Once a bustling point of departure, Cape Tormentine is now a quiet cottage and campground spot. Confederation Bridge made it redundant.

by ARCHIE NADON

Should the Canadian Government have replaced the Cape Tormentine ferry service with some other, viable business when it built Confederation Bridge? I think the bridge was a good idea, faster, cheaper, safer, more reliable than a ferry. It was good for Prince Edward Island and good for New Brunswick. My problem is what it did to Cape Tormentine.

I get anxious when communities get abandoned. It’s bad enough when the economy thumps an industry and mills go under, but when there is a conscious decision to eliminate a community’s sole support it seems there should be some compensation. The tourist stop at Cape Jourimain doesn’t qualify as adequate compensation because it can only support a few students and mainly in the summer.

So what can replace a money maker like the ferry? If government knew the answer to this no community would ever hit hard times. However, too many times artificially supported businesses collapses once the support is withdrawn. Industries, it seems, do best when they’re in a community for organic reasons, like where natural resources are abundant or it’s strategically placed, like Moncton is now. That was once the case with Cape Tormentine.

For a little over a century Cape Tormentine was ideally placed to connect PEI with the mainland. The cape stuck out far enough into the Northumberland Strait to make it a quick ferry ride over. Cape Tormentine thrived because those going over to the island had to stop and wait, sometimes for a couple of hours, depending on the season. With the bridge there is no wait, it’s just part of the highway, there is no need to stop and hang out for a couple of hours and spend money.

Things change, I guess. It seems a lame conclusion, but it’s all I’ve got. The new Trans-Canada did similar things to many communities in the province. Many communities that were in the center of things before are in the backwaters now. Motels closed, restaurants are boarded up. I love the new highway, but I always feel a little guilty using it. The next generation won’t feel that, but I always will. Still, I would like to see something new in Cape Tormentine.

More about Cape Tormentine and yet more…Terminal Tormentine

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.