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Red Island

Behind Bulletproof Glass

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By Ed Staskus

   I should have known better when I told the young woman on the other side of the Walgreen’s bulletproof drive-thru window that I needed the kind of coronavirus test that would get my wife and me into Canada and she breezily said, “For sure, this is it.” She was a trained pharmacy technician, but made up her harebrained reply, assuring me all was well even though she didn’t know what she was talking about. We found out three days later trying to cross the border at Houlton, Maine into Woodstock, New Brunswick.

   Getting a straight answer from the young can sometimes be like trying to give fish a bath. They often have a quippy answer for everything. Their answers are in earnest no matter what they’re asked and no matter their wealth or lack of knowledge. Whenever they are fazed by anything they say, “Oh, whatever.” 

   They say whatever they want when they are behind bulletproof glass.

   My wife and I were going to Prince Edward Island, where we didn’t go the summer before because of the 19 virus. Canada closed itself up tight as a clam in March of that year and didn’t reopen for Americans until early August of this year. Once we heard the opening was going ahead, we got in touch with the folks who operate Coastline Cottages in the town of North Rustico on PEI and let them know we were coming on August 21st and staying for three weeks.

   The cottages are on a hillside, on land that has been in the Doyle family going on two hundred years. A park road cut through their farm when it was built in the 1970s, but unlike other landowners they didn’t sell their remaining acreage to the state, so it sits snug inside the National Park. There are several homes on the bluff side of the eponymous Doyle’s Cove, some old and some brand new. In one way or another every one of them houses a homegrown north shore family, except for Kelly Doyle, who has lived on the cove the longest and lives alone.

   It takes two and half days to drive from Lakewood, Ohio to Prince Edward Island. At least it did every other year we had driven to the island. This year it took us six and half days.

   When we got to the Canadian border the black uniform in the booth asked for our passports. We forked them over to the tall trim guard, forearms tattooed, a Beretta 9mm on his hip. He was young and just old enough to be on this side of Gen Z. He looked our documents over and asked where we were from and where we were going.

   “Cleveland, Ohio,” I said. Although we live in Lakewood, an inner ring suburb, we always tell red tape we live in Cleveland. No one has heard of Lakewood. Everybody has heard of Cleveland, for good or bad. At least nobody calls it “The Mistake on the Lake” anymore. 

   I almost preferred the insult. “It keeps the riff raff rich away,” I explained to my wife. “There is no need for Cleveland to become the next new thing. They will just use up all the air and water and our real estate taxes will go ballistic. On top of that, we would end up knee deep in smarmy techies with their cheery solutions to all the world’s problems.”

   We handed our ArriveCAN documents over. We handed our virus inoculation cards over. We had both gotten Moderna shots. We handed our virus tests over, proving we had both tested negative.

   “You are cutting it close,” the border guard sniffed, shuffling everything in his hands like a deck of cards. I was hoping he wouldn’t turn a Joker up.

   The negative test had to be presented at the border within 72 hours of taking it. We were there with an hour to spare, although it would have been two hours if we hadn’t had to wait in line in our car for an hour. We had driven a thousand miles. It was tiresome but waiting in an idling car wasn’t any more skin off our noses.

   It started to smell bad when a second border guard stepped into the booth and the two guards put their heads together.

   “The antigen tests you took aren’t accepted in Canada,” the Joker said. “It has to be a molecular test. You can go ahead, since you’re from Canada, but your wife has to go back.”

   I was born in Sudbury, Ontario, and have dual citizenship, although I only carry an American passport. I couldn’t tell if he was being serious, so I asked him to repeat what he said. He repeated what he said and gave us a turn-around document to return to the USA when I told him I wasn’t ready to abandon my wife.

   We went back the way we had come, just like two of the six cars ahead of us, although we had to wait in line at the American crossing for an hour. Once we returned to Maine, we found out we could get the molecular test, but it would be a week-or more before we got the results. Nobody we talked to, not even the Gods of Google, was any help. A friendly truck driver mentioned New Hampshire was faster, only taking a day or two.

   The truck driver was stout, bowlegged, wearing a Red Sox baseball cap, a two-or-three-day growth of beard on his face, with a small shaggy dog to keep him company on the road. He wasn’t a Gen Z man. It was hard to tell what generation he belonged to, other than the changeless working-class generation.

   We drove six hours the wrong way to Campton, New Hampshire and checked into the Colonel Spencer Inn. It was Saturday night. We got on-line and made test appointments for noon at a CVS in Manchester, an hour away. We streamed “Castle of Sand” on our laptop. It was a 1970s Japanese crime thriller movie and kept us up past our bedtime.

   Over breakfast the next morning our innkeeper told us to go early since the traffic leaving New Hampshire for home on Sunday mornings was heavy. We gave ourselves an hour and a half to drive the 55 miles and barely made it. Luckily, we hadn’t made appointments for an hour later. We never would have made it. The traffic on I-93 going south was a snarl of stop and go by the time we started north back to Campton.

   We got our test tubes and swabs and stuck the swabs up our noses. I spilled some of the liquid in my tube and asked the Gen Z pharmacy technician behind the bulletproof glass if I should start over with a new kit.

   “You’re fine, it doesn’t matter,” she said, lazy as a bag of baloney. She couldn’t have been more wrong, which we discovered soon enough.

   Gen Z is self-centered and self-sacrificing both at the same time. “My goals are to travel the world and become the founder of an organization to help people.” They want to stand out. “Our generation is on the rise. We aren’t just Millennials.” They say they are the new dawn of a new age. “We are an unprecedented group of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

   Welcome to the future, just don’t take the future’s word for it.

   We spent the night at the Colonel Spencer. It was built in 1764, a year after the end of the French and Indian War. During the war the British, allied with American colonists, weaponized smallpox, trading infected blankets to Indians. The virus inflicts disfiguring scars, blindness, and death.

   “Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion, use every stratagem in our power to reduce them,” the British commander Sir Jeffrey Amherst wrote to his subordinates.

   The results were what the continent’s newest immigrants from the Old World expected.

   “They burned with the heat of the pox, and they died to feed the monster. And so, the village was deserted, and never again would the Indians live on that spot,” is how one of the natives described the deadly epidemic.

   We had dinner at Panorama Six82, not far from our inn. The hostess seated us outside on the patio which looked out over a valley and a series of cascading White Mountain hilltops. The sun went down behind one of them and we finished our dessert in the dark.

   Our server was a middle-aged man from Colombia wearing jeans, a Panorama Six82 signature shirt, and a Sonoma-style straw hat. He went back to the homeland every year to visit relatives.

    “They always want money, so I don’t bring too much of it,” Fernando said. “It’s not as dangerous as most Americans think it is. I avoid some neighborhoods, sure, and I avoid riding in cabs. The rebels are in the hills, not the cities, and besides, they don’t do much anymore. The Venezuelans are a problem, all of them leaving their god-forsaken country. But they do a lot of the dirty work for us these days.”

   We drove back to Houlton on I-95. The speed limit north of Bangor is 75 MPH. I set the cruise to 85 MPH and kept my eyes peeled for moose. The fleabags lumber onto the roadway, sometimes standing astride one lane or another. Hitting a moose is a bad idea. A full-grown bull moose stands six to seven feet tall and tips the scales at 1500 pounds. It isn’t certain that the collision will kill the beast, but it will kill your car, and maybe you. They do most of their roaming around after nightfall. We made sure we got to our motel before dusk.

   In the morning my wife was winding down a business meeting on Zoom when there was a knock on our door. It was the housekeeper. She wore a black uniform and black hair pulled back in a bun. She was young. She was part of the Z crowd.

   “We’ll be out in about a half-hour,” I said.

   “Can I replace the towels and empty the trash?”

   “Sure.”

   “Weren’t you here a few days ago?”

   “Yes,” I said, and told her about trying and failing to get across the border and our search for a fast 19 test.

   It turned out the explanation for the motel being sold-out was because of the same problem. Every other person lodging there had been turned around for one reason or another.

   “You should go to the Katahdin Valley Medical Center,” she said. “A friend of mine went there, they did the test, she got it back the next day, and went to Nova Scotia.”

   “Thanks,” I said. We packed and followed Apple Maps to the medical center. The receptionist didn’t know anything about a fast molecular test. She sent us to Jesse, the man upstairs, who was the man in charge.

   “We test on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” he said. “It takes about a week to get the results back from the lab.” It was Tuesday. We were already three days late. I started looking over my shoulder for Chevy Chase.

   “Not the next day?”

   “No.”

   We left Houlton and drove to Presque Isle, had lunch, messed around, my wife went running on the town’s all-purpose trail, and we drove to the Caribou Inn in the next town north. While the receptionist checked her computer for our reservation, we heard a wolf whistle through the open door of the office behind the front desk. A minute later we heard it again.

   “That’s just Ducky,” the receptionist said. “She belongs to the manager.”

   “Does she do that often, whistle, I mean?” I asked.

   “Whenever she sees a pretty girl.”

   Another wolf whistle came my wife’s way.

   I must have looked cross, because the receptionist said, “Ducky is a parrot.”

   Ducky was a parrot in a tall white cage just inside the door of the office. Her plumage was green with some red and yellow mixed in. She was a saucy character.

   “She’s twenty years old,” the receptionist said.

   “How long has she been here?”

   “Twenty years.”

   Ducky was spending all her Gen Z years locked up at the Caribou Inn, where flocks came and went. The only lasting relationship she had was with Betty, the hotel’s manager, and the bird’s keeper.

   “I didn’t know parrots lived that long.”

   “They can live to be seventy, eighty years old,” Betty said.

   “Ducky wolf whistles women?”

    “And men. We thought she was a he until she started laying eggs not long ago.”

   The parrot was going to outlive most of us, the 19 or no 19. They sometimes play dead in response to threats. They can also look dead when they are asleep. But if a parrot is lying still and not breathing, looking lifeless, you can assume it is dead.

   We had a non-smoking room, although every hallway that led to our room was lined with smoking rooms. The hallways smelled sad and stale. We were settling in with a bottle of wine and a movie when we got a phone call. It was the lab in New Hampshire that was doing our 19 molecular tests. They had good news and bad news. My wife tested negative, but my test was discarded. 

   “There wasn’t enough liquid in the test vial to maintain the sample,” the lab technician said. “Did you happen to spill some of it?”

   I didn’t bother trying to explain. I got on-line and filled out another ArriveCAN form. When we got to the border my wife had no problem. The only problem I had wasn’t make or break, since they couldn’t deny me entry, test or no test. A health officer gave me a self-test kit and told me to make sure I performed it within four days. She was in her early 30s. I had no reason to be skeptical. She was just out of Gen Z range. I should have been leery since she was wrong. She wasn’t as far out of the field of friendly fire as I thought.

