Atlantic Canada

The Well Gone Dry

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By Ed Staskus

   Cavendish is an unincorporated community on the central north coast of Prince Edward Island, a half hour drive from Charlottetown, the capital of the province. The population is less than 200, although in the summer it swells to more than 8,000, who sleep in tents, campers, motels, cottages, and resorts. In the dead of winter it is a ghost-of-a-place with only a red fox or a white hare crossing Route 6.

   The place was founded in 1790 and named after Lord Cavendish, Colonel of the 34th Regiment of Foot. In 1893 the world-record holding clipper ship Marco Polo got caught in a storm, grounded, and broke apart on its coastline. Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of “Anne of Green Gables,” grew up there. She is buried in the Cavendish Community Cemetery. It was largely a quiet whistle-stop through the first half of the 20th century

   In the second half of the 20th century campgrounds, amusement parks, restaurants, and bars were built. The PEI National Park was created along 40 miles of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some of the province’s best beaches are in the park, including Cavendish Beach. There are four championship golf courses, each one only a few minutes from the others.

   Cavendish caters to family vacations, romantic getaways, and golfers. It wasn’t always like that. It was once more like Dodge City and Thirsty’s Roadhouse was where to be and be seen. “Cavendish was the place to be on Prince Edward Island,” said Rob Gibson, who was the long-time general manager of the roadhouse. “And Thirsty’s was the place to be in Cavendish, bringing in up to seven hundred people on a Saturday.”

   My wife and I first discovered Cavendish the second summer we went to Prince Edward Island. We had been on an improvised road trip around Nova Scotia three years earlier when somebody we met in Halifax suggested we take the ferry to Prince Edward Island for a look-see. 

   “What is Prince Edward Island?” I asked.

   “It’s a big island on the other side of the Northumberland Strait. It’s one of Canada’s original provinces. Mapmakers sometimes forget to include it on their maps. I shouldn’t say so, I suppose, but it’s even nicer than Nova Scotia.”

   “I’ve never heard of it and I’m from Canada.” I said. 

   I was born in Sudbury, Ontario. My parents were refugees from the Baltics, which they fled after World War Two and before the Iron Curtain came down. My father worked in the nickel mines of the Sudbury Basin for almost ten years. My mother worked as a nanny for thirteen children until she began having children of her own. They left for a better life in the United States once they had saved enough money to make the move. Even though I lived in the United States ever after, I had dual citizenship, which meant I could say I was a compatriot whenever I went to Canada. That and some loose change meant I could get a cup of coffee at Tim Horton’s.

   We took the ferry to Prince Edward Island. We had a Rand McNally road atlas but no idea where to go. We ended up in Cornwall. When it started to get dark we started looking for a place to sleep. We found the Sunny King Motel, which was clean and affordable. We stayed there three nights. We spent two days roaming around the island. It was on the second day, the day before we had to go home and get back to work, that we stopped in North Rustico to get a bite to eat. It was late morning. There was an unassuming place called Lorne’s Snack Shop on the side of the road. They had a fisherman’s breakfast that amounted to an all-you-can-eat plate. The plate was full of fried eggs, a slab of bacon, sausage, grilled tomatoes, chunky home fries, and thick toast with jam. There was a side of baked beans. We took a pass on dinner that night.

   A woman speaking a dialect of English we had to pay very close attention to suggested we take a drive along the coast on the Gulf Shore Parkway. We found out later she was from Newfoundland. We also found out later about poutine at Lorne’s Snack Shop. It wouldn’t be long before we started dashing in for the French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. We took a drive along the coast and discovered the landscape was pretty as a postcard. 

   We decided to come back the next summer for a two week in one place vacation. There were several groupings of cottages on the Gulf Shore Parkway between North Rustico and Cavendish. One was across the street from MacNeills Brook, but it was too expensive. One was on a hillside overlooking North Rustico Beach, but it wasn’t to our liking. We stopped at the Coastline Cottages across from Doyle’s Cove. It was just right. We made a reservation for the next year.

   Thirsty’s opened the summer of 1984, except it wasn’t Thirsty’s at first. It was G. J.’s North. Phil Manovilli, who was part owner of Gentleman Jim’s in Charlottetown, created the near-to-the-beach bar. He changed the name the next year. It became one of the two most popular watering holes in Cavendish. The other one was the Cavendish Arms, which later became Chevy’s. A sign behind the bar at Thirsty’s said “Hangovers Installed and Serviced Here.”

   Loose-knit groups of the young trekked across the street from nearby campgrounds for drinking, dancing, local bands, high-spirited conversation, and Silly Olympics. The dancing was haphazard, but if you can dance you’ve got a chance. When the night was done there was no need for designated drivers. Everybody walked back to their  campgrounds. There was plenty of grass to cushion face-first encounters.

   The next summer, after miscalculating our ability to drive 1,236 miles from Cleveland, Ohio to North Rustico in one-and-a-half days, we got to the intersection of Cavendish Lane and Route 6 at two o’clock in the morning. When we did we realized we had little idea of where the Coastline Cottages actually was. Everything looked different in the dark a year later. We pulled off onto the shoulder of the road in front of Shining Waters. We were standing outside of our car looking at everything with no lights on anywhere when we heard talking and laughing. Four men were sitting by the light of an electric lantern on the front deck of one of the Shining Waters cottages drinking beer. We explained out predicament.

   “From the States, are you?” one of them asked.

   “Yes, but I’m originally from Canada.”

   “Ah, then,” he said. “Just go that way to the ocean, follow the road to the right, and you’ll come to the Coastline Cottages soon enough. If you get to North Rustico, you’ve gone too far.”

   We found our beds without any trouble and fell into them without unpacking. We woke up to a bad-tempered rainstorm that cleared up by noon and became a sunny day. We were at the top on a long gradually sloping  lawn that ended at the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Every so often a flock of cormorants flew past.

   Now and then Thirsty’s was cited for something or other. Overcrowding was one of the things they were cited for. “The Prince Edward Island Liquor Control Commission has suspended the lounge operation as well as the liquor service in the dining-room of the licensed premises known as ‘Thirsty’s Roadhouse’ located in Cavendish, PEI, for a three day period. The violations of the Liquor Control Act Regulations are ‘A Licensee shall not admit more persons in his licensed premise than the capacity established and posted by the Fire Marshal’s Office’ and ‘A licensed premise shall comply with the Fire Prevention Act.’”

   We stopped in a few times, although we never stopped in on happening weekend nights when there was barely enough room to stand or turn around, much less find a table or a bar stool. The drinks were abundant, the food was fair, redeemed by its agricultural island roots, but the music was mostly unremarkable, cover bands skilled at a few chords and not much else. We did see Mis-B-Haven there, who were three guys and two gals who knew what they about and were fine to listen to.

   “I still have the note my mother wrote allowing me to perform at Thirsty’s when I was under age,” said Janet Boulter, who was one of the gals. “Man, did we have fun!”

   We discovered the roots music of the Maritimes and started going to a Women’s Institute in Stanley Bridge,  a Lion’s  Club in Cymbria, and a community hall in Brackley Beach to hear it. The music is based on Scottish and Irish and Acadian traditions. We especially liked Acadian fiddle music. We went to the Agricultural Fair in Abram-Village to hear Eddie Arsenault and to Charlottetown to hear Barachois. We went to the Piping College in Summerside to hear everything else, including a bagpipe marching band.

   Somebody once said a gentleman is a man who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn’t. There were no gentlemen in the marching band. You could hear them a mile away.

   Thirsty’s closed at the end of the Labor Day weekend in 2010. “The 1980s and after the bridge opened in 2000 were good to Thirsty’s but the downward spiral began in 2005,” Phil Manovilli said. “Part of it is my fault, our fault. I’m 52 years old now. When I started I was 28. I’m out of that loop,” He was sitting at a table near the dance floor. “Successful bars need to be in touch with their age groups. I’m just so far removed from that now. Kids here now could be my kids.” He watched his two growing children playing on top of a pool table.

   “Cavendish has been changing over the last 10 or 12 years,” said Donald McKearney, the Chairman of the Cavendish Resort Municipality. He said it wasn’t going after the party crowd any longer. “We don’t want the party people. They bring some money to the economy but basically they’ll pitch a tent, 25 people will be there, and they just drink, fight among themselves, and generally carry on. That’s not what we’re looking for.” He said the Victoria Day weekend in Cavendish had gotten to be nothing but a boisterous party weekend on the north shore.

   All good things come to an end. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It usually means something else is about to begin. The goal of a song isn’t to get to the end but if it doesn’t get there it doesn’t reach its goal. “Thirsty’s holds a special place in people’s hearts and I think they’ll remember it fondly,” Rob Gibson said after the roadhouse’s closing day, standing behind the bar in front of shopworn signs for Alpine and Moosehead beer.

   Yesterday is always just a memory. It’s what is left when the past doesn’t completely unhappen.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Monster Hunters

Beyond the Haunted Motel

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By Ed Staskus

   The Adventure Zone in Cavendish on Prince Edward Island’s north coast is three attractions. One of them is the River of Adventure Mini Golf Course. The second one is the Hangar Laser Tag Arena. The last one is the Route 6 Haunted Motel. Neither Oliver nor Emma planned on playing golf until they were senior citizens. They couldn’t play laser tag because their parents didn’t want their children playing with guns, even if the gunplay was called laser tag. What Oliver and Emma were mainly interested in was the Haunted Motel.

