View from the Mountain

A Summer Excursion Through New Brunswick, PEI, & Nova Scotia

This article has some 2013 updates based on our fall of 2012 trip to New Brunswick.  All the links are current as of December 2021. COVID restrictions might make visiting difficult.

The picture to the left was taken on our farm in St. Croix Cove, Nova Scotia in 1973.  That is the Bay of Fundy in the distance.

We lived in the Maritimes for sixteen years and met some wonderful people who are still great friends.

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Going to Canada is going to another country, and border crossings are pretty serious places these days. 

However, Canadians love Americans to come to Canada so assuming you have good identification and are just vacationing you'll be welcomed in Maritime Canada. 

You can find more information on going to Canada visit this Canadian government site.  Plan on taking your passport at a minimum and be prepared to provide so details of your trip.

On our last visit we straight up Interstate 95 (The Maine Turnpike) once we got into Maine.  It is easy to cross the border into Canada at Houlton, Me.  Passed on that experience, this is roughly the route that I would recommend from central North Carolina to Fredericton. Whether you go up I81 or I95 just depends on what the current traffic challenges are but I like the western route which avoids the Washington traffic parking lot that requires some planning to get through.

Once you get into New Brunswick, you can relax and slow down a little. You will be in a different country and you should take your time enjoying it.

The first place I would recommend visiting is King's Landing, a historical settlement similar to Williamsburg. 

You will find over 70 historic buildings, complete with artifacts, furniture, tools and equipment. The history is real, the stories you hear are true. Staff are thoroughly trained and immersed in the 19th century to provide you, the visitor, with an authentic visit to New Brunswick in the 1800s

If the weather is nice, spending a few hours walking around King's Landing is a great way to unwind after all the driving.  You'll switch over to Atlantic time once you get into New Brunswick.  So nine am Eastern Daylight Time becomes ten am Atlantic Daylight Time.

King's Landing's hours are from ten to five daily so you can spend a couple hours enjoying the site,  then  enjoy lunch at the "The King's Head Inn" and spend another couple of hours walking off lunch and head off to Fredericton.  Fredericton is the capital of New Brunswick and only twenty minutes south of King's Landing.

There is enough to do in Fredericton for a quiet evening.  This website will give you some thoughts on how to enjoy Fredericton.  You can continue to unwind and practice being a Canadian.   The next leg of journey which will take you to Charlottetown, PEI, is a relatively short one. With the new TransCanada Highway and the causeway, the trip according to my Google map should take just over three and one half hours.

Once you get to Charlottetown, get ready to shift down another gear and really start relaxing.  Prince Edward Island is a magical place.  You can stay in Charlottetown because nothing is very far away. Plan on spending at least a couple of days.  Take a day and go to some of the beautiful beaches and enjoy a Lobster church supper.

If you arrive July 3rd or later, you will be just in time for Canada's summer (which is now longer than the one day of damn poor sledding often cited by my neighbor Charlie) and with luck for a performance of the Anne of Green Gables musical or some other great theater at the Confederation Center.  After you are finished enjoying Prince Edward Island, the next stop on your journey should be Halifax, Nova Scotia.  The trip should take around four hours.

While Nova Scotia is full of historic sites, I still recommend staying in downtown Halifax and use it as your base of operations.  Halifax is a wonderful town to walk around and enjoy the great dining, wonderful people and the beautiful harbour. 

Make sure you visit the Halifax Public Gardens and the Halifax Citadel which is my favorite fort.  Depending on how much energy you have left after visiting Halifax, you can take another few days and visit  the "Cape Breton Highlands National Park" perhaps catching the "Fortress of Louisbourg" along the way.  Be warned that it adds a lot of driving and has been know to be fogged in for a few days, but the mountains coming right down to the sea can be spectacular.

You can take a couple of short cuts on the way out of Nova Scotia.  They all involve car ferries which take you either to Saint John, New Brunswick, Bar Harbor, Maine, or Portland, Maine.  I recommend driving down the Annapolis Valley as one last taste of Nova Scotia.  The Annapolis Valley is one of the most beautiful spots on earth in the summer.