   Four days later, when I went on-line and followed the directions for the self-test, the Indian-looking Indian-sounding woman on the other side of screen was nonplussed when I apologized for waiting to the last minute.

   “I don’t understand.” she said. “You are four days early. You are supposed to test after eight days of self-quarantine.”

   When I started to spell out what had happened, she wasn’t in the mood, and said she would schedule Purolator to pick my test up the next day. Purolator sent me an e-mail saying they would pick up between nine and noon. The truck pulled up just before five. I was grilling dogs and corn on the front deck. The next day I got an e-mail informing me my test came back negative. I had been tested four times in ten days and was finally officially virus-free.

   No matter the generation, Prince Edward Island was the only place and people who got it right. When we arrived late Wednesday afternoon and crossed the nine-mile-long bridge to the province, we waited in one of the many lines edging towards checkpoints. It didn’t take long. A young woman took our vitals while an older man in a spacesuit swabbed our noses.

   “If we don’t call you within two hours you tested negative,” he said.

   We drove to the Coastline Cottages. “Welcome to Canada,” our hosts said. “You made it.” 

   No one from Health PEI called us. We unpacked, watching the day get dark over the Atlantic Ocean, and fell into bed. I drifted off thanking God somebody on our part of the planet knew what the 19 score was, not some mumbo jumbo they dreamed up because they neglected to check the scoreboard.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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Red Island

Searching for the Surfside

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By Ed Staskus

“Whenever we leave home, to Ontario or New Brunswick, I always say we are crossing into another world, into a strange world, into Canada,” said Marie Bachand. “I always ask Louie did you bring our passports?” She always asks in French because her partner Louie Painchaund doesn’t speak English.

It was a cumulus cloud high sky day when they went to Prince Edward Island. They didn’t have their passports. Who wants to look like their passport picture on a sunny summer day, anyway?

They live in Saint-Gregorie in Quebec, a community of the city of Becancour, on the south side of the St. Lawrence River. Their house dates to the 1780s, built by refugee Acadians after the French and Indian War. “They came down the St Lawrence River, four hundred families. It was a rough time. They stopped, said OK, looks good, and settled here.”

It is about six hundred miles to Prince Edward Island, up the St. Lawrence, down New Brunswick, and across the Confederation Bridge to PEI. The first time they went they were touring the Maritimes. The island was a spur of the moment runaround. They drove across the Northumberland Straights on the nine-mile-long bridge to the other side.

“We thought we could run over and visit PEI in one or two days,” Marie said. “It’s so small.”

Even though it is pint-sized, the smallest of the ten Canadian provinces at just a little more than two thousand square miles, compared to Quebec’s almost six hundred thousand square miles, it goes over big.

Ten years later, even after Andy’s Surfside Inn is no more, they still go to Prince Edward Island two weeks in the summer, staying at the Coastline Cottages up the hill across the street, riding their bikes all over the place, still finding substantial fresh things to rack up on the to-do list.

The inn was on the ocean side of North Rustico, near the entrance to the harbor, a white clapboard two-story house with a dozen windows, two dormers and three porches on the side facing the water. A broad lawn slopes down to the cliffs. It wasn’t always the Surfside Inn and isn’t the Surfside Inn anymore, having since taken up where it left off, back to being a home.

“The first house was bigger,” said Kelly Doyle.

Kelly’s grandparents, Mike and Loretta Doyle, were visiting and playing cards at a neighbor’s house one winter night in 1929. Their friends lived about a mile away. At the end of the evening, going home in their horse-drawn sled, they crested a frozen hill. A red glow lit up the sky and flared across the flat cove below them.

The house was being swallowed up by fire. The pitch-dark night was blazing. They had left seven children behind in the care of the eldest.

“It was a flue fire,” said Kelly. “It burnt down because of the stove.”

By the time the Doyle’s raced their sled down to the house, and finding all the children safe and sound outside, there wasn’t much they could do. There were no neighbors nearby to help and there was no fire department. Mike Doyle was able to drag some furniture from the first floor out the front door and saved as many fox furs as he could.

The house was rebuilt the next year and finished the following year.

“The foxes my grandfather saved built the new house.” Kelly’s grandfather was a fox farmer. What he sold the pelts for paid for the work of the itinerant immigrant tradesmen who built the house.

Furry garments are made of furry animal hides. Even though it has lately fallen on hard times, fur is one of the oldest forms of clothing. Once we started globe-trotting out of Africa, to where everywhere else was colder, we started wearing furs. Ever since, people have worn beaver racoon sable rabbit coyote wolf chinchilla opossum mink and foxes.

Mountain men wore the bears they shot and killed.

In the 1880s foxes were bred for the first time, accomplished on Prince Edward Island by locals Charlie Dalton and Robert Oulton. Theirs was the original fur farm in 1884. Within several years the rush was on. But the rush didn’t really and truly mushroom until after a pelt sale a few years later when their harvest of 25 skins brought them nearly $35 thousand dollars. It was a boat load of a barn door of money, bearing in mind that the average island farm worker those days made less than $30 dollars a month.

In 1926 nearly nine hundred live silver foxes were shipped from Summerside to the United States. It was the most valuable shipment in the history of Prince Edward Island up to that time and is still called the ‘Million Dollar Train’. Andy Doyle was born the same year, spunky and healthy, although nobody ever called him the ‘Million Dollar Baby’.

By the 1930s the fox farm industry was strong as a bull, raking in multi-millions of dollars. There were hundreds of thousands of foxes being farmed and skinned coast to coast throughout Canada and the United States.

“The furs my grandfather was able to rescue from the fire were worth five thousand. In the end the new house cost five thousand,” said Kelly.

“We stayed at a country inn, at the information center at the bridge they said it was nice, but it was a little room, yuk,” said Marie. She picked up the official PEI tourist book. Where to stay next? She thumbed through the book. She put her finger on Andy’s Surfside Inn. “I say to Louie, what’s that, the north shore? We had already decided to stay three or four more days. We went looking for it.”

Gavan Andrew “Andy” Doyle was 81 years old in 2007 when Marie and Louie went driving up and down the north shore looking for his eponymous inn. Andy had been born in the white house that was the inn. Years later, grown-up a young man, pushing off after World War Two, he landed in Montreal, married, brought up three stepchildren, and years later, when his wife Vivienne died, went back to Prince Edward Island.

His mother died shortly after and he inherited the house on Doyle’s Cove. “My aunt, his sister in Montreal, always had a soft spot for Gavan. She helped him get the place up and running. She bought a bunch of nice furniture for him,” said Kelly Doyle. It was the late 80s. Andy Doyle resurrected the Surfside Inn that had been his mother’s brainchild in the late 40’s.

“When my grandfather died in 1948, my grandmother wanted to make some money with the house and started taking in tourists,” said Kelly. “There was a white picket fence, she had ducks and geese and sheep in a big barnyard, and she kept a garden.” It was a large working garden. “She fed the bed and breakfasts herself.”

As her six girls and two boys grew up and left home, she converted their rooms to guest rooms.

“She filled those rooms all through the 50s and 60s,” said Kelly. “PEI wasn’t like the rest of the world back then. Tourists found the way of life interesting, honest and down-to-earth. There wasn’t much entertainment, but there was always lots to do. They just liked the place.”

When Marie telephoned the Surfside Inn, a Japanese woman answered the call.

“Andy always had Japanese girls, three girls, housekeepers for the season who were exchange students who wanted to learn English. They shared a small bedroom over the kitchen. She told us, yes, we have a room.”

Louie and Marie drove up and down Route 6 between Cavendish and North Rustico searching for the Surfside Inn. When they couldn’t find it, they finally stopped at a National Parks kiosk and got directions. It was in the park, although on private land, Doyle’s Land on Doyle’s Cove. They drove down the Gulf Shore Parkway, past Cape Turner and Orby Head, and down to the coastal inlet.

When they got there, there wasn’t a room. There were four rooms that shared a bath. They were all taken. What Marie and Louie didn’t know was that there was a fifth room on the ground floor, which was Andy’s bedroom with a private bath.

“When we are full, he gives you that room,” explained the young woman.

“We’ll take that,” said Marie. “Where does Andy go to sleep?”

“He sleeps in the boat.”

The Japanese girls did the heavy lifting in return for being able to learn English. “I don’t know where they learned it, but it wasn’t from Andy,” said Marie. “He never talked to them.”

Outside the house was a castaway wooden lobster boat. The hull and forward cabin were worthy enough, although it needed some planks and rib work. it looked like it still had some spirit to it, like it could still make a living at sea.

“It smelled bad, all old stuff papers tools junk a small bed,” said Marie. “It should have been burned long ago.”

The Surfside Inn had a kitchen with several refrigerators. “We thought it was just for breakfast, but we saw other people storing food and making supper.” They started shopping at Doiron’s Fish Market on the harbor road. One suppertime Andy saw them coming into the kitchen with lobsters.

“Let me fix those for you,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” said Marie, “he was good. Tack, tack, tack, all done.”

They started bringing their own wine from home, though.

“I don’t like PEI Liquor wines. We brought Italian and French whites and rose for the fish.”

Coming back from Doiron’s one day, putting away fresh cod wrapped in Kraft paper, Marie noticed small buckets of frozen milk in the freezer.

“There was a Muslim couple staying at Andy’s, the guy was always in the living room, but she was wrapped up, always going to the bedroom. She didn’t talk. At breakfast, no words. She looked at her iPad, that’s all.”

The mother was expressing her breast milk and storing it. She kept it in the back of the freezer, the coldest part of fridges. One day all the milk was gone.

“We never saw the baby, though, maybe it was somewhere else, with a grandma.”

“Tourists in the 50s and 60s weren’t from Monkton or Toronto,” said Kelly. “Some were from the States, but a lot of them were from Europe. We lived next door and ran around the yard, having fun, meeting people. In 1970 my grandmother got a little bit ill and couldn’t keep it going. She lived alone for seven years until my dad moved her into the senior citizen’s home in North Rustico.”

The white house was empty for about ten years, for most of the 80s. It came back to life as the rooms filled up. In summertime it was never vacant.

“You could see the sea right in front of you,” said Marie. “We sat on the porch every day. It was a special place. After a week we would say, let’s stay another day, then another day. Other people, too, were crazy about this place.”

One day Andy asked Louie to help him take an old heavy bicycle out of the lobster boat. “You’re a big guy, you can do it,” said Andy.

When the bike was on the ground Andy straddled it and pedaled to the downhill on the all-purpose path. “He was going down the hill, but Louie told me there were no brakes. Stop! Stop! I yelled but he yelled back, I’ve been riding this bike for thirty years!”

Whenever Andy pulled his four-door sedan out to run errands or go to the grocery, Marie and Louie kept their distance. “I don’t think there were any brakes on his car, either,” she said.

