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Sean Hickey
From Brooklyn to Breton

Urge for Going


Canada

Urge for Going

Even at the ungodly hour of five AM, there was activity on our block: two guys in the midst of a louder-than-needed conversation, Brooklyn-style, one in the street, one in the car with the engine running. The city certainly looked sleepy as I pulled onto the expressway. At that time of day, I made the Triborough Bridge in twenty minutes, the Connecticut border in forty. An hour and a half from leaving I was in Hartford. Stopping somewhere in the hills of that state’s northeast it was noticeably cooler. The kink had worked its way out of my neck and I was comfortable pushing on to Wooster, Mass and onto the outer bypass of Boston, the 495.

I’m not one to pass judgment on the way others drive but, well, hell, that’s not true. I pass judgment on other drivers regularly as I’m certain that it’s part of my Detroit birthright. Travel has allowed me to experience firsthand, and comment on expertly, the different styles from state to state. Michiganders drive fast on the wide freeways of that state as do Californians on theirs. Floridians seem to think that every lane is a slow one and that the yellow line is often a fuzzy, vague demarcation of road. Constant lane changing or ignoring the stripes that define them has a New York freeway more resemble a giant slalom than a drag race. This behavior, at least for those that live in the city, has been learned from that most hellbent of street drivers: the NYC cabbie. My wife takes issue with drivers from New Jersey, the state that happens to boast the highest auto insurance rates in the U.S., and I won’t contradict her. Garden State drivers love to make left turns the moment a light turns green and before oncoming traffic, a dangerously stupid move one sees several times daily. But pound for pound – or mile for mile, in this case – I find the drivers of the state of Massachusetts – the colorfully-named “Massholes” – to be in a league of their own. It’s seldom speed, recklessness or stupidity that I’ve encountered in that state; rather, a driver’s bewildering approach to the road itself. Drive (or walk) in Boston and you’ll see what I mean. On this morning, a Honda Civic stayed in the right lane for the entirety of my one-hour stretch of I-495. He would speed up to ninety, then drop down to about fifty all in the span of one minute. This he repeated at least a dozen times as if he was trying to test G-forces. Each time I thought that he had exited somewhere, he would come roaring up beside me and past. If music was fueling his driver energy, then this fellow must have been alternating speed metal with The Carpenters in an oddball mix.

I-95 sweeps into New Hampshire, that wedge-shaped state that boasts the shortest ocean coastline – at a mere twelve miles – of any in the country. I crossed the high bridge of the Piscataqua and into Maine, less than four and a half hours after leaving home. Even along this busiest of freeway arteries, the wild of the north makes itself known in the form of thick forests that press up to the road and numerous meandering streams that pass under. Portland and Augusta passed by quickly and soon I was upon Bangor, gateway to Maine’s remote north woods. Never having visited Canada’s Maritimes before, I was enchanted with the possibility of visiting, and to do so by driving. I didn’t have time to adequately explore massive Newfoundland, though I thought it might be possible, with the few days I had, to investigate that sparsely-populated bastion of Gaelic culture in the New World: Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. The week before I had checked to see if I could catch one of the ferries to Nova Scotia from either Portland or Bar Harbor, Maine, saving several miles and hours of driving. All were booked for the Labor Day weekend. And with that news, I became fascinated by the possibility of driving the distance to Nova Scotia in one day. Checking the map and calculating the distance, I knew it could be done, and fairly easily too. It just seemed so improbable to wake up in Brooklyn and to go to sleep in Nova Scotia. Outfitted with tent, sleeping bag, clothes, water, and some chips, I was going to give it a try.




More or less devoid of settlement, Route 6 in northeast Maine was quite a serene drive and even on this first of September I was able to spot clumps of red in the trees as I closed in on the Canadian border, surprising to me given the intense heat of the summer in the East. Here I could look over my left shoulder and spot Mt. Katahdin – at 13 feet short of a mile, the highest point in Maine – a peak I had summitted just the weekend before. The area is littered with lakes, both great and small, one of which spreads all over the map; the delightfully appropriate name: Scraggley. Soon I crossed the squiggly line of the St. Croix River, a border contested long after the Revolution, and into Canada at one of New Brunswick’s least used border crossings. Despite the tourist information center, dusty Vanceboro looked ignored, as if there were too few people passing through, much less stopping, at either of its two stores. This road would take me north to Fredericton, provincial capital and second largest city, and on to the speedy Trans-Canada, an engineering marvel of sorts and the longest road in North America.

