Just before Confederation, the province hired a deranged American named Ambrose Church who slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow to draw a map of each county in Nova Scotia. Not just draw, but list the name of each household and business and shoal, each jut of dangerous rock, each brook and river and marsh. Deranged. To be without range, or row—or maybe, without place. A rumour that he was a U.S. Army deserter hadn’t yet been disproven.
Any map must have an element of fantasy, but Ambrose’s map was like remembering a dream, or a hallucination. “Old Fort,” he marked at the edge of the Shaubac, with a star, though one has never been located. Some misconceptions were aural. On the map, names of householders were written in the Germanic accents of the time. Hottman instead of Hartman. Other errors defied physics. Brooks that run north to south in real life, there run east to west in the dream world. Some lakes exist in both worlds; others, only in one.
Now, as they did then, the roads in the Shaubac lead across themselves, twisted and tangled, and are mostly unnamed. But in Ambrose’s rendering, there is only one road, running not toward the shore, as it does in this life, but away from it, dead-ending somewhere in the forest. Unnamed too are the hills. Then, as now, you would have to know someone who grew up here to have heard their local names, like the other hills along the river: Vinegar Hill, Egg Hill, Church Hill, Bear Hill. Why egg hill? Was a clutch of grouse eggs once found there?
Once, deep in the Shaubac forest looking for something, I met a frail old man on the trail. It didn’t seem possible he could have found his way there. “These are public roads, public ways,” he told me, “even though they are also the way of moss and mist.” Though I have often returned, I never saw him again.
Another time, on a hot June morning, before I knew the trails well, I got more than lost in that part of the woods and stumbled into a humid, sunlit clearing: there, a ramshackle cabin with garbage and strange metal forms and wreckage strewn about the grass, like something out of True Detective. Steam, not smoke, seemed to rise from its crooked chimney. “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colours,” wrote Elizabeth Bishop. Delicate. The superlative of derangement.