He seemed to own only three short-sleeve shirts. “I have three nice ones,” he said. “I got them for a dollar each at the Salvation Army.” One was yellow, one green and one blue. The blue shirt was his favorite. He dried all his laundry on an outside clothesline, in the sun and ocean breeze.

“All the guests, they were from Canada, the United States, Italy, England, all over. A Chinese couple had a four-year-old who had been born in Quebec, so they named him Denis. Whenever we saw a Chinese child after that we always called the child Denis Wong. There was a couple from Boston, they lived in the harbor on a boat there. He was 80 and she was in her 70s.”

“I didn’t come with my boat. I came with my girlfriend,” he said.

“There is no age,” said Marie. Until you find out your grade school class is running the town city province country.

Aging and its consequences usually happen step-by-step, sometimes without warning. One minute you’re only as old as you feel and the next minute you don’t feel good. It’s like going on a cruise. It can be smooth sailing or a shipwreck. Once you’re on board, though, there’s not much you can do about it.

“There were always many guests, but suddenly a few years ago Andy started getting mixed up. He forgot reservations, there were two Japanese girls instead of three, it wasn’t the same.” What it takes to make an inn work wasn’t getting done. By 2016 it was far more vacant than occupied and Marie and Louie were staying at Kelly Doyle’s Coastline Cottages up the hill across the street.

“Andy introduced us to him,” Marie said.

Like Dorothy said at the end of ‘The Marvelous Land of Oz’, “Everything has to come to an end, sometime.”

In 2018 Andy Doyle moved to the Garden Home in Charlottetown and his nephew Erik Brown took the house over, renovating it and transforming it into his home. In November Andy died. He was 92. It was the end of the Surfside Inn.

“On the ocean was wonderful,” said Marie. “Once we found it, Louie and I loved the Surfside.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Red Island

Finding the Coastline

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By Ed Staskus

   “Remember what the dormouse said, feed your head, feed your head.”  Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane

   There are no dormice on Prince Edward Island but there are plenty of mice. There are house mice, field mice, and meadow jumping mice. There are rats, too. There is the Norway rat, otherwise known as the brown rat. There are so many of them the wide world over, next to human beings, they are the most successful mammal on the planet.

   Mice are little bundles of energy and love to chow down. They eat fruits, seeds, and grains. They are omnivorous, which means they eat plants and meat. They eat just about anything they can find, always on the prowl. The trouble with the rat race is, win or lose, you are still in the rat race.

   Every day is a field day for them on Prince Edward Island. The state of the island is that its land mass is 1.4 million acres and almost half of it is cleared for agricultural use. Back in the day swarms of vermin would show up out of nowhere and eat everything in the fields. In the 19th century, the years 1813 to 1815 were known as “The Years of the Mouse.”

   We had a mouse in our cottage a couple of years ago. We heard something at night scratching around in the kitchen. The next morning, my wife Vanessa found droppings.” She tucked all the food away and told Kelly Doyle, the proprietor of Coastline Cottages, which are five cottages up a sloping lawn from the eponymous Doyle’s Cove in North Rustico. He found a tiny hole at the back of the cottage the mouse had chewed to get in, plugged it up, and set a trap under the sink.

   “That’s the end of that mouse,” I said.

   “You know what they say,” Vanessa said.

   “No, what?”

   “It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.” The second mouse never showed up, though, staying away in the barley field behind the cottages.

   The first farmers at Souris, near the northeastern tip of the island, suffered many infestations. Vermin can and will lay waste to croplands. The first of a dozen plagues of mice in the 18th century happened in 1724. When the time came to give the town a name, the townsfolk called it Souris, which is French for mouse. Even though they are not welcome, the town’s mascot is a mouse.

   Integrated pest management systems have gone a long way controlling infestations in the 21st century. It doesn’t mean complete eradication of them, but rather bringing their numbers down to where losses are below economic injury levels. It’s about not throwing the baby out with the bath water, but rather ensuring crop protection while reducing human health risks and environmental damage.

   Mice have since gone That’s Entertainment! on Prince Edward Island. In 2010 small bronze statues of them were hidden around Charlottetown. They were based on Eckhart the Mouse, who is a character from PEI author David Weale’s book “The True Meaning of Crumbfest.” The around town game was about downloading clues and trying to find the hidden in plain sight little urchins.

   Mice in the wild live a year or two. The bronze rodents are still in Charlottetown. They’ve been living on their charm and good looks.

   Wherever there are mice there are foxes, and since there are a lot of foxes in the National Park between Cavendish and North Rustico, there are consequently a lot of mice. Foxes are omnivores and eat seeds, berries, worms, eggs, birds, frogs, and fungi. They are a lot like the mice they chase and snatch up. They eat everything. In the winter they eat lots of rabbits.

   We saw red foxes the first time we drove up to the north side of the island. They sat on the side of the road eyeing us. We were on a car trip across Nova Scotia, our second in as many years, when somebody mentioned Prince Edward Island. “What’s that?” Vanessa asked. I was born in Sudbury, Ontario, and was still a Canadian citizen, but couldn’t answer her question. I had never heard of the place.

  We took the Northumberland Ferry at Caribou to the island the next morning. The best dressed person on board in the brisk wind was a Chow Chow. We stayed at the Sunny King Motel in Cornwall. The next day we had lunch sitting at the bar inside Churchill Arms in Charlottetown. Vanessa had a Havarti and vegetable sandwich, and I had a clubhouse.

   “How long are you here?” asked the bartender.

   “Just a day or two. We need to be back to work on Monday.”

   “Where are you from?”

   “Northern Ohio, west of Cleveland, on Lake Erie.”

   “Eerie as in scary and strange?”

   “No, it was named after the Erie tribe of Indians.”

   “You mean Native Americans?”

   “Right, the Indians. The Iroquois called them Erie, which means long tail, because they wore bobcat fur hats with the tail on the back.”

   “Don’t bobcats have short stubby tails?” asked the bartender.

   “That’s the part that stumps everybody.”

   “We had never even heard of Prince Edward Island before,” Vanessa said.

   “I’ve seen some Canadian maps where we aren’t even there,” said the bartender, refilling our coffee cups. “There’s New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and the next thing is Newfoundland, which is not even really Canadian.”

   “I’m originally from Sudbury and I had an idea there was something here, but I couldn’t have told you what it was.”

   The bartender gave us a Visitor’s Guide.

   “You might try the north coastal side of the island, Rustico, Cavendish, Brackley Beach, up around there.”

   We took Route 7 to North Milton and Oyster Bed Bridge, took a left to North Rustico, and kept going to Cavendish. We saw a Visitor Center, turned right, and drove to the National Park. It was mid-September, and the toll booths were closed. There were no boom barriers. We drove onto the Gulf Shore Parkway. The road followed the curve of the ocean, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the landscape rolling.

   We stopped at MacNeill’s Brook and took a walk on the beach. The freshwater outflow comes from the brook, part of David and Margaret MacNeill’s farm and house a hundred years ago, when they were cousins and neighbors of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote “Anne of Green Gables.”

   We stopped at MacKenzie’s Brook and walked up to a grassy bluff. The brook passes underneath the parkway through two culverts. There was a long beach to the west and red sandstone cliffs to the east. One enormous rock in the cliff face had an enormous hole in it. We lay on our backs on the grass and looked up into the sky. The sun was warm on our faces and the breeze was cool.

   We stopped at Orby Head, parked in the gravel lot, and walked to the edge of the cliff. Cormorants was nesting in the cliffs. Some of them were fishing off the shore, others were drifting, their heavy bodies low in the water, while others were chilling in the sunshine on a ledge. They are large water birds with small heads on long necks. Their thin hooked bills are about the length of their heads. The birds are dark, brownish black with a small patch of yellow-orange skin on their face. They look pre-historic up close.

   “Oh, man, this is where we should come next year,” I said, getting back into our car.

   “I am with you,” my wife said.

   Before we could pull out, a red fox ran diagonally across the parking lot and jumped into the brush, hellbent after something running for its life.

   We passed Cape Turner and a minute later the road dipped down to Doyle’s Cove. On our left were two older frame houses, one green and the other one white. The white house had a sign on it that said, “Andy’s Surfside Inn.” On our right, up a grassy slope, were some cottages. The sign at the front of the drive read “Coastline Cottages.” We drove up to the office and parked in front of a neon OPEN sign in the window.

   A Japanese woman carrying a blue plastic bucket came out of one of the cottages. She told us her name was Katsue and that the owner was away, but she could show us one of the cottages, the one she had just finished cleaning. By the time we left, our names were on the paper schedule board for a cottage the next September, right after Labor Day.

   A year later, driving up and down Route 6 between North Rustico and Cavendish in the dark, after twelve hours in the car, having lost all sense of where exactly the park road and the cottages were, we finally found the Visitor Center on Cawnpore Lane. It was closed, but we heard voices across the street at Shining Waters. One of the cottages was still lit up and four men were talking laughing drinking beer on the deck.

   None of them knew the Coastline Cottages, but all of them knew where the shore road was.

   “That’s a step in the right direction,” Vanessa said, shooting me a vexed relieved look. “Maybe we won’t have to sleep in the car after all.”

   In the event, we almost fell asleep on the deck of our cottage after we found it, wrapped in blankets, looking up at the wide expanse of stars in the inky sky, stars we never saw at home, where the lights of the city obscured the heavens.

   “Keep your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars,” I said.

   “I know you just said that, but who said that?” asked Vanessa.

   “Teddy Roosevelt, in the biography about him I’m reading.”

   “We are all stars, and we all deserve to twinkle.”

   “Who said that?”

   “Marilyn Monroe.”

   I read more books than watched movies and my wife watched more movies than read books. I was a by-the-book man, and she had her head in the stars.

   The next morning, the day clear brisk breezy, we unpacked and went for breakfast at Lorne’s Snack Shop in town. We both ordered the special, sausage eggs hash fries and toast at the kitchen hole at the back of the front room. There was a mixed bag of potato chip bags on wire racks attached to a wall where we stood.

   “We got a couple gut founded,” we heard the woman at the counter say to the other woman at the stove. “Fire up a scoff.”

   We sat down on worn chairs at a worn table. Everything was in apple-pie order but worn. There were scattered card tables in a back room and shelves on two walls full of VCR tapes for rent. Three rough and ready men talking low threw us a glance.

   When the front counter woman brought me my plate, I asked, “Is that for both of us?

   “No, that’s your, we’re just doin’ the other toast.”

   “It’s a good thing we haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.”

   “Where yah longs to?”

   “What’s that?” I asked.

   “Where yah from?”

   “The States,” said Frank. “What country are you from?”

   “Here in Canada, man, from Newfoundland.”

   “Oh.”

