Vacation Bargain

Of all the unsung pleasures of a Canadian vacation, especially in the Maritime Provinces, the least celebrated and the most attractive is the way of living one discovers, or rediscovers. None of the literature for visitors seems to deal with this particular attraction; instead, the leaflets undertake to lure the tourist with a color photo of a kilted piper or a group of Mounties in dress uniform, or with such wonders of nature as tidal bores and reversing falls.

The American visitor reads about these phenomena and drives earnestly up and down the land in search of them, but in simple truth scarcely any of them is worth looking at. The renowned tidal bore, which the visitor is led to believe is an awesome wave rushing in and sweeping all before it, is simply seawater, a few inches deep, moving over broad tidal flats. The kilted piper is probably a high school girl or a man hired by a ferry company to hail the visiting motorists as they disembark. I recall one booklet which included a photograph of a bandstand, unoccupied, in a Halifax park, presumably on the theory that anyone who would be impressed by watching the tide come in would enjoy equally looking at a wooden bandstand built, like most public structures in the Maritimes, at the wrong time.

The travel leaflets ought to say something instead about the garden vegetables we enjoyed every day during a long late-summer sojourn in Nova Scotia. What was served at noon and evening was picked that morning. Wax beans and green beans had a richness of fresh flavor that nothing in the markets at home provides. Tomatoes were on the very day of their maturity when they appeared. The local apples had that remembered taste of tree-ripened, freshly picked fruit. The homemade bread, as always, produced wonderful toast. These are, of course, absurdly simple elements of what would be called plain country cooking, and most of the food adjectives have been squandered so widely on the precooked-frozendinner kind of cuisine that I suppose there is no longer any language to set apart, for instance, the flavor of an apple sauce, freshly made from nippy green apples, or a slice of pie such as a Nova Scotian pastry cook creates. Even so, even if all the adjectives have been pre-empted by General Foods, the meals at some of the small tucked-away resorts on the peninsula are worth boasting about. The prices deserve mention, too: for our favorite cabin, meals, and no work of any sort to do beyond laying a fire in the fireplace, we paid a total weekly rate for two of $100.

The Maritimes would do well, incidentally, to spend some money on an up-to-date pollen count at many places during the August-September ragweed season. My own impression is that the incidence of ragweed in Nova Scotia is negligible in comparison with New England, and precise figures showing the differences ought to be impressive. Neither do the leaflets say enough about the summer climate, which, if one waits until the blackfly season is over — usually by mid-July — is surely one of the most agreeable in the world: brilliant sunny days, with everything fairly sparkling in the clean peninsular air, and cool nights calling for a fire and a blanket and sometimes two or three blankets. Not least of virtues to be emphasized is the extraordinary beauty of the natural scene, the seacoast, the lakes, woods,streams, and meadows, the abundance of birds.

Implicit in these affirmatives, it seems to me, is the proposition that the Maritimes are a region where the visitors who settle in somewhere and live the life of the countryside are much better off than the transients who stay on the move. Meals along the road are chancy; the summer season is short, and there is no reason why a small town in a farming community should be expected to support a first-class restaurant. For a family with young children, these small resorts mean a complete escape from housework,

while the children find and invent wonderful projects of their own. I say this after watching a half dozen children last summer who worked hard for three days in changing the course of a small stream that winds through the grounds of our little backwoods hotel. They achieved a pool by means of an earthen dam and an ambitious bend just beyond the pool — all of it simply an exercise in selfentertainment that harmed nothing and seemed to give them immense satisfaction. It was not at all the sort of experience they might have derived from sitting in a fast-moving car all day and sleeping in a different motel every night.