We have just arrived at the third of Canada’s maritime provinces, Prince Edward Island. We left Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with their flag in our window, having had it presented to us by our friends in the campground, the Cape Bretoners. They seemed to think it was pretty special for us to drive 5500 miles to visit Cape Breton and have fun talking to them as well. And, it was fun to hear their accents, but their laughter sounds just like ours. This morning was the first day we drove west on this entire trip! We are heading back, but we detoured up to P.E.I. first by putting the RV on the Northumberland Ferries to cross the Northumberland Strait. They don’t charge to get on the island - just to get off. The way they put it is you have to pay “if you decide not to stay!” So, we wanted to take the 75 minute ferry ride over and then we will drive over the Confederation Bridge (and pay) to get back to New Brunswick.
It has been a very wet and stormy day, and the crossing was a little rough, but we had live entertainment to enjoy. A musician played his guitar and fiddle as part of the “music on deck” program for the ferries (or, in this case, inside and out of the rain). He was good! They are great fiddlers up here; lots of Scotch, Celtic, Irish, and other great combinations. The musician was Scotch-Irish. He said, “Half of me wants to get drunk, and the other half doesn’t want to pay for it!” After getting off the ferry, we drove across the island to the north shore, and we are camped in a very nice campground on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Charlottetown, the capital, is in the middle of Prince Edward Island, and we are north, at Cavendish, along the coast.
We will explore and drive the Prince Edward Island National Park, which is along the north coast here, and we’ll probably drive more of the coast to see lighthouses (there are fifty), see some of the stuff about Anne of Green Gables, and pick up some of the fresh produce. This island has a lot of farmland to go with all the water on the island and around us. It has a population of 140,000 with about 40,000 in Charlottetown, so it doesn’t have the big, busy metropolitan feeling I expected, which is nice. It’s small and rural. This entire stay in these three provinces of Canada has felt like we are stuck in the 80’s. Everything seems so dated and old fashioned, including peoples’ attitudes. It’s as if time has passed them by here, and they haven’t modernized in lots of ways (and don’t want to) that we take for granted in the U.S. We have gotten up close to the local culture, and it is very local. Charming, simple, and old fashioned but a little out of touch with the modern world.
Part of that, I think, is the economy. That, too, has passed them. The fishing industry has totally collapsed except for small fishing for lobsters and clams. The coal mines have closed, and they get their coal from the U.S. The next generation leaves home to find careers in the big cities or in the oil sands of Canada. These provinces are charming and full of tourists, but they are like some small towns in the U.S. that have depopulated with just the older generation surviving on the land. Quaint, but sad in a way. The older traditions are kept alive and are even more meaningful to the locals to make sense of a crazy world. Like a famous pottery maker in North Carolina said to me, in the middle of making his pots, “This is a crazy world.” I don’t know exactly what he meant by that, but these people must feel like the tide has gone out and left them stranded, and they are comfortable staying with what they know and understand, but, perhaps they feel they are missing something, like the opportunity to make a choice. It’s covered over in the culture by a great sense of humor and self deprecation, but, under it all lies a sense of plaintiveness.