PEI Trip Diary 2005
Thursday, June 23rd
A day of transcontinental travel. We started out from the homestead at nine AM for the Salt Lake City International Airport.
Jason’s had enough disciplinary problems in the last couple of weeks that he was seriously threatened with being left behind with Michele’s parents. He did manage to come on the trip — just barely — but his penalty was that I was assigned as his “travel buddy.” Among other things, that meant that when we dropped Michele and the other kids at the terminal with the luggage, Jason went with me to park the van in long-term parking and take the shuttle bus back. By the end of the trip, Jason had come to realize that being my travel buddy meant missing out on little fun things as he accompanied me on errands. My guess is that this awareness will not translate into improved behavior with an eye toward consequences.
The travel buddy arrangements changed whenever we got to our airplane gate, though. Since Emma is still under two years old, she can fly free as long as she’s on someone’s lap, and that someone has to be a disignated adult. I designated me. On our flight from Salt Lake to Cincinatti, Michele and I were side by side, so Emma conveniently slept from before takeoff until halfway through the flight stretched across our laps.
The leg from Cincinatti to Bangor wasn’t as painless. Thanks to a) no way on delta.com to specify a baby-in-arms and b) the Delta call center in India for fielding such calls, I ended up with my seat assignment being removed from my ticket, and thus had to check in at the gate in Cincinatti to get a seat number. The rest of my family was in rows 8 and 9; me, I had to get shunted to row 18 of an 18-row plane. (The issue was that planes of that model only have extra air masks for infants on the right-hand seats, and delta.com had originally put all of our seats on the left-hand side.) Working with the ticket agents at the gate, I managed to get Alex pulled back to sit beside me. Emma once again fell asleep between getting seated and lifting off. Then through the flight we switched parents and kids around often enough that the flight attendants started cracking jokes about us playing musical chairs.
Arriving in Bangor at 10pm and taking possession of a Grand Caravan with more bells and whistles than a Star Trek runabout, we made our way to our reserved Econo Lodge room (hey, when all you’re planning to do is sleep, you don’t worry about extra frills and decor). Michele stayed there to get the kids ready for bed, while I used a DexOnline map to find the nearest supermarket for some late supper, our first realish meal since McDonald’s (yeah, I know) in the Cincinatti airport.
Let me tell you something about Bangor, or more specifically its suburb Brewer. The sidewalks roll up completely. I’m from suburban/exurban Utah, and I’m still accustomed to such civilized features as 24-hour supermarkets. But old-growth areas like Maine apparently don’t cotton to such newfangled conveniences. All of the supermarkets in the area were closed. In fact, in my wandering (around the tangled streets of a city I don’t know at night), the only establishments which were open aside from motels themselves were about a third of the gas stations and a single bar. Supper ended up coming from the gas station right beside the Econo Lodge; you always find something in the first place you look. Good thing there was a microwave in our motel room to cook the Totino’s personal almost-pizzas. (It was more of an insult to my stomach than usual, as the night before we had had a damned fine New York-style pizza from Tommy Angelo’s, my new favorite local pizzeria.)
Eventually, hungers somewhat sated and frazzled nerves somewhat soothed, we went to bed sometime midnightish.
Friday, June 24th
And happy birthday to me! In an effort not to spend the entire day on the road, I set my alarm for 6am. That’s 4am Utah time, a fact of which my pounding headache persisted in reminding me for most of the day. We took advantage of Econo Lodge’s free breakfast — my kids don’t usually eat more than a single donut or english muffin anyway — and got on the road at about 7:30, only a half hour after my optimistic target hour.
The day before, the kids old enough to appreciate it were amazed at the simple presence of trees on the eastern side of the continent. If you don’t actively work to prevent them, trees grow on their own! Bizarre! in Maine, they got to see it up close, and it fascinated them. It’s especially striking in Maine, which has managed to route I-95 so that almost every town it passes is completely invisible from the freeway; it’s like a trail of blacktop cutting through the pristine habitat, punctuated only by occasional signs with Penobscot placenames.
