Halifax, Canada â?? A cold wind ripped through Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Then came the frigid rain. In a minute, I was thinking, the headstones will be shivering.
"Now," said Blair Beed, my guide, "imagine how it would have been in those lifeboats. Surrounded by ice."
He was talking about the Titanic, of course. Although this Halifax cemetery lies about 750 miles northwest of the waters where that celebrated ship went down April 15, 1912, it was the seamen of Halifax who retrieved more than 300 of the dead, along with a grim harvest of flotsam. In the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic downtown, you can see the lost gloves of a doomed millionaire and the lost shoes of a tiny child. Fairview Lawn Cemetery is home to 121 Titanic victims, more than you'll find anywhere else above sea level.
This city (population: about 390,000) gets plenty of attention in Canada for its role as a port, a provincial capital and a college town, with no fewer than five universities, whose students rarely see a week without rain. The local pro basketball team is called "The Rainmen."
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