   They had a professional interest in it. Oliver was the Monster Hunter of Lake County and Emma was his right- hand man They were from Ohio. They were on the island with their parents on a two-week vacation.

   They were standing in front of the Haunted Motel, sizing it up, when two children walked out of the Hangar Laser Tag Arena. One of them was a big boy wearing a pink sweatshirt. The other one was a black-haired girl wearing baggy Sinbad pants.

   “When we went one-on-one, I totally destroyed you,” Big Pink said.

   “Sure, but when we played that family, I dominated,” Baggy Pants said.

   “You were super good at sneaking around, getting behind them, and shooting, shooting, shooting,” Big Pink said. “You would just surprise run up and shoot them in the back the whole time.”

   “Sneak attacks are the best,” Baggy Pants said.

   A pack of  tweens came out of the Haunted Motel while Oliver and Emma were wondering whether to try it out.

   “That was twice as scary as the Haunted Mansion in Kensington,” one of them declared.

   “I know why they say ‘No Money Back’ if you leave early,” another one said.

   “Did you see that moon faced boy crying?” 

   “Yeah, he looked all freaked out.”

   “How about that mom who ran out? She went in with six kids and she was the only one who bailed.”

   That sealed it for Oliver and Emma. They paid the admission charge. They stepped into the Haunted Motel.

   Afterwards, even though it had been loud and claustrophobic, and they thought it was fun, they wondered what was so scary about it. In their time they had gone up against Destoroyah, the Green Goblin, and Long Tall Sally, the Loch Ness Monster’s sister. They weren’t babes in the woods when it came to scary. 

   They spent most of their time in the Haunted Motel in total darkness. There were small red lights that were markers signaling when and where to turn. The floors were uneven and they had to bend and twist to make their way. They found out later every third or fourth person, young and old, didn’t make it through from beginning to end. 

   “That boy behind you, who kept clutching at you, he was scared out of his wits,” Emma said.

   “I finally held his hand and he made it all the way through,” Oliver said.

  “What about that girl, who as soon as the lights went out, she curled up into a ball on the floor and wouldn’t get up?”

   “If that want scary, you should visit the Midgell River Motel in St. Peters Bay, which may or may not still be there,” a voice behind them said.

   When they turned around to find out more, the voice wasn’t there anymore. There wasn’t anything other than a shadow behind them, which shape-shifted into smoke that the wind blew away. They looked down at the gravel at their feet and saw hobnail boot footprints.

   As it happened, their father had planned a day trip to St. Peters Bay and two days later, early in the morning, they were on the way there the 40-some miles along the north coast. When they got there they drove just beyond it to the Greenwich Interpretation Centre. They studied the Time Line exhibit, which depicts 10,000 years of life on Prince Edward Island, and tested their naturalist skills with the Shell Game, Shorebird Challenge, and the Dune Plant Quiz. Being city folk, they came in last place.

   They went for a walk on a boardwalk through the biggest sand dunes on the island, including parabolic dunes, which are unusually large and mobile dunes with rare counter ridges called Gegenwälle. Some people call them blowouts because their center sometimes blows out leaving just a rim. When they drove back to St. Peters Bay they stopped at Rick’s Fish ‘N’ Chips and had fish and chips. 

   They had just started on their way back to the Coastline Cottages when Oliver spotted a sign for Midgell River.

   “Dad, can you turn up that way?” he asked.

   They turned that way. When Oliver saw the Midgell River Motel he asked his father to stop. Emma and he jumped out of the Jeep Cherokee and surveyed the dilapidated house that had once been a boarding house and later a motel. It looked deserted and unhappy.

   “What are you up to Ollie?”

   “We heard a story about it, so we want to look around.”

   “Was it a spooky story?”

   “Yes.”

   “All right then, but your mother and I are going to tilt the seats back and take a nap here in the car. Wake us up when you’re done.”

   “OK, dad.”

   They surveyed the house, which looked like it was at the tail end of one hundred years of solitude. It had been built in three parts, each part higher than the other. The first room they went into was a front bedroom. A door creaked and a young girl walked in. She made eye contact with them even though she didn’t have eyes. She started opening the drawers of a dresser and throwing out clothes that vanished in thin air before hitting the floor.

   When they heard somebody clomping up and down the stairs they went into the lobby and looked, but there wasn’t anybody on the stairs, even though they continued hearing the clomping. A hangman’s noose was neatly coiled on the landing, its fibers bristling with menace.

   “This is creepy,” Emma said.

   When they went upstairs they saw a man in a bathroom combing his hair in the mirror and the reflection of another man standing behind him. Every time the man combing his hair looked behind him, the other man wasn’t there anymore. A flock of blackbirds flew through the hallway and out an open window. Oliver and Emma went downstairs.

   “This is getting creepier,” Oliver said.

    A card game was going on in the parlor. Four men were playing five-card draw. One of them slapped down a dead man’s hand, a pair of black aces and black eights, and swept the pot off the table. One of the other men reached for a gun, convinced there had been cheating, but a third man slapped it away 

   “Not here, not now,” he said. “We’ll settle this later.”

   The fourth man, unnoticed, slipped all the jacks up his sleeve.

   Stepping into the kitchen they saw a man wearing hobnailed boots. Dishes flew out of the cupboard and smashed themselves to pieces at his feet. Three Norwegian rats peeked out from the rust-stained sink.

   “Don’t mind the dishes,” Hobnail Man said. “It happens all the time.”

   “Who are you?” Oliver asked.

   “I’m the caretaker,” Hobnail Man said. “Can’t you tell? After all, you’re the monster hunter.”

   “I was just double-checking,” Olver said. He knew full well who Hobnail Man was and what he was up to.

   “Do you know, this place was burned down years ago by order of the local priest, who said Satan’s work was being done here.”

   “I was wondering what that smell was,” Oliver said.

   “Now I burn it down every night.”

   “I thought you might,” Oliver said.

   Hobnail Man raised his hand and said, “I’ve got to lock all the doors now and do my work.”

   “Before you do, we have got to go,” Oliver said.

   “You can’t go anywhere,” Hobnail Man said. “There must be an offering.”

   But before he could take a step, Oliver dug into his pockets which he had stuffed with packets of salt from Rick’s Fish ‘N’ Chips, and ripping them open sprinkled Emma and himself with salt. Evil spirits hate salt. He threw a handful of it in Hobnail Man’s face, who stumbled backwards, trying to get a grip on the floorboards with his boots. 

   He  cried out, “I can’t see, I can’t see!”

   Oliver and Emma ran out of the Midgell River Motel fast as jack rabbits and back to where their parents were napping. They woke them up, piled into the Jeep Cherokee, and a minute later were on their way.

   When Oliver looked over back his shoulder he saw the Midgell River Motel going up in flames.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Monster Hunters

Lay of the Land

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By Ed Staskus

   When Oliver’s father steered their Jeep Cherokee off the Confederation Bridge and past the Gateway Factory Outlet, he turned on his GPS. He hadn’t told his family, but since entering Canada he had been steering by the stars, by the compass on his dashboard display, not using a map or GPS. The digital compass was up to date snazzy  but old-fashioned like every other compass. He was an electrical engineer attuned to high tech, but sometimes he ditched it. 

   When they had crossed into New Brunswick from Maine, he thought, the island is due east of us, so I’ll just drive due east until we get to it. Other than having to navigate a rotary in the middle of nowhere, the family got to Prince Edward Island with no problem.

   After crossing New Brunswick, he continued on to PEI’s Route 13 through Crapaud, Kellys Cross, Hunter River, and New Glasgow. The family was on its way to the Coastline Cottages in North Rustico for two weeks.

   “Dad,” Oliver asked his father, “how come there are no billboards on the roads here like at home?”

   “That’s a good question, Ollie, but I don’t know.”

   There are nearly 20,000 highway billboard signs in Ohio. There are many more of them dotting the state’s towns and cities. Advertising is legalized lying. Billboards are big and bold about it.

   “I know why, “ Emma said. “Most billboards are banned.”

    “How do you know that?” Oliver asked.

   “Because I did my research, not like some people I know,” she said.

   Oliver was the Monster Hunter of Lake County. He was ten years old. Emma was his older sister by two years. They lived in Perry, Ohio. After the pinching and pushing in the back seat was over, Emma told her family what she knew.

   “No billboards are allowed on most of the roads on PEI, which is what everybody calls the island. It was named after Prince Edward, who became the father of Queen Victoria. He never set foot on ground here. He was like a ghost. The lion on top of the PEI flag is an English lion. The official bird is the Blue Jay. The official animal is the Red Fox. The official boss is called the Premier. Every fifth potato grown in Canada comes from here, which is why some people call it Spud Island.”

   “Anything else, clever clogs?” Oliver asked.

   “No more fighting,” their mother immediately commanded from the front seat.

    That night, after finding the Coastline Cottages and unpacking, they sat in an array of Adirondack chairs on the wide slopping lawn that dead-ended at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and scanned the dark sky for stars and constellations. Light pollution where they lived in northeast Ohio obscures most of the stars most of the time. From their chairs on the lawn, the family saw many more than they had ever seen.

   “That’s a boatload of stars,” Oliver said.

   “That’s only some of them,” his father said. “There are more stars in the sky than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches.”

   “Oh, wow! Who counted them all? Did you, dad?”

