Caper Gas: Back to the Future

When I moved to D'Escousse, Isle Madame, in 1971, the island had at least eight gas stations, all representing major oil companies – Gulf, Shell, Esso, Irving. They were full-service businesses, selling gas, oil, tires, batteries, accessories, lube jobs, minor repairs and tune-ups. Some of them also did bodywork and paint jobs. Two were new car dealerships: Clarence Martell sold Chevs, and his cousin Leo sold Fords.

Five of those eight stations have run out of gas. One stands abandoned, another has been levelled, and three have been converted to other uses: a fiberglass boat factory, a heritage centre and an auto-repair shop. Of the three surviving stations, two are essentially unchanged, but one has morphed into a little retail node which includes a convenience store, fast food services, a propane depot and a car wash.

These changes echo a nation-wide movement away from traditional service stations and towards self-serve gas bars, often coupled with convenience stores. Between Halifax and D'Escousse, gravel lots mark the sites of vanished service stations in Heatherton, Salt Springs, Marshy Hope, Sutherland's River and elsewhere.

The vanished stations may be no terrible loss on the TransCanada Highway, but it's another story on the back roads and secondary highways. There's hardly a place left to buy a chocolate bar, let alone a tank of fuel, in the 80 km between St. Peters and Sydney.

Yet though rural communities may not offer economies of scale, they do still represent a market. Years ago, when the major oil companies shut down their local heating-fuel businesses, a wide-awake entrepreneur named Greg Boucher established Greg's Fuels and built a thriving home-heating operation in the niche vacated by Big Oil. He expanded into the gasoline business, and when major companies like Esso abruptly severed their long-standing relationships with outlets like Poirier's Garage in D'Escousse, Greg's Fuels – head office, Arichat, NS – was ready to fill the gap.

Boucher ultimately built a chain of service stations reaching into New Brunswick, just as Wilson's Fuel expanded elsewhere. (The former Petro-Canada station in West Arichat is now a Wilson's convenience store/gas bar.) But then along came Emera, the energy company that grew out of Nova Scotia Power. Emera bought Greg's Fuels, and promptly closed down the head office and many of the stations.

The Poiriers in D'Escousse eventually found their competitors were selling fuel for less than they themselves were paying for it. They stopped selling fuel, and within a couple of years they closed the station and retired. That left us with an 8-km drive to the nearest gas pumps.

But the oil business – and the Acadians – are irrepressible. After Emera bought Greg's Fuels, Greg's customers migrated en masse to a new distributor in Arichat, Boudreau's Fuels, established in 1995. Boudreau's Fuels is owned by four Boudreaus, two cousins and their wives – Brian and Lisa, Lloyd and Viola. In the beginning, the two men drove the company's two trucks. Now, with seven trucks and 10 employees, Boudreau's is the dominant fuel supplier in the area. And rightly so. I've done business with them for a decade, and they're a pleasure to deal with.

And their whole business is built on their perception that though rural communities may not offer economies of scale, they do still represent a market. Which brings us to Caper Gas.

Caper Gas is the Boudreaus' new venture – a business aimed squarely at rural consumers abandoned by Big Oil, a business which actually returns gasoline retailing to its roots. In the beginning, after all, gas was sold from a hand-cranked gas pump out in front of a general store. Service stations came later. But why shouldn't a general store sell gas again? As a standalone business, gasoline retailing may not be very rewarding – but as a community service, as part of a broader business, and as a generator of traffic to a store, it may make a great deal of sense.

The Boudreaus commissioned a smart corporate orange and green logo derived from the Cape Breton flag, and adopted the Cape Breton phrase “drive 'er” as their motto. They developed a micro-station format, with a fat above-ground tank and a single pump for regular gas. They found partners in small Cape Breton general stores like G.H. Smith and Son in Orangedale, the Fleur de Lis Store in Rockdale, Ehler's Convenience in Whycocomagh, and – of course – Shamrock Store in D'Escousse, run by my friends Pearl and Raymond LeBlanc. Four outlets now, two coming soon, more in development.

And when Wilson's recently chose to build up a great fund of consumer ill-will by peevishly and publicly allowing rural gas pumps to run dry, the phone was ringing furiously in Arichat. Would Caper Gas be coming to other Cape Breton locations?