   Twenty years Lorne’s Snack Shop is gone, their poutine a strike-it-rich memory. The Co Op is gone, and although the food market across the street isn’t any bigger, it’s better. Amanda’s and their wood-fired pizza pies is gone, taken over by Pedro’s Island Eatery, big plates of fish on a new deck. The hard scrabble park road has been replaced, flanked by an all-purpose walking running biking path. The toll booths at the entrances to the National Park have been torn down and rebuilt.

   “This is swank,” I said. “What do you call these things, anyway?” I asked a teenager in a green shirt in the toll booth.

   “The guardhouse,” the teenager said, leaning out the window of the air-conditioned guardhouse.

   The town is bigger than it used to be. A trove of big ass houses has been raised in the triangle formed by Harbourview Drive, Church Hill Avenue, and the North Rustico beach. When winter comes most of the occupation army leaves and the houses sit empty. A brick-faced line of condos has been built on Route 6 between Co Op Lane and Autumn Lane.

   One summer evening we threw our beach chairs in the back of our Hyundai, popped open a bottle of wine, and drove to Orby Head to see the sun set. We unfolded our chairs at the edge of the cliff, poured ourselves wine in plastic water cups, and settled down, the orange red orb of the sun sinking over Cavendish. A sweet-tempered breeze drifted through the stunted trees.

   A minute later we were running back to our SUV, our wine splashing, the cork God knows where, swatting at the lynch mob of mosquitos coming after us. “What the hell,” I said as we stepped into the cottage. “You try to enjoy some out of doors and see what it gets you, a swarm of biters.”

   “The out of doors gets you a lot, but not just strong legs and a suntan,” Vanessa said. “Sometimes it’s best keeping the outdoors outdoors.”

   “Some people say the mosquito is the official bird of PEI,” Kelly Doyle said. “The sunset is when you’re most likely to feel them. If you were to stop at a certain place, like Orby Head, and get surprised by the little buggers, just move on. So long as it’s not sunset, they won’t follow.”

   It’s the price you pay to feed your head.

   A Stanford University study found that students who walked in a green park for an hour-and-a-half exhibited quieter brains than those who walked next to a rip-roaring highway. They manifested less activity in the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with depression. Walking in a natural setting was shown to improve frame of mind. It also avoids clouds of carbon monoxide soaking into the lining of your lungs.

   A study at the University of Exeter in En­gland found that people who moved from concrete spaces to green spaces experienced a clear-cut improvement in their mental health. The boost was long-lasting, mental distress over all lessened even three years post-move. An analysis in 2018 of more than a hundred studies on green spaces found that the benefits included upgraded heart rate and blood pressure, lowering of cholesterol levels, and better sleep duration. There were discernable reductions in type II diabetes, cardiovascular mortality, as well as overall mortality.

   Nobody needs to wash down the ‘Drink Me’ potion Alice did to get perspective, or slip away on Grace Slick’s Orange Sunshine, to have the zero cool red cliffs make your head spin. Just go there and see for yourself. Don’t stand too near the edge, though. Don’t go at sunset, either.

   “Maybe about fifty feet of our land has fallen away since I was a boy,” said Kelly. “It might be climate change, but the storms have gotten more intense, for sure. This island is made of sandstone. We’re like a BIC lighter, not meant to last. There’s no stopping that. It’s just our geology.”

   There is no granite or hard rock to keep the breaking waves away. “Everybody knows it,” said Adam Fenech, director of UPEI’s Climate Lab, echoing Kelly Doyle. He meant everybody on the island, like the Doyle’s, who have been there going on two hundred years. But nothing lasts forever, not mice, not red sandstone, not even hard rock. In the meantime, put on your walking running biking shoes, get out into outer space, never minding the bugs or what’s in the cards.

   Feed your head while you can is where it’s at.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Red Island

Six Oysters Ahoy

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By Ed Staskus

“He was a very valiant man who first adventured on the eating of oysters.”  King James VI and I

“I checked the weather report,” said Frank Glass.

“What did you find out?” asked Vera Glass.

“It’s going to be the same today as it was yesterday.”

“Is it going to rain all day?” asked Vera.

“You don’t need a weatherman for that,” said Frank, throwing a glance at the window.

A steady rain was falling outside the large front window of the cottage, down on the long sloping lawn of the Coastline Cottages, on the Gulf Shore Parkway, on the three houses on the other side of the road, and out to the horizon as far as they could see. The sky was dark over Doyle’s Cove. Broad surfboard-sized waves worked up the water. When Frank looked out the northwest-facing kitchen window, the sky, where the weather was coming from, was even darker.

“What should we do? It rained all day yesterday. I’m getting cabin fever.”

“We could play cards, read, and talk among ourselves. How about dinner and a show?”

“That sounds good, especially the part about dinner,” said Vera. “Where do you want to eat?”

“There’s a show opening tonight at the Victoria Theatre.”

“All right, but what about dinner?”

“We could eat at the Landmark, it’s right there.”

“I’ve always liked the Landmark,” said Vera. “Eugene is a great cook. They have the best meat pies.”

“Somebody told me he sold it and there are new owners,” said Frank.

“What? How can that be? Eugene and Olivier and Rachel are gone?”

The Sauve family tree had repurposed an old grocery store in Victoria into a café restaurant in the late 1980s, adding a deck, digging a basement for storage and coolers, and expanding their dining space several times. They were a perennial ‘Best Place to Eat on Prince Edward Island’ in the magazine Canadian Living.

“It’s now called the Landmark Oyster House.”

“I love oysters,” said Vera. “Let’s go.”

It was still raining when Frank and Vera drove up Church Hill Road and swung onto Route 6, through North Rustico to Route 13, through Hunter River and Kelly’s Cross. It was still raining when they pulled into the small seaside town of Victoria on the other side of Prince Edward Island, on the Northumberland Straight side, 45 minutes later. It rained on them as they rushed into the Landmark Oyster House.

There wasn’t a table to be had, but there were two seats at the bar.

“Look, we’re right in front of the oysters,” said Vera, as they sat down at the closed end of it. “I love this spot.”

Kieran Goodwin, the bartender, agreed, standing on the other side of the bar, on the other side of a large shallow stainless steel bin full of raw oysters on ice.

“Best seats in the house,” he said. “They were going to put the bar in the front room, but the dimensions didn’t work out.”

“Who’s they?” asked Frank.

Vera looked the chalkboard on the wall up and down. The names of the oysters on ice were written on the board. There were six of them, Valley Pearl, Sand Dune, Shipwreck, Blackberry Point, Lucky Limes, and Dukes. She looked down into the bin. She couldn’t make heads or tails of which were which. She knew raw oysters were alive, more-or-less.

She wondered, how could you tell?

“Greg and Marly Anderson,” said Kieran. “They own a wedding venue up the road.”  It is the Grand Victoria Wedding Events Venue, in a restored former 19th century church. “When this opportunity came up, when Eugene was looking to tone it down a bit, they decided to purchase it.”

“I worked at the Oyster House in Charlottetown shucking oysters for almost five years,” said Marly. “We heard that the family wanted to retire because they had been working at this restaurant for 29 years. We already felt a connection to this place and we are friends and neighbors with the family.”

“They’ve put their roots down in the community, are making their stand here,” said Kieran.

“I like what they’ve done in here, casual but upscale,” said Vera.

“It looks like the kitchen is more enclosed than it was,” observed Frank.

“Yeah, they did up a wall,” said Kieran. “When you used to walk in, you could peek right in.”

“I remember Eugene telling us once he learned all his cooking from his mom. Who does the cooking now?”

“Kaela Barnett is our chef.”

“We couldn’t do this without her,” said Greg Anderson.

Somebody’s got to have a steady hand on the ladle that stirs the soup.

“I’m thinking of doing oysters and a board,” said Vera.

“That’s a good choice,” said Kieran. “I recommend the large board. You get a bit of everything. I personally like getting some cheese.”

“Me, too.”

“Are you oyster connoisseurs?” asked Kieran.

“Not me,” said Frank. “I can’t remember the last time I ate an oyster.”

“I wish I was, but I love them,” said Vera. “We were on the island last year and went to the Merchantman in Charlottetown with Doug and Rachel, Eugene’s daughter. We had oysters and she went through all the ones we ate, explaining them to me.”

“Would you like something from the bar?” asked Kieran.

“I’ll take the Gahan on tap, the 1772 Pale Ale.”

“What wine goes with oysters?” asked Vera.

“We have a beautiful California chardonnay,” said Kieran. “It’s great with shellfish. I recommend it.”

“This is good, fruity,” said Vera, tasting it.

“We have six oysters,” said Kieran. “You could do one of each.”

“That’s what I’ll do,” said Vera.

“I think I’ll have the seafood chowder and some of the board,” said Frank.

“Oh, Frank, try one,” said Vera.

“Lucky Limes are my favorite,” said Kieran. “It’s a good medium oyster.”

“OK, I’ll try it,” said Frank, shrugging.

Kieran handed him a Lucky Lime.

“How do I eat this thing?” Frank asked Vera.

“Sometimes I chew it, sometimes I don’t,” she said.

“Some people like putting stuff on it, like horseradish, which kills the taste,” said Kieran. “But straight up is best. That’s how islanders do it, just shuck it.”

Frank looked down at the liquid-filled half shell.

“From the wide end,” said Kieran.

He slurped the oyster into his mouth and swallowed it.

“Now you’re a pro,” said Vera.

“That wasn’t bad,” said Frank. “How could you tell it was a Lucky Lime? They all look the same to me.”

“If you look at the chalkboard, it’s one through six. That’s one way.”

“Can you tell by looking at them?” asked Vera.

“I can tell by the shell,” said Kieran. “The ones that are more green, that means there’s more saltwater content. So this is a Sand Dune, quite briny. That one is almost straight salt water.” He pointed to an even darker greener shell.

“The Shipwreck, the name made me nervous to have it, but it was mild,” said Vera.

“It would be farther up the estuary, closer to fresh water.”

“Blackberry Point was very salty.”

“The Blackberry’s are from Malpeque, which is near Cavendish,” said Kieran. “The Sand Dune is from Surrey, down east, and the Lucky Limes are from New London Bay. Valley Pearl is from Tyne Valley and the Dukes are from Ten Mile Creek.”

“I thought you were just making all this up,” said Frank.

“No, its like wine,” said Kieran.

“How did you get into the shellfish racket?” asked Frank.

“I graduated in business, traveled, lived in New Zealand and Australia, and then came back home, and worked in a bank as a financial advisor for six years, in Summerside and Charlottetown, but then I just got tired of working in a bank, and went back to school.”

“How did you find your way here, behind the bar?”

“I date Jamie, who is Marly’s sister.”

“Are those pickled carrots?” asked Vera, pointing at the charcuterie board in front of her.

“Yes, and you have raisin jam, too,” said Kieran.

