Come From Away

I am a come from away. 

I was born in Montreal at St Mary’s Hospital. Dr. Quinn told my father that I was a perky pipsqueak. Perhaps I was too little and lively to be raised in the big city. At 4 months old, I moved to Cape Breton. As the result of my parent’s decision, I was able to spend my childhood roaming the fields with my dog, playing games in my neighbours’ yards and roaming the seashore with my friends.

My father had ties to Cape Breton. His mother, Lucy à William, à John, à Eli, à Basile, à P’tit Basile Chiasson, was born and raised in St Joseph du Moine. She married Lloyd Crawford and raised her children in Moncton, N.B. My father loved to visit his grandparents in Lemoine.

My parents moved from New Brunswick to Quebec in 1965 as they were crying for teachers and paying them very well. Five years later, the October Crisis forced them to re-evaluate. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) kidnapped James Cross, a British diplomat and the provincial Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. They killed Laporte. The War Measures Act was imposed. We had an English name.

My father was a school principal and my mother had a good job; they were well established. Nevertheless, in October 1971, they loaded three kids and a dog into their vehicle and drove to Grand-Etang, Cape Breton. No house, no jobs…they were starting from scratch.

Back then, my father’s teaching certificate was no good in Nova Scotia. He got a job selling insurance, door to door. He hitchhiked to Truro during the summer months to take teaching courses. Eventually, he got a job teaching in Inverness, and then at NDA school in Cheticamp, closer to home.

In the summers, my father ran a whale-watching business, the first one in Nova Scotia. He got a lot of flack from the local fishermen for the way he awkwardly docked his boat the first few times, and for telling tourists those ”poissons bleus” were whales. Over time, people realized they were pilot whales, and now whale-watching tours operate in many ports.

He talked to countless visitors over the years, and most times he would say, ”I chose to live here.”

When I was 18, I left Cape Breton. I went to university. I lived in a multitude of places: Banff, Yellowknife, the Gulf Islands, Halifax, South Korea, Ottawa, Quebec.

In 2011, I moved back to Cape Breton. I chose to live here.

I came from away for good.  

Published in The Inverness Oran, May17,2023