The border crossing took all of forty-five seconds, with no ID necessary for adults or children. (Just watch; on the return trip, we’ll have to lube up for full body cavity searches). And it’s puzzling how the arbitrary border between Maine and New Brunswick manages to be reflected in the landscape. Maybe it’s just the fact that houses can now front directly onto the road, bringing houses into view that would have been hidden in Maine. But further into the province, the difference becomes unavoidable; thanks to a rocky layer closer to the surface, the trees become shorter and less robust as you head toward the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Back when I lived on the island, the two ferry boat lines were the only means to the mainland aside from airplanes. Since I left, they replaced the western ferry with a causeway, which I drove for novelty’s sake the last time we visited five years ago. But to my calcified mind, the ferry is really the only way to get onto the island. Which meant that, despite having a clear route to the causeway, I went out of my way to cross over into Nova Scotia to catch the ferry from Caribou. It seemed a brief detour as the crow flies; what I failed to realize is that, with no highway in the area, our route would take us through a couple dozen tiny villages and unincorporated communities. Granted, it was a nice change from the impersonal Trans-Canada Highway, and we soon fell into the habit of calling out repeated features at port and starboard; our favorite two were “Lupins!” and “Church!” (either with “Dead people!” or “No dead people!” depending on whether these hundred-year-old chapels dotting the landscape have an accompanying cemetery). But it threw off our travel estimates mightily; our original plans for the 2:45pm ferry evaporated, replaced by a cautious hope for the 4:15. Which we made.
There’s no better way to approach the island than by sea, watching the headland of Nova Scotia pull away to the rear, seeing the bar of atmospheric blue on the forward horizon resolve itself into deep green hills with a stripe of brilliant red rock where the cliffs meet the sea. I’m always sorry that we have to go below and get ready to drive our cars our before the actual landing, before that expertly-maneuvered bump that says, “We’re here.”
The earth of Nova Scotia is grey; in some places, such as on the road leading up to the Caribou ferry, it’s the same color as the asphalt. The plants along the shoreline miles have that faint yellow cast that seems so common in saltwater vicinities. It makes the contrast with the island that much more striking: The soil is a vibrant brick red, and the greenery, well above sealevel and out of the reach of the salt spray, is robust and deep. The island seems as if it has vast reservoirs of life that are too expansive to ever be depleted.
Twenty minutes’ drive along mostly coastal roads brought us to my grandparents’ house, nestled in a small village in the valley of a river. The route from the ferry is not one I had often driven, so there was a sharp demarcation between the vaguely-known roads and the locales so well-remembered it made my teethe ache. I was here from age fourteen to age sixteen; my grandparents’ house is imprinted on me like the sound of my mother’s voice. We were there, and except for my brother Jared who lives in Halifax, we were the first.
And my grandfather is old.
My grandmother is old too, though by eight fewer years according to the calendar. But I expected that. She had had a stroke since the last time I saw here, and the process of rewiring her brain so that she could access her old personality had taken a lot out of her; her movements are still sharp and confident, but almost all of the color has gone from her hair, and she tires easily. I knew all of that.
But Grandad got old without anyone noticing. He was always a round Santa-ish man, but a recent and causeless loss of appetite has melted thirty pounds from him. His hands are thin, and they shake. The skin of his forearm has the texture of wet tissue. His scalp is spotted by age, and by the allergic reaction he’s been having to a new medication. His voice sounds like it’s playing through a bad amp, one which cancels out all the bass tones and leaves only a weak treble. He’s slowed down, not in the sense of losing mental acuity so much as energy; whereas Grandmama can muster the bursts and nap afterward, Grandad simply seems unable to get out of second gear.
It’s one of those sobering realizations — that someone you know is not long for this world, and there isn’t even a specific disease or condition to blame and rail against. It’s just life. Everyone runs out in the end, and sometimes you can see just how much the individual grains trickling through the bottleneck of the hourglass diminish the available reservoir.
Enough of that. We introduced and reintroduced my children to Grandad, Grandmama, and my retired aunt Cathy. Alex is old enough to remember the last trip five years ago, but Jason doesn’t remember them at all, and Sariah was a bump in Michele’s tummy. We took a grand tour of the house, which hasn’t changed at all (and thank all that’s holy for that), and waited for the rest of the family to show up. My sister Bethany is expecting a baby in the next week, and Liz used up all her extra money and vacation days on a knee operation earlier this year, but the other six Shumate siblings came, three of us with spouses and children.
