Tag Archives: Doyle’s Cove PEI

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

Bringing Back the Future

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By Ed Staskus

   The green house on Doyle’s Cove and the shore road on the Gulf of St. Lawrence have both been there for more than a century, except last century they changed places. The road used to be on the cliff side and the house on the hillside. The green house is on the cliff side today and the road has been moved away from the ocean. It is now the National Park road.

   “It was on the property but maybe a few hundred yards away,” said Kelly Doyle, about what became the green house. When Kelly’s father, Tom, hauled it down to the water’s edge, it was because his new bride refused to stay in the white family house, the house that ended up within earshot.

   “Dad in the back of his head thought his mother and wife would get along, but they were both very damned strong women,” Kelly said. “They just couldn’t live in the same house, both determined about that.”

   When Doris and Tom Doyle married in 1947, both in their early 20s, Dottie from Boston and Tom native to the island, they moved into the big white house on the cove built in 1930 that Tom grew up in.

   “The only place to live was living in the white house,” Kelly said.

   The white house is on the ocean side of North Rustico, on the north side of Prince Edward Island, near the entrance to the harbor, a 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. 

   “The first house was bigger,” said Kelly.

   It had been bigger, but it was gone.

   Kelly’s grandparents, Mike and Loretta Doyle, were playing cards at a neighbor’s house one night in 1929. It was winter, cold and snowbound. 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 ice in the cove below them. 

   The pitch-dark night was lit up. The house was on fire. They had left seven children behind in the care of the eldest. Tom was the youngest, four years old.

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

   By the time the horses raced down to the house, the parents finding all their children safe and sound outside, there wasn’t much Mike and Loretta could do. There were no neighbors nearby to help and there was no fire department. Mike 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 from the fire built the new house.” Kelly’s grandfather was a fox farmer. What he sold the pelts for went to pay for the work of the nomadic immigrant tradesmen who built the house.

   “Nobody knew them,” said Kelly. “They weren’t from around here.”

   It took the Great Depression a year to get to Prince Edward Island, but when it did it disrupted farming, what the island did for a living. In 1930 PEI farmers had a large grain and potato harvest. They had never had problems selling to their markets, but by then their markets were going broke. For the next couple of years, no markets were buying. By 1933 average net farm income on PEI was twenty dollars a year, selling fruits, produce, vegetables, and cattle.

   Although agriculture and the fisheries crashed, tourism and fox fur farming boomed during the 1930s. It was how many islanders kept their heads above water. One in ten PEI farmers were involved in keeping foxes, supporting their families. There were 600-some fox farms on the island in 1932. Five years later there were double that. By the end of the decade ten times the number of pelts went to market as had the previous decade.

   “When my mother married my dad, she didn’t get along with my grandmother all that well,” said Kelly. They were all living together in the family house. “My mom and grandmother liked each other enough, but not enough to live in the same house. She finally said to my dad, you better build me a house.”

   It put Tom Doyle on the spot. There wasn’t the money for a new house, even though they had the property. “Dad had a choice to make, either lose your wife, or build a house.” He couldn’t build a house, so he improvised.

   “I don’t know what kind of a building it was,” Kelly said. “It was few hundred yards away. He hauled it down the hill to the cliffs and turned it into a house, even though he had his hands full farming at the time.”

   Moving a building is no small amount of work. Fortunately, the building was on the small side, there was a short clear route, and there weren’t any utility wires that had to raised. There was no electricity or plumbing to disconnect, either. Still, wooden cribs had to be inserted to support the building inside and out, jacks had to raise it at the same exact rate and lower it the same way, and it had to be trailered slowly and carefully to its new foundation, between the barn and the white house.

   “It was almost eighty years old when my dad moved it,” said Kelly. “It was two thirds the size of what it is now. When I grew up in it, it was pretty small. They built onto it in 1964 when I was eight years old. We spent that winter in my grandmother’s house while our house was being renovated.”

   The Doyle kids, Cathy, Elaine, Kenny, John, Mike, and Kelly grew up in what became a two-story, gable-roofed, green-shingled house, even though it was never big enough for all of them, never enough bedrooms.

   “It wasn’t bad, since there was a fifteen-year difference between the youngest and the oldest. We all left the house at different times.”

   Mike Doyle died in 1948, soon after Tom and Dottie’s marriage, leaving Loretta a widow. She started taking in summer tourists, putting up a sign that said Surfside Inn. She harvested her own garden for the B & B’s breakfasts. “My grandmother filled all the rooms every summer. Some Canadians came, and more Europeans, and Americans because they had lots of money.” 

   She ran the inn for more than twenty years. 

   “She got a little bit ill around 1970, and lived alone for six, seven years until my dad moved her into the senior’s home in the village. After that nobody lived in the house for ten years.”

   In the late 1980s Andy Doyle took it over, rechristening it Andy’s Surfside Inn. 

   “My uncle had been gone for more than twenty years, nobody ever heard from him, and then he came out of the woodwork and took it over,” Kelly said. Nobody could believe that a man in his late 60s wanted or could run a five-room inn. He ran the show for almost twenty-five years, outliving all his siblings until dying in his sleep two years ago.

