Finding Anne – Prince Edward Island, Canada

Spring had come once more to Green Gables – the beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring, lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Step from a tiny plane on to the tarmac at Charlottetown in May and the first thing you notice is the scent. My city lungs could write an ode to it: the shock of its vegetal freshness, laden with salt, the earthy tumble of ploughed fields and the botanical sweetness of a landscape of balsam fir and pine. ‘Welcome to Prince Edward Island’, says a neat little sign on the bricks of the airport terminal, and the ghost of my eleven year old self pinches her arm just to make sure.

Home to 146,000 people, Prince Edward Island is the smallest province in Canada, measuring just 280 kilometres from point to point. Cradled by the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to the north and turbulent Northumberland Strait to the south, the ‘Garden of the Gulf’ is also one of the most beautiful – with lushly rolling hills falling to red sandstone cliffs, gabled timber farmhouses nestled in fields of dandelions and deep, pure stands of Acadian forest. It is also the birthplace of both Canadian Confederation (in the spring of 1864 the premiers of the provinces met in Charlottetown to first discuss a unified government) and a story beloved by so many generations of readers that thousands travel each year to visit a small island farmhouse by the name of Green Gables.

I read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables for the first time when I was ten. An instant bestseller when it was published in 1908, it is difficult to account for the effect the story had on me as a girl; like many readers I identified with its mishap-prone, red-haired heroine not in looks or circumstance, but imagination and precocity, and took her spirited determination as a blueprint for my own. Anne is quick-witted, brazen- hearted and always seems to be running across fields or communing with mayflowers in shadowy places, and I worked my mind’s eye over every nook and valley of her island world until it felt as real to me as the memory of any place I’d ever been and loved.

I hired a car at the airport and within 20 minutes was in downtown Charlottetown checking in to the pink-gabled Harbour House Hotel on a quiet, tree-fringed street near the water. Charlottetown figures thinly in the eight novels that make up the Anne series so I didn’t know what to expect, but was delighted to discover street upon street of timber houses painted in shades of blue, yellow and red – their deep verandas and lamp-lit window seats beckoning in the fading light, gardens bright with tulips and daffodils. P.E.I.’s capital city is not only refreshingly human-sized but navigable almost entirely on foot. Be sure to walk the southeastern end of Great George Street from Province House to see the colourful early-19th century wooden terraces opposite the gothic spires of St. Dunstan’s Basilica. Come early evening a stroll by the bustling outdoor cafes around Peakes Wharf is the perfect way to experience the ambience of this historic harbour where the Confederation Fathers landed 152 years ago. Also make time to visit the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, with its excellent lobster tacos, fresh produce and artisan crafts, and to play a game of pre-dinner checkers on Victoria Row, a cobbled pedestrian street lined with local boutiques and restaurants. If you listen closely to passers-by you may be struck by the maritime dialect, with its almost Celtic lilt. PE.I. prides itself on its mixed heritage, from the indigenous culture of the Mi’kmaq to the first Scottish, Irish and Acadian French settlers, and its musical vernacular is an unexpected delight.

The sea is an undeniable presence here and Islanders have lived by its rhythm and command for centuries. So it comes as no surprise that P.E.I. is home to no fewer than 63 lighthouses, many of which are still in operation. Together they monitor 1,100 kilometres of ruggedly beautiful shoreline, from calm ocean coves freckled with sea glass, to craggy red cliffs buffeted by spindrift tides. The reef-borne water here may be the warmest north of the Carolinas, but it has a history of luckless vessels and the ocean floor is littered with them (there is even the legend of a flaming ghost ship still occasionally sighted in the Northumberland Strait). One hour and 20 minutes’ drive ‘down east’ from Charlottetown you’ll find East Point Lighthouse, white-shingled and red-capped like something from a picture book, with a dramatic view of the Island’s most easterly point from the top of its 67 stairs. Built at the meeting of three stubborn ocean tides, it was for a long time one of the busiest aids to deep-sea navigation and has seen many maritime tragedies in its 150-year history.

