that's what I did.
At 12:10 a.m., Monday, September 29, Hurricane Juan barreled into Halifax County.
That's right. On the very night that the most destructive hurricane in 110 years came to town, I had cleverly arranged to stay in an eighth-floor suite that overlooked the harbour. Not since 1893 had Halifax been slammed by a hurricane's "eastern eyewall." That's a meteorologist's term for a storm's worst winds, and these gusts, some reaching more than 185 kilometres per hour, hurled rain at my apparently sealed windows with such force that enough water somehow entered the room to form a puddle. The lights went out. The elevators died. The halls leading to the stairways, and the stairways themselves, turned inky black.
So I just stood there in the darkness, beside the puddle, wearing one of the hotel's white terrycloth bathrobes. I listened to the wind whistle, the rain rage and distant sirens wail. I peered down at the unlit and eerie city as the highest water ever recorded in the harbour smashed the boardwalk, flooded apartments over at Bishop's Landing, and thrilled the flashlight-wielding youths who'd come from all over the city to see the devastation. "Citizens frolicking by the seashore during the height of the storm," the Canadian Hurricane Centre sternly observed later, "showed a lack of respect for the awesome nature of a hurricane, and a general lack of awareness of their risks." Still, if I were half a century younger, I too would have been frolicking by the boardwalk as Juan did its dirty work.
After a sleepless night and a cold continental breakfast, I left for Moncton. I drove up Morris Street, turned right at South Park, passed Victoria Park, the Public Gardens and the Commons, and headed out Quinpool towards Bicentennial Drive.
Not even the waterfront destruction I'd witnessed the night before had prepared me for the horror shows in the heart of Halifax. The toppled trees, snapped power lines, crushed automobiles, smashed windows, pushed-up sidewalks, house-high clumps of tangled roots...these were stunningly wrong, undeserved and obscene. With no jobs or schools to go to, Haligonians wandered about aimlessly. The destruction-so shocking to see-had forced some of them into a kind of trance. Others wept openly at the murder of century-old trees they'd taken for granted all their lives. We were living a nightmare in the morning light.
It wasn't until the following spring that I knew what Juan had taught me. The bringing-low and overnight infliction of thousands of wounds on Halifax made me realize I belonged there. Good-bye, Moncton. I came home for good this past June and, if Peter Bowyer is right, I may one day see a storm even worse than Juan torture my city. He's the program manager of the Canadian Hurricane Centre, and says a bigger one is still out there: "A storm with higher winds, larger waves, greater surge and a more sinister combination of all three....
"Statistics tell us that it will likely be another hundred years before Halifax gets another Juan. Statistics also tell us that a worse hurricane could hit Halifax next week."
I'll be here, just as I was last time.