Soon, soon! Drive 'er, chers Boudreaus!

-- 30 --

The Fourth Maritime Province

In 1993, I published a book called Sniffing the Coast, the story of a memorable 600-mile cruise from Cape Breton to PEI, New Brunswick and the Magdalen Islands.

Sailing our engineless sailboat Silversark, my late wife Lulu and I met the shades of K.C. Irving, La Sagouine and Anne of Green Gables, hung out with Grand Prix hydroplane racers, and learned more than you'd believe about potatoes. We foregathered with poets, sand sculptors, silver fox farmers. I declared, quite confidently, that a bridge to PEI would never be built.

And we discovered a new province. Here's the story, as recounted in the book:

Around 1653, the government of France created a Province de la Grande Baie de St. Laurent, notes Mark Haines, a devoted amateur historian in Guysborough County. The new province took in all the Gulf coast from the Isthmus of Chignecto, between today's Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, to Canso, Nova Scotia. It was a properly constituted jurisdiction; its governor was Nicolas Denys.


Just a year later, in 1654, the British captured Acadia; in 1670 they gave to back to the French; in 1690 and 1710 they recaptured it; and in 1713, under the Treaty of Utrecht, they forced the French to give up, forever, “all Nova Scotia or Acadie with its ancient boundaries.”


But what were the ancient boundaries of Acadia? Nobody knew, and an international commission was appointed to decide. The commission inaugurated a venerable Canadian tradition. It abducted and absorbed the issue as completely and permanently as a black hole absorbs light: it sat for 60 years and never reached a conclusion.


In the meantime, Acadia – including a great stretch of the adjoining continental land mass – became Nova Scotia. The continental territory was split off in 1784 and became New Brunswick, and both colonies became part of Canada in 1867. In all these transactions, the terrain covered by Denys's Province de la Grande Baie de St. Laurent was assumed to be part of Acadia-- but Mark Haines can find no record that the province was ever extinguished or legally conveyed to the British. So the coast down which we sailed may still be a French colonial province.


I am eager to get a speeding ticket in New Glasgow or Antigonish. I will fight it on the grounds that the court has no jurisdiction, since the alleged offence did not take place in Canada, and Canadian laws do not apply in the Province de la Grande Baie de St. Laurent.


Readers and reviewers said all manner of nice things about Sniffing the Coast. When the hardcover's run was finished, however, the publishers declared that an affordable paperback would require a print run of several thousand copies – and they weren't sure they could sell thousands. So the book went out of print.

At roughly the same time, my friend Charlie Doucet and I produced a VHS videotape called Cape Breton's Bras d'Or Lakes: A Sailing Tour with Silver Donald Cameron. Sailors and tourists loved the video, but we never found an efficient way to distribute it. We got caught up with other projects, and then VHS itself became almost as obsolete as the eight-track. So the video also vanished.

Fifteen years later, information technology came to our rescue. Unlike a videotape, a video on DVD can be duplicated easily and marketed on the Web or transmitted electronically as a download. So can a book. And book production has been transformed by a technology called print-on-demand, which allows publishers to produce books in tiny print runs – five books, fifty books – and still keep prices affordable.

So Sniffing the Coast has just been re-issued by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, a literary press operated by a medical doctor named George Vanderburgh in Shelburne, Ontario (www.batteredbox.com) Meanwhile, Charlie has digitized the Bras d'Or Lakes video, and we've re-packaged it as a DVD.

Neither product, however, is available in traditional stores. Both are available on the Web at Ron Caplan's site, www.capebretonbooks.com . I'll also be selling them at events like the Halifax International Boat Show, where I'll be showing the DVD and reading from Sniffing the Coast next Saturday.

All of which illuminates the fate of fine independent book stores like The Book Room, now closing after serving Haligonians faithfully for 170 years. These wonderful stores were created to serve a local market – but that market has almost gone away. Book buyers shop globally, lured by big boxes like Chapters and on-line vendors like Amazon, which can afford to carry almost everything and ship it anywhere. And though niche publishing and bookselling survives, it too is global, selling special-interest books to narrow world-wide markets.

There may be three people in New Zealand who will want our DVD. They'll find us, and we'll sell it to them. How truly odd is that?

-- 30 --

The Celtic Kids

The youngsters just keep on coming, and it's a lovely thing to see.

