by ELAINE MANDRONA

Intuitively, feel yourself drawn to a particular spot—a place in the woods, a corner on a city street, a sandy inlet on the shore. Stop, look closely, look all around, 360 degrees.  Write down your experience in 100 words or less.  This is micro-tourism—appreciating an environment on a smaller scale, being in the moment, really looking at what is right before you, and seeing what is  special, unusual or beautiful about it, and then sharing that experience. Everything changes all the time, so no two micro-tourism events are the same. Time of day, time of year, weather, light, the presence or absence of people, sounds, smells, colors, textures, make each experience unique.

Micro-tourism destination Moncton, NB, Walking trail near Ida St.

We go down to the Petitcodiac River on a face-stinging, windy Spring morning right near the new bridge to Riverview and walk under it where a few graffiti artists have made their marks.  The sky is a bright, fresh spring blue, cyan.  We walk down to a rusty orange  footbridge that goes across a muddy brown tributary in an arc.  A study in shades of brown. Ric-rac rails. The ends are under construction–the boardwalk will connect here. We can`t go across. Tide’s in, gentle ripples in the water.  Some tentative bird calls. Sparkles in the distance.  Bent grasses in patterns with the last of the snow.  Footprint and  vehicle patterns in the frozen mud underfoot.  Birds making their songs heard above low pitched traffic noise.  Any day now the  sun’s heat will come.

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Acadians returning from the expusion that began in 1755 found their way back to the Memramcook River, 15 km inland, as the crow flies. Of course, they would not have been flying, they would have been following the winding course of this crooked, tidal river.

by ARCHIE NADON

“Why here? Of all the places returning Acadians could have chosen to begin again, why Memramcook?” Like most contemporary travelers, I stood in a historically significant spot and wondered why this community, built on either side of the Memramcook River, became significant. It certainly wasn’t obvious to someone driving in from Moncton on the new Trans-Canada Highway.

What I should have done, and who knows, maybe I’ll try it someday, was pack up my family —and Elaine’s—and make my way up the American Atlantic coast until I got near the original Acadie and head inland far enough not to be noticed and start looking for something familiar, like marshes, that could be turned into farms. Looked at from this perspective, Memramcook looks like an obvious choice to begin to recreate Acadie. In fact, it’s so obvious, one wonders how they got away with it and were not chased out by troops.

A quick look at the map reminds one of how close to the ocean Memramcook is, a mere 15 km, as the crow flies. But the returnees wouldn’t have been flying. They may have been sailing or rowing up or trudging alongside the Memramcook River, a meandering, tidal river that eventually empties into Chignecto Bay, the bay that borders the original Acadie.

This is the site of Village des LePlatte, the first Acadian village settled after the expulsion. The fact that it became a village in 1766, a mere 11 years after the expulsion began suggests the expulsion had already failed.

They did get away with it, though. The first post-deportation Acadian village, Village des LePlatte dates from 1766, 11 years after the deportation began. I say began, because it was a huge undertaking and took several years, some dating it from 1755-63. Given that the first new village dates from 1766, one can see that if the goal was to completely expel the Acadians, then it had failed before it was even over.

Of course, that’s my view, the view of someone sitting comfortably in a Canadian home in 2009 basking in the safety of a modern democracy where governments apologize for past wrongheadedness like the deportation. Still, it’s hard not to think that Acadie has succeeded after all.  The original Acadians were a people, not a country, distinct from their motherland and from the conquerors. They still are distinct. And they’re millions strong now.

Despite being a gray day, these colorful cottages caught my eye. They were all the same design and were likely built by one developer, but each has something unique about it.

by ARCHIE NADON

What caught my eye as we were driving about the Baie Verte area was a single row of colorful cottages by the sea, just across a lush field of grain. On a different day with a different light the colors of the cottages would have been vibrant, the scene like something out of a children’s storybook with a title like, “Nancy’s stormy day by the sea.” Maybe that’s what our obsession with the ocean is all about, we’re reliving some storybook that was read to us when we were kids.

Funny thing is, I don’t remember ever being read to. I mostly remember me doing the reading and what I remember most about a lot of books were the covers. If it was a good cover then I’d stare at if for a long time, taking it in, not trying to figure out what the story was about, but just enjoying the artwork.

