By Ed Staskus
“Where are you staying?” Isabelle asked. Her name was officially Isabella, but everybody called her Isabelle. Her close friends called her Izzy.
“In North Rustico, but not exactly. We’re in the National Park, up from Doyle’s Cove, in the Coastline Cottages.”
“Where the seaweed smells bad?”
“That’s the place, except it doesn’t usually smell bad, only when there’s a strong wind blowing onshore that piles it up, or there’s a storm that tears Irish moss from the ocean floor and dumps it on the beach there.”
“How do you know where the smell comes from?”
“My older sister Emma told me. She knows everything. She’s always reading books and stuff. She’s my right hand man.”
“Isn’t she a girl?”
“I don’t mind. She helps me hunt monsters where we live in Ohio.”
“Oh, I see. Anyway, we’re in the Gulf View Cottages on that hill above the guard station where you have to stop before coming into the park, except not this year. They have something special going on so everybody can just come and go.”
“You’re not far away, at all. I could walk over and visit.”
Isabelle and Oliver were on the front deck of the Stanley Bridge Hall, watching cars going in circles on the roundabout. They had spent the past two-some hours listening to Lennie Gallant tell stories and sing songs about Atlantic Canada, the two of them coincidentally sitting in the same row. It was where they met for the first time. Oliver and Emma were with their parents and Isabelle was with her parents, who were from Louisiana.
“My people came from Spain, around 1800, when Louisiana was a Spanish colony, and my husband’s people are from here, from even longer ago, when the Acadians were deported by the British,” Isabelle’s mother said.
“My name is the same as my grandmother’s,” Isabelle chimed in.
“We live in Lafayette, which is more-or-less the cultural capital of Acadiana, which is where the Cajuns live in the southwest part of the state. My husband has long wanted to visit the island here, around the Rustico lands, where his family came from.”
Acadians were from the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Most of them were deported in the mid-18th century during the French and Indian War. It was called the Great Expulsion. Thousands of them died of disease or drowning when ships sank. Their land was given to Scottish settlers. Many Acadians were transported to the American colonies. Those that ended up in Louisiana settled in the Atchafalaya Basin and the prairie lands to the west.
“Mom, can Isabelle and I go the Sandspit tomorrow?” Oliver blurted out. He wasn’t especially big on history lessons. School was going to start soon enough and he would soon enough have more history than he could handle.
“I don’t see why not. Check with her mother, and if she agrees we will take the two of you tomorrow.”
The next day the mothers dropped the two children off at the Sandspit.
“We’re going to Raspberry Point Oysters to hear a talk all about oysters and afterwards eat some of them,” Oliver’s mother said. “Then we’re going to drive to New London to see Lucy Maud Montgomery’s birthplace, before she moved to Cavendish. They have a museum there with some of her personal scrapbooks from when she was working on ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ We will probably stop for coffee somewhere and pick you up around five o’clock.”
“OK, mom,” Oliver said, barely listening, and running off with Isabelle in train.
The Sandspit is an amusement park in Cavendish, about six miles from North Rustico on Route 6, except they didn’t take Route 6. They had taken the Gulf Shore Parkway through the National Park, stopping at the overlook at MacKenzies Brook to see where the Cactus Pot had once been. It had been a sandstone sea arch that was lashed black and blue by Hurricane Fiona in September 2022 and collapsed one Sunday morning two months later after the tropical depression Nicole passed through.
“It’s not there anymore,” Oliver said, looking at the nothing where the sea arch had been.
“When Fiona went by it took a nice little chunk out on the right-hand side of it and that kind of weakened the structure a lot more, and then we had Nicole, and I guess with the heavy rains and winds that we had, it was the last straw, “ said Timothy Gallant from nearby Rusticoville, who was taking photographs of the coastline. “We had been watching it deteriorate for quite a little while, well, since Fiona, and we were wondering when it was going to happen.”
“It’s scary, but it’s Mother Nature, the hurricanes, like where we live in Louisiana,” Isabelle said.
“Dad says they’re scarier these days,” Oliver said.
The first ride Oliver and Isabelle went on at the Sandspit was the Ferris wheel. It was seventy feet high and they could see the whole amusement park from the top. Once they got their bearings they ran from one ride to another. They rode the Cyclone roller coaster, the longest roller coaster in Atlantic Canada, screaming down the sharp drops and through the corkscrews. They rode the Sandstorm 360 pendulum with full rotations. They rode the Paratrooper and Tilt-a Whirl and after that the bumper cars and bumper boats. They whooped it up on the Landslide and the Scrambler. The last ride they got on was the Cliffhanger.
The Cliffhanger was a drop tower that took its riders fifty two feet up in the air before plunging straight down, creating sudden G-forces, making the riders feel weightless. At least, that is what it was supposed to do, except it didn’t. The ride was halfway up its fifty two feet when it suddenly peeled rubber. By the time it got to the top it was going like a rocket and shot their seat into the sky, scattering a formation of cormorants. The jet stream got behind them. Before they knew it they were flying over North Rustico.
Ten minutes later they were flying over Brackley Beach. The seat was open-air bench-style with an over the shoulder restraint and a lap bar. They kept the restraint and bar where they were. They passed over Stanhope, Grand Tracadie, and Wild Harbour. They were on course for St. Peter’s Bay.
“I like the green fields right next to the red cliffs,” Oliver said.
“The farm fields down there look like a patchwork quilt my mom has,” Isabelle said.
They almost slammed into an osprey head on, but the big bird veered away at the last second, whistling and screeching its disapproval.
“Maybe we could stop at Rick’s Fish & Chips when we get to St. Peter’s Bay,” Oliver said. “The man and his wife in the cottage next to us were there yesterday and said their fish hits the spot.”
“That sounds great, let’s do that,” Isabelle said. “I’m getting hungry, but, how do we land this thing?”
Oliver looked all around but didn’t see a joystick or any brakes, or even a parachute.
“That’s a good question,” he said.
Frank Arsenault was on St. Peter’s Highway outside of Morell when he saw the seat in the sky. He was driving his Dodge Ram 3500, transporting the drone that he used for crop scouting and monitoring field health back to his barn. That don’t look right, he thought, especially not with two kids along for the ride. He kept them in sight. As they were St. Peter’s Isabelle noticed the pick-up truck tracking them. She made the one-handed Signal for Help sign, waving her hand back and forth.
Frank sped up to get ahead of them and pulled off into a gravel lot next to the St. Peter’s Bay Volunteer Fire Department. He jumped out of the pick-up truck, unlocked the clamps and tie-down anchors holding the drone in its cradle, freed the soft straps keeping the folding arms in place, and released the drone. He controlled it to the rear of the Cliffhanger seat and shot a tow line at it. The tow line’s hook snagged the seat. Frank brought it down in ever diminishing circles, landing it in the gravel lot like laying a baby in a cradle.
“Are you kids OK?” he asked, rushing over to them.
“Thanks mister,” Oliver said. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
“What happened?”
“The Cliffhanger took off and we just hung on.”
Frank Arsenault had no idea what Oliver was talking about, but seeing they were unhurt didn’t ask any more questions, packed up his drone, and drove away.
“Look, there’s Rick’s Fish & Chips across the street,” Isabelle said.
“Let’s go.”
They ordered a bowl of mussels swimming in garlic butter and a plate of haddock with fries and split their order, eating outside at a red picnic table in the shade of a white spruce.
“I was getting dizzy up there,” Oliver said. “You came through with that S. O. S. sign. You’re like another right hand man.”
“Call me Izzy,” Isabelle said, reaching for the last piece of haddock.