“Chutney, stop the madness!” exclaimed Vera. “Oh, it’s strawberry jam. It just looks like chutney. It’s delicious.”

“We had raisin pie at a small diner in Hunter River the other day,” said Frank.

“The one by the side of the road, up from the Irving gas station?” asked Kieran.

“That’s the one,” said Frank. “The waitress told us she always thinks of raisin pie as funeral pie, because back in the day, if there was a funeral in the winter, women always made raisin pies for the reception after the memorial service, because raisins kept all year round.”

“Can I take my oyster shells with me?” asked Vera.

“Sure,” said Kieran. ”We can get a little bag for you.”

“You can really taste the sea eating oysters,” said Vera. “Blackberry Point was a little thin and too salty, but once you eat one, and you don’t like it, whoa, what are you going to do? Valley Pearl didn’t have a lot of flavor, but there was some good texture to it. Lucky Lime was very good. My favorite was Sand Dune. It had a strong ocean flavor, briny.”

“I’ve heard people say oysters are slimy, but the one I had, it didn’t seem that way,” said Frank. “I can see having oysters again.”

“Don’t people sometimes say the world is your oyster?” said Vera.

“Do you want dessert?” asked Kieran.

“Do you have carrot cake?”

“It’s made here.”

“We’ll split a slice of that, and two coffees, thanks.”

As Vera and Frank dug into their carrot cake, there was a commotion at the other end of the bar. Kieran, Jamie, and Marly were huddling over glowing screens.

“Did your electronics go haywire?” asked Frank when Kieran brought them coffee.

“The microwave in the basement tripped the breaker. We hardly ever use it, except to melt butter sometimes. It’s weird, it’s been working until now. We have a thing that magnifies our wi-fi signal. We just found out it’s on the same circuit.”

“My mother was a pastry chef,” said Vera. ”She didn’t use microwaves much, but whenever she did, she always said, ‘I’m going to nuke it now!’”

Frank and Vera used their forks on the last crumbs of their cake and finished their coffee. Frank checked the time on his iPhone. “Time to go, sweetheart,” he said. They paid the bill and stood to go.

“Enjoy the show, hope to see you again,” Kieran said as Frank and Vera walked out of the Oyster House.

“It’s raining and sunny at the same time,” said Frank as they dashed across the street to the Victoria Theatre, yellow slanting sunlight leading the way.

“That’s PEI for you,” said Vera. “By the way, what are we seeing?”

“Where You Are.”

“I know where we are,” said Vera.

“That’s the name of the show,” said Frank.

“Aha, I see,” said Vera.

“Hustle it up, we’re almost late.”

They went up the steps into the theater, got their programs, and sat down. Vera tucked the bag of shells under her seat. “Wherever you are, there you are, oyster boys and girls,” she thought, making sure they were safe and sound.

“How could you even tell?” she wondered, as the lights went down and the show started.

Photograph by Vanessa Staskus

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Red Island

Island Hopping

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By Ed Staskus

It is roughly 700 miles from Montreal, Quebec, an island at the confluence of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence rivers, to Prince Edward Island, on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The way most people get off Montreal is by bridge or tunnel. There are twenty-five bridges and three tunnels. The longest passage is slightly more than a mile.

Most transit gets to Prince Edward Island by way of the Confederation Bridge, the only bridge that connects the island to the rest of Canada. Until the span was built coming and going was largely by boat or ferry. When the Northumberland Strait froze solid you might strap chains onto your tires and drive across it. After four years of construction the bridge opened in 1997.

It is the longest overpass in the world traversing ice-covered water. The concrete arc is 8 miles long. It is illegal to stop on the bridge and there is a curve to it whose only purpose is to keep drivers alert.

“It’s weird, it’s long, you’re on it for 5 minutes, at least.” said Tanner Patterson.

“It’s more of a 12-minute trip,” Amanda Patterson pointed out, fine-tuning.

“I did a project on it at school, actually, although I didn’t have any choice,” she said. “My teacher told me, you’re doing the Confederation Bridge. There was a referendum about building it. It was really close because lots of people wanted the island to stay secluded.”

There were even some who preferred the concept of a moat.

“Local workers built it and it’s sturdy. It’s probably never going to fall down,” said Amanda, putting the moat idea to rest.

More than a million-and-a-quarter people travel to PEI for a week-or-two in the summer, almost nine times as many people as live on the red island. Some of them cross by ferry, some of them fly into Charlottetown, but most of them drive over on the bridge.

“It’s very impressive,” said Cathy Patterson.

“Crossing it is anti-climactic, though, because of the concrete parapet. You can’t see anything,” said Mark Patterson, Tanner’s uncle, Amanda’s father, and Cathy’s husband. “But there’s a church you can pull into after you cross, up the approach towards Victoria, and from the parking lot you can see the bridge going all the way back into New Brunswick. It’s an incredible view.”

The Patterson’s live in the West Island, on the west side of Montreal, a laidback community-oriented green space small town feel in the big city kind of neighborhood. One of Montreal’s last large remaining spots of wilderness is in West Island. The region was a summer retreat into the 20th century.

Cathy Patterson first visited Prince Edward Island with a group of fellow potters in 2014. “We did the circuit of the pottery studios,” she said. Throwing, firing, and glazing mud and clay is a cottage industry on the island. “Several teachers showed us their methods.”

The small troop of ceramic artists stayed in the town of North Rustico, at the Coastline Cottages, on the seashore. “Kelly Doyle opened a cabin for us. It was very nice, but it was cold.” By the end of March 2014 more snow had fallen that winter than had in more than 40 years. Blizzards swept the island. “The landscape was stunning, but really, really cold. We all had three layers on.”

“I was here when I was a kid, thirty-five years ago,” said Mark. “We went to Nova Scotia, did the Cabot Trail, and came here. I saw “Anne of Green Gables” at the Confederation Centre. My mom told me we stayed near North Rustico.”

One afternoon when his nephew, daughter, and wife had gone deep-sea fishing, he went for a drive, exploring the north central coast. At the intersection of Route 6 and South Rustico he spotted an old-school style roadhouse. He pulled the car over.

“It was the original motel with green paint,” he said. “That’s where we stayed.”

The Patterson’s piled into their car on a Saturday at 6 o’clock in the morning in late June and left West Island for the eastern seaboard. The drive is circuitous, north to Quebec City, south to Fredericton, east to Monkton, and finally across the bridge. It takes close to 15 hours.

“We played the letter game in the car,” said Cathy.

The alphabet game is played on long car rides. The players try to find the letters of the alphabet on license plates, road signs, and nearby buildings, in order, starting with “A”. If any player spots a graveyard on the side of the road and declares it, the other players have to go back to the beginning. There is a shout out for the winner after they have reached “Z” if they can remember all the different things for each letter of the alphabet.

When he wasn’t playing the letter game, Tanner was downloading podcasts on his phone. “They saved my life,” he said. “’Our Fake History’ and ‘Night Vale’ are good ones.” ‘Night Vale’ is about a small desert town, mysterious lights in the night sky, and dark hooded figures with dark unknowable powers.

“I like to sleep,” said Amanda. “When I get bored I start rambling, talking nonsense.”

“It’s annoying,” Tanner groused about Amanda bunking in the back seat, who didn’t lose any sleep over it. “I can’t sleep in cars. She’s out for at least half the trip.”

“I drive,” said Mark. “I’m no good being a passenger.”

“I can drive all day or I can sleep,” said Cathy. “Put me in the passenger seat and I’m out like a light.”

Three years after Cathy had gone to Prince Edward Island, bundled up against the cold, they were on the way there in the summertime. They were in shorts and t-shirts because Sue Cameron, a fellow potter, had booked two weeks at Coastline Cottages earlier in the year. Cathy got wind of the vacation while at lunch with her friend one day.

“Is there another cabin?” asked Cathy.

“I don’t know, we can find out,” said Sue.

“I called Kelly, he had an open cottage, I said fine, and booked it on the spot,” said Cathy.

“Our first week we went to beaches five days in a row,” said Mark.

There are almost 700 miles of PEI coastline, cliffs, sand dunes, and long sandy beaches. There are about 90 of them. Most of them are located in provincial or national parks. The beaches on the north coast are white sand while those on the south coast are red sand. The sand at Basin Head is called singing sand because it squeaks when you walk on it.

“I was so excited for the beaches,” said Tanner. “We went all over, to Cavendish, Brackley, Thunder Cove.”

“He just sits there listening to music,” said Amanda.

“Or I listen to podcasts,” said Tanner. “Then I go in the water.”

“Thunder Cove is a secret beach,” said Amanda.

“The kids took a walk to the Teacup,” said Cathy.

“The way the rock there has eroded you can walk underneath it,” explained Mark.

“It’s a cliff, so you can be on the beach and behind you the water flows into the cliff, and you can go inside it,” said Tanner.

“It was cool,” said Amanda. “But, there were little crabs that bit your feet, especially this one part where they kept snapping at you.”

The day Mark Patterson went solo exploring was the same day the rest of the family boarded Papa’s Gem, one of two 45-foot Aiden’s Deep Sea Fishing boats sailing out of the North Rustico harbor. The fishing charter supplies rods, tackle, and bait, cleans the cod and mackerel you’ve caught, and you get to take it all with you.

Aiden Doiron started fishing when he was 15-years-old, started his own deep-sea fishing excursions in 1957, and started up Doiron’s Fish Market on the near side of the harbor. His family still operates the charter and the fishery.

“I caught one cod and two mackerel,” said Tanner.

“I caught two cod and mom got sick,” said Amanda.

“This guy on board was smoking a cigarette,” said Cathy.

“You’re not supposed to smoke,” said Amanda. “The captain got mad when he found out.”

“It was the way the wind came up and the smoke hit me full throttle. I had to sit down, but when the engines started up and we started moving, going back, it was too much. The next minute I was feeding the fish. It was quite embarrassing.”

Mark fired up the grill at Coastline Cottages the next day.

“I had never had mackerel,” he said. “We didn’t have any spices, no nothing, maybe a little parsley, but Tanner and I pan-fried the fish, and it might have been our best meal on the island.”

“No, dad, it was ice cream at Cows,” said Amanda.

By all accounts dinner at the New Glasgow Lobster Suppers was a big hit.

“It was a high point for me,” said Tanner.

The restaurant, on the Hunter River, not far from North Rustico, got its start in 1957 when the New Glasgow and District Junior Farmers Organization, looking for a permanent meeting place, bought and moved a canteen to the eatery’s current location. The first lobster supper, priced at $1.50, was served on improvised plank tables as a fundraiser in 1958. The dinner was followed by a dance.