I made a point of giving Michele an anniversary present in front of everyone. We had decided to forego such observances, as the trip was a major expenditure, but twelve years ago today I got my best birthday present ever, and I wasn’t going to give up the chance to crow about that among family. (It was a wristwatch set with antique-style cameo designs, if you must know.)
After a meal of roast beef sandwiches and some hobnobbing, we were led to the cabins that Grandmama and Grandad had rented for us. It’s a more wooded area than the last time we came, and with us renting all five cabins it’s much more private. It’s also home to mosquitoes so big, and in such quantities, that we considered tethering down the children so they wouldn’t get carried away. My mom and some of my sisters are on emough of a health kick that they eschewed any DEET-based bug repellent like OFF!, instead choosing to rely on some citronella-filled spray whose ingredients sounded like they belonged to a cough drop. I tried it once, and after fifteen minutes I checked the label again to see if the main ingredient weren’t sugar water. Cancer in forty years, vs. relative comfort now? It’s Deep Woods OFF! for me! We kept a large can right outside the cabin door, and used almost all of it in a week.
Our cabin has one large bedroom with two double beds, plus a fold-out couch in the living room/kitchen. Mom had already stocked our fridges with enough food for tomorrow’s breakfast, but I decided to go back into Murray River for some late snacks and a few other goodies. I then discovered that Murray River has lost both of the grocery stores it had had back in my day. Several of the old tourist shops had also closed up. I don’t know that it shows a general downturn in the island’s economy; it could just as easily be a symptom of economic consolidation, in which a few larger stores and tourist centers are pulling revenue away from the scattered hamlets. Whatever the reason, I was glad that the convenience store attached to the one remaining gas station was open. In addition to lunch meats and chips, I brought back a few Canada-only chocolote bars, like Crispy Crunch (like a Butterfinger with les butter and more finger) and Crunchie (foam toffee covered in chocolate).
Saturday, June 25th
Welcome to the first day of complete Circadian confusion. Not a one of us, from baby to parent, knew when we should be waking or sleeping. It was a good day to have nothing scheduled; we puttered around at the cabins, then took our kids for Nathan’s Remembry Tour. My family lived in two houses on PEI within a mile of each other; one of them is now owned by a grown-up neighborhood kid, and we walked around the outside with me pointing out the details that none of my children cared about, like where the garden used to be. The second house (which we had converted from a closed grocery store, and which had a gift shop at the front for the first couple of years we lived there) is now a restaurant serving traditional island fare — cheeseburgers, french fries with poutine gravy, and fried clam strips. (I was disappointed to see no scallops on the menu.)
We also drove by my old elementary school, and stopped to visit with the Coopers, who run the grocery store across from our first house. (Yes, I realize how often grocery stores figure into this narrative. Food is the staff of life.) It’s a tradition; if you make it back to the island, you have to stop by Cooper’s. We had wanted to invade en masse, but couldn’t figure out a schedule to get all of us by there at once. Of note there in the store: A four-foot section of shelf devoted to Mexican food — hard tortillas, taco seasoning, refried beans, etc. That doesn’t seem significant until you realize that that stuff simply did not exist here when we lived across the street. Mom had to make her own corn tortillas, and have infrequent family members visiting from the states bring a few packets of taco seasoning. She would have KILLED for this selection.
Speaking of Mom, when we got back to the cabins, she dispensed some of her pottery to those assembled. She had been an amateur potter twenty years ago, but hadn’t had much chance to pursue it; this last Christmas, we kids all pitched in to buy her a pottery wheel. She’s running out of space at home to store what she’s making, so she brought assorted bowls, cookie jars, and honey pots for all of us to pack carefully and take home.
