Northern composure

By David Rakoff

updated 3:42 p.m. ET March 13, 2008

It was a murderous summer heat wave that gripped New York City. The newspapers carried grim stories of people essentially cooked to death in their un-air-conditioned apartments. Con Edison, the power utility, was sending agents door-to-door, begging people to turn off appliances to forestall an inevitable blackout. Al Gore's direst predictions seemed to be coming true. How to escape this inconvenient truth? By getting out of Dodge, of course. But if my Northeastern home was now the climatic equivalent of Atlanta, what did that make New York's local oceanic respites, the Hamptons and the Jersey Shore? The Everglades?

The only solution was to go north. Hoping to avoid the throngs of vacationers who yearly overrun Cape Cod and Maine, I settled on the Canadian Maritimes. I had always wanted to see that part of my native land, my desire based almost entirely on a postcard I had received as a child depicting the lighthouse at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. Possibly the most famous image of Eastern Canada, the bright-white beacon stands alone and proud on the smooth, bare rock, looking out to a gray sea that is cold and huge and cares not one jot for the lives and aspirations of man or beast. My kind of place.

The first leg of my journey on the ground — a two-hour cab ride from Nova Scotia's Sydney airport to Ingonish — is as immediate and welcome a relief as a cool hand on my forehead. I am driven through the misty, rugged Cape Breton Highlands. Unlike, say, Rome, New York or any other improbably named place (O, whither your white nights, St. Petersburg, Florida?), the Highlands of Nova Scotia, literally New Scotland, really do resemble their namesake, both topographically and spiritually. We cross the Great Bras d'Or inlet, a narrow channel from the Atlantic bordered on both sides by piney banks of forest. It is beautiful and harsh and looks like nothing so much as Loch Ness. We pass signs reading CÉAD MÍLE FÁILTE ("one hundred thousand welcomes"), an old Gaelic greeting, just as we come upon the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts, an institution devoted to the culture of the original settlers. There in the circular driveway stands a young student playing the bagpipes in full kilted regalia. The winding road up Mount Smokey climbs about eight hundred feet in a mile, the Atlantic stretching out below us. I've said it before — perhaps even in the pages of this magazine — but it's hard to be blasé about an ocean. And there in the distance is my first stop, the Keltic Lodge: red-roofed, Tudor-timbered, perched on its rocky promontory. It is here that I am meeting up with one of my best and oldest friends, Natalia, who now lives in London, along with her husband, Philippe, and their three children. We will be together for five days.

The Keltic Lodge sits incongruous as a bowling green in the cone of a volcano, paradisiacally situated on a peninsula of protected provincial park. The sea roils below on three sides, crashing against rocks that give way to wild forest which climbs the hills. But the grounds of the hotel itself are sweet formal English flower beds and rolling lawns dotted everywhere with multicolored Adirondack chairs. Opened in 1952, it still has that feel. Indeed, 1952 (in that innocent and retro sense, as opposed to that Red-baiting/duck-and-cover sense) will be the prevailing mood for days to come. A gentle politeness will suffuse every interaction. The Keltic is a Shangri-La of sorts. A reverse Shangri-La, to be precise: The place is peacefully geriatric. Golf culture and its attendant quiet prevail. And while I don't feel anything but completely welcome, the 1952 feeling also savors of a Canada before it became a multicultural haven. I do not see, for example, among the prevalent white hair and ice cream–colored wardrobe, anything resembling the sartorial exuberance of my own fellow Hebrews when they reach a certain age: the Matisse-bright loungewear accompanied by the ethnic clank of hammered silver jewelry purchased on the previous year's trip to San Miguel de Allende.

We get into the Keltic rhythm by doing not much of anything really. We walk to a nearby rocky beach, picking and eating raspberries along the way. We have our very good breakfast and supper nightly in the lodge's Purple Thistle Dining Room, with extraordinary views of the Atlantic on both sides, and we spend a fair amount of time sitting in the Adirondack chairs, chatting and taking in the astonishing scenery.

