New Scotland, old friendships
Notes from a maritime reunion in Nova Scotia
I’d be forgiven for thinking I never left Scotland. There were bagpipes on the boardwalk, tartan scarves in tourist shops, and a fiddler playing what might as well have been the soundtrack to Braveheart. I’d just flown nearly seven hours across the Atlantic from Edinburgh to Halifax, but as I stepped out into the crisp Canadian sun, it felt less like arrival and more like teleportation; from the Scottish Highlands to their North American echo.
The pine trees were a giveaway. So were the pickup trucks. Long flat carriageways lined with conifers, enormous metallic cars that looked like they’d been bred to survive journeys harsher than any to be found on the other side of the pond. But the names — Inverness, Berwick, Dundee, New Glasgow — disoriented me, although they shouldn’t have. Nova Scotia, after all, is Latin for “New Scotland,” which only reinforced my long-held theory that for a people who conquered half the planet, the British showed remarkably little flair for invention. It was as though they took a map of Britain and copied it eastward in permanent marker. No wonder, then, that when I told a friend in London I was off to Halifax, he asked if I meant the bank down the road.
But this wasn’t Scotland. This was the Maritimes, one of Canada’s eastern provinces, where the people call themselves Maritimers with a charming pride that comes from living close to wind and water, and where the horizon feels just a little further away than it usually does, as if the land and the seas are caught in an eternal tussle to see who can stretch itself longer. I had come to visit a friend I hadn’t seen since high school, and in spending a week together — with her partner, in her world, surrounded by the life she had made — I found that childhood friendships offer a strange kind of intimacy, one unmoored from time, where just a few good conversations can elevate the faded outlines of shared adolescence.
On the first evening, we drove to Peggy’s Cove, that most photographed of Nova Scotia’s postcards, complete with a lighthouse perched on salt-licked rocks. The road there wound gently, the sea peeking in and out like a shy child behind curtains. Boats bobbed in the water that created small inland lakes from the vast ocean like freckles on a sunburnt nose. Layers of green hugged and spilled over the roads with all its shades — mossy, piney, sun-washed — and the smooth tarmac stretched on endlessly, flanked on either side with yellow lines and a sky so blue, it almost felt boastful.
By the Cove, I stared at the lighthouse, wondering how many lives it had saved, of sailors and lost men at sea, before becoming an extra on tourist photos. It looked tired ... in the way old things get tired when they outlive their purpose. In 2010, the Canadian Coast Guard had declared it “surplus,” a word that sounded like bureaucracy but felt like betrayal, and I couldn't help thinking that if lighthouses had feelings, would this one be hurt? Or bitter? Or would it be resigned, the way an elderly professor might watch the school tear down the chalkboards and still show up in tweed and tie, just in case a student needed something explained?
Standing there, I wondered if obsolescence always arrives so mundanely, with paperwork instead of drama. The lighthouse still stood, still posed for photos, still held its recently-painted form against the salt wind, but it no longer saved anyone from the rocks. Perhaps there’s a particular dignity in being kept around for what you were rather than what you are. Or perhaps, like old friendships revisited after years apart, the purpose was never as fixed as I initially thought. The lighthouse no longer guides ships through storms, but it still helps people find their bearings, still offers a reason to drive out to the edge of things. My friend and I were no longer the teenagers who’d shared homework and heartbreaks, but weren’t we finding new coordinates for each other too?
“Welcome to God’s country,” said my friend’s partner, as we crossed into the island of Cape Breton. It was a phrase his grandfather would use often, and standing there, watching the light play across the highlands, I understood why some places make believers out of skeptics. The Cabot Trail wound before us like a meditation on curves — serpentine roads that rose and fell with such drama that my stomach forgot which way was up. Each turn revealed another impossibility: mountains that seemed to lean into the sea, forests that tumbled down cliffsides like green waterfalls frozen mid-pour, and always, always, that endless stretch of the Atlantic, changing colours like a mood ring worn by the gods.
