Rendezvous with a Hurricane

A friend of mine once remarked that the two best parts of a vacation were planning for it and remembering it later.

I don't quite agree. Planning can be fun. And any good vacation provides a wealth of impressions that we draw on for the rest of our lives—the difference between knowing a place just a little and not knowing it at all.

But memories tend to fade into slide shows and  often-repeated stories that don't quite measure up to what really happened, while a good deal of the energy of planning, especially as the vacation approaches, goes into worries about whether the Uber you've scheduled for 3 a.m. will show up, whether you'll make it through the security line on time to catch your flight, whether the car rental agency will stay open past 7 if your second flight is delayed, and whether you'll be able to locate your AirB&B in downtown Halifax in the dark. Travel anxieties. Not fun.

Why go to Halifax? Good question. We weren't going to Halifax in particular—that just happened to be where the airport was. Nova Scotia was the destination. Hilary and I like the sea, open vistas, seafood, birds, and wild, uncrowded countryside. It seemed like a good fit. We'd been to northern Maine, and believe it or not, we've toured Quebec, Tadoussac, and the Gaspé Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, twice.

The first unusual thing I noticed as we approached the Halifax airport is that it sits in the midst of a vast spruce forest stretching for many miles across the province from Wolfville and the Bay of Fundy. You can see on any map that  the airport is quite a ways from downtown; I presumed that the intervened territory was suburbs. Not so. I felt like we were touching down in Bangor, Maine! The spruce trees themselves weren't aged and majestic. No, they looked stunted. Bent.

The Eurocar agency, located in the lobby of a dilapidated Quality Inn, was still open. The young man behind the counter threw a set of keys my way. "We've given you a Toyota Tundra," he said, either imagining or hoping I'd be pleased. "No thanks," I replied. "I reserved a Yaris."

"Okay. I'll see what we can find in the lot that's clean enough to go out."

We ended up with a Corolla, which was fine with us, though it wasn't entirely shipshape. No big deal: the previous driver, an insurance agent named "Ken," had left his card in the front seat and three cans of beer in the trunk. Much worse than that, the vehicle didn't have a CD player!

View from the library

We spent two days in Halifax, which was plenty. Fish and chips, the marine museum, Maud Lewis, the Citadel, Point Pleasant Park, and the spectacular new public library. We were only slightly concerned that Hurricane Dorian was headed our way. It sounded serious, but we'd never experienced such a thing, and it was difficult to get information about how serious such an event might be.

I asked two young women behind the information desk at the marine museum about it. "We're scheduled to stay at a cottage on the coast near Shelburne tomorrow night," I said. "We don't want to get washed out to sea."

"Are you going to be right on the beach? Shelburne is right where the hurricane I supposed to make landfall," one of the women said. "I'm not a fortune teller, but if I were you, I'd make sure to be off the highway and snug in your cottage before it arrives. Bring a flashlight or some candles. And don't forget your storm chips."

"Storm chips? I've never heard of it."

She shot a glance at her colleague behind the counter and they started giggling a little. "Those are the chips you eat during the storm."

Later that afternoon we walked over to the MEC sporting goods store, which, as far as I could tell, was the only place in the province that sold iso-butane canisters. (We'd brought along a little stove along with our other camping gear in a suitcase.) The bin was almost empty. It took me half a second to figure out why...

During our afternoon tour of the Citadel, a historic military fort on top of the hill, one guide said: "See that ship coming into the harbor? That might be the new British aircraft carrier. It's not even commissioned yet." He explained that NATO was bringing all of the ships in the vicinity into port to wait out the storm.

But the first palpable evidence that things were going to be a little different when Dorian arrived came a few hours later when we stopped into a local supermarket and noticed that many of the deli and frozen food items had been heavily discounted, and the checkout lines snaked off into the store for fifty yards past the bottled water displays and well into the pet food section. Everyone was stocking up. And not only potato chips.

Back in our tidy Airbnb apartment I tried, without success, to get a weather or a news channel for quite a while, and finally called our "host," a woman named Tiffany whom we'd never met or even spoken with  —she lived in Dartmouth, on the far side of the harbor.

"I can't get any channels on the TV," I said.

"You can watch any movie you want on Netflix," she replied. "Or Hulu, or Britbox. But we don't subscribe to any broadcast channels. Weather? Just use your phone."

We set off early the next morning. Gray skies, slight mist, few cars on the highway heading south through the stunted, and now vaguely sinister, spruce forest. We had originally planned to visit Peggy's Cove briefly and spend the rest of the morning at the World Heritage Site of Lunenburg, famous for anything to do with shipbuilding, but under the circumstances we proceeded southwest directly to the small and quaint town of Shelburne, founded by loyalists from Massachusetts during the American Revolution. Hilary had been rereading the guidebook along the way, and we stopped in at a B&B on the harbor waterfront to inquire about a room less directly exposed to Dorian's wrath.

An elderly gentleman answered the door, looking somewhat surprised. His tallish, silver-haired  wife soon rounded the corner and stood beside him. When we explained our situation, she said, "We do have rooms available. But if there's a surge, we'd be just as vulnerable as you would be out on Sandy Point Road. We'll all lose power, of course. During the last hurricane the road in front of the inn here was entirely flooded. The next morning people drove down to gawk. I hate to turn away business ... but if I were you, I'd inquire at the motel at the top of the hill. On the other hand," she added, "we're on the same grid as the local hospital. We'll get our power back sooner."