You can view some pictures of the Annapolis Valley at this website. 

The shortcuts home all involve a little sea faring adventure, but people having been catching one of the ferries from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick or Maine for decades. My first ferry ride to Nova Scotia was over 50 years ago in 1970 when four of us, mostly college students decided to take an extended Thanksgiving vacation which included driving and camping around the Cabot Trail in freezing rain and sleet. There was no Internet in those days so we were surprised to learn that all the campgrounds close for the season well before November.

Good luck on your trip, I doubt that you will regret the driving. Once you get past the moose pastures of Maine, you will see a different world  Some spots have enough beauty to take your breath away. It is a little like going back to an earlier time so relaxing isn't very hard. Don't be surprised if you find some self-service fruit and vegetable stands along the way and lots of friendly people, great seafood, and wonderful places to enjoy the rich history of the area.

The best time to visit the Maritimes is the summer. Do not believe the locals that summer is defined as either July 1 or July 4.  However, do plan on taking a fleece jacket even in the summer.  It can be cool by the water when the fog rolls into town.

No place on the route that I have recommended is very far from the water. No place in Nova Scotia is more than 42 miles from the water.  Many of the roads cling to the shore. PEI is even closer to the water with no place more than 10 miles from the water. Even our farm in Tay Creek which was 20 miles north of Fredericton was only 86 miles from the Bay of Fundy. St. John, New Brunswick, which is on the Bay of Fundy is about 30 miles from the Nova Scotia shore of the Bay where we first lived in the village of St. Croix Cove which was settled in 1772.  We could see the lights of St. John from our kitchen table.
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For more check out our book, A Taste of the Wild, Canada's Maritimes.

If you live in the Maritimes you might want to check out my post, Calling All Canadians, Especially from the Maritimes or my free online guide to visiting Emerald Isle, which is a much nicer beach than any of those closer-by Maine beaches that often seduce Canadians.

My Theory of Soil

As I wrote in November 2021, there has been dirt on my hands for many years. I started serious gardening in the summer of 1972 on our farm in St. Croix, Nova Scotia.  It was grass pasture that we turned into a garden. It was plowed with my John Deere tractor and its three furrow plow. It was then harrowed, covered with old chicken manure. The next spring we tried beating it into submission with a tiller with front-mounted tines. It was a bone jarring experience.

We were young and strong so it still became a great garden. We grew so much broccoli that I am still traumatized if I eat broccoli more than once a week. We moved to New Brunswick where we raised cattle for ten years. Not only did we garden, I also planted twenty acres in oats most years. We did not harvest the oats as grain but green chopped them in the fall to extend the pasture season. The oats were a cover crop for reseeding an old field in grass and clover.

The garden spot that we inherited on the old farm in Brunswick had been used for quite a while so it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from our garden spot in Nova Scotia. It was also rocky, well-drained soil while the Nova Scotia soil was heavy clay once you got down over a foot.

If you a trying to grow new grass where mostly weeds and brush grew, you work the land hard. If you are trying to build up a worn out soil, you hardly work it.  What did do was apply as much rotted manure to the old garden as we could. We never plowed. We would use a disc harrow to work the composted manure into the soil.  Then I would till it in the spring before planting with my tiller that now had rear-mounted tines.  Towards the end of our time on the farm in 1984, the garden really did not need tilling.  The soil structure had been restored.  You could easily stir it with a three-tined digger. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the rocks. As the old-timers were fond of saying, the most reliable crop in the area was rocks.

Since the farm we have lived and gardened on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. Next we did the same along the marshes at the North Carolina coast and finally here on ridge in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The recipe for good soil has always been the same, plenty of compost, mix it with the soil so the air, soil, compost, and moisture can do their thing.  This year our soil needed stirring, I used a broadfork to lift and break the soil a little. It was not turned over like with a plow. I figure three or four years of this and I will be able to stir it with my three-pronged digger. As for no till gardening, it can work if your soil is in good shape. As for no-till farming, I am all for the no-till not so much for all the chemicals.

