The Last Best Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

flowed from Port Royal. If, for instance, Biencourt had not asserted the French presence here, it is possible that this territory would not have been returned to France by the Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye in 1632. Then the best-known event in Nova Scotia’s history would never have occurred.
    I speak here about the Expulsion of the Acadians, the 1755 deportation of an entire French-speaking people to France, the West Indies and the French possessions along the Mississippi because they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. It is more than just a slice of history. The yarn of a Paradise Lost and its martyred people provides a proper context for a place through which a mist of sadness—a wisp of “what if”—habitually drifts. The irony is that the man responsible for the myth, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was an American who never came here. But
Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie
was some of the best PR the province ever got.
    Acadia, which back then meant an area roughly equivalent to the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, was not quite as sumptuous as the ancient Greek Vale of Arcady, that idyllic landscape where nymphs danced and shepherds piped. But the ten thousand French living mainly around the Bay of Fundy had turned it into something startlingly special: instead of clearing and cultivating the uplands they used their experience with the salt marshes of France to build an elaborate system of dykes that allowed excess fresh water to flow back to the Bay while protecting the land from the salt water flooding at high tide. So life by eighteenth-century standards was sweet: no famine, no drought, an adequate-enough diet to keep epidemic away. Longfellow made the place sound like the Garden of Eden and introduced the reader to Évangéline and Gabriel, whose romantic idyll was cruelly interrupted by the English deportation order. The lovers roamedAmerica searching for each other, only to be reunited when the prematurely old heroine ends her wandering and becomes a Sister of Mercy in Philadelphia, where she finds Gabriel, now dying in a hospital.
    The Acadians came back. To me that was the amazing thing. It would be patently stupid to make any parallels between their return and my coming back 250 years later. But at some level we felt the same pull. They arrived in leaky, decrepit boats or on foot from as far away as Massachusetts, walking all the way up through Maine and New Brunswick. This time most of them agreed to take the British oath of allegiance, allowing them to stay. But only in small groups, in designated areas, far from their original lush lands, which had been given away to the English. And never would they forget.
    One day in Moncton, N.B., just a few miles’ drive from the Nova Scotia border, I went to something called the World Acadian Congress on the campus of the Université de Moncton. I walked around and looked at the historical displays, listened to some Acadian music, both bouncy and mournful, and spent some time in a gymnasium looking at huge family trees taped to the walls. Then I went outside to stand in the sunlight amongst all the thousands of happy, proud people wearing nametags that identified them as Daigles, Theriaults, Arsenaults, Doucets, Savoies, Bastaraches, Chiassons, Maillets, Michauds, Cormiers and LeBlancs. A celebration of survival. At one point I sidled over to a big tent where a tubby guy stirred a pot of gumbo with wide circles of his thick,hairy arm. Petite Cliff LeBlanc was a chef down in Abbeville, La., near where his folk had settled after the diaspora.
    “We got them bluish-green eyes that sparkle,” he drawled. “That’s how I tell who my people are. We all come from the same place, we’re all Acadians.”
    That spirit, more resolute than ever after all this time. I marvel at it as I move along the southwest shore of Nova Scotia, through the township of Clare with Rev. Al Green blasting on the stereo. Off to the right are low trees and some