   “Not me, Carl Sagan did.”

   A fox chased a zigzagging rabbit in the dark field behind them. There were no streetlights anywhere. The stars twinkled in the inky sky.

   The next day they drove the Gulf Shore Parkway to Stanhope Main, a beach just east of Brackley Beach in the National Park. There was a mile-or-more of sand and dunes. The water was shallow and there were sandbars. It had been a local hotspot during Prince Edward Island’s rum-running days, both for landing booze and having a party.

   Oliver and Emma built inukshuks on the beach, which Emma had also researched. She taught Oliver the mechanics of making them. Inukshuks are human-like figures made of piled stones. They are central to Inuit culture in the Arctic. A red inuksuk is on the flag of their land called Nunavut. The word itself means “to act in the capacity of a human.” They are sometimes used as guideposts showing the way.

   “Dad always says you can learn more from a guide in one day than you can in three months of fishing alone,” Emma said.

   “But dad doesn’t fish,” Oliver said.

   “Oh, you’re right,’ Emma said.

   The tide came in as the afternoon wore on. They packed up and walked back to the parking lot. Oliver found a scrap of paper sticking out of the Marram grass bordering the path. It said, “If you disbelieve in spirits and have faith that you will die in your bed, you may care to watch at Holland Cove at night at the hour when the tide is high.” 

   “Dad, do you know where Holland Cove is?” Oliver asked his father. 

   “No, but I can look it up on my phone.” He found it on his cell phone.

   “It’s near Charlottetown.”

   “When are we going to see ‘Anne of Green Gables’ in Charlottetown?”

   “Tomorrow night,” his father said. “Why?”

   “Can we stop and see Holland Cove after the show?” 

   “Is there something there you want to see?”

   “Yes.”

   “OK, we’ll swing by afterwords.”

   They saw the song and dance stage show the next night at the Confederation Centre, buzzing about it afterwards as they walked back to their car.

   “That girl playing Anne had some Broadway belt in her voice,” their father said.

   “She was almost pure energy,” their mother said. “The show was wonderful. I’m glad we could take the kids.”

   “I was so sad when Matthew died,” Emma said.

   “Me too, sis,” Oliver said.

   It didn’t take them long to get to Holland Cove after the musical show. They parked near the shore. Oliver said they would have to wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.

   Samuel Holland had been the Surveyor-General for the northern half of North America in the mid-18thcentury. He was responsible for the partitioning of Prince Edward Island into 67 lots back in the day. He had come to the island in 1764. His wife Racine came with him. She was tall, pretty, and French. One of Samuel Holland’s surveying trips took him longer than he planned. Racine was anxious about his absence. She bundled up and went out on the ice on the cove to see if she could spot him. The ice was thinner then she expected. She fell through it and drowned a day before her husband returned.

   After her body washed ashore and Samuel Holland buried her, he started seeing her apparition. She always brought a flagon of water with her and called for him. More than two centuries later her voice is still heard along the shoreline of Holland Cove calling for her husband. She has long black hair and is dressed in a white robe. She comes out of the surf, prowls the beach, and returns to the cove disappointed. Many believe that those who see her will themselves soon drown.

   When she came out of the surf only Oliver and Emma could see her. Their parents couldn’t see the apparition. They didn’t believe such a thing was possible. Oliver and Emma met her on the beach. Oliver meant to explain to Racine that she was dead and gone. They introduced themselves. Racine’s face was obscured by mist.

   “Where is Samuel?” she asked them.

   “He died some years after you died, so long ago nobody can remember what either of you ever looked like,” Oliver said. 

   “Oh, no one told me,” she said.

   Sometimes ghosts are muddled and don’t even know they have died. When they find out they are bemused.

   “Do you know you are dead?” Emma asked.

   “No, I didn’t know.”

   “Do you know there are those who believe they will themselves soon drown if they see you?”

   “That’s terrible,” she said. She knew firsthand how terrible it was.

   “Would you like to move on?”

    “Yes, but how do I do that?” 

   “When you are back in the ocean tap the heels of your shoes together and say three times, ‘I do believe in Heaven and Hell.’”

   “I will do that,” Racine said. She turned and strode into the surf, never to be seen again. Oliver and Emma ran back to where their parents were waiting for them.

   “Did you see what you came to see?” their father asked.

   “Yes, but what we saw has moved on to another place,” Oliver said.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Monster Hunters

Making Tracks to Prince Edward Island

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   “Hustle it up, kids,” Oliver and Emma’s father said. Oliver was 10  years old. Emma  was 12 years old. Oliver was the Monster Hunter of Lake County. Emma was his sister. She considered herself Oliver’s right-hand man and the brains behind their monster hunting. The family was on their way to Prince Edward Island, which was 1228 miles away from Perry, Ohio, which was where they lived. They were going by car. Their car was a Jeep Cherokee.

   They stopped at a Sheetz at the entrance to I-90, filled up the gas tank, and headed east. They got to Erie in no time and kept going. They drove past Buffalo and Rochester but got off the interstate when they got to the Finger Lakes. They stopped in Waterloo and had a New York Pickle pizza at Ciccino’s Pizzeria.

   “Are we going to the quilt farm after we finish eating?” Emma asked.

   “Yes,” her mother said.

   The farm was on Seneca Lake near Pen Yan. On the way they passed several black and yellow road signs depicting a horse and buggy.

   “Mom, what are those signs?” Emma asked.

   “There are hundreds of Mennonite families up and down these lakes. Some of them get around with horses and buggies.”

   “Who are Mennonites.”

   “They’re cousins to the Amish.”

   The Amish and Mennonites trace their roots to the Anabaptist movement of the early 16th century. Anabaptist is a nickname that means they are rebaptizers. They came from Switzerland and Germany. Both denominations believe modern advances are helpful but only if they  support a simple and humble life.

   “Why don’t they drive cars like us?”

   “The Amish stick to a strict interpretation of the Bible, which means they usually don’t use modern technology in their daily lives. Some Mennonites are old order, so they have horse-and-buggy transportation. Other Mennonites drive cars and wear clothes like us. It just depends.”

   Pauline Weaver and her Mennonite quilters have been making quilts at Weaver View Farm for thirty years. Their prize-winning bedspreads have been featured in Smithsonian Magazine. Dozens of quilts hang from the rafters of their restored 19th century dairy barn.

   “What’s the difference between Amish and Mennonite quilts?” Pauline said. “Not much. Maybe Amish just rolls off the tongue easier than Mennonite.”

   Emma’s mother was looking for a Lone Star pieced quilt.

   “Is it true Mennonite quilters always make an intentional mistake to show humility before God” she asked.

    “I don’t know how that one got started,” Pauline said. “As for me, I make enough mistakes as it is.”

   After they put in their order for the design they wanted on a quilt that would be shipped to them in a couple of months, and were preparing to leave, Emma’s mom asked if quilting bees were still common.

   “Quilting bees really aren’t all that common anymore,” Pauline said. “Sometimes a family will suffer a catastrophe and we’ll do a quilting bee to raise money. A quilting bee is a little like a barn raising. A quilt is completed in a single day. It’s not so hard to do with a large group of women, but the quilters do end up working very quickly.”

   They got back on Rt. 14S and were soon back on I-90. They drove past Albany, the Berkshires, skirted Boston, and stopped in Portland across the border in Maine for the night. They were staying the night near the waterfront. After walking up and down Commercial St. they stopped at Gilbert’s Chowder House and had chowder. Afterwards they walked down the Custom House Wharf. 

   “Dad, Is it OK if we talk to that man writing on that thing,” Oliver asked. A man was sitting on a lawn chair beside the Coastal Bait Shop. He was hunched over tapping at a mint green typewriter. The typewriter was on a red milk crate which was on a block of concrete.

   “Yes, but stay right there until we come back,” his father said. “ We’re going to walk to the end of the wharf and then come back.”

   “Hi mister,” Oliver said, Emma at his side.

   “Hi kids,” the man said.

   “What is that thing?” Oliver asked.

   “It’s a typewriter, a portable Royal, like a laptop.”

   “Where did you get it?”

   “I got it at a rummage sale. Everything works except the letter W.”

   “Why doesn’t it work?” 

   “The rods here hold the letters that hit the paper. When I strike a key a rod swings up and hits this ink-coated tape which transfers the letter to the page, except the W, which is missing.” 

   “Oh.”

   “I’m writing my life story.”

   “Oh.”

   “My name is William.”

   “I’m Oliver and this is my sister Emma.”

   “Where are your parents?”

   “Down there by the water.”

   “Good,” William said. “I’m not up for two orphans.”

   William was wearing a Panama hat on top of a head of dreadlocks, a sleeveless ribbed undershirt, baggy blue pajama pants, and orange Crocs. He was smoking a Calabash pipe, the kind Sherlock Holmes used to smoke.

   “Who’s Sherlock Holmes?” Oliver asked.

   “A detective from long ago.”

   “Are you making a book about your life?”

   “Yes and no,” William said. “I write a chapter every day but at the end of the day I throw whatever I’ve written into that trash can over there.” He pointed at a trash can.

   “Why do you do that?”

   “Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself. That’s what it’s all about, in the wink of an eye.”

   Neither Oliver nor Emma knew what to say, so they said, “Here come our parents.”

   “It’s been nice talking to you kids,” William said. “Do you want to hear a secret?”