After that, we went to play at Fantasyland. That’s the name of it. That’s not what the signs say, but that’s the name of it. Sometime about fifteen years ago, the Militant Disney Lawyer Corps found out that an obscure government-run park in a corner of Prince Edward Island had the same name as a segment of its much-vaunted Disneyland, and dispatched a cease-and-desist letter. The Canadian government, being Canadian, didn’t do the good and right thing (i.e., sending back a letter saying, “Bite me, bite me, bite me”), and instead caved and changed the name to “King’s Castle.” But it will forever be Fantasyland to me, and the Mouse may bite me, bite me, bite me. It’s nothing terrific; there are some forest trails in which fairytale characters of painted concrete are posed, and a dozen metal playground units with slides and ladders in various configurations. But it was always the family’s favorite place to go and simply play, instead of go and pay for the privilege of being entertained. I have pictures of my fifth birthday party there.
Did I mention that the Mouse may bite me, bite me, bite me?
Dinner was in Montague, the nearest town of any size (population roughly 2000), at a pizza restaurant that was surprisingly empty for the weekend dinner hour and didn’t seem to know how to serve a crew as large as ours, even with reservations. Then back to the folks’ house for ice cream.
I also took my kids on a tour through the old Toy Factory. Since before I was born, Grandad had made wooden toys in the old barn on the property. Then he had built on and opened a shop to sell them. Then he started wholesaling and shipping them out all over before he decided that that kind of mega-business just made him tired, and he wanted it to be a post-retirement hobby again. I worked for him every summer of my teenaged years on the island, when he had scaled the business back to selling just in his own shop again. When I was nineteen, after my family had moved, I came back to help him pack up the patterns and some of the equipment to sell to a new entrepeneur; Grandad was just getting too tired to keep up with a daily retail business. He still makes toys down there for the grandchildren with the equipment he kept. I showed my kids all the machines I used to work on, from the bandsaw (which gave me the distinctive scar on my right index finger) to the various sanders to the drill press. Sariah was fascinated with the sawdust and tried to clean off all of the equipment. “Give it up,” I told her. “There will always be more sawdust.”
In all, it was a long and eventful day, but with more than a little undercurrent of wistfulness. I have always maintained that the island is a great place to visit. It’s also dead boring to live there. At least it was for me. I would be ashamed to characterize my childhood as “unhappy”; there are people whose histories with abuse and trauma more fittingly deserve that title. But I was very alone in my interests and pursuits, and never felt that I had any friends. When I come back to the island in a glow of nostalgia, I can never forget that I’m experiencing Good Old Days Syndrome, and on those rare occasions when the fancy of moving back to the island seizes me, it doesn’t take much to remind me that this was not a life that I actually liked, nor would I especially like it again (even with satellite TV and high-speed internet and all of those other modern wonders to help me connect to a community outside the salt-of-the-earth types in the rural vicinity). And I wouldn’t want my children to feel as lonely and isolated as I did.
And the island seems to be atrophying in some way. The boarded-up stores in Murray River and Montague say something about a lifestyle in transition. I don’t know if tourism is down, but I do know that an economy built so heavily on tourism without the “vacation destination” characterization of a tropical isle is precarious at best. PEI seems to be waiting for something, and doesn’t know what. And the frequent for-sale signs outside hundred-year-old homes show that not everyone has the patience for that kind of waiting.
Sunday, June 26th
Overnight, the final party showed up: Big Jason (so called to distinguish him from my Jason). His relationship to the rest of us requires explanation of a not-terribly-public nature, so suffice it to say that he’s older than I am, and that neither he nor we knew he was one of us until just before the last family reunion. He came with his fiance Michelle (thus upping the name confusion quotient immensely) and her two daughters. They’re the sole non-Mormons of those assembled, so their late arrival gave them a perfect excuse to miss Church Sunday morning.
The Montague branch of the LDS Church averages less than thirty people attending each Sunday; it has ever since our family left eighteen years ago. In a lay ministry like ours, every member is called upon to speak sooner or later on Sunday, and in a small branch that means that everyone ends up speaking at least once a year. So whenever visitors come, we’re immediately tapped to speak. Grandad, who is First (and only) Counsellor to the Branch President, asked me and Dad to fill in along with a local boy who was giving his first-ever talk.
I didn’t write out a complete text as I did a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t have anything to splice in here. But it is a topic which interests me (which is why I was able to pull a talk together on it given two days’ lead time and a couple of scrawled notes on notebook paper), so it will probably end up as a separate post around here sooner or later. Here’s the teaser: The Lord is not the Air Force. (Dad had an even easier time preparing; he has given literally hundreds of talks in the past few years in his various leadership calling, and has all of them stored in full on his PDA. So it was just a matter of browsing through, picking one he felt like giving, and putting bookmarks in a few scriptures.)