A perplexing sign on the on-ramp reads, “Welcome to Fredericton, the drive-by capital of Canada”. Despite the boast, it’s easy to see why few would stop. I found no indication that there was a city of any size even remotely close. So I drove by, pleased that I would now be traveling east. I had made it to Fredericton in eight hours.

The Trans-Canada has to be the ugliest swath of pavement anywhere. Its wider-than-necessary three lanes are separated from the oncoming lanes by a barren median the width of football field. The shoulders are sprinkled with crushed ochre stone that fans out like a skirt. But the amazing feature of New Brunswick, and impossible to ignore, is the endless forest, the likes of which I had never seen before. Occasionally, the drab Trans-Canada ditch would rise enough to permit a vista of endless miles of spruce and birch stretching far to the horizon with nary a town, a settlement, or any sign of life, in sight. The highway makes such an intrusion into the green density that if you stood on the edge and stuck your arm in the woods you wouldn’t be able to see your fingers. Twenty feet of brush is cleared on either side of the road to allow drivers to more effectively react to the numerous moose that spring into the lanes, especially between dawn and dusk. But beyond that: nothing but the thick wooded tangle of darkness.

Crossing the St. John River after a few hours on this road, I was in need of a good stretch and Moncton, the province’s third largest city with a population of 60,000, was to be the place. My guidebook said that, “you can’t help but sense the city’s vitality and energy”. If strings of fast food chains and donut stores were indicators of this then, yes, I too couldn’t help but sense those, at least here on Mountain Road. As sterile and commercially sad as the outskirts appeared to me, the downtown, a mere few blocks, looked wretchedly unbusy. Moncton sprung up on a bend in the Petitcodiac River, actually one of the furthest reaches of the Bay of Fundy, and home to the world’s most dramatic tides. Visitors come to Moncton to witness one of the more striking visual manifestations of a rapidly rising tide as it pushes up the river in an impressive tidal bore. Bore Park, located downtown, is the spot to witness the tide peaks every twelve and a half hours. At low tide, the river is not much more than a muddy ditch strewn with sleepy white plovers and banked with acres of reeds and wispy grasses. With an hour before the tide came in and not wishing to reach Nova Scotia in the dark, (I had lost an hour crossing into New Brunswick), I found Bore Park to be exactly that. So I pulled out of dull Moncton, passing a string of department and variety stores (Wal-Mart, Zellers) and back onto the freeway with a lowering sun behind me.




From here, it would have been fascinating to head north up to the Northumberland Strait, the shallow passage between New Brunswick and Canada’s smallest province - but the continent’s breadbasket: Prince Edward Island. Acadian New Brunswick is marked by French-flavored cities, marshes, sand dunes and broad beaches along St. Lawrence Bay. Furthest north, the shallow Baie des Chaleurs (Bay of Warmth), named by Jaques Cartier upon reaching its tepid waters, separates the northern part of the province from Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula. Unfortunately, that would have to wait for another time. East of Moncton I took a short detour into Sackville, a small college town, home to Mount Allison University, founded in 1843 and the first in the British Empire to grant a college degree to a woman. Sackville sits astride the enormous Tantramar Marshes, the broad low-lying plain between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The name is a corruption of tintamarre, basically, “loud racket”, after the scores of screeching gulls and other birds that patrol the sodden flatland. Sackville was settled by farmers from the marshy estuaries of western France and here they built an elaborate series of dykes and diversions to better irrigate the land. Today, several farms and bird sanctuaries, some of the largest in Atlantic Canada, cover this easternmost part of the province. Just a few miles further, I crossed the isthmus and from it entered Nova Scotia, exactly twelve hours from when I left this morning.

After securing a campground outside the border town Amherst and setting up tent, I took a drive to see if I could catch a sunset glimpse now that I was on the east side of the Bay of Fundy. I passed through River Hebert and into Joggins just as the sun dipped below the horizon and the sky immediately grew pink then eerily dark. Passing back over the streams and rivers I had just crossed, the tide had moved in and transformed the soggy landscape, noticeable even in the nearly absent light. I was spent and quickly went to sleep on the shores of Lake Lomond, satisfied that I picked my head up off the pillow this morning in New York. I lay it down now in New Scotland.



Previous
Introduction
Next
A Good A Day As Any
  Sean Hickey - Bio and Journals
  From Brooklyn to Breton - Intro Average Rating of 2 Viewers
Chapters of From Brooklyn to Breton
  Urge for Going
  A Good A Day As Any
  Further Up, Further In
  Jeux sans Frontiers
  Keep the Ocean on Your Left
  Songs About Buildings and Food

       

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