Today the all-you-can-eat feast starts with fresh rolls seafood chowder coleslaw salad and Island Blue mussels.. The main course is lobster. Dessert is buffet-style. The restaurant is still owned by the Nicholson’s and MacRae’s, two of the original founding couples. It was showcased on TV’s Food Network in 2012, on a program called “You Gotta Eat Here”.

“You sit at a long picnic-style table. It’s like clockwork, so well run,” said Cathy.

“Tanner and I ate a whole bucket of mussels,” said Mark.

“You can have one, two, three buckets, all you want,” said Cathy.

“I ate them all,” said Tanner proudly.

“I never had fresh mussels like that,” said Mark.

PEI mussels, sweet and tender, are widely available at seafood counters in many countries, and are often considered the best in the world. Some gourmands say the best mussels are harvested on lonely rocky outcrops along cold-water tidal inlets, but since few people haul themselves, their rubber boots and gloves, and 5-gallon plastic pails to isolated shorelines, the island’s rope-grown mussels are the next best. They are super tasty nutritious sustainable and even help purify water by clearing nitrogen.

Nothing beats sitting down to PEI mussels on PEI.

“Amanda tried a mussel, but she wasn’t crazy about it,” said Tanner.

“Hey, I ate a lot of them!” she protested.

After a week of lolling on beaches the Patterson’s got into their car and went touring. The Tip-to-Tip Tour is about driving the length of the province on the rolling coastal roads. It’s a way to see the meeting of the tides at one end of the island at East Point and North America’s longest natural rock reef at the other end at North Cape.

“You go to one side, they give you a ribbon, and when you get to the other side, and show them the ribbon, they give you a certificate,” said Mark. “It’s a long drive. We were all tired by the time we got to North Cape.”

When they pulled into Tignish, a small town on the far northwestern tip of the island, they were ready for their daily bread. When they asked, someone recommended the Very Best Restaurant, which turned out to be part of the Tignish Co-op. A small sit-down, it has a big name for its Acadian meat pies.

“At first I thought they were bragging,” said Mark. “But, it’s got to be good if they say that. When we got there, there were all kinds of different tables and chairs.”

“It looked pretty sketchy,” said Amanda.

“After we sat down we could tell it was going to be good because all the local farmers and fishermen were there, in work clothes and Chevy caps,” said Mark. “We fed the whole family for thirty-five dollars.”

“It’s like a PEI secret place,” said Tanner.

“The name comes from living in the north,” said Amanda. “If you ask anybody how their day has been, they always say, the very best day.”

Closer to home, one day Cathy told the 12-year-old Tanner and the 13-year-old Amanda that the next day would be their day. They could pick whatever activity they wanted to do.

“We got one day, no, one morning, out of two weeks,” said Tanner.

“No, we went to all those beaches,” said Cathy.

“Oh, yeah,” said Tanner.

The next morning they went to Cavendish.

The resort town is the next town over from North Rustico, known for its numerous cottages and campgrounds, Green Gables attractions, golf courses, boardwalk, and amusement parks. The first place they went to was the Route 6 Motel, a haunted house nestled in a spruce grove, crawling, walking, and running through the winding corridors where disturbing obstacles lurk.

“It was great, but I couldn’t. I was fine, but I don’t like getting squished,” said Amanda. “When they yelled to get ready for the airbags, I hate that. I told them I needed to check out and they opened a side door for me.”

Tanner had already checked out.

“I’m good at scary movies,” he said. “I can predict everything. I just use my brain, but haunted houses, I don’t like it when it’s super dark and super loud.”

Cathy was waiting outside, catching some fresh air, reading a paperback. A young mother walked out of the haunted house with a 7-year-old in hand. The boy was crying.

“Is he OK?” asked Cathy.

“The haunted house did him in,” said the woman.

“I’m waiting for my kids,” said Cathy.

“Is one of them wearing a pink sweatshirt?”

“Yes.”

“They’re out already.”

Cathy found Big Pink and PJ at the side of the Route 6 Motel.

“Sure enough, neither of them finished the haunted house,” she said.

Within the first few days of arriving on Prince Edward Island, Tanner was known as Big Pink, since he was a large boy and wore his favorite pink sweatshirt whenever he could, and Amanda was known as PJ for wearing her pajamas over her bathing suit going to and from the Coastline Cottage’s kidney-shaped saltwater pool overlooking the ocean.

Their next stop was the Hangar, a black-lit, fog-filled, state-of-the-art laser tag arena. Strapped into special vests, Tanner and Amanda were released into the 3000-square-foot space, firing infrared beams with Uzi-style ray guns.

“When we went one-on-one, I totally destroyed her,” said Tanner.

“Sure, but when we played that other family, I dominated,” said Amanda.

“She was super good at sneaking around, getting behind you, and shooting, shooting, shooting,” said Tanner. “She would just surprise run up and shoot you in the back the whole time.”

After two weeks on the island, going home to Montreal wasn’t easy, except for leaving the pillows behind. “The beds are comfortable in the cottage, but the pillows aren’t,” said Amanda.

“Bring your own pillow next time,” said Cathy.

“We all went to see “Anne of Green Gables” in Charlottetown. When Matthew dies at the end, I was, oh, crap, I had forgotten that part. That got me,” said Mark.

“The island is beautiful,” he added. “I liked that I wasn’t working for two weeks.” Island hopping is being able to do nothing much and having all day to do it before you have to go back to whatever made you go on vacation in the first place.

“I liked getting up in the morning, taking my cup of tea down to the ocean, sitting on my log down there,” said Cathy.

“The beaches,” said Big Pink. His favorite place was anyplace by the ocean. “Eating mussels and Canada Day were awesome, too.”

When he heard there was pole climbing rubber boot throwing lobster eating contests and a cow bingo, guessing where the cow will do its business at the end of the afternoon, every year at the Agricultural Exhibition and Acadian Festival, he said, “We’re coming back!”

“I’m not chasing pigs!” said Amanda.

When the Patterson’s piled into their car for the return trip to Montreal, they drove from North Rustico to New Glasgow to Hunter River to Kelly’s Cross to Crapaud onto Highway 1 to Borden-Carleton and onto the Confederation Bridge.

By a twist of the turnstile, there’s no cost to cross the bridge for a summer vacation on the red island, no ticket takers. But, when you pull  up to the tollbooth to go home, it costs $47.00 to leave. It’s like the candles costing more than the cake. That’s when you might as well make plans to go back, since the 12-minute way off the mainland over the wide coastal water to Prince Edward Island is always for the asking.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Red Island

Road Map

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By Ed Staskus

   There are more than six thousand kilometers of two-lane roads from one end of Prince Edward Island to the other end. There are some fast roads but most of them are laid-back. Tractors cows dogs slow the going down. About two thousand of the kilometers are unpaved and even slower, even if it was a motorcycle or a sports car trying to get up to speed. The ruts and chuckholes would make short work of them. All the unpaved roads are red clay dirt. Most of the paved roads are reddish to the naked eye.

   “At one time there was island stone and beach sand that was used in concrete,” explained Jamie Reid, the PEI operations manager for USCO Concrete.

   The landscape of Prince Edward Island is layered over sandstone bedrock. The sandstone is leavened with iron oxide, or rust, giving the countryside a distinctive red color beneath blue skies overlooking green fields. The natives who lived on the island before European colonization called their land Epekwitk. They thought Glooscap, who was their god, after he finished making the rest of the world, mixed all his colors with a final flourish and made their island.

   Sandstone can be dug up by backhoes and is still sometimes used for local and seasonal roads. Wet weather transforms unpaved byways and tractor paths into what some islanders call baby poop. 

   “When I was a kid most of the roads around here were dirt,” said Kelly Doyle. “Sometimes after a bad winter storm you couldn’t go anywhere for a day-or-two.”

     The first roads on PEI were built in the late 1760s. At the turn of the 20th century cars were banned on most roads most of the time, especially on market days. It didn’t have anything to do with drunk driving. There was a total ban on alcohol on the island. A Red Flag law was legislated, ordering there be a man at the front of every car with a red flag, ready to wave it just in case things got out of hand. Twenty years later the law was thrown out , the red flags were put away and cars went anywhere they wanted so long as there was a throughway that they could handle without breaking an axle.

   Kelly Doyle has lived in North Rustico, a small town on a natural harbor on the north-central side of Prince Edward Island along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, most of his life. He owns the Coastline Cottages on Doyle’s Cove on the National Seashore, operates PEI Select Tours, and was a lobster fisherman for many fishing seasons.

   “I grew up on a mixed farm. It wasn’t anything elaborate, basically turnips, which is a rutabaga, and we grew grain, barley, and wheat. My father was the farmer.” Mixed farms are for families who need a farmer three times a day, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

   Tom and Doris “Dottie” Doyle farmed 100 acres, although at one time the family had almost 400 acres. “Most of our land is rented,” said Kelly Doyle. “We used to have seven fields on our one hundred acres, but now it’s three fields.”

   By the early 1900s PEI’s dense forests had been largely cleared and ninety percent of the island’s land was being farmed. There were more than 12,000 farms, almost all of them between fifty to one hundred acres. The land was sub-divided by dikes, which are walls built of rocks dug up from the fields.

   “Those dikes were full of berries,” said Kelly. “Our mom used to send us back in the fields with buckets. We’d come back with them full of wild raspberries and blueberries.” 

   After World War Two technology and tractors led to modernization and bigger farms. One-crop planting became common. By 2006 there were only 1,700 working farms on Prince Edward Island and more than half of them were growing potatoes.  PEI is sometimes called the Million Acre Farm. Other times it’s just called Spud Island.

   “Fields were smaller fifty years ago,” said Kelly. “Maybe it should have stayed that way. Now they’ve ripped out all the dikes and sprays kill all the wild berries. It’s a shame to see it.”

   Tom Doyle, however, was the only Doyle who ever farmed.

   “They were boat people from Ireland in 1847,” said Kelly. “It was on his third sailing here that my great-great-grandfather landed and stayed. He did something so that the Queen, or somebody, granted him land, and two shore lots.” 

   By 1850 a quarter of the people on Prince Edward Island were Irish. The last wave of immigrants was from County Monaghan. They usually paid their own way to North America and usually made their own way once on the island, rather than submitting to tenant farming.

   Most freeholders farmed and controlled livestock. By the mid-1800s PEI was already exporting surplus foodstuff all over eastern Canada and to Great Britain. The Doyle’s, however, raised horses and propagated thoroughbreds. The family later took advantage of fashion and bred black silver foxes for their pelts.

   The riddle of breeding foxes was solved in the late 19th century on Prince Edward Island. Twenty years later single pelts sold for as much as $2000.00, at a time when farm laborers made about a dollar a day. In 1913 the provincial government estimated foxes were worth twice as much as “all of the cattle, horses, sheep, swine, and poultry” on the island.

