Long Road Trips

The gates at Louisbourg Fortress

This morning I’ve been working on adding descriptive introductions to the Primary Sources in my second volume of American History Told By Contemporaries. The first few are a collection of newspaper advertisements of runaway indentured servants and slaves; a description of politics in Pennsylvania under its longest pre-Revolutionary proprietor, Thomas Penn; an excerpt from Jonathan Edwards’s account of the “Revival” we know as the First Great Awakening, and an account of the Louisbourg Expedition in 1745. As I’ve been working on these, I’ve been thinking about going to some of these places over the next couple of years.

Louisbourg fortress is an interesting example. It’s at the northeastern edge of Cape Breton Island. That’s due east of where Anne of Green Gables lived on Prince Edward Island, north of Nova Scotia. And south of Newfoundland. I’ve been to Nova Scotia before and really enjoyed it. I’d love to go to Cape Breton Island, and even to Newfoundland, to see the Viking settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows.

It’s a LONG WAY to go. When I was in college, on my first honeymoon, we drove into Canada and returned through northern Maine. Climbed partway up Mt. Katahdin. We briefly considered driving the Gaspe Peninsula. But the distances were just too much. I grew up in southeastern Massachusetts and always had a New England roadmap in the glove compartment of the white Beetle my parents gave me. I distinctly remember my first drive in Maine. I had spend so much of my time looking at the other side of the New England map, that covered Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. I sort of expected that the Maine side of the map would work similarly.

It did, of course, with one exception. I drove and drove and drove, along Route 95 and then US Highway 1 and didn’t seem to be getting any closer to my destination, Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor. The scales of the two sides of the map were wildly different. I had no idea how big Maine was, until I tried driving only about two thirds the way up its Atlantic coast.

Since then, I’ve done much longer road trips. Minnesota to California, for example. Or a really stupid sleepless thousand-mile drive from Puerto Montt to La Serena in Chile (that’s a story for another day!). Or the thousand miles from Bemidji Minnesota to Edmonton Alberta, more reasonably completed in two days. I like driving, but I want to be aware of the time I’m going to be spending behind the wheel and ensure the benefit is worth the cost.

I think a Maritime Canada trip would be worthwhile in a several ways. Scenery and tourist appeal, certainly. But also history. The Great White Pine Forest of North America’s eastern edge was in the maritimes and Maine. The pines stamped with the “Kings’s Arrow”, reserved for the Royal Navy during the colonial era, were in those coastal forests. Paul Bunyan is claimed by Bangor Maine as well as Bemidji Minnesota. And many of the Loyalists who left the new United States for what became New Brunswick probably supported themselves by felling trees in those woods. Finally, I think it would be interesting to visit some of these places described by early accounts. See what I think of them, relative to what Primary Sources from centuries ago say. And also, learn a bit about what people there NOW think of the history they live “on top of”. There are about a thousand people living in Louisbourg today, for example. I wonder whether today’s residents teach any of this history in their schools? Whether they have a historical society. Certainly there’s a tourist industry that takes advantage of this past, but I wonder whether the people living there engage with it? Similarly, what do today’s residents of St. Ignace or Mackinaw City think about the old fort, Michilmackinac? Does anyone remember the Wendat (Huron) who fled there after their defeat by the Iroquois? Kandiaronk?

In any case, I think there are at least three compelling reasons, to plan a Canadian maritime visit this summer. It’s SO far that this will probably be my big roadtrip of the summer. Probably a multi-week affair. Three? With visits along the way, to my daughters in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire? Something to look forward to!