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rolling hills, and on the other side, the Atlantic Ocean, blue as the Mediterranean. Somewhere along the road things begin to change. Brilliantly painted homes, far more colourful than the ones owned by English, break the view. Acadian flags—red for courage, white for purity, blue for the sea with a yellow star for the Virgin Mary, patron saint of the Acadians—ripple in the breeze. I pass church after church, big granite things that break the sky with their steeples. The French shore is really one main street, thirty miles long, populated on each side by the descendants of those lively, resilient souls. Cap Ste-Marie becomes St. Alphonse, Meteghan becomes Saulnierville, Comeauville segues into Little Brook, Grosses Coques slides into Beliveaus Cove, and St. Bernard becomes New Edinburgh, despite its name still a French settlement.
    Longing to be part of this vibrant, tough culture—literally to taste it—I pull into a roadside takeout spot advertising rappie pie, the local delicacy. Now this is a new one for me, even though I fancy myself a connoisseur of road eats, a person who feels eminently qualified to nominate the club sandwich as Nova Scotia’s officialdish, it being the one thing you can safely order in the most forlorn eatery in the least-travelled back road and still stay clear of the emergency ward. I can immediately tell that rappie pie, or at least this version of it, does not come with that guarantee. I explore with my plastic fork, testing the semi-gelatinous consistency, take another bite and notice that it has no discernible taste, drive over by the garbage can, roll down the car window and toss the whole thing.
    Maybe it travels well and held the Acadians over on their biblical exodus back. Around here few things are only what they seem and just about everything seems to have deeper resonance. It is so hard to avoid traces of history. Nova Scotia is lousy with museums, replicas of famous forts, ships and habitations and plaques to commemorate some long-dead person who did who knows what, God knows when. There’s a curiously egalitarian view of the past that treats all events with the same gravity.
    Don’t take my word for it. Along the South Shore you pass the home of Phil Scott, the world’s champion log roller, the signs announcing authentic woollen mills, lighthouses, “the oldest non-conformist church in Canada” and “the home of the Cape Islander lobster fishing boat” amidst the signs for bingo and “access to the Internet.” I mean, how is a person to know whether the Archelaus Smith Museum on Cape Sable Island is important or whether time would be better spent having a look at Port La Tour, named after the Huguenot nobleman who founded the place four hundred years ago and fought a decades-long war against a commercial and political rival that cost him his wife and his empire?
    There is no way of knowing. Just as there is no way of knowing that the simple sign a couple of clicks south of Shelburne that states “Birchtown, site of the black Loyalist landing in 1783” commemorates something truly special. Birchtown is not a village or a settlement; it is a sign with a few smallish houses and a population of about two dozen, a number of whom are black. That in itself is not unusual; Nova Scotia has a large black population. That so few of the residents of Birchtown are black is what is really odd. Once, when this was the first settlement of free blacks outside Africa, there were black people living there named Robert George Bridges, Boston King, Nathaniel Snowball, Isabel Gibbins, Cesar Perth, Cato Perkins and Moses Wilkinson. Once among their people were ship carpenters, boat builders, caulkers, anchorsmiths, sail-makers, labourers and rope makers; sawyers, millers, shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, tanners and skinners; carpenters, painters, gardeners, farmers, fishermen, pilots, sailors, seamen, bakers, tailors and chimney sweeps; a seamstress, a clothier, a milliner, a coachman, a