   “Sure.”

   “Everything depends on a 6-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

   “Oh, OK, thanks for the secret.”

   The next day they got up early, had an early breakfast, and got going north on I-95. The highway starts in Miami in Florida and ends in Houlton in Maine. Every few miles they saw a sign saying “Beware Moose Crossing.”

   “We have to be careful about moose coming on to the road,” their father said, “although they mostly come out at dawn and dusk and in between at night. We’ll be on Prince Edward Island before it gets dark though.”

   “Moose are really big,” Emma said.

   “They are about a thousand pounds.”

   “What would happen if we hit one?”

   “We’re not going to hit one.”

   When they got to Houlton they filled up their gas tank at an Irving’s and drove the couple of miles to the Canadian border. They had to wait in line. When they got to the guard booth a dark man in a blue uniform wearing a turban leaned out towards them. His name tag said he was Gagan Singh. He asked them for their passports. The family had NEXUS cards and handed them over.

   “Are all of you American citizens?”

   “Yes.”

   “Where are you from?”

   They told him they were from Perry, Ohio.

   “What is your destination?”

   “Prince Edward Island.”

   “What is the purpose of your trip?”

   “Vacation.”

   “Have a good trip,” the border guard said.

   They drove into the province of New Brunswick, which they would have to cross the length of to get to Prince Edward Island.

   “Dad, that man, he asked us if we were citizens, but he didn’t look like a citizen,” Oliver said.

  “He was probably an immigrant who became a citizen. I think he is a Sikh.”

   “What’s that’s?”

   ”It’s a religion, like being Catholic They’re from India.”

   “Why don’t they stay in India? Why are they in Canada?”

   “Probably for the same reason there are immigrants everywhere.”

   “What’s the reason?”

   “There are different reasons. Most of time it’s to go somewhere where they can find a better life. Maybe there were no jobs where they lived, or the climate was getting bad, or there was a war going on.”

   They drove east past Woodstock, Frederickton, and Moncton. When they got to Sackville they stopped for a bite to eat at the Cackling Goose Market. An hour later they were at the Confederation Bridge. Before 1993 the only way to get to and leave the island was by car ferry. After 1993 there was the bridge. It is a nearly 8-mile long box girder bridge carrying the Trans-Canada Highway across the Abegweit Passage of the Northumberland Strait, linking Prince Edward Island with the mainland. It is the same length as 117 football fields. It weighs almost 8 billion pounds. The average person weighs about 150 pounds so the bridge equals 50,000,000 people.

   “That’s a mighty big bridge!” Emma said.

   “And long, too,” Oliver said.

   They got to North Rustico on the north side of the island before dusk. They were going to stay in one of the cottages at the Coastline Cottages just outside of town on the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. When they drove up the long drive they passed a kidney-shaped salt water pool.

   “You didn’t tell us they had a swimming pool!” Oliver and Emma exclaimed at the same time. 

   “They do and it’s open every day it doesn’t rain.”

   “Does it rain much?”

   “Not too much.”

   “Woohoo!”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Rise and Shine

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 By Ed Staskus

  “I got started in theatre when my mom was looking for what I might be interested in,” Hayden Lysecki said. “She put me into all these random things, from dodgeball to martial arts, but the thing that stuck was theatre.” Born and bred in Whitby, Ontario, Hayden was 12 years old when he got cracking. He put his dodgeball sweatbands away and retired his gi fighting suit. He planted himself on the stage.

   “I think it stuck because I love being a part of telling stories and I love attention.”

   One of the first productions he appeared in was “Oliver!” It is a musical from 1960 based on an 1838 book by Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist is an orphan navigating London’s underworld while searching for a family and a home. He falls in with a gang of pickpockets led by the cunning Fagin.

    “The director Geoff Couler saw something in me and gave me the part of Fagin,” Hayden said. He was the youngest member of the cast. “There was a sense of great excitement and utmost fear in me. I found out thriving on that is what theatre is all about. It’s like riding a roller coaster. It’s a positive fear, since it’s such a fun experience.” He belted out “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two.” The applause lit him up.

   “The year of ‘Oliver’ changed my life. The majority of what I’ve done since then are musicals. You get to act, sing, and dance, instead of just talking at an audience.” Musicals are about characters who feel so deeply about something that they are compelled to break out into song. “I love plays, but some of them are stinkers, like when there are two guys in one room and they spend all their time talking to each other.”

   Hayden majored in performing arts at Oshawa High School and O’Neill CVI High School. He participated in a Broadway Student Summit studying “Hamilton” and “Chicago.”  He secured a Music Performance diploma from Holland College and is currently a Bachelor of Music student at the University of Prince Edward Island. 

   “Choral music was pushed in our high school, which suited me since it is one of my passions,” Hayden said. “Our chamber choir was invited to sing at Carnegie Hall for Eric Whitacre.” The bus ride to New York City took most of a day. Eric Whitacre is an American composer and conductor best known for his choral music. “There were lots of choirs who were part of that show. It was mind-blowing.”

   During Hayden’s high school years he participated in several tailored workshops. “Most of the workshops ended with the advice, if you can do anything else, please do it. The mindset I learned to keep is, what’s destined for you will come to you, while what’s not for you, you will be rejected for it. It will suck but you will move on. The only thing you can do is accentuate what you do well, and that way you’ll get the roles you’re going to shine in.”

   His parents were all in, even though neither of them were performers. His father, however, had once played in a  band in high school. It was a four bass guitar band called Lake of Bass. There was a steady beat but the melody had to be worked out  by the listeners. 

   “My family made the commitment to driving me to rehearsals multiple times a week until it became an in school thing in high school.”  All youngsters need some help as well as the confidence of the help they are being given. Parents helping their children is fruitful for everybody. It enriches the children and benefits the neighborhood by keeping parents off the streets.

   “I was a bit of a black sheep trying a new thing,” Hayden said. “The way my parents supported me came in all the ways parents have to do it behind the scenes, driving me everywhere, making sure I was fed before rehearsals, and coming to all my shows. I think they realized it could be a reinforcing thing for a kid who wants to figure out who they are in life, who wants to grow into their own.”

   Hayden graduated from high school as the Covid-19 pandemic picked up steam. “I didn’t get to go to prom, a graduation ceremony, or perform in our year-end show. I was supposed to be Joseph in ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.’ I couldn’t go anywhere. I went nocturnal for a couple of months. Not being able to perform, your soul just dies.”

   Hayden’s father was the Chief Technology Officer of a software company. Mike Lysecki moved his family from Ontario to Prince Edward island in the summer of 2021. His firm had  leased office space in Charlottetown, the capital of the province, intended to house 50 employees, and wanted somebody up the chain of command to run the operation. Hayden’s father was that man. 

   “Prince Edward Island and Charlottetown are growing areas for top talent across Canada and the province’s proximity to universities and its passionate workforce makes it the perfect place for our expansion,” he said.

   “My father had been thinking of retirement and thought Prince Edward Island would be a wonderful place to settle down when he eventually stopped working. It was the fastest process ever for our family. He told us about it in June and we were on the island in August. It was a whirlwind. Things were crazy for me for a while but as soon as I came here I could see there was a vibrant music and theatre community on the island.”

   The family moved to the bay at West Covehead, up the street from the Brackley Beach Drive-in. Hayden started knocking on doors. “Since then, I’ve been living and doing shows here. I started by working at the Watermark Theatre in North Rustico as an intern, doing all kinds of things, props, painting sets, being their office manager. I was a part of the ‘Munshables’ at the Confederation Centre last year and this year I have been in ‘Rent’ and ‘Anne & Gilbert’ at the Florence Simmons Theatre.”

   “Rent” became a big hit as soon as it premiered on Broadway in the 1990s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Musical. The story revolves around Mark and his friends in the arts struggling to make a living in New York City. Hayden played Mark in the musical, embracing the character’s dual roles as narrator and documentarian of his circle’s experiences. “Mark wants to shed light on not just his friends, but the entire community that he’s immersed himself in. And that’s such an inspiring journey.”

   It’s also a challenging journey. “One of the most challenging aspects of the musical is all the genres Mark performs in. Rock is the main medium in the story, but Mark performs in a myriad of musical styles from powerful duet ballads to dancing the tango. It’s almost entirely sung through, like an opera, so there is very little downtime onstage. Mark and I are very similar in our abilities to connect with people and read their emotions to properly perceive a situation. We also both have a passionate fire inside of us that translates to our physicality. Rallying a crowd and leading a group number feels like second nature.”

   “Anne & Gilbert” was where he learned to act fast. The actors had only two and a half weeks of rehearsals. They had to get the ball rolling. “They needed to learn 17 musical numbers in a short rehearsal time, and the quality of their singing was exceptional,” Wade Lynch, the director of the show, said.

   It was also where Hayden sussed out the merits of authenticity. “You lose authenticity when you chase it, when you set your performance around trying to get an audience to react to you. Your job is to do your part in the narrative. In musicals the actors on stage are gaining a lot of their energy and passion based on what the audience is giving back to them. If you can get an authentic reaction from the audience, then you’ve got something great going.”

   He had something great going when he played Fagin in “Oliver.” In the second act he sang a song called ‘Reviewing the Situation.’  It starts by asking, “Can a fellow be a villain all his life? I’d be the first to say that I wasn’t a saint.” It ends by declaring, “I’m a bad ‘un and a bad ‘un I shall stay.” Reviewing a situation usually means identifying issues for improvement and making changes. Not so for Fagin in that song. 

