By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 30, 2003
It takes about a day to figure out what is wrong with New Brunswick, the sleepy Canadian province that sits atop Maine like a bushy toupee. The highways are wide and kempt -- and as empty as a newborn interstate. The towns are clapboard and compact, full of charm and as of yet free of the litter of corporate signage that clutters American business strips. The locals are pleasant and welcoming to the point -- you begin to worry -- of naivete.
It all seems perfect. But something is off. It's too colorful. Clearly, New Brunswick should be in black and white. This is the Fred MacMurray of provinces, the Saturday matinee of destinations. New Brunswick is an hour ahead of Washington, D.C., but it's more important to adjust your calendar than your watch. At the beep, the time will be 1959.
My family and I cross from Calais, Maine, into New Brunswick on a bright August morning and promptly shed about five decades. After two days of East Coast backups to get here, the lightly peopled Canadian side of the St. Croix River makes even Maine seem like a teeming metroplex. There's a mere cul-de-sac's worth of traffic along the main route northeast, Highway 1, which is leafy with prime Acadian forests to the west and tapers eastward down to the rocky Atlantic Coast.
Tipped to the dreamy driving, we have made this our bomber road trip of the summer. It's a weeklong, 2,000-mile odyssey that will take us from an island full of working fishing villages to the maritime spectacle of the Bay of Fundy's biggest-in-the-world tides to the cultural oddity of St. Andrews, a comely resort town founded by reverse refugees from the United States in the 18th century.
In the Shadow of the Lighthouse
Driving from D.C. is insane, of course. But our only regret so far is that the retro setting means the four of us -- a dad, a mom, two girls of car-seat age and 1,000 hours of "American Girl" audio books -- might feel more appropriate in a colossal station wagon with chrome bumpers than in our increasingly microscopic Honda sedan. On the ferry out to Grand Manan Island, though, our little Accord fits neatly on the car deck between seafood trucks and trailers stacked with sea kayaks.Grand Manan -- our first stop -- is the largest of the islands strung across the entrance to the Bay of Fundy. It's 16 miles long and home to about 1,000 year-round fisherfamilies. In the summer, the ferries from Blacks Harbour fill with bird watchers and tourists -- largely from Toronto and Montreal -- and Grand Manan temporarily converts into an isolated vacation retreat and an open-air museum of coastal culture. We pass a misty brown smudge on the southern horizon and Dave MacKinnon, an off-season lobsterman leaning over the ferry rail, identifies it as Campobello, the Fundy island where Franklin Roosevelt kept a summer home. Later, he points out three dolphin running along the ferry's bow wave.
"Keep lookin'," MacKinnon says with curt kindness to the girls. He's a short-haired man in a blue windbreaker, with a face pickled by sea air and Yankee reticence. "There's been right whales around this year. They must've had a lot of babies born in Florida last spring."
After about 90 minutes, we pull around the northern tip of Grand Manan under the lee of a looming cliff. At its top is an Edward Hopper-ready lighthouse, gleaming white in the cloudless afternoon. It's a towering octagonal cone, whitewashed clapboard with a bright red cap, strapped to the island rock with cables against the shrieking Atlantic gales. The keeper's house, set back along the grassy bluff, is a dramatic B&B flanked by steep cliffs and infinite views.
We head south along the east shore to Seal Cove, the heart of Grand Manan's fishing industry. On the ocean side of the coastal road, we pass small harbors with boats aground in the low tide. On the inland side, there are broad meadows speckled with wildflowers. Beyond them, we can just see the rise of the forested cliffs we will explore by foot in coming days.
Tourist businesses are few, except for a cluster of museums, kayak outfitters and gift shops near the ferry terminal and the many modest frame homes doing seasonal duty as guest houses. There is a tiny IGA grocery store, with a vintage silver motor home built into its side that is open for business as a drive-up clam house. We would come to discover some inventive and upscale restaurants on Grand Manan, but now these fried clams and scallops on wax paper are perfect.
At Seal Cove, we found an art director's dream of a New England shantytown tucked into a deep notch of shoreline. Twin church steeples rise above the helter-skelter of sardine sheds, dock houses and, just offshore, the tilted, net-draped pilings of the herring pens. A whole compound of weathered and dignified smokehouses have been restored -- by a New York artist, no less -- into a delightful museum of the sardine industry. The tufts of demonstration smoke, mixed with the salt breeze, tendrils of fog and rich seaweed decay from the tideline, make for a sort of dockside aromatherapy, a sweet and soothing briny incense that we savor for an hour before walking back to our cottage.
On the advice of Tammy Brown, our innkeeper at Beach Front Cottages, we gather periwinkles along the way to be steamed and consumed with butter on the porch of our cabin overlooking the water. We eat the unlikely shellfish dinner and listen to the artillery boom of the tide up and down the shore. The lights of Seal Cove twinkle on, and we congratulate ourselves for being on this spot at this moment.
Time and Tides
Three days later, back on the mainland, we are again marveling at the tide, but this time it's not booming so much as attacking us. We're at Hopewell Rocks, a state park about five hours up the coast from the Maine border. On the way up we had detoured through Saint John, New Brunswick's largest city -- an amiable, Old World city in the Annapolis mold -- and the vast maritime forests of Fundy National Park. But we're spending an entire day at Hopewell Cape, the epicenter of the world's highest tides.When we arrived, these gravel flats were under a few billion tons of seawater. Kayakers had been paddling around the groves of oddly shaped pillars, towering stone mushrooms carved by eons of rushing tides. Now the kelp forests are all draped limply over the rocks and tourists pick their way between the pillars and over the exposed floor of the bay.
