The fake red braids are everywhere. As are the "Anne of Green Gables" soda, keychains, T-shirts and potato chips. And the commemorative Anne license plates. And of course the "Green Gables" movie -- all three parts -- and the animated series.
The 11-year-old freckle-faced orphan is a heck of a marketer, as it turns out, and the guardian of a killer franchise that has helped lift Prince Edward Island, Canada's tiniest province, out from the shadow of Nova Scotia, its better-known, craggier neighbor. Anne lurks around almost every corner, and even a hip home-furnishings store in the island's capital of Charlottetown can vow, in a sign, that it is only "95 percent Anne free." But if any islanders resent the fact that their homeland's most enduring symbol and chief tourist attraction is a fictional character, they're not talking.
As for me, I prefer P.E.I. unadorned, with its rolling green hills, royal blue sea, fresh lobsters, and the modesty of a place that -- with the notable exception of the Anne machine -- feels little need to shout its virtues.
Nearly two years after my father died, curiosity has brought my mother, two sisters and me there, to the land he left as a child. He had, repeatedly, expressed no interest in returning.
Half expecting a lonely and left-behind outpost, we find instead a tidy island idyll dotted with family farms and wildflowers, undisturbed pink-sand beaches and the quiet hum of a less-traveled place. Things are slow in this pocket-size speck of the world's second-largest country, and no one seems to be complaining.
After an 11-hour slog from Boston, we cross a sleekly modern bridge from the lonely tip of New Brunswick, and there we are, smack in the middle of a paint-by-numbers canvas: Bucolic Landscape No. 1.
We pull over in Victoria, a tiny bayside artists village. The bay is there, all right, but the artists are nowhere to be found. All but a couple of the town's shops are shuttered on this warm, sunny Sunday, and one gets the feeling that it wouldn't be whole a lot peppier on any other day of the week. But there is a shop that makes its own chocolates -- okay, I've done my homework -- and a roomy porch on which to loll and watch people pass by (or not) as we drink coffee and lemonade and sample the wares. For me, it's better than fine, and on this point there seems to be broad consensus.
This, I realize later, is vintage Prince Edward Island. There's not a lot to keep you busy, but plenty to keep you happy. It's a bloom that unfurls, petal by petal, at no one's pace but its own.
Anne's Land
But a certain perennial preteen is allowed -- encouraged, even -- to break the staid isle's rules, as we discover on a trip to Cavendish, a town on the north-central coast, a region that's better known as Anne's Land.
Cavendish, the childhood home of "Green Gables" author Lucy Maud Montgomery, is the vortex of Hurricane Anne, the belly of an excruciatingly amiable beast. If you're looking for Anne-themed miniature golf or an Anne-style gas station, or if you want to get married in the Green Gables museum -- some people do -- then the Cavendish area is your place. About half of the island's 800,000 annual visitors pay their respects to the Green Gables house, a farmhouse once owned by cousins of Montgomery that inspired the setting for the novel.
In a world in which travelers are more often seduced by action and glitz, the little orphan Anne is pretty much all that islanders are willing to offer up to the gods of tourism. But they do so with a gusto that can be somewhat disconcerting, elevating the celebration of the feisty but pure-hearted redhead to something between a cult of personality and a fetish.
"Is Anne of Green Gables really real?" The question posted on a tourism Web site acquires a certain existential heft. The answer proffered is almost mystical: "You have posed a question to which there is no short answer."