Not long after, we got the telephone call which precipitated the first full-scale crisis of the vacation. We had left Grandmama’s and Grandad’s phone number with exactly two people: Our immediate next-door neighbor, and the mother of the kid down the street who was taking care of our pets. The latter called, and left a message with Grandad that our turtle had gotten loose and was lost.
This was Alex’s turtle Toonie, which he had gotten scant days after our last PEI reunion five years ago. He was fresh-hatched at the time, and no larger than a Canadian “Toonie” coin, which is where he got the name; he had grown to probably a good six inches from stem to stern of his shell. Having him disappear would not only be devastating to Alex, but it would have been almost physically impossible. The tank we left Toonie in in the back porch was too high for him to crawl out of; plus, we had a window screen that we kept on top of the tank to keep junk from blowing in or cats attacking. So Toonie would have had to have gained the proportionate strength and abilities of a spider, he would also have needed opposable thumbs and well-toned biceps to lift the screen off.
I called back as soon as I could and talked to the kid. According to him, he left the cover on the tank on Saturday, and when he came by Sunday morning, it was off and the turtle was gone. His family combed the back yard, but couldn’t find him anywhere. It was his considered opinion that Toonie had been stolen.
Well, crap.
Michele and I quickly discussed whether we should withhold this news from Alex, but decided to let him know for a couple of reasons. For one thing, that was the point of leaving our number with anyone: So we would know if anything happened at home. For another, would there ever be a better time for Alex to fall to pieces over the loss? And for a third, if we withheld the news from him, he wouldn’t not only feel the grief over his missing and presumed dead pet, but he would also feel deeply betrayed by us. So we told him.
He did not take it well. He cried in our cabin for a good hour, and afterward was hyperventilating so much he almost fainted. Eventually, as the afternoon wore on and we had activities around the cabins, he participated, but there was still a black pall over him.
One of those other activities was the Decorating of the Boats. Granddad had made enough wooden lobster boats for every child, grandchild, and great-grandchild, and we spent time over the afternoon decorating them with crayons and colored pencils. For what? Tell you later.
Later in the afternoon, it was with great relief that Cathy drove over from the folks’ house (no phones in the cabins and no cell service) with the news that the OTHER neighbor had called; he had found our turtle and didn’t know what to do with him.
I got over there, called him back, thanked him profusely, and offered his four-year-old daughter the job of caring for the turtle and the crabs for the rest of our trip for ten bucks. When he protested that money wasn’t necessary, I told him, “Look, my next call is going to be to fire the kid we were paying to do this, so if she’ll do the job, she gets the pay.”
And no, I didn’t accuse the first kid of pulling the turtle out of the tank and playing around before wandering off in a stupor. I do need to maintain good relations with the family. But he’s not our go-to person for pet care.
(Sunday morning was also when I discovered a cruel Canadian mind game: Their Mountain Dew has no caffeine. It’s just a vaguely orange-flavored soda. That explains, I guess, the “Mountain Dew Energy Drink” I saw in Canadian stores. I had expected it to be “real” Mountain Dew fortified with taurine and guarana and all those trendy-tasting herbs; instead, it just meant that this was Mountain Dew complete with the caffeine God intended it to have.)
Monday, June 27th
When all of us were planning the trip and discussing what we might want to do as a group, my suggestion was this: How about we take on some sort of maintenance project around their house or property that many hands could render light work. What came up, after further consultation, was loading wood into the basement from the outside stacks for the woodburning stove. Monday morn found all of us strapping young descendants and in-laws, including my two boys, forming a line and working up a good sweat.
Afterward, I gathered up Michele and the girls (the latter of whom were feeling a bit sickly — someone’s always got to get sick, any time we come) and headed to the nearest town of any size: Montague, population roughly 2,000. We did a wee bit of shopping in an honest-to-goodness supermarket, picked up a few souvenir T-shirts, and allowed Alex to discover that he loves the Aero chocolate bars more than just about anything.
