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 However, too many times artificially supported businesses collapses once the support is withdrawn.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

Monument Lefebvre in Memramcook, NB, was part of the first Acadian university. My own Catholic education didn't get beyond elementary school. The Catholic high school was all boys, which wasn't for me.

by ARCHIE NADON

I didn’t go to the Catholic high school in our town, Scollard Hall, for two reasons: first, it cost money and we had none; and second, no girls. It was an all boys school and that was taking religion too far for me. Besides, a mile from my home and half the distance to Scollard Hall a brand new, ultra modern, mega school had just been built and we were to be the first full year class. There were 1,300 students which meant at least 650 girls which in turn meant my Catholic education came to an abrupt halt.

But that was in bustling, railroad center,  booming North Bay, ON, in a primarily anglophone community. That wasn’t in a fishing community like Cocagne or Escuminac, NB, where decent education wasn’t about choosing which of five high schools you wanted to attend, but about deciding to go to high school at all. And if you made the choice to be educated, you most certainly were going to be educated by priests or nuns within the Catholic religion.

What I’m getting at here is that as a teenager I had choices, lots of choices, as to how I wanted to be educated and in what language and I didn’t have to leave home to do it. The worst case scenario was a 20 minute bus ride uptown. However, if I had been born twenty years earlier and 1,500 km east, things might have been different. Anything like higher education—namely, high school—meant leaving home, leaving your family and friends, impoverishing your family twice, once by the tuition and board and once by your not being there to help fish or farm.

Lots has changed. Louis Robichaud, New Brunswick’s premier during the sixties, made basic education for Acadians a reality. It sounds third world, I know, but when Elaine and I chatted with a friend of hers, Jeannette Depres, who grew up near our cottage in Cocagne, she talked about the poverty of the Acadians in her time. When I asked what made the difference she blurted out, “Education.” I, with my five high schools to choose from, thought I was listening to a turn of the century story but that story would have been mine had I grown up in the Acadian peninsula.

Now, everywhere you drive in Acadie you find large, modern schools for k-12 and now there are remote campuses of the community colleges as well as the University of Moncton. I work with a young woman who learned 3D modeling  at the Campus de la Péninsule acadienne in Shippigan, traveling the 40 minutes from her home in Tracadie-Sheila every day. Incidentally, good roads was the second major factor Jeannette said improved the lives of Acadians in her time.

I wonder how many young Acadians understand how far their people have come in such a short time. When I hear Acadians of the generation before mine talk about what they had to do to get an education, I know I probably would have gone to work at the railroad, like my father did.

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.

Elaine on the boardwalk at Cape Tormentine. Cape Tormentine is where the ferry to PEI used to leave from. Now it doesn't leave from anywhere. There is a huge bridge.

We have had a cottage in the area since 2001. Our first trip here was to the Bouctouche Bay Inn. It was a cold fall but the trip was wonderful and romantic enough for us to look for a cottage to rent for the following summer. We found one in Caissie Cape and then from our Caissie Cape base we started to look for a cottage of our own. Months later we came upon a deal in Breau Village we couldn’t pass up and we’ve been here ever since.

Our first journalistic tour took us to Indiantown, FL, to visit Mayan refugees from Guatemala. We made that trip in a tiny red Toyota Tercel Elaine’s father left her. It was Elaine, me and my son, Christopher and we had a lot of fun talking to people, taking photos and recording voices.

We’re getting back to that with our exploration of Acadie. We’ve done a rough sketch starting at Baie Verte where New Brunswick meets Nova Scotia and, so far, we’ve gotten as far as Miscou with our picture taking. Our work these last few months have been as much about exploring “us” as it has been about exploring Acadie. We’re away from each other during the week these days and we need to reconnect. Somehow, the two are inextricably intertwined. This isn’t just fun. We need to do this.