Grounded in Life

Our Roanoke, Virginia, Home

Heading out on your own involves a little mystery until you find you place in the world. People used to join a company and the company had a lot to with their life and where they lived it.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore.

Our life wasn’t a structured one.  I got out of college, felt lucky to not be fighting a war in a jungle and equally lucky to have missed the law boards.  I went back to the land in Nova Scotia.  Life was remodeling a two-hundred year old post and beam house, gardening, and taking care of a few cows until I figured out what to do with my life.

Our First Nova Scotia Home

That house and others that followed provided safe haven from not just the weather but from a lot of life’s challenges.  We built our lives around our houses.  The people we met were nearby and because of the nature of the jobs that I held, I always had an office in the house.

In seventies and early eighties when we lived on the farm, local neighbors, also tied to the land, would drop by to build relationships and strengthen that web of friendship that keeps farming communities running.

After we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Columbia, Maryland and eventually to Roanoke, Virginia, visitors were often those with children of the same age.  Only for a few short months did we live where we could attend a company holiday party.

Life revolved a round our homes, church, and schools.Our Roanoke home at the top of post was high on the side of the foothills of a mountain. It was safe have from the winds that often buffeted  the mountainside and reminded us of our Nova Scotia years. It was big enough to get lost in and to collect far too many family treasures as our parents passed away,  The office I had there was larger than the one I commuted to as Apple director.  As the kids moved away the house became too big for the two of us.

Our Coastal NC Home

We moved to a smaller house on the North Carolina coast. It anchored us once again. We found friends and a church with more friends. Once again I had an office in the home. Our coastal home kept us safe from a number of hurricanes and plenty of high water.

After fifteen years there, we decided to move on again.  Each move after Roanoke took us to a

Our NC Piedmont Home

smaller home but every time the home anchored us in life. This last move to the Piedmont which by my counting is our sixth and might truly be our last. This has turned out to be a good home, one where we are comfortable in our surroundings and well-anchored in life.

At a time of rising seas, it is good to perched on a ridge at 785 feet instead of just six feet above sea level in marsh.  Even though I loved every moment of living in the marsh, I have found plenty to love here in the Piedmont.

Drawn To Wilderness

I admit to being conflicted. I grew up in the North Carolina Piedmont, the mountains were never far away. The Blue Ridge Parkway was in my backyard. We spent the summer vacations that we didn’t go to the beach in the Smoky Mountains. The beach was always North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Just after I turned sixteen, I drove across the country with a friend only a couple years older than me. My favorite part of the trip was Montana and a quick trip to Glacier National Park. The summer of 1969, a college roommate and I took a road trip to Alaska.  We wandered through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, up through western Canada to the Alcan Highway which was still gravel at the time and finally to Alaska. I saw plenty mountains and loved most of them, especially the towering Tetons and the nameless ones in Alaska.

John Muir once said the following.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

I wish that I could have invited John Muir to join me in a walk along the salt marshes of North Carolina. I have seen my share of mountains from those in Alaska to the Canadian Rockies, the Tetons, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and the Alps of Austria and Switzerland.

Though I have lived on side of a mountain, no mountain has ever brought me the peace that I feel walking or paddling the edges of the salt marshes, sounds, and beaches of North Carolina. I do not disagree that the redwoods and the tall mountains of the world are wonderful cathedrals to nature. However, I think marshes are even more important to our lives and what they give back to those who treasure them is priceless.  Maybe if I could have lived along a mountain stream, I would feel differently, because I loved the streams in the deep dark woods of my youth.

The wonderful thing about the salt marshes and the waters that touch them is that they are alive with creatures that touch our existence in so many ways.