We drove up to the motel and had no trouble booking a room. Then we returned to the grocery store we'd passed on the way into town. Once again, everyone was stocking up. It was almost by chance that we then stopped in the parking lot at the local library so Hilary could pick up the wifi on her phone. She'd received a text from Leah, the host of our ocean-side cottage. "I'm down here at the property. Are you coming down?"

We canceled our room at the motel and drove eight miles along the coast on a narrow but decent asphalt road before finally pulling into the gravel parking lot beside a small but nifty modern cottage sitting in a field fifty yards from the ocean. There were six or seven apple trees in the front yard, none of them tall enough to fall on the house. The wind and rain had picked up considerably. Leah met us at the door and we came inside.

"Our hurricanes aren't like Florida hurricanes," she said. "Those people on the hill opposite came down just to watch the waves."

A robust and confident woman, Leah had been raised in Shelburne—her mother still lived just down the road—but went to college in Regina, Alberta, where she met and married a local boy and spent the next thirty years on a farm nearby. When he died she settled up and moved back home, and she now builds and restores houses for a living. Including this one. 

It was reassuring to hear her dismiss the loud but intermittent flapping noise from just outside the house—like a thick piece of plastic being buckled back and forth—as "nothing to worry about." She had just opened the refrigerator to show us the condiments other guests had left behind when the power went out with a faint "pop."

"There it goes," she said, smiling wanly. "It was inevitable. There are candles all over the place. And blankets. But we have a well here, so you won't be able to get water or flush the toilet."

"We brought our camping gear," I said. "And we have at least a gallon of water in the car."

Leah drove off in her pick-up and we settled in to an afternoon of reading, naps, and extended glances out the windows. They were somewhat clouded by the spray, but I could see twelve or fourteen waterfowl feeding at the mouth of the river that ran alongside the cottage. Some looked like black ducks, others  might have been female common eiders. The wind was howling and the apple trees were shaking in every direction like a dog shaking the water out of its fur. The waves were large but not ferocious; I've seen bigger ones on Lake Superior. Still, it wasn't the kind of weather anyone would be likely to take a walk it.

During the first few hours we were there I went outside only once, to get our two-gallon water bottle. I noticed during that dash to the car that one of the apple trees had gone down in front of the cottage. The waves looked frothier, messier, and more powerful, but the sky looked lighter.

At one point Hilary picked up a report on her phone from Environmental Canada, or some such agency. It was focused on Halifax and the Eastern Shore, and it was hard to tell from the report whether the worst was over out here in Shelburne, a hundred miles to the west, or whether the hurricane hadn't arrived yet.

We nibbled on some cheese, salami, and stoned wheat thins, and I heated some water for tea on the camp stove. A little later I uncorked a bottle of wine. 

We also had some chips.

A book on the shelf caught my eye: The August Gales. According to the cover copy, it's focused on a series of shipwrecks in 1917 out on Sable Island, a hundred miles offshore, but the forty pages I read concerned themselves with the development of the fishing industry in Lunenburg from earliest times, when the British brought in hundreds of Germans—who weren't terribly interested in fishing—to populate the area. I'm sure I learned more in those forty pages than I would have wandering around the streets of Lunenburg itself—in any case, enough to chat halfway intelligently with the fishermen we met later on about schooners, dories, line fishing, and trawling.

At 6 p.m. the sun came out. It happened abruptly as the curtain of gray clouds moved inland. We stepped out into the cool and amazingly fresh air. I counted nine roof shingles lying in the front yard. Though the thick grass in the fields surrounding the cottage was sodden from four hours of rain, a path led down to the beach, fifty yards away, where five-foot waves were still rolling in. The late afternoon light was now catching the flurries of white spume on their crests. It was time to take a walk.

Before it got dark we went back inside and heated up a can of chili on the camp stove, lit a few candles, and sat in the gloaming, listening to the diminishing ruckus in the trees outside.

With cool, clear air and no ambient light for miles, the stars that night were spectacular.

The next morning we spent some time wandering the beach. Then we drove into town. A few trees were down, a few roads were closed. Power was out everywhere. We zigzagged down to the harbor, and I happened to notice that the couple we'd talked to the previous day were standing on the corner outside their inn, chatting with a neighbor.

As I pulled to a stop I rolled down my window and greeting them.

"We're the couple that was looking for a room yesterday. We ended up down at the seafront cottage after all."

"How'd you make out?" he said.

"Not bad. One apple tree came down. Lost power and water, of course. But it ended up being a lot of fun."

As I drove off it occurred to me that it wouldn't have been as much fun if you actually lived there. Across Nova Scotia 450,000 people lost power, many of them for three or four days. During our morning ramble around the southern tip of the province, we passed several gas stations that were closed; fifteen or twenty cars might be lined up along the road waiting to get into the ones that were open.

At noon we were sitting in a very busy cafe just north of Yarmouth eating hot lobster sandwiches.

"This place is really hopping on a Sunday," Hilary said to the waitress.

"Most of these people don't have power," the waitress replied with a smile. "Everyone likes a hot meal once in a while."