Finding Old World Charm on a New World Island

Looming in front of us and not helping my disposition any was a pickup with a camper on the back. I hate to be behind vehicles I can’t see around.

It wasn’t as if this was a traffic jam. It wasn’t. My wife, Joyce, and I had been traveling through some of Canada’s Maritime Provinces, and we were at the car-ferry landing in Caribou, Nova Scotia, waiting to cross over to Prince Edward Island.

I was tapping impatiently on the steering wheel when I hit the horn. It stuck. With both of us pounding and pulling, it stopped after a few seconds. But it sure got the adrenaline going.

“Now, you’ve done it,” Joyce said.

“It was just an accident,” I answered. My wife, who was looking through the windshield, nodded toward the pickup.

“Which,” she said, “you may be about to have.”

A tall man with a red face and muscular arms had climbed down from the truck’s cab and was walking toward us. As he leaned on the driver’s side window frame, the car settled a little in his direction.

“Tourists, right?” he said.

“It was an accident,” I said. “The horn has a hair trigger. No offense.”

He waved my answer aside.

“Just thought you might be trying to get my attention. Nobody honks much around here.”

He leaned in and introduced himself as George Wasson. Then he called out toward the camper, and a lady and two young girls came out. He introduced them as his wife and daughters.

We learned that he was a fisherman, that for aboot (Canadian for about) four months a year he was a lobsterman, and that he and his family had lived on Prince Edward Island for generations. He informed us that God also lived on Prince Edward Island.

His wife asked if there was anything special we should see on the island.

“Just touring the Maritimes,” I said. “We don’t even know what we should look for.”

“Got a map?” Wasson asked. We handed it to him.

“First,” he said, “it helps if you know we call her ‘P.E.I.,’ and that she’s the most beautiful part of Canada.” He spread the map on the hood of the car and we all crowded around while the Wassons pointed out the places we would have to see.

Even the girls got involved. “You’ll have to go to the preserves,” the older girl said. The other agreed. “It’s the most fun. The preserves are just heavenly.”

They told us about Charlottetown, the only city among 30 villages, “the home of Canadian independence,” along with harness racing and lobster dinners. We promised to take a guided tour. There were no arguments about trying the lobster dinners.

“You never get tired of them,” Wasson said.

Then a name was dropped that made no impression on me at all but it seemed like magic to the ladies.

“And you’ll have to go to Ann’s house.”

“Ann? Ann who?”

“Ann of Green Gables,” the fisherman said. Seeing that I still didn’t understand, he lowered his voice and continued.

“She was a fictional character,” he said. Catching his daughter’s disapproving look, he added, “I think. You’ll get to know her before you leave.”

-- -- --

We booked a room at the Linden Lodge, which was really a bed and breakfast place that was also a farm. A dog on a chain in the front yard announced our arrival by barking, jumping in the air and then running in tight circles trying to bite himself on the rump.

Since each circle seemed to shorten his chain, I figured maybe he’d be good for two more guest arrivals and then the back half wouldn’t be able to get away from the front.

Sinclair MacTavish, owner of the inn and the dog, came out and introduced himself.

“Don’t know why he does that,” MacTavish said. “The older he gets the more he acts like people.” He never did explain that one.

The next morning, after breakfast, we got a little history of the island.

Over coffee, MacTavish explained how in 1803 the forefathers and mothers of the island’s population had arrived, having been evicted from their farms during the Highland Clearances and deported to the New World.

The English landholders of the Scottish shires of Ross, Argyle and Inverness and the isles of Uist, Skye and Mull thought they could make more money using the land for sheep rather than tenant farms. So they simply deported the population to the Maritime Provinces.

When we loaded our bags into the car, the dog was growling at his backside and snapping at his hind feet a time or two.

MacTavish told us to take it easy, enjoy the countryside and come back.

We drove through rich farm land and along the ocean. Nearly every house had a yard half-full of lobster traps, and it didn’t look as if anyone was in a hurry.

Our city guide in Charlottetown was in his last year of high school. The tour took an hour and the guide provided a lot of information about Canadian history. Even more about hockey. He was hoping for an athletic scholarship to college.

When I asked him if he was good, he answered: “Still got my teeth.” I took that to mean “yes.”

At the end of the tour he pointed out the Confederation Centre of the Arts. “Every year from June 21 to Oct. 8 there’s ‘Ann of Green Gables,’ a musical show. It makes the ladies laugh and cry.”

“But not us tough men, huh?” I asked.

He shook his head and smiled.

We had scheduled two nights at the Strathgartney Inn because we’d heard that Martha Gabriel, who owned it with her husband, was one of the island’s finest cooks and that the inn was more than 100 years old.

Martha Gabriel gave us the bridal suite.

The inn had that tilt peculiar to many old wooden buildings. And our bedroom had an add-on bathroom that was two steps down from the bedroom level, but I didn’t take much notice of those steps till the middle of the night.

At about 2 a.m. I crept out of bed and tiptoed across the ancient, tilted wood floor so that it wouldn’t creak and wake Joyce. I eased the bathroom door open and stepped through.

It was then that I noticed the two steps down.

Joyce called out: “What just went ‘clunk, clunk, bonk!’ Damn!”