We're beginning to pick a little nervously, though, because the phenomenal Bay of Fundy tide has bottomed out, turned and is beginning its rapid climb back up, rising five stories in about six hours. Twice a day, the bay is flushed by the most powerful tides on the planet, rushing in and out at the rate of 25 million cubic meters per second, equivalent to the combined flow of all the rivers in the world, according to the breathless promotional brochures. At spots around the bay, the tidal bores and riptides are so strong you can ride them in motorized rafts like whitewater rapids. It's common, every 12 hours, to see whole fishing fleets stranded in the mud as the water retreats hundreds of yards away from the shore.
Now it's on the way back, and we scamper over the rocks and through the tidal caves with a little more urgency as the bay reclaims yard after yard of bottom. We climb up into the woods and turn to watch the tide's twice-daily rout of the lowlands. The flood complete, we head back to a lobster dinner at the Florentine Manor, a restored country inn set among the bayside farms.
Canadians by Choice
Our final stop takes us back to our earliest New Brunswick era: St. Andrews, a coastal village originally founded by British loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. In 1783, when colonists faithful to King George III realized the upstart Americans had actually carried off their rash rebellion, a few hundred of them from New England simply stepped across the St. Croix River and remained subjects of the crown.In the centuries since, St. Andrews has evolved into a tri-cultural resort town. It's Canadian, of course, but with heavy English filigree -- portraits of the queen, Prince Charles and even Diana abound; streets are named for the children of George III. And finally, being just a dozen miles from Maine, it's the most American of Canadian villages. Bunched around a tight grid on Passamaquoddy Bay, St. Andrews is the doppelganger of many a quaint Yankee harbor town. Georgian, Federal and neoclassical homes sit on neat, broad lots between perfectly spaced streets. Some of the oldest frame houses along the waterfront -- now seafood restaurants, shops and galleries -- were actually disman- tled and moved here by barge from Maine during the unpleasantness of 1783.
This is four-star New Bruns-wick, a weekend and summer retreat of fine dining and upscale hotels in the way of Bar Harbor, Maine. It makes for a comfortable end to our Canadian week. We set up in the center of resort life, the venerable Algonquin Hotel, a sprawling Tudor behemoth stretching for blocks above the downtown. It's another time warp: The bellmen greet us in kilts, the infinite verandas are crowded with genteel folk in rocking chairs, and there is actually a wait for croquet on the front lawn.
Swimming in the chilly outdoor pool, touring the nearby historic houses and gardens, and lurking around the waterfront cafes and shops, it's easy to lose track of the hour. We find ourselves trotting down Edward Street in a mild panic that we'll miss our whale-watching cruise, the grand finale of our week. We're not wearing watches, but the spectacular steeple on the Greenock Church bears a clock.
According to that clock, it's nearly 8 on a bright sunny morning in the 21st century. But something about this town, and this province, suggests that it's much, much earlier.
Steve Hendrix will be online to discuss this story Monday at 2 p.m. during the Travel section's regular weekly chat on www.washingtonpost.com.
Details: New Brunswick
GETTING THERE: New Brunswick, Canada, is on Maine's northern border, about 900 miles from Washington. We drove, and took two nights to do it. (It was not only tolerable but fun, given our strategy of sightseeing along the way and stopping early at hotels with pools.) Air Canada flies from Dulles or BWI to Saint John, in the center of coastal New Brunswick, starting at about $285 round trip, via Montreal or Toronto. Proof of U.S. citizenship (passport or birth certificate) is required for travel to Canada.GETTING AROUND: Tourism is largely concentrated along New Brunswick's eastern coast and the Bay of Fundy. Heading north from the Maine line, Highway 1 connects coastal villages, ferry connections to the Fundy islands, Saint John (the largest city), Fundy National Park and the maritime wonders of the upper bay near the Nova Scotia border. We started on Grand Manan Island, reachable by ferry from Blacks Harbour. There are up to four sailings a day in the spring, seven in the summer. Adult round-trip tickets are about $6.50, children $3, under 5 free; cars are $19. Details: 506-636-3922, www.coastaltran sport.ca.
WHERE TO STAY: On Grand Manan, the most talked-about place is the Inn at Whale Cove (506-662-3181, www.holidayjunction.com/whalecove), a well-reviewed inn and restaurant on the north end. Rooms start at $64 a night, cottages from $473 a week.
The island is also full of small, family-run guest houses and cottages. Beach Front Cottages (506-662- 3115, www.beachfront cottages.ca; rates from $425 a week), where we stayed, are perched on a bluff, overlooking the sea and the handsome village of Seal Cove.
Florentine Manor (800-665- 2271, www.sn2000.nb.ca/comp/florentine- manor-b&b), between Hopewell Cape and Fundy National Park, is a grand old shipbuilder's mansion in a rural setting. They do a mean lobster feast. Rooms begin at $60.
In St. Andrews, the epicenter of resort life is the grand Fairmont Algonquin (800- 257-7544, www.fairmont .com/algonquin), a sprawling Tudor resort overlooking the town, with rates starting at $135 in summer.
WHAT TO DO: To experience the Bay of Fundy's signature massive tides, go to Hopewell Rocks. The park offers paddling tours of the offshore rock formations at high tides, and then you walk the same ground when the 50-foot tide retreats. Admission: $4. The park opens mid-May; be sure to check the tide tables beforehand. Info: 877-734-3429, www.the hopewellrocks.ca.
In St. Andrews, the lush Kingsbrae Gardens (866- 566-8687, www.kingsbraegarden .com; $5) are worth half a day. And while whale-watching trips abound around the Bay of Fundy, the majestic gaff-rigged cutter Cory made our trip especially interesting. Rates are about $35 for adults, $24 for kids under 16. Details: 506-529-8116, www.town search.com/svcory
INFO: Tourism New Brunswick, 800-561-0123, www.tourismnew brunswick.ca.
-- Steve Hendrix