   “It’s got four verses with a ton of words,” Hayden said. “I was stressed out about forgetting the words on opening night but I got in a groove and it just flowed. When I hit the end of the song, the audience loved it. It felt incredibly validating. It makes you feel invincible. From then on I knew that was the feeling  I was after.”

   Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off the goal. Nothing can stop a man with a purposeful frame of mind. Nothing can help a man with an aimless frame of mind. Hayden is staying focused on the bullseye.

   “One of the main reasons I enjoy performing is because of the connections you make with people, not just within your troupe, but with the audience, too,” he said. “Audiences come and go but they can and do remember you.”

   Being in the acting business can be enriching in more ways than one. “Some people look at acting like it’s just messing around and not work, not exactly a way of making a living,” Hayden said. “I try to surround myself with creative individuals and theatre people who enjoy the craft, so I hear a lot less of the negative voices. For me, acting fluctuates between being a business and the favorite thing I like doing. If you’ve got the grit, if you’re marketing yourself, if you are accepting opportunities, it is one of the most rewarding jobs on the planet.”

   All jobs require a measure of stamina, staying aware of the whys and wherefores, and putting in the effort. “My next few years are committed to studying my craft at the University of Prince Edward Island, so I’m sticking around here,” Hayden Lysecki said. He is committed to rise and shine.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, the deep blue sea, magic realism, and a memory.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Shock Wave

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

   “When Britain is at war, Canada is at war,” Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier said in 1910. “There is no distinction.” Four years later when Britain entered World War One, Canada signed on, too.  In August 1914 the Governor-General of Canada vowed that “if unhappily war should ensue, the Canadian people will be united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honor of our Empire”

   Empires are made by plundering and slaughtering. They are always sure of the rightness of their cause. They never go down without a fight. It doesn’t matter if there’s any honor in the fighting, or not. They plow straight ahead.

   The country had no air force, a navy fit for a bathtub, and an army of 3,000-some men.  By the end of the war more than 600,000 Canadians had enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight for King and Country and more than 400,000 of them served in Europe, out of a population of fewer than 8 million nationwide.

   “The Empire Needs MEN” is what the posters said. “All answer the CALL! Helped by the YOUNG LIONS the OLD LION defies his foes. ENLIST NOW!”

   Everybody wanted in on the fight because everybody thought it would be over by Christmas. Canadians lined up to support the British Empire and collect steady pay of $1.10 a day. The harvest that year was bad, and unemployment was soaring. But machine guns fired ten times as many bullets a minute as they were paid pennies a day. Hundreds of thousands on all sides were slaughtered week by month by year by the rapid-firing weapons on the Western Front.

   At the beginning of the war, it was better to be killed than wounded. The wounded were taken off battlefields in horse-drawn wagons or on mules with baskets on their sides, the baskets soaked and dripping with men bleeding to death. There wasn’t any such thing as a dressing. If they made it to a train station, they were transported to hospitals. “One of those trains dumped about 500 badly wounded men and left them lying between the tracks in the rain, with no cover whatsoever,” said Harvey Cushing, the head of the Harvard Unit of volunteer doctors at the American Ambulance Hospital of Paris.

   Nearly 60,000 Canadians were killed, most of them the result of enemy action, and more than 170,000 of them were wounded. Almost 3.500 men and one woman had at least one arm or leg amputated. Private Curley Christian lost all four limbs but survived.

   During the Battle of Vimy Ridge he was unloading cargo from trucks when an artillery shell hit next to where he was, trapping him under debris for several days. When stretcher bearers tried to reach him, they were killed by more artillery. When he was finally rescued, he was transported to a military hospital and from there to London. His arms and legs had gone gangrenous and all four were sawed off.

   When he got back to Canada he was fitted with prosthetic limbs and married Cleopatra McPherson. He deigned his own prosthesis for writing. Cleo and he had a son who twenty years later served in World War Two.

   More than 7,000 Prince Edward Islander’s enlisted. Five hundred of them were killed and more than a 1,000 wounded. Tommy Murphy went overseas with a siege battery in 1915. Before he went, he got married to Freya O’Sullivan and got her pregnant. He got word of his son Danny’s birth by telegram while taking a break in an ankle-deep puddle of water sheltering in a trench during the Third Battle of Artois. 

   He had spent eight days at the front and was due for four days in a reserve trench and then four more days at a rest camp. When the bloodletting went on and on and the ranks thinned out, he never made it to the reserve trench much less the rest camp. It was that kind of a war. The Allied and Central Powers fought the same battles over and over.

   The British French and Canadians assembled seventeen infantry and two cavalry divisions for the offensive at Artois, backed by 630 field guns and 420 heavy artillery guns. During the fighting the field artillery fired 1.5 million rounds and the heavy artillery 250,000 rounds at the Germans defenses. Tommy Murphy barely slept for days. Whenever he took a break, he felt like his arms were going to fall off after loading shells until there weren’t any more to load. He knew he had sent his share of Germans to Hell even though he never saw one of them die.

   When the Allies tried to advance, they suffered 40% casualties. The battle went on from late September to mid-October when it ground to a halt in the middle of a never-ending autumn rainstorm and mutual exhaustion. By that time both sides were conserving ammunition because they were running out of it. They spent the rest of the month burying their dead, tending to their wounded, and withdrawing.

   Tommy was a cannon man because he was taller than five feet seven inches and burly enough to do the heavy work of feeding artillery. He didn’t have flat feet or bad eyesight, He didn’t have the greatest teeth, but explained he was enlisting to fight Germans, not bite them. He could have begged off the war because he was married, but he was patriotic and wanted to do his fair share. Money from the Canadian Patriotic Fund helped his wife keep the home fire burning.

   His battery had a lance corporal scout sniper attached to it. Francis “Peggy” Pegahmagabow was an Aboriginal who could split a bullseye nobody else could even see. He had more than 300 kills to his name. He roamed No Man’s Land at night for them, seeking out enemy snipers and forward spotters. He always came back in the morning. The other side never made it back to their side.

   He wore moccasins instead of army boots, chewed dead twigs whenever he sensed danger, and always carried a medicine bag. “When I was at training camp on Lake Superior in 1914, some of us landed from our vessel to gather blueberries near an Ojibwa settlement,” he said. “An old Indian recognized me and gave me a tiny medicine bag to protect me, saying I would shortly go into great danger. The bag was of skin tightly bound with a leather throng. Sometimes it seemed to be hard as a rock, at other times it appeared to contain nothing. What was inside of the bag I do not know.”

   Tommy had signed up for short service and when 1915 was over and done and it was April 1916, he was done with his one year on the Canadian Expeditionary Force. His commanding officer tried to convince him to re-enlist, but he had a wife, a child, and a farm that needed him. He didn’t need to kill anymore Germans. He was sick of the butchery. Three men from North Rustico were already dead. He didn’t want to be next. He knew if he re-enlisted it was only a matter of time before he went home in a box to be buried on Church Hill Rd.

   He got out when the going was good. The next year enlistments dried up as men near and far began to realize the toll the new style combat on the Western Front was taking. Machine gun fire and shell fire was murderous. On top of that there was poison gas. The dead were left where they fell. They were left for the rats. In May 1917 the government announced conscription through the Military Service Act. The rats stood up and cheered.

   It was easier getting into the army than it was getting out. He finally found a ride on a troop transport from Calais to Dover, took a train to London, and spent the night at a whore house with a razzle dazzle girl. He took a steam bath the next morning and had lunch at a corner fish and chip shop eating cod with a splash of vinegar and a full pint at his elbow. He followed the first pint with a second pint and was happy for it. He had a ticket for passage to Halifax in his wallet, but it was a week away. His grandfather had come from Ireland, or so the family story went, and done something big for the Crown, who rewarded him with 400 acres of PEI shoreline. He unfolded a map and located Dublin. It was directly across the Irish Sea from Liverpool.

   He bought a train ticket to Liverpool and the next morning landed in Dublin. It was Easter Monday. The Easter Rising had happened yesterday. The Easter Rising was happening today. 

   After landing at the Dublin Port, he followed the River Liffey, making for Dublin Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His plan was to find a room for a few days and have dinner. He would explore the rest of the city after a good night’s sleep. He was wearing his Canadian Army uniform over a pair of Spring Needle underwear and carrying a rucksack. He had his toiletries, four pairs of clean socks, his rolled up military wool overcoat, and a paper bag full of Huntley & Palmer biscuits in it. The biscuits were so hard they would crack a man’s teeth at the first bite if not soaked in tea beforehand.

   His papers and money were in a travel wallet attached to his belt. He had his Colt New Service revolver on his belt, too, for what it was worth now that his war was over. An hour later he was glad he had it, after he got it back, although he wasn’t sure if he was going to need it to protect himself from the Irish or the British.

   Dublin Castle was in the middle of the old part of the city. The city got its name from the Black Pool, the ‘Dubh Linn,’ where the rivers Liffey and Poddle met. It was where the castle was. It had been a Gaelic ring fort in the beginning, a long time ago. Later, after the Vikings showed up, it was a Viking fort. For the past 700 years it had been a British fort, the seat of their rule in Ireland. 