It is easy to fall in love with the beautiful feathered friends that I find on my trips through the marshes. However, it goes far beyond that. The other day I saw a fox chasing something along a marsh pond. I have watched river otters play on the shores of the marsh. I have been lucky enough to have an osprey dive straight into the water just yards from my kayak. I have caught fish in the marsh. I have seen ospreys eat mullet in the trees along the marsh edges. I have watched in awe as fish and crabs fight over scraps we have fed them.

The marsh is a world in itself. Birds and fishes live and die in the marsh. Nothing is wasted in the marsh. Whatever falls there is always recycled. An area of marsh which has been either undisturbed or repaired is a powerful source of life, food, and healing for the soul.

Walking through the marsh, I see swirls of bait fish, ducks and other birds feeding in the marsh, hawks and ospreys hunting for food, and sometimes from the edge of the marsh I can even see bottle nosed dolphins feeding on fish that were born in the marsh.

Somehow I worry about the marshes more than the mountains. I know mountains get developed but marshes get destroyed.  Marshes seem so fragile. The Raymond’s Gut marsh where we lived for fifteen years is now under full assault. A neighboring tract of land of land has been completely cleared of trees. A fine, sandy silt now covers everything according to former neighbors. I have heard the Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, and River Otters have disappeared from Raymond’s Gut. The cycle of life in the marsh is breaking down. 

Maybe the sometimes hostile mountains built on granite will be around when we are all gone and the marshes are filled in with silt.

All my life I have sought those places on the edge of civilization where the wilderness and humans touch each other.  One of the reasons is that those edges are the places where the interactions between our world and the wilderness are the easiest to see. 

Years of working far too inside the world of wall to wall humans has made me leery of living where all the trees are in a park and the rest of the land has been paved over into parking lots.

Mowing Your Way Through Life

I am not sure not how people managed in the first half of the twentieth century before there were yards to connect them to the soil around their homes. I suspect that they were working in their gardens and fields. By the time I was growing up in the fifties in Lewisville, North Carolina, yards had become important. The condition of our grassy yard often stood between me and a trip to my uncle Henry's fishing ponds. My mother who claimed the only yard she had as a child was packed dirt swept with broom straw wanted our yard neatly clipped. In driving by our old home, I am little disappointed the town did not put in sidewalks in front of our house during my youth. It would have eliminated the slope on the front yard. It was by far the hardest part of the yard to mow as a youngster.

Going away to military school (high school) and then college got me out of mowing yards for almost a decade. My first home after graduation was a two-hundred year old farm house located in a sheep pasture on the Fundy coast of Nova Scotia. No sheep came with the old farm house but long grass did not bother me as a young farmstead owner. When I first moved there in the summer of 1971, the yard was the least of my worries. Getting hot water plumbed in and running so we could stop taking showers at the local campground was close to the top of the list. The second summer I had a tractor with a nine-foot-wide bush hog which I used to mow around the house a couple of times a summer. That was all it needed in my days of being single. After all, I mowed plenty of mature grass or hay, starting with the twenty acre field behind the house which served as one of the few backyards in my life away from home.

Then came the summer of 1973, and I married Glenda, the love of my life from the world of well-manicure yards in North Carolina. Her mother often mowed their yard twice, the second time against the grain, just to catch any grass that might pop up after the first mowing. Sometime during the summer of 1974, Glenda and my neat-lawn-loving mother who was visiting us formed a conspiracy. They drove down the mountain to Bridgetown ten miles away and came home with a Toro push mower. I spent much of the next forty-forty years sharing the task of mowing whatever yard happened to be attached to our personal home.

For the ten years or so when we lived on our farm in Tay Creek, we had a nice riding lawn mower which was adequate for much of the yard. Even Glenda did some mowing. When we lived in Halifax, our yard was postage-stamp sized. By the time we arrived on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, I had come to somewhat enjoy mowing. There are those times in your life when something as simple as mowing a yard can be very satisfying because you can actually see what you have done.

One of the immutable laws of mowing is that the farther south you live, the more miserable the task of mowing can be. Sometimes, even the most careful home yard person can end mowing in the oppressive heat of the day like I did more times than I want to admit after we moved to the North Carolina coast. As I wrote then, there is a true brotherhood of Southerners (both men, women, and teenagers) who have mowed yards when they never should have.