Then it was back to the cabins for a burdgeoning Shumate reunion tradition: The free-for-all lobster binge. We don’t go to those lobster supper restaurants, no sir, where you get a single lobster and huge gobs of coleslaw (truly a vile, vile substance). See, Grandad knows a bunch of local lobster fishermen, so he can arrange for them to pull out a bunch of larger “canner” lobsters — those that are a fraction of an inch too small to send to the restaurants. They then boil them in sea brine on their way back to shore, and send the mess of them our direction. And we eat in massive quantities without rationing or guilt.
Last time we were here, Alex hadn’t been able to bring himself to eat something that looks like a bright red cockroach. This time he gave it an honest try, and discovered that he quite enjoyed it. Jason liked the idea of playing with the carcasses, but not of eating the meat. Sariah, though, dove right in and ate plentiful amounts. I’d say that she’s generally fearless, but you should have heard her scream when she found an inch-long ant climbing up the front of her shirt.
Immediately after lunch, I took Alex and Jason over to the Toy Factory for a more hands-on tour. Each had decided that the decorations they had put on their boats were simply all wrong, so I had to sand off their old designs and scrounge up some drawing tools for them to redesign completely before the boat race. They say that the sense of smell is most closely linked to the deep, reptilian part of the human brain, and the smell of pine dust fresh off the sanders has hooks deep in my psyche.
And then the sequel to the Coloring of the Boats: The Racing of the Boats. We took the whole fleet to the short bridge over part of the dam on the Murray River where we had swum as kids, and dropped them off the side where the overflow makes a shallow but swift set of rapids. With a few of us positioned at the bottom, we not only were able to determine the winners of several heats, but we didn’t even lose any. The calm side of the dam was always a favorite freshwater swimming spot for my family, the water temperature in June is still chilly, so the kids just splashed around at the edge for a while.
The late afternoon was taken with a bit more shopping (or browsing, really), and then dinner at a local fried food take-out, complete with clam strips and scallops. Let me tell you about Islanders: They love to do things the Island way. The Island way is sloooooow. We got to the take-out just after six, intending to be on our way by seven. We didn’t even get the food until then. It was good, sure, but gulping it down in a mad dash just isn’t satisfying.
The rush was because we were late for clamming; everyone was assembling and leaving from the cottages at seven. It was only due to a) my vague knowledge of some little piddly turns in the road, b) my amazing map-reading and extrapolating abilities, and c) the plain fact that I rock that I was able to track them down and not deprive my children of the consummate Island experience.
There are two kinds of clams you can dig up on the Island shorelines: softshells, which live in firmer sand right up near the top of the tide and which are collected by digging up the sand at low tide where their little blowholes are visible and knocking them out of the sand; and quahaugs, which live a little further out in siltier sediment and are found by stepping around in the mud and feeling for lumps with your feet. We were after the latter, and we managed to get about three buckets full in forty-five minutes. I’m not a hunter, and I’m not a fisherman, but there’s just something magical about going out into uncultivated land and simply pulling food out of the ground. It has nothing to to with any of that “man vs. animal” falderall (and “man vs. clam” scarcely sounds sporting, anyway) and it has nothing to do with communing with nature and finding your place in the great circle of life. It’s simply this: There’s free meat! Lying around for the taking!
Tuesday, June 28th
The day started with a pancake breakfast, after which Michele went shopping with my mom and sisters while I drifted around the cabin with the littler kids. Aside from the vision-obscuring clouds of mosquitos, the cabins really were in a beautiful location, and we explored footpaths through the woods and played in the sandbox of the simple little playground area. Emma’s getting old enough to know when she’s tired; in the middle of running up and down the lane looking at bugs, she turned to me with her lower lip hanging out and said, “Lie down.” Five minutes later, she was asleep, lying on my chest on the couch in the cabin. I tried to have a nap too, but nobody would leave me alone long enough for sleep to really sink in.
Lunch was comprised mainly of the clams we’d gathered the day before, supplemented by burgers and salads for those who just couldn’t handle an all-mollusk meal. (The brothers-in-law all gamely tried a few, but mostly stuck to landlubber food.) Alex had a few; Jason turned up his nose at them (though he collected a few shells); and Sariah, true to form, had three plates full of them.
