of shine in the air. That and the echo of laughter somewhere in the hills.
He leads me into a back room to show me his still. It doesn’t look like much: a blackened metal keg, a bunch of bent wires that run to the cool stream out back. You’ve got to like their spirit. I feel like a member of the James Gang, sitting in this room full of bleary eyes, cigarette haze and hockey chatter where the defiant, irreverent spirit of the outlaw lingers like smoke. I’m giddy as a kid when we pile back onto our ATVs. It’s time to ride! I’m without fear now, roaring down the hill to destination unknown. A small detour first to show me some blueberry fields. Bill cuts the engine. “Just look at that sky,” he says, tilting his head backwards for a better view of the black bowl dusted with silver. “I come out here sometimes by myself just to see that sky.”
I awake with a clear head, just before six-thirty. I hear Bill snoring down the hall. I creep downstairs and open the front door: overcast with mist rising from the grass around the cabin. If my life depended on it I could not retrace last night’s steps. I know it happened; in my jacket pocket a plastic cup smelling like a hospitaloperating room tells me so. I drop it in a garbage can, leave a thankyou note on the kitchen table, back the car out onto the road and make for Halifax.
Somewhere in this mess of tapes, pens, notepads and newspaper clippings on my desk is a photocopy of a page from a book that contains this sentence: “I do not believe I have ever experienced anything more exciting than being on that sixty-foot speedboat on a pitch dark night, with cutters in hot pursuit and powerful searchlights vainly attempting to penetrate our smoke screen … only a bullet could have caught us that night.” The writer was Hugh H. Corkum; this sentence came from his autobiography. The surprising thing was not that he spent a decade working on the Liverpool banana fleet, made up of boats that sat low in the water to avoid detection as they hauled Prohibition rum, whisky and fine champagne from St. Pierre and Miquelon down to gangster speakeasies in New York. For in these parts the time-honoured tradition of running liquor has always been as much a monument to rebellious spirit as a way of putting groceries on the table. What I found most interesting—and why I had copied the page in the first place—is that Corkum, who was thrice arrested for rumrunning, wrote those words in 1989. Just after he had retired from a long, illustrious career as the fabled fishing town of Lunenburg’s chief of police.
The photocopy sat there for a long time. Periodically I would pick it up and reread it, just because I found it so odd that someone could move so easily from one side of the law to the other.“The old rumrunners were almost folk heroes in the small communities,” a man a few years older than me with a reddish moustache and calves like those of a workhorse told me one bright summer afternoon. An acquaintance back in Halifax had put us in touch. Fred Gallup was an RCMP sergeant and a member of the Mountie Coastal Watch program, which meant he had one of the great jobs on the planet. We were in one of those fat rubber Zodiacs, flying across Mahone Bay, hitting the low breakers with enough zip to get airborne for a couple of feet before landing with a small explosion of water.
This is what Gallup and his fellow G-men do: blast at high speeds up and down this riveting coast. Once probably they would have been looking for guys like Corkum. The very landscape—the hundreds of hidden coves, harbours and islands—would have been against them, each bobbing head in a dory a lookout, each schooner blocking the way to port a delaying tactic. But running booze was tradition and beating the system. Drugs, today’s contraband of choice, are big money and local kids turn junkies on some far-away Toronto street corner. No one feels much affinity for the South American cartels that
He leads me into a back room to show me his still. It doesn’t look like much: a blackened metal keg, a bunch of bent wires that run to the cool stream out back. You’ve got to like their spirit. I feel like a member of the James Gang, sitting in this room full of bleary eyes, cigarette haze and hockey chatter where the defiant, irreverent spirit of the outlaw lingers like smoke. I’m giddy as a kid when we pile back onto our ATVs. It’s time to ride! I’m without fear now, roaring down the hill to destination unknown. A small detour first to show me some blueberry fields. Bill cuts the engine. “Just look at that sky,” he says, tilting his head backwards for a better view of the black bowl dusted with silver. “I come out here sometimes by myself just to see that sky.”
I awake with a clear head, just before six-thirty. I hear Bill snoring down the hall. I creep downstairs and open the front door: overcast with mist rising from the grass around the cabin. If my life depended on it I could not retrace last night’s steps. I know it happened; in my jacket pocket a plastic cup smelling like a hospitaloperating room tells me so. I drop it in a garbage can, leave a thankyou note on the kitchen table, back the car out onto the road and make for Halifax.
Somewhere in this mess of tapes, pens, notepads and newspaper clippings on my desk is a photocopy of a page from a book that contains this sentence: “I do not believe I have ever experienced anything more exciting than being on that sixty-foot speedboat on a pitch dark night, with cutters in hot pursuit and powerful searchlights vainly attempting to penetrate our smoke screen … only a bullet could have caught us that night.” The writer was Hugh H. Corkum; this sentence came from his autobiography. The surprising thing was not that he spent a decade working on the Liverpool banana fleet, made up of boats that sat low in the water to avoid detection as they hauled Prohibition rum, whisky and fine champagne from St. Pierre and Miquelon down to gangster speakeasies in New York. For in these parts the time-honoured tradition of running liquor has always been as much a monument to rebellious spirit as a way of putting groceries on the table. What I found most interesting—and why I had copied the page in the first place—is that Corkum, who was thrice arrested for rumrunning, wrote those words in 1989. Just after he had retired from a long, illustrious career as the fabled fishing town of Lunenburg’s chief of police.
The photocopy sat there for a long time. Periodically I would pick it up and reread it, just because I found it so odd that someone could move so easily from one side of the law to the other.“The old rumrunners were almost folk heroes in the small communities,” a man a few years older than me with a reddish moustache and calves like those of a workhorse told me one bright summer afternoon. An acquaintance back in Halifax had put us in touch. Fred Gallup was an RCMP sergeant and a member of the Mountie Coastal Watch program, which meant he had one of the great jobs on the planet. We were in one of those fat rubber Zodiacs, flying across Mahone Bay, hitting the low breakers with enough zip to get airborne for a couple of feet before landing with a small explosion of water.
This is what Gallup and his fellow G-men do: blast at high speeds up and down this riveting coast. Once probably they would have been looking for guys like Corkum. The very landscape—the hundreds of hidden coves, harbours and islands—would have been against them, each bobbing head in a dory a lookout, each schooner blocking the way to port a delaying tactic. But running booze was tradition and beating the system. Drugs, today’s contraband of choice, are big money and local kids turn junkies on some far-away Toronto street corner. No one feels much affinity for the South American cartels that
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