I returned to our place at the Firkin & Flyer pub, which at that point was our foxhole in the war zone, as other delayed travelers piled up. Also piling up were plates and glasses. We’d decided to run the Firkin’s gamut of Nova Scotia brewing: Tatamagouche ales, Big Spruce stout, 2 Crows IPA, Garrison sour ale, Propeller pilsner. And to help the medicine go down, potato skins: Nova Scotia’s answer to nachos, that replaces tortilla chips with slices of potato and doubles down on the jalapeño. Susan, the waitress, had become one of us, a traveler in-kind, making tracks across the incredibly busy pub.
At this point, an announcement was made. No arrivals would be coming in. And nothing would be going out, nothing at all: the highway had been closed. We were snowbound.
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9:30 p.m.: Fried pepperoni
After the beer, and a round of burgers, we must have been looking glum: Susan came by with a plate of fried pepperoni. We’d been trying to eat our way through to the other side of delay—the side where movement is bodily impossible. But this pepperoni wasn’t ours, and we shook our heads at it.
“On the house,” she said. She was on her way to another table, two plates of burger and fries balanced on her one forearm, her other hand on a chucked hip. “My granny used to say ‘Feed a cold, starve a fever.’ Well, we’re feeding cold here tonight. Cold people!”
That was Nova Scotia: accommodating, ready to commiserate in any circumstance, particularly the bad times. The peninsula was a confluence of Indigenous Mi’kmaq people, and Black Refugees from the United States, Acadian, and Gaelic cultures; a shared history of hardship formed the basis for a strong sense of community. And a snowstorm might be major, but it was nothing new. Not like the time Dan, from the next table over, dug his truck out from under six feet of wet-pack snow. Or the blizzard in which Silvia, also flying to St. John’s, had lost power to her Musquodoboit Harbour home, and decided to invite her neighbors over to eat all the ice cream in her freezer before it melted. “I know I could’ve just put it outside,” she said. “But where’s the fun in that?”
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5:00 a.m.: Deep-fried Mars bar
We kipped on the airport floor, our luggage around us as both bedding and a protective shield. We slept fitfully, the sleep of the overdue and the overindulged. I woke up in the darkness of pre-dawn, but in the working light of the tarmac, I could see the snow had stopped. The ground crew was already clearing the path for our exit.
We were still keen on St. John’s, of course, but there were other alternatives: Susan’s place, or Dan’s, or Silvia’s, all of whom had offered beds and a hot meal “if things went looney.”
The Firkin & Flyer was just opening, a few shadows already bent over eggs and coffee. I needed some of that myself, but there was something else, something sweeter, that could perfectly cap that endless last day in Nova Scotia. Under any other circumstance, a deep-fried Mars bar at 5:00 a.m. would have been inexcusable. But this was just dessert at the end of a very long night.
8:00 a.m.: Departure
We arrived in St. John’s late for our appointments, but happy to have arrived at all. After a few days and even more meals in the city—cod tongues, salt fish with drawn butter and a side of brewis (hard bread), and sweet toutons (fried bread dough)—we prepared to leave. The forecast wasn’t good; another blizzard was coming across the Gulf. We didn’t mind. Another delay was just just another series of opportunities.