   Whenever fish and crop prices went south, men turned to fox breeding. No one overly minded the stink, the skunk-like smell of the fox farms. The fur bubble burst on the eve of WW2. “When they went out of style my dad let all his animals out and he became a farmer.” By the early 1950s the fox industry was finished.

   Kelly grew up on the family farm and went to the nearby Stella Maris School, across the street from the Church of Stella Maris Roman Catholic Church. The school was built in 1940 and burned to the ground in 1954. “We stood looking utterly helpless in our misery,” a nun at the nearby Stella Maris Convent wrote in her diary. A year later, a year before Kelly’s birth, the town re-built their school. “It is the most modern fourteen room school in the province,” the Guardian newspaper touted in its feature article.

   “I went grades one through nine. Almost everybody my age quit in grade nine. It was the 60s and 70s. There was no need of education around here. Fathers would tell their kids, you’re not going to do anything in school, get to work in the boat. All of us said we’ve got better things to do and banged out of there.” 

   As a young man he wasn’t ready for boat work, or steady work of any kind, instead roaming Lower Canada, living in Montreal and sowing a bushel full of wild oats, until returning to North Rustico. He built a cottage on family land on a hillside overlooking Doyle’s Cove, but couldn’t find work.

   High unemployment in Atlantic Canada has been a constant since the 1950s. The eastern provinces are more invested in  seasonal jobs, like agriculture, fishing, and tourism, than Canada’s other regions, leading to seasonal lay-offs and involuntary part-time work.

   “Back in the 70s and 80s, she was pretty lean here. There was no money around for years.” 

   In the 1980s the gross domestic product of Prince Edward Island was the lowest in Canada, only 56% of the national average. Next to Newfoundland, the province had the lowest per capita income in the country. There was the fruit of the sea, though. When Kelly was offered work on a fishing boat putting out of the town harbor, he took it.

   “When I first started fishing everyone had a gasoline engine in an old wooden boat. Everything was done manually, except for hydraulics to haul gear off the bottom. The steering was even done by chains. Then everything went fiberglass, everything went diesel, and everything went hydraulics.” 

   As late as the 1980s fish men went door-to-door, making a living selling cod, until a ban on the taking of ground fish was put in place. Fish stocks had been over-exploited for decades up and down Atlantic Canada. They were severely depleted.

   “When I started fishing, people were baiting hooks and hauling trawls for halibut, haddock, and cod. Then the moratorium came in. All we were allowed was lobster.” 

   Kelly harvested hundreds of thousands of lobsters for almost three decades.

   “Lobster traps were invented a while ago and they’re as simple as mousetraps,” he said. Except, unlike mousetraps, lobster traps are remarkably half-baked, even though they almost always get the job done. Invented just more than one hundred years ago, they have changed little in the interim. Even though entrances to the traps are one-way, any lobster that tries to escape can get away, if it has a mind to.

   “My theory is there are two ways lobsters get caught,” said Kelly. “One way is what I call simple mindedness.” Since lobster brains are less than the size of the tip of a fountain pen, he might be right.

   “Lobsters won’t usually back out the same way they’ve come in. They crawl up the net, there’s a flap on it, then once they’re in that they can’t go back. The other way they get caught is they just stay too long in the trap eating bait, and when we jerk it out of the water, they get tossed into the back by the sheer momentum of us pulling it up with the hauler.” 

   Since lobsters spend almost all day and night racking their brains about where their next meal is coming from, crawling on their walking legs to get to it, and finally eating all the crabs, mollusks, fish, and even other lobsters they can get, it lends credence to Kelly’s second theory about overeating.

   Kelly Doyle’s brothers, John, Mike, and Kenny, all fished. “We weren’t farmers, exactly, but we weren’t fishermen, exactly, either, although I think it was naturally in our blood, since every one of us was at ease on the water.”

   John Doyle fished for several years before marrying and moving to Ontario to raise a family. Mike Doyle was one of the first satellite television providers on PEI. “Mike had rubber boots and oil gear and he went out, too, but then he got into TV’s.”  He later transitioned from catching lobsters to serving them at his Blue Mussel Café, a seafood restaurant, at the far end of the harbor.

   Kenny Doyle spent fifteen years fishing on local boats, and the next ten years fishing commercially with his brother, Kelly. “He’s captained deep-sea fishing boats out of Rustico for fifteen years, too. Kenny’s an able man behind the wheel.”

   Cathy and Elaine, the Doyle sisters, stayed on dry land. They did so for good reason. In North America fishing boats sink to the bottom of the sea at the rate of one every three days. Unpredictable storms roil the ocean. “You get black and bruised,” said Kelly. “During those seas, you do everything slower. You have to be a lot more careful with your gear, your traps, and the rope under your feet. You always have to watch your P’s and Q’s.”

   Kelly fished with his partner, Paul Doiron, a man he’s known since they were youngsters, although nine years separates them. “Paul, that’s my buddy, that’s my partner in crime.” Their boat was the Flying Spray, a modern, high-bowed 40-foot fiberglass craft built in nearby Kensington. “Paul’s roundish, built a bit like a buoy. He lives right here in the crick.”

   North Rustico has been known as ‘The Crick’ for many years. “There was a creek that ran right through the village,” said Kelly. “The people from Charlottetown either didn’t know what a creek was, or misunderstood, and ended up calling it the crick, so we ended up being nicknamed that.”

   There are only three houses on the shore lots on the northwestern side of Doyle’s Cove. One of them is a newer house built by Kenny Doyle, the other is the old Doyle family house, and the house nearest the cove was Andy’s Surfside Inn. Andy Doyle was Kelly Doyle’s uncle. “Andy turned 90 a couple of years ago and was still over there.” When he passed away, a cousin took over the house, renovating it.

   Kelly’s all-year cottage, large sliding glass doors fronting red cliffs and the curving shoreline, is on the field side of the Gulf Shore Parkway, the National Park roadway between Cavendish and North Rustico. Since the late-1980s he has one by one built five seasonal cottages adjacent to his, which are the Coastline Cottages, on the crest of the hill overlooking Doyle’s Cove. In the new century he added a kidney-shaped saltwater swimming pool. 

   “People thought, I’m turning it into a tourist trap,” he laughed.

   “Most of my friends ended up getting married. I ended up having cottages and getting in debt.” He is not on the rocks, but “there was no money around here for years. We’re all making a living now, but there still isn’t any great amount of it.”

   He owned and operated Amanda’s, a fresh seafood diner, in town across from the market, for many years. It wasn’t in his blood, but it was. During the 1960s his parents had a small restaurant in nearby Cavendish. 

   “It was 7 cents for pop, 30 cents for a hamburger, and 17 cents for fries back then,” he said. “That was the kind of money you made in 1964. There were six kids in our family. Some of those French Acadian families around here had a dozen births. It was no different for anyone.”

   Besides his cottages and fishing for lobster the months of May and June, like many men and women on Prince Edward Island he has always had other jobs to keep his head above water. He operates PEI Select, a tour guide service catering to Japanese tourists visiting Anne’s Land, the home of “Anne of Green Gables”. The series of books by Lucy Maud Montgomery, about a plucky red-haired girl, are big in Japan. In 2014 a Japanese-language version of the “Anne of Green Gables” musical wrapped up a sold-out nationwide tour by playing in Tokyo.

   In the spring he rents his farmland to neighboring farmers for hay, grain, and soybeans. He doesn’t let potatoes be planted on his land. “I let them grow food that uses the least amount of herbicides and pesticides,” he explained.

   Coastline Cottages, the Doyle houses, and the cove are in the National Park, but are not the National Park. The park was established in 1937 and encompasses more than five thousand acres of coastal headlands, sand dunes, and beaches. The Doyle’s didn’t sell their land when the park was being created on the central north shore of Prince Edward Island. 

   “But they have the patience to wait everybody out,” said Kelly. “That’s the beauty of the National Park. You don’t want to sell right now? That’s fine. Your son will want to sell, and if he doesn’t want to, his son will. If it takes two hundred years, we will get you out of this park.”

   Only change is unchanging, even though when times change it sometimes seems like not much is different. “There’ve been a lot of changes around the island, but it’s nice to go home and say it hasn’t changed much right here. That’s another beauty of the National Park. Since it’s a national park, it stays the same.”

   About 285 million years ago Prince Edward Island was a mountain range. Over time it evolved into a low-lying basin as glaciers advanced and retreated. Most of the ice was gone by 10,000 years ago and the island slowly took shape. Living in a traditional farming and fishing community, looking past the sandstone cliffs of Doyle’s Cove and out over the Atlantic Ocean, from the vantage point of Kelly Doyle’s deck it can seem like only a little has changed in a long time.

   “Only the rabbits and trees get bigger,” he said.

    Before the rebuilt Gulf Shore Parkway, which features a new all-purpose trail as it winds down a long highland past the cove, there was the old Gulf Shore Parkway, and before that there were tracks, and before that there weren’t any roads, at all. 

   “When the road came in sometime in the 1950s it cut our farm in half,” said Kelly. Before it was a road it was a hillside. When it rained in early spring or late fall, and especially when it rained all day, the slope that is now a road turned into a slippery slope of PEI sandstone, red clay goop slippery as an eel.

   The Doyle’s still always got to where they had to go. Getting somewhere is staying on your feet, knowing the drive, trimming your sails. Sometimes any road, or even no road at all, will get you where you want to go.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Red Island

Cabin Fever

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By Ed Staskus

The nearly 80,000 people who plug away every day on Prince Edward Island go to work in lots of places, including groceries school offices, aerospace and bioscience and pouring coffee and serving breakfast, but mostly in agriculture, fisheries, and tourism.

Grains, fruits, and potatoes lead production on farms, bringing in cash receipts of about $500 million.  “Good soil is better than money in the bank” was once a commonly used expression on Prince Edward Island. It is still true, although it doesn’t hurt to have a bundle in the bank, something for a rainy day.

The lobster fishery lands 40 million-some pounds, valued at more than $200 million. Every last person on PEI is too few to eat all the lobster, so exports are vital. There are more than 4,000 commercial fishers and 47 licensed processing facilities. The enterprise employs as many as 8,000 people during peak production times.

Tourism rounds out the big three. A million-and-a-half visitors come from all over the world to golf, eat, relax, and experience “Anne of Green Gables.” It is far more come and go in summertime than lives on the island.

When you live and work on PEI summer starts when the snow melts and the days get longer. If you are in a business dependent on tourism, ice cream theaters restaurants transportation accommodation, summer starts when summer is over.

Tourism on PEI generates 15,000 to 17,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal jobs. When summer is over many in the trade go somewhere starting in mid-autumn, looking for a few weeks of summer in another country. The sweltering heat of Cuba is a sticky thing, but it is super in winter, when there are plenty of dry sunny days and lots of blue sky.