   Tommy didn’t have anything against the British, but after a year of serving in their army, he thought the Irish might be better served ruling themselves. They couldn’t do worse. During the year he served on the Western Front three quarters of a million Jacks and John Bulls were killed. It made him sick to think of the men he had seen obeying orders to attack barbed wire and machines guns across open fields. Another few million men went wounded and missing. The broken might survive, but he didn’t think the missing were coming back anytime soon.

   He was glad to be out of it. It hadn’t ended by Christmas of 1914. It still wasn’t over by Christmas of 1915. The next Christmas was in eight months and the talk was it would take a half-dozen more holidays to either win or lose the war. He meant to say a prayer in St. Patrick’s Cathedral before dinner. 

   He didn’t get a chance to say a prayer, find a room, or have dinner. He lost his chance when he came across the bridge leading to Trinity College, turned the corner towards Dublin Castle, and found himself face to face with a Mauser semi-automatic pistol. He knew exactly what it was. He stood stock still exactly where he was. The hand on the firearm was a woman’s hand. She was wearing an old military hat and a yellow armband.

   “Hand’s up and on the wall, boyo,” she said, a second woman coming up behind him. The second woman was wearing a bandolier laden with a half dozen hand grenades. She had a revolver. It looked like it came from the Middle Ages. He did what she said. She patted him down and took his Colt.

   “Who are you and what are you doing here?” she asked.

   “Tommy Murphy, Canadian Army, from Prince Edward Island by way of a year in France,” he said. “I’m here to take in the sights before going home. Now that we’re talking, I thought Ireland was sitting the war out.”

   “We ask the questions,” the woman wearing the bandolier spit out.

   “Come on,” the woman with the Mauser said, poking him in the small of the back with the barrel of the gun.

   The streets leading to the city center were barricaded. When they got to the General Post Office, he saw there were two green flags flying in place of the Union Jack. They said “Irish Republic” in gold letters. He knew there was no such thing as an Irish Republic. 

   “What’s going on?”  

   “We’re rocking the casbah,” the grenade girl said.

   There was a man outside the post office reading from a broadsheet. It was the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic.” There were copies of it pasted on walls. Newsboys were handing them out to anybody who wanted one. Not everybody wanted one. Most of them didn’t understand what was happening. The grenade girl handed him a copy. “Read this,” she said. There were men with rifles and shotguns on the roofs of buildings overlooking bridges.

   “Who’s this?” said a man wearing a scrap of paper pinned to his breast. It said “Citizen Army.”

   “We found him down the street, Sean.”

   Sean was Sean Mac Duiarmada, one of Commander-in-Chief Patrick Pearce’s right-hand men.

   “He’s Canadian,” Sean said pointing to Tommy’s regimental badge and the “CANADA” title at the end of his shoulder straps.

   “We thought he was a Brit.”

   “They’ll be here soon enough,” Sean said.

   There were 1,200 rebels waiting for 20,000 British troops to arrive.

   A shot rang out in the distance and Margaret Keogh fell down dead. She was a 19-year-old nurse tending to a wounded Citizen Army man. She was the first person to die during the Rising of Easter Week.

   A team of Volunteers trotted past on their way to the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park. They took all the weapons and ammunition they could carry and blew up the rest. When the son of the fort’s commander tried to raise the alarm, he was shot dead. He was the second person to die.

   “You’re free to go,” Sean said to Tommy. “Best you leave Dublin all together.”

   “What about my sidearm?”

   Sean nodded to the grenade girl, and she handed Tommy’s Colt back to him.

   When a contingent of the Citizen’s Army approached Dublin Castle, the police sentry James O’Brien ordered them to halt. He was shot dead even though he was unarmed. He was the third person to die. When British troops showed up the rebels retreated to City Hall, stormed up to the roof, and fired down on the troops in the street. The man commanding the rebel contingent, Sean Connolly, was shot dead by a sniper, the first rebel and fourth person killed.

   Tommy carefully made his way back to the docklands and the port. He boarded the same boat he had come on. An hour later the boat was steaming into Dublin Bay on its way back to Liverpool. Eight hours later he was asleep in a room of a boarding house on the waterfront, not far from the Three Graces.

   The next morning was cold and damp. Women were out in the streets with their long-handled push brooms. They were called Sweepers. Others were in homes cleaning and scrubbing. They were called Dailies. Many more were at work in munitions factories. They were called Munitionettes. Liverpool’s men were on the Royal Navy’s battleships and in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. They were called Cannon Fodder.

   Tommy found a greasy spoon near the port and ordered breakfast, eggs back bacon sausage baked beans a fried tomato fried mushrooms fried bread and black pudding. The Liverpool Daily Post headline screamed “REBELLION!” There was no need for him to read about it. He thought he might have this same breakfast at midday and tonight. Somebody once said, “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.”

   He put the newspaper aside. Pushing himself away from the table, he checked his ticket for Canada. He tucked it securely away with his service revolver. Tommy Murphy was going to keep himself safe and sound until his boat sailed for home. Once he was out of the frying pan that was burning and smoking on another man’s stove, he was going to stay out of it.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Making It Happen

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By Ed Staskus

   “I’ve been immersed in the world of performing arts for as long as I can remember, from singing songs from Cinderella with my mom as soon as I could speak, to studying performing arts at Sheridan College,” Charlee Whitty said. Cinderella is the story of a hardworking underdog who doesn’t have much but knows what she wants when she sees it. “When you’re driving through the moonlight, breathless with wild anticipation of adventure and excitement,” Julie Andrews sang in the 1956 Rogers and Hammerstein movie musical.

   It was the middle of summer on Prince Edward Island. Charlee was taking a break from serving coffee and sandwiches at Tide & Tales Bistro in North Rustico, where she was working part time for the season. Behind the eatery an osprey flew in from the ocean to its nest perched on top of a utility pole. There was a fish in its beak. The sea life was for its hatchlings.

   Charlee is a 26-year-old performer and choreographer from Newmarket, Ontario, now making a home in New Glasgow, Prince Edward Island with her husband Ryan. They got married in 2022 and straight away moved to Atlantic Canada. She graduated from the Huron Heights Secondary School arts program with majors in dance, drama, and vocals. She moved on to  Sheridan College’s performing arts program, where she honed her craft before relocating to the eastern seaboard. Some of her theatrical roles include Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ Little Red in ‘Into the Woods,’ and Frank-N-Furter in ‘The Rocky Horror Show.’  

   “My husband and I moved because we were going to get a small apartment in Ontario after we got married, but my dad advised us not to,” Charlee said. “What he said was, ‘You’re not going to get anywhere starting out in Ontario, it’s so cutthroat finding work.’ There is a crazy rat race mentality in the province. We had been talking about moving to Prince Edward Island where there is a lot of opportunity in theater. Both of my parents pushed for that, saying we could better make a name for ourselves in a smaller community.”

    Everything in life is competitive. It can be a good thing. It forces us to do our best. The theater business is especially scrappy. “Getting a role can literally come down to you and one other person. You could be perfect but maybe you don’t have the exact look the creative team is looking for. It’s not about talent at that point. Its cutthroat although it’s not personal. It’s a rewarding job. You get to be like a child again, exploring things, but you have to keep auditioning and auditioning. One rejection after another can be taxing on your mental health.”

   When Charlee got to Prince Edward Island she started looking for doors to get her foot into. “I didn’t know a single soul on the island. I was nervous. It was daunting, but I knew I wanted to get into choreography. When I got the opportunity to do that in ‘Rent’ it kick-started everything. I have made some friends since then who have become best friends.”

   ‘Rent’ is a rock musical based on Puccini’s opera ‘La Boheme.’  It tells the story of young artists and musicians struggling to survive in New York City in the days when the East Village was bohemian and not yet gentrified and bland. More than anything it is about finding your voice. It scored four Tony Awards and is one of the top 10 longest-running musicals on Broadway. “It’s about a community celebrating life,” said Jonathan Larson, who created the show.

   “I’m thrilled to be part of its debut on the island this summer,” Charlee said. “It resonates with me for many reasons, but a huge one is because it encapsulates the essence of love. I think we can all empathize with the characters in ‘Rent,’ such as how we cherish the bonds of friendship, how we navigate self-worth, and understanding that you must find love in everything you do because life is so precious. I strive to infuse every aspect of my own life with that same spirit.”

   She has lately added ‘Anne and Gilbert: The Musical’  to her resume. She got to spread her wings, playing four roles, which are Ruby, Mrs. Pye. Christie Stuart, and Marilla Cuthbert. The actor who has no immediacy has no wings.

   Acting isn’t for everybody. The competition is never-ending. Everybody wants it as bad as everybody else. It can amount to years of dispiriting turndowns. The travel takes you away from your family and friends. Equity pay is more terrible than phenomenal. “Almost 100% of everybody I talked to growing up said don’t go into acting,” Charlee said. “They said, if you can do something else, do something else.”

   What they were saying is, do something normal. What they weren’t saying is, normal is only one cycle on a washing machine. There are other cycles. Cut-and-dried isn’t always the be-all and end-all to aspire to. It can be overrated. Sometimes the aspiration to move into a new frame of mind is what brings into being a new normal.

   Lee Strasberg, the preeminent exponent of method acting, said, “Acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing, it occurs. You can have conscious preparation but If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up.”