   It was the end of the Surfside Inn, but not the end of the white house. Erik Brown, the son of Elsie, Andy’s sister, moved in, keeping it in the family. The next summer he started renovating the house back to a home.

   “It was a rambling old home with large rooms and a spectacular view,” said a woman who came from Montreal. “The best thing is having breakfast in the morning with all the guests around one table. One year ten years ago it was with mime artists from Quebec, an opera singer from Holland, and another lady from Switzerland. A dip in the cove outside the front door is a must before breakfast. There are lovely foxes gambling outside, in the evening, on the large lawn!”

   “It was neat when I was growing up,” said Kelly. It was the 1960s. “There were ducks geese and sheep and white picket fences. She had lots of tourists from Europe. We were just kids, all these little blond heads running around. I started meeting those people from overseas.”

   Up the hill from the bottom of the pitch where today there is forest land there was in the 1970s a summer camp for clansman kids.

“They called it Love it Scots. There wasn’t a tree up there then. A couple hundred kids from around the Maritimes would come and they would teach them Scottish music and their heritage. We could hear the bagpipes being played every night on our farm down here.”

   Highland College staged the PEI Scottish Festival there.

   “After that it was a campground, three four hundred families up there.”

   When the campground closed, the trees began to grow back until today it looks like the trees have always been there, rimming out the horizon, alive with damp and shadow. Blue jays, weasels, red squirrels and red foxes live there. The foxes hunt mice and rabbits. The blue jay is the provincial bird and stays above the fray.

   “I grew up with tourists,” said Kelly. “It was different back then. Now people come here and expect to be entertained.”

   There is Anne of Green Gables for the kids. There is harness racing and nightlife. There are performing arts in Charlottetown, Summerside, and even North Rustico. There are ceilidhs every summer evening all over the island. There is a country music festival in Cavendish that draws tens of thousands of people. There is cultural tourism. There are bus tours. Cruise ships dock in Georgetown, Summerside, and Charlottetown, disgorging hundreds of passengers on shore excursions, looking for something to do.

   The provincial authorities opened a buffalo park in the 1970s after getting a score of bison as a gift. Bison is not native to the island. Nevertheless, tourists lined up to see the car-sized animal like a large cow with horns curving upwards. Bison can run three times faster than people and jump fences five feet high. Fortunately, they were behind six-foot fences.

   “Back then people came here with a different attitude. There was lots to do, too, because they found the local life interesting. They liked the humbleness of everybody, the way of life that was so honest and down to earth. PEI wasn’t like the rest of the world back then. The Maritimes were kind of cut off from the rest of the world once the Merchant Marine was taken away. We kind of fell behind there.”

   The tourists of the 1950s and 60s were young couples travelling with children. Some were older couples from the American east coast. There were nature lovers. There were artists. Some of them were bohemians. Others came because PEI had become the “Cradle of Confederation.”

   “Even though, it was a dump here when I was growing up, to be honest,” said Kelly. “Everyone had an outhouse and a pig in the backyard. There were rats everywhere. It wasn’t all that nice in Rustico, but a lot of artists, writers, photographers, people who liked nature came here. It took a long time to come back, in the 70s and 80s, before it became looking like a real village.”

   In the 1970s the provincial government invested in tourism and has stayed invested ever since. It partnered in the Brudenell Resort near Georgetown and the Mill River Resort. Both include golf courses, which are seen as important tourist attractions. 

   Fifty years later, Prince Edward Island is a different place.

   “It’s sterilized now,” said Kelly. “It’s a completely different PEI, and the people who come here are different, different attitude, different interests.”

   Kelly grew up in the green house, on the cove. After storms the beach and red sandstone were often choked with seaweed, stinking for hundreds of yards. Back in the day some men collected it for fertilizer in their gardens and banked it against their house walls as insulation against the cold winter weather.

   Everyone went to school in town. After school Kelly and his friends didn’t have to go far for fun.

   “Between the pool hall and the rink, those were my social events, before I could drink. We grew up in the pool hall here.”

   To this day John Doyle is an outstanding pool player and participates in tournaments. “John is a decent shot,” said Kelly. “Keep your money in your wallet.”

   The pool hall was down and around the corner from Church Hill Road. A boatbuilder had several shops there and one of his sons converted one of them. The shop that became a pool hall was green like the green house. “There were a couple of pinball machines up front and eight tables in the back. it was the spot for boys and girls on weekends.”

   By the time he was 16 years old and finished with 9th grade, he was finished with school. Many boys did the same, going to work with their fathers, or simply going to work. Kelly went west to Quebec and Ontario, but when he got back to Prince Edward Island and started going into the tourist trade, the green house was still there. 

   He built a cottage up the hill from it.

   In the years since then Kenny Doyle built a brown house behind the barn. After Tom and Dottie passed away, the green house was rented to a young woman from the village for a few years, but John Doyle has taken it over. Bill and Michelle DuBlois, sprung from Elaine Doyle, have built a blue house across the street. 

   It is Doyle’s Land, from the edge of the ocean to the edge of the trees.

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.”