Tag: Canada

Looking at mainland New Brunswick

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Americans, in general, know little about their “neighbor to the north,” meaning Canada, though where I live it’s actually closer to the east.

That said, I’ve been learning principally about its province of New Brunswick, with its border coming about a mile from our home.

Here are ten highlights.

  1. It’s one of the three Maritime provinces – the other two being Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island – and one of the four Atlantic provinces when Newfoundland, which includes Labrador, is added in.
  2. It was set off from Nova Scotia in 1784 when 10,000 Loyalists arrived in exile from the new United States at the conclusion of the American Revolution. They established communities like St. John, St. Andrews, St. George, St. Stephen, and Fredericton. Some of them had even dismantled their homes in New England, shipped them, and erected them anew.
  3. Half of today’s population of 850,000 lives in three urban areas: Moncton, St. John, and Fredericton. As a result, New Brunswick, rather than say Manitoba or Saskatchewan, is proportionally the most heavily rural province in Canada.
  4. Although the first attempted French settlement in the New World was on St. Croix River, 1607-1608, on today’s border with Maine, it was abandoned. Later French colonists, from 1629 on, created a unique society based on dyke-based cultivation of tidal marshes along the Bay of Fundy. French authorities referred to the region as Acadia.
  5. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 not only ended the French and Indian wars with the English colonies but also gave England unchallenged rule of the region, leading to the forceful deportation of 12,000 Acadians. Those who emerged in Louisiana became known as Cajuns. Enough remained in New Brunswick to make it officially bilingual today – the only Canadian province so designated.
  6. About 8.5 percent of the population speaks French only. It’s a dialect stemming from southwestern France and is distinct from Quebecois elsewhere in Canada.
  7. Two-fifths of the city of St. John was destroyed by a fire that broke out in June 20, 1877. Among the 1,612 structures lost were eight churches, six banks, 14 hotels, and 11 schooners. Nineteen people were left dead and about 13,000 people became homeless.
  8. Today the city is home to the powerful Irving Group of Companies, including the gas station chain.
  9. Tourism is also a major economic factor, with the Bay of Fundy and its world’s highest tides as a central attraction. The province also has 58 covered bridges, including the world’s longest, and about 100 lighthouses, not all of them active.
  10. Four-fifths of the province is covered by forest. The Appalachian range extends across the northern half of the province.

About neighboring Campobello Island

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s less than two miles away from our house. We even see it from our upstairs windows. But it’s in New Brunswick, Canada, and we’re in Maine, USA, separated by some serious ocean currents. As I proclaim when fog kicks and obliterates that view, “We lost Canada again.”

Before the border restrictions that resulted from 9/11 in 2001, visitation both ways was common. Just hop in a boat and land over there or over here. Families, employment, and shopping often spread across both sides of the border. At least one previous owner of our house was born on Campobello, a long time before Covid really shut things down.

Here are some details.

  1. The international bridge to Lubec, Maine, is Campobello’s only direct route to the mainland. Tiny Lubec then serves as their closest retail center. You need a passport to go either way. Before the bridge opened in 1962, much of the traffic went by ferry connecting to Eastport, Maine.
  2. The island is 8.7 miles long and 3.1 wide, covers 15.3 square miles, and has a population of 949. Half of the island runs along the spectacular Bay of Fundy. In fact, it’s the second-largest of the Fundy Islands.
  3. The island has one school, which serves all grades.
  4. At the end of the 1800s, the island became a summer resort colony for wealthy Canadian and Americans, including the parents of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At their summer home, the future president learned to sail and explored the wild and, later, as an adult, tragically contracted polio. For Eleanor, the cottage was her favorite place to be, and she returned often, usually through Eastport. Today the residences are the core of Roosevelt Campobello International Park, with tours and programs administered jointly by Canadian and U.S. authorities.
  5. Combining its 2,800-acre natural preserve with an adjacent provincial park, the attraction extends to pristine cobble beaches, trails for hiking and cycling, breathtaking panoramas, rocky headlands, and several garden-like Arctic sphagnum moss peat bogs, one with an extensive interpretive boardwalk. The interior roads are, by the way, unpaved.
  6. Also within the park is Friar’s Head and its related trails, one down to a beach. On the Maine-facing side of the island, its views present the lower stretch of Passamaquoddy Bay and the beginning of Cobscook Bay. The highland sits above a landmark monolith outcropping dubbed the Old Friar for a presumed resemblance that has apparently faded, in part due to artillery practice from nearby crews in time of war. The waterway between Campobello and Eastport is known as Friar’s Road. (Now you know.)
  7. A small car-and-truck ferry connects Campobello and one end of Deer Island; from the other end, a second ferry runs to mainland New Brunswick.
  8. Campobello’s mail delivery comes through the U.S. There have been controversies over U.S. Border Patrol searches of the posts.
  9. Harbour Head Light, first built in 1829, is perhaps the most photographed lighthouse in Canada. Pedestrians who wish to climb to its beacon room can visit it only at low tide, but it is visible from other points.
  10. The island shelters us from heavy surf of the open Atlantic in Fundy Bay, as well as its fierce storm winds.
The Old Friar stands above the tide at the Roosevelt Campobello International Park in Canada.