Rousing ourselves one morning, we tag along on a nature hike. We see two varieties of birch and some woodpecker holes in a fallen tree, but I can't really blame the kids when they get a little bored. There's just not that much going on in these woods, and our guide is a less-than-electric docent. We do manage to see a partridge slowly making its way through the underbrush, but Philippe and I peel off with the girls down to a rocky outcropping where we can at least watch the waves come in. And there, finally, wildlife! A school of jellyfish. (Does one say a "school"? Isn't their presence in multiples merely a function of currents? Can they be said to have social cohesion any more than one would describe the dozens of insects flattened on a car's windshield as a community?) The jellyfish are a very pretty dark bluey-purple. We skim one out of the water and bring it up on the rocks to get a closer look. While it's floating in water, we can see the flowerlike opening and closing of its body. But here on dry land, glistening in the soon-to-prove-lethal sun, it is a formless and shuddering pile of violet gelatin, absent of structure.

The irony is not lost on me that finding refuge on this roasting planet requires that I blithely increase my carbon footprint by hopping on a gas-guzzling airplane (two of them, actually: I had to change in Montreal) and, once here, further engage in that most traditional of fossil-fuel bacchanals: the driving holiday — and me a nondriver. My guilt is assuaged somewhat by the fact that the Maritimes are almost completely unserved by trains, except for one — about which more later — and that I am just one of six sharing a barely midsize vehicle. It is all very jolly in the backseat with the three children, who take up little room and are excellent company; but after an hour, the delusional monsters start complaining about the size of my backside.

Tara Donne / Condé Nast Traveler / Tara Donne The popular marina in Charlottetown, on Prince Edward Island.

Our Maritimes trip will describe an exaggerated circumflex that will take us from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to Prince Edward Island, and back to the mainland of Nova Scotia to Halifax. We leave the Keltic one morning and are driving off the car ferry onto Prince Edward Island by that afternoon. The lodge and its environs seem a distant dream. Maybe that's because the evergreen wilderness of Cape Breton stands in such distinct contrast to the flat patchwork of Prince Edward Island's fields. We drive past immaculate clapboard houses and small white churches, through towns with the most starchy Anglo names: Roseberry, Cardigan and Point Prim. It might all be called Point Prim, given the pin-neatness of the landscape. Even Charlottetown, P.E.I.'s capital, seems to be under the thumb of some despotic, flower-hatted gardening club. Its many small green squares are lovingly planted and maintained. Large shade trees line streets of restored old mansions — some once again private homes, some that house social services, clearly predating the area's revival, and some converted into B&Bs, like the Hillhurst, where we are staying.

At our breakfast table the next morning, we are joined by the inn's other guests: five grown women from Utah, Mormon sisters and sisters-in-law. They have left their many children back at home with their husbands. All very nice and chatty, Natalia asks what brought them here to P.E.I.

"Anne," one of them answers simply.

Ah, yes, Anne of Green Gables, the Lucy Maud Montgomery heroine who put P.E.I. on the map and has inspired mad global devotion. But in our little group, I, the only Canadian, don't care, Natalia and Philippe didn't grow up with the books, and the children don't know them either, so we count ourselves uniquely lucky in our imperviousness to the ubiquitous merch.

Tara Donne / Condé Nast Traveler / Tara Donne Equestrians on Prince Edward Island ride along woodsy trails and beaches

It might seem that visiting P.E.I. in the summer and not driving to the mock Anne of Avonlea village up in Cavendish, or seeing at least one of the two Anne-themed musicals playing simultaneously in Charlottetown, is like visiting Mecca during the hajj, but for the ceramics. Still, there is much here to delight the general traveler. We stroll along streets of restored nineteenth-century buildings, past outdoor jazz trios and ice cream parlors. It is both languorous and decorous. A beach town in white gloves. In a gift shop, I find the first in the line of Canadian Legends action figures: John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister. There he is in his dark frock coat, with his fearsome swivel table and two Chiclet-sized leather-bound volumes at the ready. Biff! Pow! Take that, foes of post-colonial representative parliamentary democracy!

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