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From my sister's window, in the north end of Halifax, the water of the harbour in the early morning is white.

It is covered in ice-ghosts. The air is about minus 18 C, the water slightly warmer, so mist rises in wispy spirals, giving the impression of waves or dunes of pure cold.

To my right, the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge, which we still call the Old Bridge, looks black against the sky. To my left, on the other shore, the three giant striped chimneys of the power plant. The vapour they give off is densely coiled.

Right in front of me are the long hangars of the shipbuilding yards. Cranes and the turrets of ships rise from behind their roofs. Across the harbour sits a long grey warship; next to it four black submarines bask in the winter sun. The streets are deserted. No ships seem to be coming and going. Every few hours a siren wails, signalling a shift change at the shipyards, but always making me think that some disaster is being foretold.

All in all, it is not a welcoming place.

This is almost exactly where the great explosion of 1917 took place: just behind the house, at the top of the hill, is the concrete monument to the victims.

There is a little strip of shops within walking distance, but every time I come here it's Sunday or Christmas or some other medieval thing, so they are always closed. Last Monday I thought I would walk to them and check out the pastry shop and the antique shop. They were both closed.

This was later explained to me: Because they are now allowed to open on Sundays, a lot of shops close on Mondays. Ah, Halifax: You are going to take your own time in adapting to the modern world.

Well, fair enough. You are not going to get unnecessarily excited about shopping, what with the war on, and soldiers in green camouflage gear at the airport and waiting for the bus on the ravaged emptiness of Gottingen Street.

The only traffic around here is the steady to and fro from the gates of the naval base. I have the feeling that if you asked any of the pink-faced guys in their green parkas, waiting expressionless under the bridge for their bus, what they thought of the cold, they'd say, "We've seen worse."

The whole North End seems to give off this stoicism. We've seen worse. We should be quite glad that the steel bridge is still standing: After all, it's supposed to be cursed, since it was built on Mi'kmaq sacred ground. The first two or three bridges fell down. (Yes, right on the site of the damn explosion.) We've seen worse.

I watched the Superbowl with my family and my sister's friends on a big screen at a perfectly North End joint, the Lion's Head Tavern. The point of this event -- and I remember this convention from almost any gathering in a pub from my youth -- is to be as funny as possible, all the time.

There is a particular style of Halifax humour: It consists of saying something faintly earnest that just might possibly be taken seriously, and seeing how many people can be taken in. The object is to make clear that there is very little that isn't funny, if said in the right way. It is a humour I have also found among Eastern Europeans who have lived under communism.

It is also essential to tease your friends as much as possible, to promise to put drinks on their tab when they're out for a smoke, to ensure that they are aware of just how many chicken wings they've consumed, to promise that you will be sleeping on their couch tonight and will be needing that sweatshirt they're wearing.

All this is to disguise a deep kindness. In this bar, the servers know your name. (This is not an easy feat, as there are a lot of Steves.) The teasing alternates with handshakes that seem heartfelt. There were door prizes given out throughout the game, mostly promotional hats and shirts, through lottery draws, and Steve the bartender was quite concerned that almost everybody received one. He even waited for parties of smokers to return from the cold before making draws.

If something bad were really to happen -- as God knows it so frequently has happened here, in this fortress town, a place that often, especially when it's 18 below, feels like a steel machine for channelling youth out into the slate North Atlantic -- I would feel that I could expect these people, even those I had just met, to look out for me. It's what they do here.

I have a feeling they would smile and say, "We've seen worse," and get down to cleaning up the mess. I feel safe among them, and unafraid.