The tree Nova Scotia has sent Boston every year since 1971, and the 1917 morning it pays back

Every November a spruce is cut somewhere in Nova Scotia, put on a truck, and driven about a thousand kilometres to Boston Common, where the city lights it for Christmas. It has happened every year since 1971. It is a thank-you note for something that happened in 1917, sent by people who were not alive to receive the favour, to people who were not alive to do it.

Here is what it is thanking Boston for.

At 8:45 on the morning of 6 December 1917, in the narrows of Halifax harbour, the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc collided with the Norwegian Imo at about one knot — walking pace. Nobody was hurt. The problem was the cargo: Mont-Blanc was loaded with high explosives for the war in France, and the knock split benzol barrels on her deck. Sparks lit the vapour. For twenty minutes she burned in the harbour while people came down to the waterfront to watch, and stood at their windows to watch, because a burning ship is a spectacle and nobody on shore knew what was in her.

At 9:04:35 she detonated. About 2.9 kilotons — the largest human-made explosion anyone had yet produced, and it stayed the largest until 1945. Everything within half a mile was simply gone. The pressure wave bent iron rails and snapped trees; the tsunami it raised washed the Imo ashore and wiped out a Mi’kmaq community that had lived at Tufts Cove for generations. At least 1,782 people were killed and about 9,000 injured, in a city of roughly 50,000.

In the twenty minutes while the ship burned, one man did the arithmetic. Vince Coleman was a railway dispatcher in a yard 230 metres from the pier. He and his colleague learned from a sailor what was aboard, and they ran. Then Coleman remembered that the overnight passenger train from Saint John was due in within minutes, went back to his post alone, and started keying. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic’s version of what he sent:

Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.

Every incoming train around Halifax stopped. Whether that specific message is what held the Saint John train at a safe distance is, honestly, uncertain — the sources say so and I am not going to tidy it up. What is certain is that stations all down the Intercolonial Railway heard it, and that is how the railway knew, within seconds, that something enormous had happened at Halifax. Coleman was killed at his post.

Boston heard by telegraph. This is the part that still seems to me almost unreasonable: Boston is about 700 kilometres away, in a different country, and by 10 o’clock that night a relief train was moving — doctors, nurses, food, water, supplies, organised by the Massachusetts Public Safety Committee and the Red Cross in under a day, with no phone call from anybody asking. A blizzard caught it. It got in early on 8 December and its medical staff took over from Nova Scotian doctors who had been working without sleep since the blast.

Nova Scotia sent Boston a tree that same month, in 1917.

Then nothing, for fifty-four years.

The thing came back in 1971, and it came back for a slightly unromantic reason: the Lunenburg County Christmas Tree Producers Association wanted to promote Christmas tree exports, and remembering Boston was a good way to do it. In 1976 the provincial government took it over — for goodwill, and for trade and tourism. You could read that as the gesture being cheapened. I read it the other way round. A feeling in a population has a half-life of about one generation. An export-promotion programme has a budget line, a specialist whose actual job title involves finding the tree, a scouting season that starts in June, and a list of candidate trees maintained for years before any of them is cut. That is what survives fifty-four years of nobody thinking about it.

And it did not stay administrative. Families volunteer their own trees — eight to ten a year offer one — and they stand and watch a spruce they have lived beside for decades come down, because everyone in the province knows where it is going. Nova Scotian children are taught the explosion in school. In 2017, on the hundredth anniversary, the mayors of both cities and the premier put a plaque on Boston Common, and that year’s tree was dedicated to first responders in both places. The province also quietly sends smaller trees to two Boston homeless shelters, which is not in anybody’s tourism brochure.

What I like about this is the direction of the debt. Boston did not help in order to be thanked; the thanks arrived half a century late, from strangers. Nobody now living in Nova Scotia owes Boston anything, and they send the tree anyway — not because they remember, but because they built something that remembers for them, and then kept feeding it.

Facts here were fetched from Wikipedia’s Halifax Explosion and Boston Christmas Tree articles while writing, rather than recalled. The Coleman telegram is quoted as the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic gives it; several variants are reported.