Visiting Prince Edward Island in summer means warm enough to go to the beach, swim sail kayak, and go walking, running, and biking. There are plenty of days in July and August when t-shirts and short sleeves are the order of the day, and maybe a pullover for cooler nights. It’s about four months on PEI of being able to get out the door and outdoors.

It is aces having a big cabin if you get cabin fever. But nothing is as wide open big as being out in the open air. Besides, not everyone has a big cabin, or a cabin big enough. Even the largest cabin is dwarfed by the overarching sky.

Yoga means “to yoke.” Even though nobody gets paid for doing it, it is a kind of work. It is also its own reward.

Most people consider yoga an indoor activity. It is mostly practiced indoors, the weather being what it is in North America. Yoga studios are almost always inside buildings, anyway. That is a good thing if it’s the middle of winter in Vermont, or the armpit of summer in Mississippi, or fall winter a wet spring on Prince Edward Island.

Almost 120 inches of snow falls during the winter on PEI. Skiers going to Vermont are happy if 80 inches has fallen during the season. The wind off the ocean can make everything feel colder than it is on the island. Sometimes harbors are still frozen stiff into May.

That was why Frank and Vera Glass never left northern Ohio on the edge of Lake Erie to go to Prince Edward Island until June. Although it was never a sure thing, they tried to make sure they could get outside as much as possible.

Doing yoga indoors means being able to practice in the middle of a blizzard or a thunderstorm, or even a light sprinkle. It means doing it in a space set aside for exercise and breathwork, or just meditation, without interruption. It means being able to be consistent in one’s effort, a good habit thought to be fundamental to gaining ground.

No rain checks are ever needed when unrolling a mat at your local studio or your rec room. They are private spaces, spaces in which the environment is controlled. If you’re looking for insight, lightning might strike, but it won’t be literal lightning. If you’re just looking for a dry place to exercise, you’re in the right place.

Some yoga, like Bikram Yoga, is only done indoors only, in sealed-up steam-filled rooms, like heat-ravaged parts of the world in the grip of a climate change event, when you might as well be outside. Even then it probably wouldn’t live up to what Bikram Choudhury, the eccentric mastermind of hot room yoga, calls his “torture chambers.”

K. P. Jois, the man who inspired and developed Ashtanga Yoga, on which most yoga exercise of the last half-century is based, recommended that it be practiced indoors.

“Outside don’t take,” he said. “First floor is a good place. Don’t go upstairs, don’t go downstairs.” When asked about yogis in in the past practicing in the forest, he simply said, “That is very bad.” K. P. Jois was a man of few words.

Even though there are problems associated with practicing outdoors, including that it will inevitably defy the weather forecast and rain the one day you try it, people do it all the time. Southern California is littered with classes like ‘Beach Yoga with Brad.’

“Ditch the confines of the indoors!” recommended CBS-TV Los Angeles, reporting from the great outdoors.

“If you’re doing yoga indoors then you’re cheating yourself,” said Sarah Stevenson, a Yoga Alliance-certified instructor in Orange County. “The sun’s rays and fresh air provide not only improved physical health, but also spiritual and emotional wellbeing.”

It isn’t just warm clime folks, either, who roll out mats regardless of rocks and roots and bugs. From Missoula to Minneapolis, any place where the winters are long and dark, the sun-starved come out in droves in the summertime.

Frank was a fair weather man, but some don’t wait for the solstice.

Members of ‘Y-8’ routinely practice their ‘Alsteryoga’ on the thick ice of the rock- hard Lake Alster outside the northern German town of Hamburg. They make sure to pull the hoods of their insulated sweatshirts over their heads when in headstand.

Whether it’s ice or sand or grass, the instability of ground outdoors makes for an easier said than done experience. Some people even practice on paddleboards when rivers and lakes have defrosted. “When you’re not on a solid wood floor surface, you end up using different parts of your body,” said Jennifer Walker, an instructor in Maine. “Outside, you end up engaging your core much more to stabilize your whole body.”

Although Frank Glass often got out into their backyard in the summer and fall, he still rolled out his mat indoors more often than not because he had carved out a space he liked at home, and because the weather in Lakewood, just outside of Cleveland, is unpredictable, while the midges and mosquitoes that fly up out of the Rocky River valley are predictable.

Sometimes, though, he jumped the traces.

The three mostly sunny weeks he and his wife Vera spent in North Rustico, on the north central coast of the island, at the Coastline Cottages, he moved his mat outside. Sometimes in the morning, but more often in the afternoon, when the crab apple trees at the back of their cottage cast welcome shadows, he unspooled it on the grass and set about doing yoga exercises, warming up with sun salutations.

“When I practice outdoors, there is this amazing energy,” said Angela Jackson, an instructor in Oakville, Ontario. “I feel more connected to the earth, the birds, the animals, the sky, and to myself.”

He did it almost every day, because they were on vacation with plenty of time, and because the days were warm, and it was fair and breezy where they were on the Atlantic Ocean. He was bitten every one of those days, sometimes more often than less, by creeping flying bugs, occasionally by black flies from the scrubby conifer woods next to the fifty acres of soybeans behind the cottages.

Prince Edward Island is predominately a farming and fishing province. There are croplands and cattle and fishing boats everywhere. A few years earlier they had stayed in a cottage one town down next to a field and a barn full of cows and thousands of flies. Every room in the cottage came equipped with a fly swatter. They checked to be sure all the screens were safe and sound and in place.

The reason we feel more connected to the earth when we do yoga outdoors is because we are standing directly on the earth, on the soil and grass of it. PEI is made of soft sandstone and its soil is an iron oxide red. The contrast of bright green grass and red land beneath a high blue sky on a sunny summer day is always striking.

Frank saw lots of sky doing things on his back on his mat behind the cottage. Insects crawling took shortcuts under him, the long way over him, or just bumped into him and zigzagged away. Seaside birds flew overhead. Most of them were cormorants, an easy to spot coastal bird with short wings and a long neck. There were plenty of wood warblers and a couple of yellow-bellied sapsuckers, darting in and out of the crab apple trees.

One afternoon behind their cottage a week-and-a-half into their stay on the island, a red fox hunkered down thirty-some feet away on the grass and kept his eyes on Frank for a long time. The fox surprised him, out in the open, even though he knew they were all over the north shore. They had seen plenty of them, on the shoulders of roads, or the edge of woods, always looking for handouts.

Vera ran on the all-purpose path every day and kept a wary eye out for them.

From 1900 until the 1930s black silver fox farming – the silver fox is a mutation of the island’s ubiquitous red fox – was a booming cash crop on PEI farms. Fox pelts were in high style but used to cost an arm and a leg because they could only be got from trappers. No one knew how to raise them until in the 1890s two men, a druggist and a farmer, perfected a way to domesticate and breed them.

It made many of the locals rich. The price for a bred fox pelt, never mind a trapped pelt, in 1910 was a jaw-dropping $1,200.00. To put that into perspective, farm laborers on the island in 1910 averaged a dollar a day in pay for ten-and- twelve-hour days.

The Great Depression and changing fashion in the 1940s crippled the market and by the 1950s fox farming was finished on the island. Most farmers simply let their animals loose. The foxes were glad to go, glad to be back on their own, glad to not have to be a fashion statement anymore.

“My grandfather raised horses, and kept foxes for their pelts,” said Kelly Doyle, a North Rustico native whose Coastline Cottages they were staying at. “But then they weren’t cool anymore, so he let all his foxes out, and since my father couldn’t make a living at that became a farmer.”

Rubbing eyes with a fox in woods or fields used to be out of the ordinary, but nowadays sighting have become commonplace.

“Whereas foxes once avoided human contact, they now venture up to parked cars, presumably looking for food,” said Ryan O’Connor, who grew up on PEI and is a historian of Canada’s environmental movement.

Although some of the issues with yoga in the great outdoors are biting bugs and bad weather and sometimes too much sunshine, rarely is the issue a wild animal. Red foxes are wild, but not so wild, too. They live in woodlots and sand dunes, are intelligent and adaptable, and have no trouble living in close association with human beings.

They are still wild, though, living out in the wild.

One moonless night, sitting on their deck overlooking Doyle’s Cove, they heard a god-awful noise somewhere out on the long dark sloping lawn. The next morning Kelly Doyle had to clean up the remains of a dismembered rabbit. Every fox hunts every night for mice rabbits voles.

Frank don’t know when the red fox slipped behind their cottage to watch him on the yoga mat. He saw him midway through his series for the day, when he lengthened into plank from down dog and transitioned into up dog, and there the fox was, nearly near-at-hand.

There is a rule at the Coastline Cottages. “Don’t Feed the Animals.” The rule is to discourage foxes from loitering, looking for food for their kits. Frank and Vera hadn’t seen anyone breaking the rule, because who wants a fox at their door cadging for a handout? But there was the red fox, plain as day, behind their cottage, giving Frank the once over.

“They won’t bother you, or bite you,” Kelly had told them.

Frank had no reason to doubt him, so he continued doing what he was doing, sneaking a peek at the animal now and then. The fox wasn’t small or overly large, maybe 20 or 25 pounds, with a reddish-brown coat, white under belly, and a black-tipped nose. One of his eyes was cloudy, as though the animal had been hurt or had a cataract.

He lounged and shifted and moved more like a cat than a dog, although foxes are a part of the dog family. His ears were triangular. When he cocked his head and his ears went up erect, he looked like a Maine Coon cat with his muzzle in mousing position.

All during the rest of Frank’s yoga practice that afternoon the fox never made a sound, and even seemed to doze off for a few minutes. He stretched and yawned. When he went away, sliding into the soybean field, he walked on his toes, heels off the ground, agile canny swift. No amount of yoga Frank ever did was ever going to get him to be able to move like that.

He didn’t see the fox with the bad eye again the rest of their stay, although Vera spotted him one day miles away near MacNeill’s Brook.

Living far north of Mason-Dixon, Vera was by necessity forced to run on a treadmill and Frank to do yoga indoors most of the time. But moving one’s mat outdoors isn’t necessarily for the birds, if only because that’s where the energy is. The fountainhead is under the arching sky in the wide blue yonder.

In the world of yoga, the word prana means energy or life force and pranayama means breathing exercises. To practice outdoors is to be immersed in the source of prana, whether you mean it as the source of life or simply as the air we breathe.

Bringing a breath of back roads air into your body mind spirit is refreshing. Great wafts of it are even better. It’s no holds barred taking in the old-school oxygen of the island. There’s more air in the air on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean than there is in most other places.

There was more than enough of it for both the red fox and Frank the afternoon they shared it, both of them dwarfed by a sweeping horizon and puffy white clouds blowing out to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, behind a cottage next to a soybean field.

“How was it?” Vera asked when Frank stepped back inside through the door.

“It was a breath of fresh air in my brain,” he said.

A version of this story appeared in International Yoga Journal.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”