Once we had decimated the clams, we packed into cars to drive off to Basin Head. The south shore of the island is largely edged by red sandstone cliffs, which are picturesque but don’t lend themselves well to comfortable beaches. The north shore, on the other hand, has beautiful white sand beaches, but often tends to have colder water temperates, being exposed directly to the north Atlantic. Somewhere in between is Basinhead, which has a fairly protected beach with “singing sand” — the silicates often make a squeaking sound as you dash through. The air temperature dropped precipitously at the seashore to 75º (and thanks for a van with a digital thermometer, as Celsius means nothing to me anymore), and the water itself was so frigid that not even the heartiest of us wandered out past waist level. That’s okay; beaches are still fun without swimming, so we built sandcastles and buried various individuals to their necks until heading home.
We capped the day with a big dinner of my grandmother’s lobster chowder. And Grandad handed out wooden cars to everybody. Get decorating!
Grandmama and Grandad also handed out photo albums to each of us, along with a manila envelope containing all the pictures of us or from us that they had collected over the decades. There was something disturbingly final about that gesture. It was an acknowledgement that they’re not going to be around very much longer.
Wednesday, June 29th
Prince Edward Island mud is red. Bright red. And it stains. We found that out years ago, when I sat my five-year-old butt down in a mud puddle. The all-cotton tighty-whities under my pants retained an orange-pink stain until the end of their days, despite my mother’s best efforts.
Since then, a couple of entrepeneurs have found a way to exploit that staining property for the tourist trade; they dye shirts and other garments and sell them under the brand names of Dirt Shirt and P.E.I. Mud Shirt. Naturally, we’ve all been kicking ourselves for years that we let somebody else come up with the money-making scheme. As my brother Spencer put it, “You were literally sitting on a figurative gold mine.”
All of which is background to my jaunt Wednesday morning to the eastern edge of the Island, to climb down the cliffs to where the clay leaches out of the runoff sand and gather it up for staining our own T-shirts. It took me a while, not only because I’m not as skillful at climbing cliffs as I once was, but because it was also an impressive tableau: The sun low in the eastern sky, the lobster boats motoring off from the harbor to their fishing grounds, the salt breeze pushing in to shore. Human culture on the Island often seems stagnant to me, but the beauty of the place often threatens to overwhelm my misgivings and drag me back. When I got back, I had to warn Michele to prevent me from buying a newspaper and checking out local jobs.
Shirt dying was, well, messy. You truly have no idea how rich and persistent the color of the clay can be. After getting rid of the worst of the sand and mixing it with water to the proper consistency, it was as smooth and bright as poster paint, and it got all over EVERYTHING. We each did designs on our shirts (THERE’S something you don’t get from those Dirt Shirt opportunists!) and left them on picnic tables to set while we went back to Fantasyland.
A raincloud met us there, so we grabbed shelter under playground equipment. It was refreshing, to tell the truth; at the very least, the mosquitos stopped biting while the rain was falling. And then, on some very puddly slides, we had wooden car races. (Sariah won!) We played a little longer, getting good and soggy, before heading back to the cabins. An utterly precious moment: On the way out, Michele told Sariah, “Tomorrow we’re going home.” There was a full two-second silence as the enormity of that sunk in, then:
“NOOOOOOO!!!”
The afternoon was unscheduled. There’s a danger of overcautiousness on the last full day of vacation; you don’t want to spend your time on something that’s less than completely fitting, and in guarding your time you might end up wasting it doing nothing but puttering around. We almost did that; instead, we went over to the folks’ house, just to hang around. It was time well spent; there hadn’t been much quiet time to spend up until then. I showed the kids some of the artifacts Grandad had picked up in his Army travels, and we looked at some old photographs I had never seen before of Grandad as a teen and a young twentysomething. It was some simple get-to-know-you time, and it was much needed.
And then the final soiree. They had rented the upstairs of a local restaurant for a nice dinner, complete with toasts and multiple forks. (Not that nice, mind you; half of us were still in shorts.) It was also a combined birthday party for those of us grandkids — Laura, Erin, and me — who have June birthdays. And afterward, we cleared the tables and… square-danced.
