Precerpt from In with the East Wind: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life - Canada: Labrador and New Brunswick
CANADA
I grew up in Maine, which meant that Canada was just always
there. Although things have changed a bit, or perhaps more than a bit, over the
years, when I was a kid, Canadian and American coins were interchangeable. A Canadian
nickel and a US nickel, penny, or dime were treated the same by merchants.
Radio shows might come from Maine or from Canada and might be in French or
English. Cereal boxes might be in French or English and might come from Canada
or the US. So, as I said, Canada was just there, like another state. No one
truly thought of it as another country.
Actually, though, I did travel to Canada three times, all of
them either by accident or “along the way.” And it was an “on the way” stopover
for NASA flights I was on (when NASA had its own commercial airplanes) from
Houston to Moscow.
Labrador
NASA planes enroute from Houston to Moscow stopped over in
Labrador (and Iceland) to refuel. We all had to get off the plane and crowd
into the small airport. Typically, our landings were at night, and we saw
little except the insides of the tiny airport. I suppose that allowed us to say,
at some level, that we had visited Canada, but, heck, we did not even get our
passports stamped.
New Brunswick
New Brunswick was a different story. We had not intended to
go there. Our intention was to visit northern Maine as a day trip from southern
Maine where we were visiting our parents. Eastport was our goal, but once we
got there we were enticed onto Deer Island, an enchanting place that will remain
in my memory forever.
Deer Island
Deer Island supposedly got its name because deer used to
swim to it. Early settlers and local Indigenous communities noticed that white‑tailed
deer regularly crossed the narrow passages between the mainland and the
island—especially at slack tide—either to forage or to escape predators. The
island’s sheltered woods and meadows made it a natural refuge, and the sight of
deer moving through the coves became so common that the name simply stuck. There’s
also a quieter, more local version of the story: people on the mainland would
look out across the water and see deer standing on the rocky shoreline, almost
silhouetted, and say, “There are the deer—on the island.” Over time, that
shorthand became the official name. It’s one of those place names that feels
exactly right: practical, unpretentious, and rooted in what people actually
saw.
Deer Island struck me as a place where the working world and
the wild world sit shoulder to shoulder. The lobster pounds—truly some of the
largest anywhere—made me stop and stare. Vast pools of cold, tidal water, each
one holding more lobsters than I had ever imagined existed in the ocean at one
time. And they kept coming. Every single day, the boats unloaded another
mountain of them, as if the sea were an endless cupboard.
We stood there watching the sorting, the practiced
choreography of hands and little wooden gauges. The breeders—broad‑tailed,
impressive—were tossed back. The babies, too tiny to be anything but future
promise, went back as well. Only the legal ones, that neat little 1–2 inches
from thorax to tail, were kept. It was strangely reassuring, seeing the care in
it, the respect for the cycle.
And then, just a few steps away from all that industry, the
island softened. Wildflowers lined the roads and the rocky edges of the shore,
as if they were trying to balance out the hard work happening at the wharves. Lupine
in purples and pinks, Queen Anne’s lace, buttercups, blue flag iris, wild roses,
and the little yarrow clusters that always look like lacework. In July, the
banks seemed to hum with color. You could walk from the lobster pools to a
patch of wildflowers in under a minute, and the shift felt like stepping from
one world into another.
That contrast—massive human effort beside effortless natural
beauty—is what I remember most. Deer Island never tried to impress. It just
went on being exactly what it was, and that has delighted many visitors,
including us.
In fact, enthrallment found us missing the ferry back to
Eastport. Oops! There being no hotels on the island itself, we were left with only
one option: the ferry to St. George. I looked at my husband, Carl, in the
driver’s seat of our car and two of our three kids in the back. Fawn had stayed
home on the farm with Ma; we had brought only Shawn and Echo with us on the
trip.
“It looks like we are going to visit Canada,” I said.
He nodded and headed toward the ferry. After landing in St.
George, we did have to show identification. I do not recall having passports at
the time; in fact, I know we did not. But it was the Maine-Canada border, back
then, when Canada seemed as much “home” as Maine did.
Bay of Fundy
We camped that night right on the edge of the Bay of Fundy,
in one of those informal shoreline spots that existed in the 1970s before
everything had a name or a sign. There was nothing around us but grass, rocks,
and the long sweep of Passamaquoddy Bay. At low tide, the water slipped so far
out to sea that it vanished entirely; the boats in the harbor settled into the
mud like sleeping animals, tilted and waiting. We stayed two days just to watch
that rhythm. The bay emptied slowly, almost politely, and then—almost all at once—it
came back. You could stand at the edge of our tent site and watch the water
return across the mudflats, spreading wide, covering everything it had exposed.
By the time it reached us, we could lean down and put our hands right into it,
feeling the cold Fundy tide rise to our toes and lift the boats back into
motion.
Around us, the local world went on in its quiet way. Gulls wheeled overhead, calling in that sharp Fundy voice. The spruce trees behind us held the fog until evening, when it rolled out toward the bay like a soft curtain. A few fishermen’s houses sat back from the shore, weathered and practical, with stacks of lobster traps and coils of rope that seemed to belong to the landscape as much as the rocks and tide did. It was a place where the ocean breathed, and we breathed with it—two days of watching the world empty and fill, as if the bay were showing us its own heartbeat.
From the forthcoming book:
Volume 1: ABC Lands
by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver
For more posts about and from this book, click HERE.
For more posts by and about Betty Lou Leaver, click HERE.
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