Mowing is one of those circular things in life. In your early years, you are too young to push a mower, so it seems fitting that in the later years of life, it is also okay to be too old to push a mower. You come to a point when you are faced with either hiring someone to mow the yard or buying a riding mower. Since I spent many years straddling a John Deere farm tractor, we chose not to revisit those days after a back problem slowed me somewhat. For a couple of years, I shared the task with our mower of choice, choosing the spots that required a push mower for myself. However, it was an easy transition to giving it all up. When we made our 2021 move from the land of coastal centipede grass back to the fescue grasses of the Piedmont, we left our third Toro mower with the father and son team that was doing our mowing. I even gave them my gas-powered trimmer.

When our current mowing team shows up, I know the noise will be over with in a few minutes as opposed to the hours that it would have taken me with a push mower. I still enjoy our green space especially the backyard which is the nicest we have had since that twenty-acre field that came with our first home. 

 

 

Christmas Traditions -The Chris Moose

Christmas is a very personal holiday sometimes surrounded with festive communities.
 
In 1973, my wife and I had our first Christmas together on the Nova Scotia coast. Thirty-three years later in 2006, we were back on the coast. This time we were enjoying the holiday season on the North Carolina coast many miles south of Nova Scotia. It was an easy decision to haul a Crab Pot Christmas tree from our second home and back to Roanoke, Virginia, our permanent home from 1989 -2012.

Our Crab Pot tree was the source of much interest in Roanoke, and at least a couple of visitors to our coastal second home after the 2006 holiday season took crab pot trees home. We kept crab pot trees shining brightly in our coastal home for fifteen years.

We left our Crab Pot trees and the coast behind when we moved back to my home turf in North Carolina's rolling hills just west of Winston-Salem.

One of the most interesting coastal Christmas celebrations that we found during our time on the coast takes place in Rodanthe and Salvo near the Chicamacomico Life Saving Station. 

For over one hundred years residents in the area have celebrated Christmas both on its normal December 25th day and Old Christmas which is celebrated eleven days later in the first week of January.  Old Christmas comes from the days before the Gregorian calendar which removed eleven days from the year.

The Old Christmas celebration starts with an Oyster Roast, music, bonfires, and the ritual visitation of Old Buck, a bull like, costumed creation which legend has it roams the woods during the year and comes out only during the Old Christmas festivities. We did not see Old Buck while we lived on the coast, but we enjoyed many oyster roasts.

We lived in Nova Scotia on the Fundy coast a for a couple of years and later in Halifax another two years.  One of the Christmas traditions there and in Newfoundland was that of Mummers.  During the time from after Christmas Day until Old Christmas, costumed visitors knock on doors while singing songs and hoping to be invited in for a drink or some food.  There is even a Mummers’ song by the Great Big Sea, a Canadian folk-rock band from Newfoundland and Labrador.  This is part of it.

Hark, what's the noise out by the porch door? Dear Granny, there's mummers, there's twenty or more. Her old weathered face lightens up with a grin. Any mummers, nice mummers 'lowed in? Ah, come in lovely mummers, don't bother the snow, We'll wipe up the water sure after you go. And sit if you can upon some mummer's knee. We'll see if we knows who ye be. Ah, there's big ones and small ones, tall ones and thin, There's boys dressed as women and girls dressed as men…

In some places there is a tradition that if the host cannot guess the identity of the group they have to join them in their merry making.

My mother before her death used to tell us about Christmas on Styers Mill pond in Yadkin County just north of where we now live in Davie County.  Christmas was not so much about the gifts as about the celebration of the season.  She was born in 1910 and remembered most of Christmas treats being fruit, nuts or candy.  Some clothes or other useful items might be given, but toys as Christmas gifts were as rare as automobiles for transportation were on the dirt roads of the day.

