Hitchhiking down the road to Edmundston, walking across the water to Madawaska, Maine for a few beer, and camping out in His Honour’s back yard

I have fond memories going back to 1975 of my first long-distance hitchhiking expedition from Oshawa at 18, just after Grade 12, to the Baker Lake and Edmundston areas of New Brunswick, and then walking over the Edmundston-Madawaska Bridge, which opened in 1921, from Des Veterans Promenade, as it is known now (not sure about back then)  or Highway 2 to Bridge Street or US Highway 1 in Madawaska,  just across the Saint John River in Aroostook County, Maine.

 

I think there was something about a girl in a bar in Madawaska (I know, sounds a bit like the opening salvo of a country-and-western song; I believe the legal drinking age may have been 18 in Maine at the time) and me later sleeping in front of either Edmundston City Hall, or the Edmundston Police Force station (I’ve forgotten which, but the building was downtown, near the old S.M.T. (Eastern) Limited bus station, I think, in those days).

 

Remarkably, I only had a summer-weight sleeping bag and packsack (and notably no tent) in late June in the Maritimes.

 

Remarkably, no one either disturbed me or arrested me.

 

My next stop would be camping out with the same gear in  Charlottetown in the back yard of the Government House of Prince Edward Island, often referred to as Fanningbank, where I was again neither disturbed or arrested, albeit I don’t recall then Lt.-Gov. Gordon Bennett inviting me in for some breakfast either.

 

A few days later, my sleeping back and I wound up camping out for the night atop some embankment, surrounded by cedar trees, I believe, in Truro, Nova Scotia. When I woke up the next morning my sleeping bag and I had descended about 30 yards down the embankment during the night, while my packsack was still back at top, marking where we had started out.

 

One of my last stops was  Channel-Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, where I discovered endless fog and Pizza Delight, which had been founded seven years earlier in 1968 in Shediac, New Brunswick. While it would be another 24 years or so, Chez Camille Take-Out on Chemin Acadie in Cap-Pelé, about 15 miles east of Shediac, and also on the Northumberland Strait, would become my favourite fried clams joint anywhere, with John’s Lunch on Pleasant Street in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, running a close second. Now if I could only make it back to check out the Shediac Lobster Festival!

All in all, this admittedly was not a particularly well-thought out adventure at the age of 18, but I was fortuitous in more ways than one. Along with not being disturbed or arrested, it didn’t’ rain for the 11 or so nights I spent under the starry Atlantic summer night sky, sans tent, and I wasn’t unduly tormented by mosquitoes or blackflies, both of which, I suspect, are not unknown to inhabit the Maritimes that time of year. 

Hitchhiking, at least in much of North America, is something of a lost travel adventure art that more or less disappeared around the time of my mid-1970’s trek to the Maritimes (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up, right? Well, maybe not. About a dozen years ago now, and more than 30 years after my Maritimes saga, I did a fair bit of hitchhiking again in Ontario, down in Prince Edward County on Lake Ontario, or simply “The County,” as it is known to locals.If you wanted to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, all you had to do was stick your thumb out. I did it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton routeOne Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considered to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there were no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owned it, with some help from relatives, he said, still returned most every afternoon from her home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still lived there on Highway 33.

Another time, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home had been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she’d also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she was well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps was the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960.

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From Jericho Beach in Vancouver, home of the rum-runner chasing fleet of RCAF ‘flying boats’ to Highway 33 in Prince Edward County and Clark Gable’s last x-ray

In the summer of 1978, I owned a 1974 Chevrolet Vega subcompact with an inline four cylinder engine and a lightweight aluminum alloy cylinder block. I had worked for the summer between years at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario at General Motors in nearby Oshawa, Ontario.

Near the end of August, as summer wound down, but before classes resumed, I pointed the Vega west. I got as far as Banff National Park in Alberta before the aluminum block decided it wasn’t going to like the Rockies much — and blew up. Since, I was travelling light and the car was beyond salvation on any budget I had, I hitched a ride into town to the bus station, packed up a few things and sent them back to Ontario. Seeing no need to let the setback ruin my trip, while a few of my things went east on the bus, I decided to carry on, hitchhiking to Vancouver.

That evening, I arrived at the youth hostel on Jericho Beach in Vancouver, named in the 1860s after a logger named Jeremiah Rogers. The Royal Canadian Air Force had built its famous “flying boat hangars” on Jericho Beach in the 1920s to chase rum-runners during the American Prohibition era. The nearby barracks eventually became the youth hostel.

I still remember the two posters that greeted me that August night in 1978 as I walked through the door to register for the night. On one wall was a poster that said, “Help Bring Back the Sixties.” On the other wall was another poster with a quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “It is a sin to remain silent when it is your duty to protest.” I was 21. I’ve tried to take both admonitions to heart in my life’s work.

As for hitchhiking, it has entered the realm of the counterintuitive. A lost travel adventure art that has largely disappeared in North America (with the odd exception such as former Globe and Mail editor  John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up, right?

Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking was alive and well in very rural, very conservative Prince Edward County as recently as 2007 anyway, and if you wanted to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, all you had to do was just stick your thumb out. I did it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route during my year-long sojourn in the County. One Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considered to be the two worst winters in the County to that point in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield.

In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owned it, with some help from relatives, he said, returned most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still lived there on Highway 33.

Another time, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home had been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she’d also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she was well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps was the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960.

As I said, true fact.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22