   “It’s mostly people who aren’t in theater telling you to give up, go do something else, get a real job,” Charlee said. “Everybody in theater, they tell you making it is hard, but they never tell you not to do it. Nobody in the theater world tries to discourage you. Surrounding yourself with the right people is absolutely imperative.” The right people are the people actors need in their lives to make it happen.

   “It’s vulnerable being an actor. You find out things about yourself that you didn’t know. You grow so much, but you’re not doing it by yourself. Many people in theater have shaped who I am. The reason I love it, every show you do, you become like a family. It’s special, the community you create. It’s a great feeling, so bonding.”

   Acting can be scary. It is a form of public speaking in a world where many people think speaking in public is akin to dying. “The first time I had a lead role was when I played Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’” Charlee said. “I was excited but terrified.”

   She was even more terrified playing Frank-N-Furter in the ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ Frank-N-Furter is a cross-dressing mad scientist. His mission in life is to create Rocky, the perfect man. In his own words, Frank-N-Furter is a “sweet transvestite from Transylvania.” The show is a mash-up of sci-fi and horror B-movies, campy slapstick, and rock ‘n roll.

   “I was scared to do the show because it is so demanding vocally and because it’s supposed to be a man doing the role,” Charlee said. “I had never done anything like it, being usually typecast as a princess or the girl next door. I had to play a transvestite wearing a jock strap, fishnets, and my hair colored bright orange. He’s a very out there character. My friends were there. My parents were there. I walked out on stage and everybody lost their minds. I got crazy laughs and it fueled me for the whole show. I needed it so bad because I was so nervous.”

   Not every audience breaks out into laughs and applause. Every one of them is different. “Sometimes you get an audience that doesn’t react while others react too much, like talking at the stage,” Charlee said. Sometimes acting is the art of keeping a large group of people from hemming and hawing. “An audience can be drab and all you can do then is get through the show. Other times they hype you up, although you definitely need to find a line. You can go over the top, like if it’s a comedy show, you try too hard, and then it’s not funny anymore. You don’t want to chase it.”

   The acting business is a freelance business. You never stop having to prove yourself and promote your work. It’s also a business which is conducive to pivoting in new directions. Charlee has pivoted in the direction of choreography. “One of the challenges I face as a choreographer is navigating the diverse skill levels of actors. I tend to create relatively intricate choreography, which I know can be intimidating, but I do my best to break it down piece by piece so that everyone becomes comfortable and knows what they’re doing. Dancing can be daunting and doesn’t come naturally, so my goal is to lift everyone up and give them the confidence to have fun, own the stage, and help them enhance the story with movement and dance. It is rewarding to watch and experience them gaining confidence and doing things they never thought they could do.”

   Besides acting, stagecraft, and choreography, Charlee teaches at Revolution Dance Studio and works with the Queensville Players, among other things. “Ryan and I have started our own business called Little Wonders Character Entertainment,” she said. “We will bring a princess to your party, like having a clown or a magician.” The Whitty’s need to pay the rent like all young actors and artists. Paying the rent by making somebody’s magic day more magical is as good a way to do it as any.

   “My first acting job was being a Disney princess at parties when I was 16 years old. We have hired a few of my friends to do the performing. I stay in the background, coordinating it all, which I love doing. That’s the direction I am going in for a career. I love being on stage, but I totally love being behind the scenes.” 

   Charlee and her husband Ryan, who also studied performing arts at Sheridan College, are planning on starting a musical theater program. “He and I will be tag-teaming the program,” she said. “Life is about finding a clear path. Don’t try to fit into somebody else’s box. If you ignore the clear path you will miss opportunities. Stay on the path and the opportunities will present themselves. Connections are huge, you have to be strategic, you have to be able to pick and choose, but staying on the path is essential. Things are falling into place. We’ll be here next year making a name for ourselves.”

   Making it happen is a process. It is a direction, not necessarily a destination. What you achieve fleshing out dreams is what you make of your direction.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, the deep blue sea, magic realism, and a memory..” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A peace officer working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Island Hopping

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By Ed Staskus

   It is roughly seven hundred miles from Montreal, Quebec, an island at the confluence of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence rivers, to Prince Edward Island, on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The way most people get off Montreal is by bridge or tunnel. There are twenty-five bridges and three tunnels.  The Victoria Bridge at a mile-and-a-quarter was the longest bridge in the world when it opened in 1860.

   Most transit gets to Prince Edward Island by way of the Confederation Bridge, the only bridge that connects the island to the rest of Canada. Until the span was built, coming and going was largely by boat or ferry. When the Northumberland Strait froze solid you could strap chains onto your tires and drive across it. After four years of construction the bridge opened in 1997. It is the lengthiest overpass ever built traversing ice-covered water. The concrete arc sans the approaches is 8 miles long. It is illegal to stop on the bridge and there is a curve to it whose only purpose is to keep motorists alert.

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

   “It’s more of a 12-minute trip,” Amanda Patterson pointed out, fine-tuning his observation. “I did a project on it at school, actually, although I didn’t have any choice. My teacher told me you’re doing the Confederation Bridge. There was a referendum about building it. The vote was really close because lots of people wanted the island to stay secluded.” There were even some who preferred a moat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   One afternoon when his nephew, daughter, and wife had gone deep-sea fishing, he went for a drive, exploring the north-central coast. At the intersection of Route 6 and South Rustico he spotted an old-school roadhouse. He pulled the car over. “It was the original motel with green paint,” he said. “That’s where we stayed.”

   The Patterson’s piled into their car on a Saturday at 6 o’clock in the morning in late June and left West Island for the eastern seaboard. The drive is circuitous, north to Quebec City, south to Fredericton, east to Monkton, and finally across the bridge. It takes about 12 hours of steady driving.

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

   When he wasn’t playing the letter game, Tanner was downloading podcasts on his phone. “They saved my life,” he said. “’Our Fake History’ and ‘Night Vale’ are good ones.” 

   ‘Night Vale’ is about a small desert town, mysterious lights in the night sky, and dark hooded figures with dark unknowable powers. Tanner had bags under his eyes by the time he was finished.

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

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

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

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

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

   “Is there another cabin?” Cathy asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Mark fired up the grill at Coastline Cottages the next day for a fish dinner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I ate them all,” Tanner said proudly, his pink sweatshirt swelling.

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

   PEI mussels, sweet and tender, are widely available at seafood counters in many countries, and are often considered the best in the world. Some gourmands say the best mussels are harvested on lonely rocky outcrops along cold-water tidal inlets, but since few people haul themselves, their rubber boots and gloves, and 5-gallon plastic pails to isolated shorelines, the island’s rope-grown mussels are the next best. They are tasty, nutritious, and sustainable. They even help purify water by clearing nitrogen. Nothing beats sitting down to PEI mussels on PEI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “It looked pretty sketchy,” Amanda said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “Oh, yeah,” Tanner said

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

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

   Tanner had already checked out. He sat down on the grass beside the road under the OPEN flag, next to a black cat who was watching the traffic.

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

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

   “Is he OK?” Cathy asked.

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

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

   “Is one of them wearing a pink sweatshirt?”

   “Yes.”

   “They’re out already.”

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

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

   Tanner was known as Big Pink, since he was a large boy and wore his favorite pink sweatshirt whenever he could, and Amanda was known as PJ for wearing her pajamas over her bathing suit going to and from the Coastline Cottage’s saltwater pool overlooking the ocean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   “I’m not chasing pigs!” Amanda declared.

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

   By a twist of the turnstile, there’s no cost to cross the bridge to the red island, no ticket takers and no tolls. But, when you pull up to the tollbooth to go home, it costs fifty-some dollars to leave. It’s like the candles costing more than the cake. That’s when you might as well make plans to go back, since the 12-minute drive from the mainland on the Confederation Bridge over the wide coastal waters to Prince Edward Island is always for the asking.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, magic realism, a double cross, and a family’s fortunes.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. An RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Pit Stop

Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

  Clyde Ferguson walked into the Queen Elizabeth Hospital mortuary room like he was seeing it for the first time, even though he had been the provincial pathologist for 11 years. “Damn, that hurts,” he said under his breath. His eyes were tearing up. He waited for the sharp stab in his left hip to go away. He felt unsteady. He steadied himself with one hand on the doorjamb. He was all right after a moment, as far as it went. His left heel wouldn’t flatten down to the floor. That leg had gotten slightly shorter the past five years. He put his arms at his sides and breathed evenly.

   The hospital was still in its infancy. It was practically new. He was getting older by the minute, which bothered him. “Getting old is no problem,” is what Groucho Marx said. “You just have to live long enough.” But sometimes he didn’t feel like he was only getting old. He felt like he was getting old and getting crippled to boot. His daughter was already telling her friends, “Don’t ever get old if you know what’s good for you.”

   His hip hurt like hell and worse. He knew exactly what the matter was. It had finally gotten to be bone on bone. The day had always been coming. Walking and yoga and strong drink had forestalled the inevitable. But he had walked too much the past several days. When the weather had gotten better, he drove to Brackley Beach, and walked two miles back and forth three days in a row. That was a mistake. It wasn’t the same as his treadmill, which had arm rails he could support himself on. He had three months left before his retirement became official. When it was signed, sealed, and delivered, he was getting an after-market hip the next day, going back to Tracadie, and staying there. He would break it in over the next year and in the evenings cut up fillets rather than the dead.

   He blinked in the fluorescent light, wondering why there were two tables set up for him. When he remembered the arm, he remembered he was going to have to do two post-mortems, one on the arm and one on the young woman who the arm had once belonged to. That arm looks like it’s been chewed on, he thought, looking at it. 