The ocean here couldn’t make up its mind what to be. Turquoise in the shallows, navy in the depths, and at sunset — oh, at sunset — it turned the kind of red that makes you understand why our ancestors invented mythology. Standing on those cliffs, watching the sun bleed into the horizon, I thought of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god who as a child mistook the sun for a ripe apple and leapt Icarus-like toward it. There’s something about a sunset this fierce that makes you want to reach for it too, to pluck it and take a bite, even if it guarantees a fall.
It’s a rare thing, finding a place that offers both stunning views and the smooth roads to reach them — most countries, I’ve found, make you choose between beauty and accessibility. But here, the asphalt ribboned through the highlands like it had been laid by someone who understood that the journey and the destination were the same thing. No wonder car companies flock here for their commercials; this is where machines on wheels go to look graceful.
The distances in Nova Scotia play tricks on you. It’s the second smallest of Canada’s provinces, yet the drive from Halifax to the northern tip of Cape Breton is the same as London to Edinburgh — a fact that made me reconsider everything I thought I knew about scale. Perhaps it’s the smooth roads that compress time, or maybe it’s the views that stretch it, but hours passed like minutes while minutes felt like tiny eternities. Not having a driver’s license meant I could surrender completely to the passenger seat, watching the scenery unspool through glass. I told myself I didn’t mind not driving, though in truth, these roads made me ache to have my hands on the wheel; oh what it must be to feel the car lean into those concrete curves.
But even paradise has its anxieties. By the time I arrived in Nova Scotia, it hadn’t rained in weeks. The forests were dry, the air was crisp, and every conversation included some mention of drought and the potential of wildfires. At a café in downtown Halifax, I had overheard someone remind their friend to turn off the tap while brushing.1
In Cape Breton, all trails were closed and everywhere we went the signs reminded us of the likelihood of extreme fire danger. The drought had been going on for weeks, turning the forests into kindling and the air into something that crackled with the worried prospect of a live matchstick. It felt wrong, all that water stretching to every horizon while the land thirsted. My friend mentioned the old line from Coleridge we used to recite in school — “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” — and suddenly the Ancient Mariner’s rime didn’t seem so ancient anymore.
Climate change has a way of making poetry feel prophetic, of turning metaphors literal.2 Here was an island surrounded by ocean, watching its forests brown at the edges, waiting for a rain that wouldn’t come.
Earlier this morning, I returned to the water’s edge. The fog had rolled in overnight, thick as wool. Through the mist, I could hear bagpipes again — some busker on the boardwalk, I assumed, playing for early morning joggers and insomniacs alike. The sound carried differently in the fog, and I thought about how the Scots who settled here must have felt carrying their instruments across an ocean, determined to make the new world sound like the old one.
But of course, it never quite does. The notes may be the same, but the air that carries them is different. The names may be the same — Inverness, Dundee — but the places themselves have their own stories now, shaped by different seasons, different storms, different sorrows, and celebrations. Even my friend, whom I’d known when we were both different people in a different country and a different decade, had become someone beautifully unfamiliar, rooted in this place I was only passing through.
As I readied myself to get to the airport for my flight, knowing I’ll be driving past those borrowed place names and towering pines, I realized that Nova Scotia had given me something I hadn’t known I was looking for: the understanding that we’re all translations of something older, all trying to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove may be surplus now, but it still stands, still witnesses, still helps people find their bearings even if it no longer saves them from the rocks.
The bagpipes faded as I made my way away from the coast, but I could still hear them long after they’d stopped, the way you can still feel the waves hours after you’ve left the shore. Some echoes, I was learning, are worth experiencing, even if — especially if — they sound nothing like the original.
Yesterday afternoon we received an province-wide alert notifying us that emergency services were battling a wildfire near Bayers Lake; smoke could be seen from my friend’s apartment window.
There's nothing quite like a travel essay about a gorgeous place with gorgeous prose. 😃