 

Sounds true to me, living where I do

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the Literary Review of Canada, Stephen Marche profiled Canadians:

“To prove ourselves better than the Americans — more upright, more loyal — is the central tenet of Canada’s founding. The anglosphere divided itself up like a dysfunctional family: England the brutal bullying drunken father, America the glamorous rebellious son with a violent streak, and Canada the daughter always trying to smooth everything over, always trying to bury the dark secrets.”

Did you know about the war between the U.S. and Canada?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

More officially, it’s the Aroostook War a.k.a. the Pork and Beans War or Madawaska War of 1838-39 over the international boundary between Maine and the British province of New Brunswick.

Although militia units were called out, no actual fighting took place.

Well, there was a skirmish between armed lumbermen, the Battle of Caribou, in 1838.

The dispute was settled by negotiations by British diplomat Baron Ashburton and U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster in an 1842 treaty.

Without getting into the myriad details, it is how the Aroostook County towns of Fort Kent and Fort Fairfield got their full names. And most but not all of the disputed territory wound up in the USA, with Aroostook County being formed in 1840.

Reported casualties came from accidents and disease rather than actual combat.

We’re welcoming the CBC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime regulars to the Red Barn know that I love radio, especially when it involves classical music. Look, I was an avid listener to “educational stations” even before National Public Radio emerged, dialing in marginal ten-watt FM signals from Antioch College or the AM daylight offerings of WOSU from Ohio State University, both of them static laden. And then there was WJR in Detroit, a high-power, clear-channel voice with its own huge staff that included Karl Haas and his “Adventures in Good Music” hour in the morning as well as the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, unless those came during a Redwings hockey game.

Later, living in the interior desert of Washington state, I relied on nighttime AM broadcasts from San Francisco and Calgary, Alberta, not all of it classical. I do remember the Canadian cohosts of one country music show expressing their amazement after a visit to Nashville that folks down there really did speak with “those” accents.

As for what I was saying about static? You came to live with it as part of the show.

Flash ahead, then, to today, when I’m living at the easternmost fringe of the USA. Most of my listening has come from streaming non-commercial stations in Boston and New York or Maine Public Classical. And then, for Christmas, my family gifted me with a Bose sound system to replace my broken components stereo.

As I loaded its radio presets, my otherwise savvy elder daughter confessed her ignorance of AM radio. It ain’t what was, for sure, no matter how much I used to fume at the static resulting when elderly cars came down the street.

Two of the six FM stations I’ve set the Bose to are Canadian Broadcasting Corporation outlets in St. John, New Brunswick, a distance up Fundy Bay from us. I am surprised how clearly their signals come in.

Like National Public Radio in the United States, the CBC is publicly funded and non-commercial. Its main network is primarily news, public affairs, and other talk, while a second is all-music, including classical during the daytime hours.

We’re finding both channels to be refreshing and exceptionally well done.

New York and Washington aren’t the center of their news coverage, for one thing. And the music includes a hefty number of Canadian voices, including a program of contemporary Indigenous music that follows the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays – the latter with its own host working around what we get in the U.S.

Well, as announcers used to say on TV and radio during the station breaks, “Please stay tuned.”

And we will. There are many varied tastes in this household to match.