“It was an owl,” I called back.

“Oh, OK.”

When I got back to bed she had fallen asleep again. She would never have remembered it if I hadn’t done the same thing about three hours later. I figure I was in the tub three times that night. And only once to take a bath.

I was equally graceful the following morning at breakfast in the main dining room. All conversation stopped cold when I told Martha Gabriel how much I liked her buns.

There was a moment of stunned silence. “They’re called muffins,” Joyce said.

“Oh, hey, right. Yeah, sorry.”

Gabriel had a second cup of coffee with us after breakfast to tell us we were being moved to another room because there was a newly married couple coming in and she had promised them the bridal suite weeks before. My wife and I were brave about it.

Gabriel gazed out the window. “When you come the next time,” she said, “make it in September or October. Our island puts on her loveliest dresses--rich browns and yellows and reds, and colors you can’t even name--so beautiful it just makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time.”

When we told her we were going to the preserves, she said it was a fine idea and asked us to pick her up some strawberry and wild cherry.

We thought it was a little island humor till we got there. Both of us had been expecting a wild animal park or a game preserve. What we found was a one-story building with a sign saying, “Prince Edward Island Preserve Company.”

“They’ve got to be kidding,” Joyce said.

The owner of the company, Bruce MacNaughton, a young man in his 30s, was wearing a kilt. A couple of years before he had discovered that adding just a little of the right cordial to good preserves can really bring out a jam’s “personality.”

During the next hour, Joyce and I ate jam sandwiches and drank tea.

We also bought a lot of preserves for friends back home and decided that maybe MacNaughton and his preserves ought to at least be declared a national treasure.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You don’t mean that. That’s just the jam talking.”

We drove on a few miles to the house L. M. Montgomery wrote about in her “Ann of Green Gables” books. She’d spent a lot of time there as a child. The visitors were treating the home as if it were a shrine. Joyce gave me a whispered, short version of the story as we toured the house.

Ann, a young girl, with bright red hair and a personality to match, had been adopted--sight unseen--from an orphanage in Nova Scotia by an elderly sister and brother to help with the farm.

The two had expected a boy and, at first, considered sending Ann back to the orphanage. So, much of the plot dealt with the young girl’s efforts to be helpful and make the two of them accept her.

She was more than successful, and everyone who came in contact with Ann was richer for the experience.

I got to know her better that night when we saw the play. It had a full orchestra and first-rate performers.

Obviously, a lot of the people in the audience knew the story. When a character came on stage and announced: “It’s foggy outside. I’m afraid the mainland is cut off from us again,” I almost missed the whole line because of the laughter.

At one point the handkerchiefs were in hand and the sniffling started long before the reason came out in the play.

There were six curtain calls. For a show that’s been running for 24 consecutive seasons, that’s pretty good.

As we left the theater I whispered to Joyce: “Prince Edward Island loves Ann of Green Gables.”

My wife dabbed at her eyes. “And so do I.”

That night’s sleep was almost perfect. We only woke up once when we heard what sounded like a “clunk, clunk, bonk! Damn!” from the vicinity of the bridal suite.

Joyce sat upright in bed. “What was that?”

“The bridegroom go-ith”

“Huh?”

“I think the groom is taking a bath,” I said. “At least I’m fairly sure he’s in the tub.” Joyce muttered and I giggled for a while, but the rest of the night went pretty well.

Martha and Gerald Gabriel saw us off in the morning, exacted a promise that we return and presented me with a bag of assorted breakfast pastry.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll always remember your muffins.”

“Look,” said Joyce, “I’ll talk. You just drive.”

We parted laughing and we’ll probably go back. The Prince Edward Islanders are as nice a bunch of people as you’re likely to find anywhere. As for the island, it’s special.

A lot of the islanders we’d met always seemed to refer to P.E.I. as “she,” and it did seem like there was some kind of an identity crossover.

Ann, an orphan and homeless, had come to the island hoping to find a home and love. She had found them both and wasn’t slow to return the love.

Those early Scots, torn from their homes in the motherland, had come to Prince Edward Island for the same reason. They put everything they had into the effort and, indeed, had found a home.

Did the island herself serve as Lucy Maud Montgomery’s model for “Ann of Green Gables?”

It feels right.

There are first-class hotels and numerous inns and B&Bs; in the area, many with facilities for boating, fishing and swimming. Two of the best:

Linden Lodge, Belfast Post Office, Rural Route No. 3, Lower Newton, Prince Edward Island, Canada COA 1AO, (902) 659-2716. Rates $38-$48 Canadian per night.

Strathgartney Inn, Rural Route No. 3, Transcanada Highway (between Borden and Charlottetown), Prince Edward Island, Canada COA 1CO. Prices $26-$34 Canadian.

To contact Bruce MacNaughton’s preserves factory, officially called the Prince Edward Island Preserve Co., write to Box 1868, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada C1A 7N5, or call (902) 964-2524.

The Prince Edward Island Tourism and Visitor Services can probably do everything for you but pay the bills, and those won’t be bad. The dollar is still pretty strong in all of Canada, including the Maritime Provinces.

For more information, contact your travel agent or Visitor Services, P.O. Box 940, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada C1A 7M5, or call (902) 368-4444.