In 1971, when I moved to Cape Breton, I didn't realize that I was immigrating into the Canadian Gàidhealtachd – the only remaining Gaelic district outside the British Isles. I had been raised in a Scotch broth so dilute that I knew nothing of the music, the heroic legends, the poetry or any other aspect of the culture of my ancestors.

Cape Breton was a revelation. At my first Broad Cove Concert, I heard someone on stage crack a joke in Gaelic – and 15,000 people laughed. These folks were Scottish in a way I could barely imagine.

And then there was the music. Hearing Celtic music was like coming home for the first time. I didn't stop loving Bach, the Beatles or the blues – but this new music reached far inside me and plucked strings of emotion I had never known were there. In some mysterious fashion, it was my music, and it spoke immediately to my character, my temperament, my spirit.

But the music, it seemed, was in danger. A film-maker named Ron MacInnis had recently aired a documentary called The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, and the island was reeling at the idea that the jig might be up, so to speak.

And so began a concerted effort to celebrate the music and enlist a new generation of players. Led by Father John Angus Rankin, the Cape Breton Fiddlers' Association was formed. It organized a couple of spectacularly-successful mass concerts at Glendale. The Association also encouraged a gifted teacher named Stan Chapman, and by the 1980s, a whole crowd of Chapman's young students was taking the stage at the Scottish summer concerts – Jackie Dunn, Tracey Dares, Kendra MacGillivray, Stephanie Wills, Wendy MacIsaac, Glenn Graham, Rodney MacDonald and others.

I remember being particularly delighted by two teenage players at a Big Pond concert: a slender girl with tumbling blonde ringlets and a very proper young man in white dress shirt and red tartan tie. Both of them played like angels on fire. The girl was named Natalie MacMaster and the boy was Ashley MacIsaac.

The Chapman Generation is now in its thirties, at the height of its power. This month, the Celtic Colours festival included a concert in Judique called “Wendy's World,” centred on Wendy MacIsaac, and featuring many of those same young people. Mary Jane Lamond sang, Stan Chapman was in the audience, and Ashley MacIsaac delivered a blistering, passionate performance which prompted his cousin Wendy to remark that he was “simply the best fiddler in the world.” At that moment, probably nobody in the hall would have disagreed.

So we're all right today. But what about tomorrow? Who's coming along now?

For me, that was the big news from Celtic Colours this year. The show in D'Escousse featured the Alberta band The McDades – and also the remarkable Jerry Holland, one of the most eloquent and melodic of all the fiddlers. But the show was opened by 16-year-old Krysta MacKinnon of Dundee, already a self-confident and accomplished performer – a fine player now, with a long future ahead of her.

The concert in St. Peter's consisted entirely of musicians 26 or younger. Two were from Scotland -- Calum Alex MacMillan and Catriona Watt, a piper and Gaelic singer respectively. The other six were Cape Bretoners. There were four fine women fiddlers, all of whom were also step-dancers: Leanne Aucoin, Rachel Davis, Beverley MacLean and Chrissy Crowley. The youngest player, Douglas Cameron, was just 13, already a veteran who described himself as an “all-purpose” fiddler, capable of handling weddings, dances, concerts or whatever other assignments might be handed to him. But when he was asked to step-dance, he resolutely shook his head.

But the most remarkable performance of the evening came from 23-year-old Jason Roach, a pianist from Cheticamp. Cape Breton pianists are superb musicians, but almost all confine themselves to “chording” – accompanying the fiddlers with pulsing rhythms, liquid runs and great sweeping chords. The only major exception I know is Dougie MacPhee, a legendary figure precisely because he is an accomplished solo performer, playing the tunes with his right hand while accompanying himself with a powerful rhythmic left hand.

Jason Roach does the same thing. He has studied with some of Cape Breton's finest pianists, notably Maybelle Chisholm, and he also has a degree in music from St. Francis Xavier. He is a dazzling performer who plays at sizzling speed, with arms and fingers of rubber. Yet he also has a musicality which serves the tunes rather than overwhelming them. I have never seen anything like him. Like J.P. Cormier on the guitar, Roach does things on the piano that I wouldn't have believed possible.

The kids just keep on coming. It's a wonderful thing to see.

-- 30 --