The Ocean Swells Community Centre sits just off Highway 329 in Northwest Cove, a small white church with a low white building beside it, on a stretch of the Aspotogan Peninsula where the road runs close to the water. On the third Sunday of most months, this is where the Athenaeum Society of Nova Scotia gathers, and on a Sunday afternoon in October the hall will fill for a talk titled "The Search for the Northwest Passage."
The speaker is Syd Dumaresq, a Halifax architect and, by his own billing, an amateur historian. He has recently cruised Canada's fabled Northwest Passage, and he will tell the room what he saw. There is no charge, no ticket, no reserved seating. The society's presentations typically draw around fifty people, and all are welcome.
That a talk about the Arctic should be delivered in a former fishing village on Nova Scotia's South Shore is less incongruous than it first appears. The Athenaeum Society was founded in January 2007 by a small group of local residents who looked around their own community, recognized the pool of knowledgeable and talented people living there, and wanted to bring that talent to a larger audience in a friendly and social forum. The model was the Athenaeum Club in London, founded in 1824 as a club for literary and scientific men and followers of the fine arts, whose past members included Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Huxley, Rudyard Kipling and John Ruskin. The Nova Scotia version keeps the spirit and drops the exclusivity: dues are twenty dollars a year, attendance at presentations is free, and the society has counted more than 350 members over the years of its existence. Meetings are held at 2:30 p.m. on the third Sunday of each month, with July, August and December off.
Dumaresq fits the society's founding premise almost too neatly. He is a fourth-generation architect, following his father Phil Dumaresq, his grandfather Sydney Perry Dumaresq and his great-grandfather J.C. Dumaresq. The family has practiced architecture in Nova Scotia since 1870, and the four men have cumulatively designed more than 100 buildings in Halifax over the past 145 years. Syd graduated from McGill University in 1969, is registered as a professional architect in Nova Scotia, is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and has served as past president of the Nova Scotia Association of Architects. He is president of SP Dumaresq Architect Limited, established in 1974, with a practice that has focused on health care facilities, public institutions, offices and commercial projects, conservation and restoration work, and conceptual design studies. He grew up in the Halifax area.
So the man who will stand up in Northwest Cove to describe the ice-choked channels of the Arctic Archipelago is, professionally, a builder of hospitals, institutions and restored heritage structures -- someone accustomed to thinking about how things are put together and how they last. The passage he cruised is the sea lane between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, running through the Arctic Ocean near the northern coast of North America by way of the waterways of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The islands of that archipelago are separated from one another and from the mainland by a series of channels collectively known as the Northwest Passages, or the Canadian Internal Waters.
For centuries, European explorers sought a navigable route through it as a possible trade route to Asia. An ice-bound northern route was discovered in 1850 by the Irish explorer Robert McClure, whose expedition completed the passage by hauling sledges rather than sailing the whole way. The Scotsman John Rae explored a more southerly route. But the first to actually sail through was the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who accomplished it with the Gjøa and six companions between 1903 and 1906 -- the first navigation of the Northwest Passage north of the Canadian mainland in a single expedition with a single ship.
What Amundsen did in three years with a crew of seven, a modern cruise ship does in a season with passengers in cabins. That transformation is the quiet backdrop to Dumaresq's talk. The passage has become a destination, and the people who now travel it are, increasingly, exactly the kind of curious retirees and lifelong learners who fill community halls on Sunday afternoons. Dumaresq is not an explorer in the Amundsen mold; he is a traveler who went to see a place he had read about, and came home with photographs and a story.
That is the Athenaeum Society's whole method. A retired vice admiral has stood in the same hall to ask whether the Canadian Armed Forces are withering. A bird atlas coordinator has presented on what a decade of volunteer surveying across the Maritimes revealed about declining and thriving species. A speaker has traced hip-hop and slam poetry back to the ancient oral tradition of passing down myths, legends and history through the spoken word. The topics range widely, but the format does not: one person from the community, or connected to it, sharing what they know with neighbors who showed up because they were interested.
The society posts notices of postponement or cancellation on its website by 9 a.m. on the day of a presentation, a service to members who might otherwise drive out to the hall through the vagaries of winter weather. October is not usually a concern. The talk begins at 2:30 p.m., the room holds whoever comes, and the only cost is the drive down Highway 329 to a small white church on the left, with ample parking in front.