Ten minutes away is North Lake Harbour, where deep-sea fishing charters compete with scenic cruises and weathered fishing huts cluster around wharves massed with rope. This is where I tasted my first – yes, first – silkily fresh lobster, courtesy of Captain J. J. Chaisson who, in addition to wrangling 3:30 a.m. starts and 300 traps in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, moonlights as The Fiddling Fisherman, taking groups out on his boat Chaisson A Dream for lobster suppers and thigh-slapping offshore ceilidhs. P.E.I. is known throughout Canada for its traditional folk music, but if you’d prefer to stay on dry land one of the best places to experience a gig is at the Trailside Music Café in the village of Mount Stewart. Performing during my visit were The Stanfields, and Atlantic Canadian folk rock band from Nova Scotia, and as I ordered fish cakes and fiddleheads (a seasonal specialty of curly edible ferns sautéed with carrots and cashews in maple butter), one of the musicians retreated into the field behind the café to tune his fiddle. Half an hour later the bad burst into a riotous throb of strings and drums as every table clapped along. I was the only person there who didn’t seem to know almost everybody else, but I clapped and hollered enthusiastically anyway. After the show I spent some time walking in the quiet springtime darkness to the unhurried animal rhythm of an island night. Barely two days on P.E.I. and my heartbeat had slowed, my limbs had loosened, and I’d become conscious of a kind of disorienting peacefulness.

In the pretty hamlet of New London you’ll find The Table Culinary Studio, very near the yellow-shingled farmhouse in which Montgomery herself was born. In the refurbished interior of this decommissioned church – the rafters newly whitewashed, a grand communal table where the pews would once have been – chefs Derrick and Roark host seasonal cooking classes and evenings of fine dining inspired by all-local island produce. I was here to learn how to cook with the Island’s black garlic, slow-roasted, caramelised garlic that is as black as pitch and spreads like double cream.

During the afternoon the rain closed in on all sides, hammering on the pitched tin roof and tilled earth outside, and for a happy moment it felt like there was nothing else in the world beyond that little room with its prettily mismatched china and uncomplicated welcome.

And then there’s Green Gables Heritage Place. Upon arrival you will be directed to a small Visitor Centre where you can see Montgomery’s typewriter, the A, N and E cleanly worn away. Passing through a reconstructed barn, you then come upon what could only be Green Gables itself – a small two-story vernacular farmhouse, neatly whitewashed, its dark green gables and shingled roof warming in the morning sun.

And this is where something strange happens and the real and fictional become a little confused. Originally home to Montgomery’s cousins, and known familiarly to Montgomery throughout her life, the farmhouse has been instead devotedly refurbished to match details from the books, from Mar ilia’s treasured amethyst brooch resting on her bureau to the fragments of Anne’s smashed slate. For Anne-lovers making this pilgrimage, the space between the keenly imagined and studiously realised can be vast and it wasn’t until I began to wander through the spruce wood below Green Gables that I felt the first flutter of recognition. For the creaking of the wind in the spruces still sounds as it must have when Montgomery was first spooked by its eerie whistle and called it the Haunted Wood, and Lovers Lane is the same sweet, shadowed spot, home to downy woodpeckers and dumps of forget-me-nots in the spring.

There is a cafe in the barn on site but it’s worth driving the short distance to New Glasgow and stopping for lunch at the Prince Edward Island Preserve Company. Here, in a renovated butter factory, quilts hanging from the eaves, you can sit overlooking the water, drinking tea blended with apple blossoms and eating luscious, Anne-worthy wedges of raspberry cream cheese pie.

Nearby is the national park of Brackley-Dalvay where you can walk the Farmlands Trail (if you drive along the Gulf Shore Parkway you can stop off at little Covehead Lighthouse on the way – tucked into pink dunes, it is surely one of the Island’s prettiest). P.E.I is crisscrossed with trails for walkers and cyclists, but this one has the distinction of following the remains of the oldest Island road through ancient farmland long reclaimed by forest, dykes still visible though grown over by generations of ostrich ferns. It also passes by one of the Island cemeteries, a quiet plot ringed with boulders and peopled with a scattering of tombstones, cut with crosses and anchors in memory of the many sailors buried there. It is a peaceful place, though after a few hours alone in the woods an overactive imagination begins to interpret every snap and rustle as the harbinger of some grey and ghostly thing. Startled almost to swearing by a lead-footed red squirrel, I couldn’t help but think of Anne, shuddering through her haunted spruce wood, bewailing the terrors of her imagination.

What you discover about Prince Edward Island is that Anne is everywhere, but never where she is supposed to be. And ironically, it is the places where she isn’t that speak most strongly to the sense of her – a red lane winding down an avenue of young poplars, a lopsided pile of books in a church window, the crisp whip of the wind on the dunes at Greenwich Beach. On my way back to Charlottetown, on a quietly undulating road, I pulled over to photograph a small gabled cottage in a grove of red spruces. It was so quiet I could hear the gentle slough of trees on the hill. I stood in the middle of the empty road and tried to take in the almost imperceptible movement of everything, the slow contentment of the fields, the tiny, ceaseless animation of the grass. I thought of Montgomery roaming through the forests and valleys she loved so much and my mind 1 it on a passage towards the end of Anne of Green Gables that I remembered reading a few nights before. “Dear old world,’’ Anne says, pondering a dusk of many moons ago. “You are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.’’