No, seriously. It was my parents’ idea. They’ve taken up square-dancing since they’ve become almost empty-nesters, and so at their urging, Aunt Cathy managed to find a local caller for rent who lived right in Murray River, even though he and Grandad had never met (a statistical impossibility, I would have thought). I was incredulous that they’d been able to find a caller on Prince Edward Island, but Mom proudly told me that there are square-dancers all over the world, communicating in little networks and over the internet and such. Sorta like the Freemasons without the cool handshakes, I guess.
Anyway. I never got to dance with Michele because Emma was feeling needy and had to be held by one or the other of us, but I did get to dance with Sariah, who had even less idea what she was doing than most of us and was perfectly happy to skip around the promenade.
And thus the last full day ended.
Thursday, June 30th
Spent the morning packing up. I wasn’t in a particular hurry — we only had to get as far as Bangor by nightfall — so we packed and sorted and wrapped and such almost until noon. We were the only people leaving then (most everyone else was going home on Friday), so we had center stage as we gave hugs and bade farewells.
Then we went back over to the folks’ house for a bit. For the whole week, we had meant to show them a CD of photos and videos of the kids, including Sariah’s dance recital, but hadn’t found a moment before now. While Michele showed off our children, I vaccuumed the sand out of the rental van.
And then… well, we said goodbye. Semi-permanently. There will never be another full-scale family reunion like this, and it’s anybody’s guess how long my frail grandparents will be around. I told them we’d try to get back for a visit in the next couple of years, but who knows if that’s soon enough? And they’re planning on selling the big, beautiful house that’s been theirs since before I was born, and which is as much “home” to my mind as any other place; the tall stairs are getting to be too much for an octagenarian and a septagenarian. So even if we make it back before either or both die, something precious will be missing from the equation.
As Grandmama said, fighting back tears, that’s what makes a facet of the gospel so meaningful: It’s not just individuals who live on after death. It’s families. And any separation we experience here on earth need only be temporary.
When we left, in early afternoon, others of my siblings and their spouses had arrived, and were making themselves wooden toys in the factory. It had been many, many years since those machines were all humming at once, and it was a cheerful sound to leave by.
In the interests of time, we drove off the island on the Confederation Bridge instead of taking the ferry, and used a different route through New Brunswick than we had coming, on the advice of several relatives. The mood was very different than it had been as we first drove to the island, trying simply to put miles behind us and reach our destination. This time, we could almost feel the maritimes fall away from us the further we got from the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Despite my pessimism, crossing the border back into Maine was no more time-consuming than the other direction had been. We took a route across the center of Maine that had no turns, no intersections, and very few cabins stuck here and there in the woods, while listening to a local college station play a long selection of old Louis Armstrong recordings. It was perfect decompression.
Then another motel stay, two long plane rides, and we were home. The house was intact, the pets were healthy, the lawn was mostly green, and our mosquito bites could start to heal.
How lovely, I think I would like to visit there for a week or two just melt into the pines and sea with no distractions hear myself breathe and leave before I feel myself getting bored. It’s been too long since I’ve seen the ocean.
I stumbled on your blog today and thoroughly enjoyed it! Are you a professional writer?
Well, sorta. I mean, no, I don’t do this for a living. Yet. But I do write quite a bit, and I’m trying to crack into several paying genres.
Whenever anyone asks me what I do and I reply with my day job, my wife (bless her heart) always comments, “But that’s just what he does for money. He’s really a writer.”
Came across your blog because I was trying to describe the wonder that is Fantasyland to my boyfriend and was looking for pictures. Imagine my suprise when I discovered that you lived in my house! Well, not really, as I live in the big city now, but my family still lives in the place across from Coopers.
I enjoyed your blog. It makes me feel nostalgic for the Island. I think I had a more positive childhood experience there than you did, but I also know that I romanticize it. And your pictures and stories of eating lobster don’t help!
Really? In this one?
Cool. I’m trying to figure out the time frame for your residency; this last summer, it was one of the grown Kinney boys (from the family that used to rent across the road) who lived there.
[...] actually been back since Thursday pm. As is my habit on such trips, I had planned to keepa trip diary to be presented here afterward. Unfortunately, this time I [...]