One of the special traditions was the cutting of a country ham which had been specially prepared for the season. My mother talked of her father driving wagons onto the ice of the mill pond to harvest ice for their underground sawdust-insulated ice house, but most of the meat had to be eaten fresh or cured. 

Late fall and the winter holiday season was a time of plenty since the weather was cool enough for the seasonal killing of the hogs.  Mother claimed that hogs were especially good when fattened mostly from a barrel where kitchen scraps were mixed with water and some grain.  Somehow slopping the hogs makes a little more sense when viewed from that perspective.

I suspect my mother’s childhood had a lot to do with the Christmas preparations that she made when she became an adult.

For years until she got into under late eighties, Christmas was a time of baking and candy making.  She would do a dozen or more of real fruit cakes which were well laced with brandy.  There would also be fudge, soft mints, applesauce cakes, spicy cheddar cheese straws, and finally what became another family tradition, peanut brittle.  Presents were often hand crocheted hats or afghans.

Even today, we try to hunt down some raw peanuts and dig out the granite slab that we inherited from my mother and make a batch or two of peanut brittle when we gather for Christmas and the weather turns cold.  Not surprisingly Christmas breakfast is usually a meal of country ham.  In a further nod to tradition our eldest daughter often surprises us with cross stitch or knitted gifts.

While some Christmas traditions come from the countries where our families originated, many are a medley that families develop on their own as they move through different areas.

I grew up near Winston-Salem which has strong Moravian traditions.  Moravian Sugar Cake and Cookies were part of our holidays.  I can still remember a trip to an Old Salem Christmas Candlelight service, and of course when we moved to our farm in Canada we took along a Moravian Christmas Star with its twenty-six points.  It was not long before we had to import a few for neighbors along with some Moravian Cookies.

Our first Christmas in Canada along the shore of the Bay of Fundy helped us pick up a few more Maritime traditions.  That year I had pickled herring as one of our holiday meals.  Many of the local Nova Scotians had lobster as their holiday meal.  That first Christmas was something of a lean one with little extra money to spare so we had to create almost all of our Christmas decorations.

We made some of our decorations out of salt dough and painted them with water colors.  We also did many hand-carved wooden ornaments for our tree.  There was one special ornament that ended up on that first coastal Nova Scotia tree.

I had stared out trying to carve a reindeer out of some scraps left over from the pine paneling that we were putting on the walls of our farm house.  It did not take long to figure out that Moose antlers would be easier to carve, so thus in the winter of 1971, the Christmas Moose or Chris Moose for short was born.

That winter strings of popcorn and cranberries joined our handmade ornaments on a fir cut from the back of our farm.  Since that time we have collected unusual ornaments, and not surprisingly I have received a veritable herd of ornaments, with each Christmas Moose more unique than the last one. 

We started our children early on their own ornament collection, but perhaps the best part of the tradition of Chris Moose has been giving to each of our three children their very own Christmas Moose which I carved by hand.  As each of our children moved out on their own, they got a wooden Moose ornament which was also accompanied by a letter which took as long to write as it did to carve the Chris Moose.

I actually took the time to cut and cure the wood for each Moose from the back of our property on the mountain in Roanoke, Virginia.  In our family getting your own Chris Moose was symbolic of growing up and being able to develop your own Christmas traditions.

The days of this Christmas season have flown by as quickly as have our many Christmas seasons since that first one in Nova Scotia.  The memories of the season swirl like snow on a winter day in the north country.  I remember my father telling me of the salt fish and oysters from the NC coast that were always his special treats for the holidays. I am pleased that my holiday memories now include steamed oysters.

I remember my mother's parties with real eggnog and I even remember my first train set and going to cut a Christmas tree in the woods of Lewisville with my one-armed Uncle Joe. I had to drag it out myself. Later after we moved back from Canada and were living on the mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia, I remember our children coming home for the holidays.  My wife's famous clam chowder was always the beginning of the holiday feast for me.  This year we are having a pot roast.  Somehow salt cod cakes got voted down.  Imagine that.

Still we are making some new memories and I hope everyone will have some as nice as ours.