My all time favorite is the only one that I still remember the story vividly, The Five Chinese Brothers. Politically incorrect by today’s standards, to be sure, but I loved that book, and still do. It was written by Claire Huchet Bishop in 1938. Comically, the basic assumption is that since they’re Chinese, you can’t tell them apart. The story doesn’t say they were quintuplets, just that they were brothers. Each of the brothers has a special ability and the one that gets himself into trouble is the one who can swallow the sea. He’s nagged by a little boy to swallow the sea so he can pick the fish up off the ocean floor. The brother relents but the boy won’t come back when signalled, the brother lets go of the sea, the boy drowns and the brother is arrested and condemned to die. The townspeople try several methods of executing the brother, but each attempt is thwarted by the special ability and interchangeability of one of the other brothers.

The cover of my favorite book...as a child. I said as a child, right? It was written in 1938 and I still love it, especially the guy who could swallow the sea. And look how happy these guys are.

When my kids were growing up I made sure I found that book to read to them. I read a significant proportion of the library’s children’s collection to my kids, so I doubt The Five Chinese Brothers had the same impact on them as it did on me. But for me, I couldn’t read it often enough. In fact, I enjoyed reading kids books to them so much I would leave the library with huge armloads of books that I would read over the next three weeks and then go back for another load. The kids enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it just as much.

I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries looking for kids books, sitting in those little chairs, checking out the covers and the stories and being excited about getting home to read them to the kids. And now I spend a lot of time with Elaine exploring the Acadian coast, Acadie, and looking for just about the same thing, good visuals with a delightful story.

The we visited the Bait Verte area was the day before a hurricane that never really hit, hurricane Bil. It gave a socked in feel to the day.

by ARCHIE NADON

The day we explored the Baie Verte area, including Port Elgin, we did no planning. None. We just jumped in the car and headed for the Nova Scotia border like rum runners. We didn’t Google it, look it up in a guide, or ask anyone about it, we just went. Elaine did have her trusty New Brunswick Backroad Mapbook with her, but that was all the preparation we did. We went with no expectations which was a good thing because there wasn’t much there, other than a pickup truck with its transmission on fire.

If we had done a little research (I got most of this history from Port Elgin’s own history page) we would have discovered things of interest. For one, Port Elgin was, at one time or other, Gaspereau Town, Fort Monckton and Fort Gaspereaux. The latter was a fort that was built in 1751 just before the deportation. After the British captured the fort, which had only 19 men guarding it, they renamed it Fort Monckton, after General Monckton, the most misspelled British commander in history. The British gave up on the fort after only a few years because they couldn’t defend it against hostile Mi’kmaqs. There is a cairn with a plaque there now, as you can see in this National Historic Site (scroll down the page about a third).

What I like about the plaque is its neutrality. When I was young, despite being French Canadian growing up in Northern Ontario, I always thought of the British as the only legitimate rulers of Canada. It’s surprising how long it’s taken me to remember to ask, when I read Canadian history, “Who wrote this?’ so that I don’t automatically see things from the British perspective. Yet, there is a third perspective which gets lost more often than not and that’s the Aboriginal perspective, in this case, the Mi’kmaq. That blatant European perspective is obvious in phrases that start like , “Champlain discovered…” Fortunately, it seems that the further we go into the future, the more we learn about the past. Perhaps, someday we really will have a balanced written history of the region, one that includes the First Nations.

The other thing that surprised me was that Port Elgin was once a port. Why the name didn’t tip me off is a subject for some other kind of blog, but it is hard to imagine that this sleepy little village was once bustling with trains, trade and factories, back in the days when the world was less centralized. There was even the obligatory industrialist, this one named Fred Magee, who owned fish and produce processing plants and shipped his Mephisto brand worldwide. His home is now a seniors’ complex.

I’m not sure what all that adds up to. Does it add up to “interesting.” What does make a place “interesting?” Water slides? Wave pool? Huge reconstructed historic sites? All of that, I suppose, depending on your age, depending on why you made the trip. Is Port Elgin interesting? You won’t get much from the Web, most of it coming from the village’s Website. But I’ll know if it’s interesting when I go back and walk the streets looking for traces of Fred Magee or the the old hand-cranked train swing bridge or the Mi’qMak fishing camps or evidence of what used to be the port in Port Elgin.

Read more about the Baie Verte, NB area by clicking here.