   Her death was being treated as the result of criminal activity. If it had been some place bigger than Charlottetown the post-mortem would have been performed by a forensic pathologist. They investigate deaths where there are legal implications, like a suspected murder. But it wasn’t some other place. It was Charlottetown, the smallest capital city of the smallest province in Canada. It would have to do and he would have to do it.

   After he was suited up, Clyde stood over the dead woman and blinked his fly-belly blue eyes. She was on her back on a stainless-steel cadaver table. It was a body-sized slanted tray with raised edges to keep fluids from flowing onto the floor. There was running water to wash away the blood released during the procedure. The blood went down a drain.

   She hadn’t been shot or stabbed. Her face was a mess, though. It took him a minute to see what it was that had killed her. Her skull was fractured. Parts of the broken head had pressed into the brain. It swelled and cut off access to blood by squeezing shut the arteries and blood vessels that supply it. As the brain swelled it grew larger than the skull that held it and begin to press outside of it into the nasal cavity, out of the ears, and through the fracture. After a minute it began to die. After five minutes, if she hadn’t called it a day, she would have suffered irreversible brain damage. One way or the other it was the end of her.

   He got down to his work, making a long incision down the front of the body to remove the internal organs and examine them. A single incision across the back of the head allowed the top of her skull to be removed so the brain could be examined. He saw what he expected to see. He examined everything carefully with the naked eye. If dissection had been necessary to look for any abnormalities, such as blood clots or tumors, he would have done it, but what was the point?

   After the examination he returned the organs and brain to the body. He sewed her back up. When he turned his attention to the arm, he saw clearly enough it had been chopped off clean as a whistle. The axe, or whatever it was, must have been newer than not. In any case, it was as sharp as could be. Her hand was clenched in a fist. He had to break her fingers to loosen it. When he did, he found a Loonie in her palm. It was Canada’s one-dollar coin introduced two years earlier to replace paper dollar bills, which had become too expensive to print. Everybody called them loonies after the bird on the reverse side.

   Clyde looked at the new coin smeared with old blood and older dirt. He put it in a plastic bag and labelled it. He recorded everything on a body diagram and verbally on a cassette tape. He put the Loonie, diagram, and tape in a pouch and labelled it. When he was done, he washed up and decided to go eat. After that he would call it a day. The work had warmed him up and he wasn’t limping as much as he had earlier. He tested his hip, lifting his leg at the knee and rotating it. His hip felt reasonably ready to go. He would go to Chubby’s Roadhouse for lunch. They had the best burgers on the island.

   The phone rang. It was Pete Lambert, the Commanding Officer of the RCMP Queens detachment.

   “What have you found out, Clyde.”

   “I’m on my way out for a bite to eat. Meet me at Chubby’s. So long as the force pays, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

   Chubby’s was 15 minutes from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and 20 minutes from the RCMP station. While he was driving Clyde thanked God it was 1989 and metallic hip replacements were as good as they had ever been. The first hips dated back a hundred years to when ivory implants were used to replace the femoral head. Elephant tusks were cheap at the time and were thought to possess good biomechanical properties. That proved to not be the case. Men and women died right and left from dislocations and infections.

   Fifty years later an American surgeon performed the first metallic hip replacement. He designed a prosthesis with a head made of something he called Vitallium. The implant was 12 inches in length and attached with bolts to the end of the femoral shaft. It worked like a charm. That same prosthesis is what he would be getting, except it was better and the implant would be inserted within the canal of the femur, where bone growth would lead to more permanent attachment. So long as he could wake up and walk upright in the morning, instead of staggering and grabbing for support, he would be a happy man.

   Chubby’s Roadhouse and Bud’s Diner were side by side in a pink and blue building on St. Peters Road in Dunstaffnage. They did a brisk business. It was a popular pit stop for bikers on poker runs. It was why Pete Lambert had lunch or dinner there once a week, getting to know the riders. He kept his enemies close.

   “We serve burgers and fries and shakes and fish and chips and clams and all that stuff,” Clarence Foster said. “But I think as far as the burger goes, the best, the one that everybody seems to like is called the Bud Burger.” Clarence was both Chubby and  Bud.  “We have wedding receptions and things like that,” he said. He told the bikers about them in advance, so that nobody ended up stepping on anybody else’s toes.

   The Spoke Wheel Car Museum was next door. Clarence and his father Ray shared an appreciation for old cars. They both liked to smoke cigarettes but loved cars more. They gave up fags to save money. Instead of going up in smoke their savings went toward buying broken down heaps nobody else wanted and restoring them. They offered to buy Bernie Doiron’s VW Beetle, but he said, “It ain’t no antique.” By 1969, they had 13 cars, including a 1930 Ford Model A Coach that Clarence drove for show. It was how the roadhouse and diner came into being. 

   “People were coming to the museum and looking for a place to eat,” Clarence said. “Since my dad was a cook in the army, we decided to build a little canteen and it just kept on growing.” 

   Clyde and Pete met at the bar and ate at a back table. It wasn’t the warmest spring day, although it was sunny. They had cold pints and Bud Burgers.. There were a handful pf people having late lunches.

   “How’s the hip?” Pete asked.

   “Hellzapoppin,” Clyde said.

   “Is that the official diagnosis?”

   “It’s how I feel. I’ve got two months and 29 days from today circled on my calendar.”

   They ate and talked small. “Find anything out?” Pete finally asked, finishing his burger and hand-cut fries. The food was good because the beef and potatoes came from the island, not from away. It would be a trifecta once islanders opened up their own breweries.

   “It will be in my report tomorrow, but since you’re interested, I’ll summarize it. She died of a fractured skull. There was tissue not hers on her face and in her hair. I want to say she was hit by a fist that got scuffed up doing it. She had alfalfa on and in her clothes. More than a brush of silage, enough to make me think she was on a dairy farm long enough to roll around in it. She wasn’t killed on that field, although her arm was probably cut off there. The last field cutting there was in late August, so she was put in the ground sometime between then and no later than the end of October.”

   Thousands of acres of potatoes on the island the last fall had been left in the ground. Heavy rain and cold temperatures put a damper on the harvest. There had been too much rain and cold, freezing and thawing, day after day, and it led to a deep frost.

   “Her arm was probably cut off by an axe, sharp as can be. Whoever did it is a strong enough man, or a man driven to extremes. I don’t believe a woman did it, although I can’t tell you why. Why it was cut off, since she was already dead when it happened, is for you to find out. She had a Loonie clenched in her missing hand. It was a 1988 issue. No prints other than hers on it.”

   “Are her prints in the report?”

   “Yes, what we could get, which wasn’t much of anything, but they will do.” It was shop talk. Pete knew everything he needed and a batch of photographs would be part of the report.     

   “She wasn’t molested or abused. I don’t think she had eaten for several days. There wasn’t anything remarkable about her teeth, none missing, one filling. She was in her early twenties, five foot five, 118 pounds, green eyes, light brown hair, no moles, birthmarks, or tattoos. She was healthy as a horse.”

   “Anything else?”

   “One more thing. I think she might have poked somebody in the eye. There was retinal fluid under the fingernails of the first two fingers on the cut-off arm. Her nails were 7 mm long and almond shaped, perfect for poking. It wasn’t her fluid, either.”

   Blunt trauma to the eye can cause the retina to tear. It can lead to retinal detachment. It can require urgent surgery. The alternative is blindness. That alternative means living in the dark forever.

   “If that happened, where would the eye have been treated?” Pete asked.

   “At a hospital or a large eye clinic.”

   “What happens if it’s not treated?”

   “Kiss goodbye to that eye.”

   “I see,” Pete said, paying the bill when the waitress stopped at their table. What crowd there had been had cleared out. It was the middle of the afternoon. When the two men went out to their cars, they were the only two cars in the front lot. Pete was driving an unmarked police car, although it was clearly an official car. Clyde was driving a Buick Electra station wagon. He could lay a corpse out in the back if he had to. They shook hands and went their separate ways.

   Later that evening a biker riding a red motorcycle approached the roadhouse, swerving to avoid a fox. There was always more roadkill in the spring and fall. Skunks and raccoons were the most common, although foxes weren’t always as quick and slippery as their reputation. He pulled up, parked, and went inside. He left the key in the ignition. His Kawasaki Ninja had an inline four cylinder, 16 valve, liquid cooled engine with a top speed above 240 KPH. He had already made that speed and more. He knew nobody was going to mess with his bike because nobody stole wheels at Chubby’s Roadhouse. It would have been a heresy. At the bar he ordered a Bud Burger and a cold pint.

   “How’s the eye?” the bartender asked. “It looks good. At least, no more pirate’s patch.”

   “Yeah, but I waited too long to get it fixed,” the biker said. “The doc says I’ll probably be more blind than not in that eye from here on. It don’t matter, I can still see enough out of the other one to take care of my business.”

   He ate fast and downed his beer. When he left, he paid cash with a new one-hundred-dollar bill.

   “Where do you keep finding these?” the bartender asked.

   “Pennies from heaven, my man,” the biker said, leaving him a tip of two new Loonies. Getting on his glam motorcycle in the gloom of dusk he thought, I got to be more careful about that.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

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 monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, the deep blue sea, magic realism, and a family saga.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. An RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication