Green Gables Island

I recently came across an old piece I wrote for a class on travel writing I took I think about 15 years ago. It's written with a magazine audience in mind, which is why it reads a little impersonal. The trip itself was taken in the mid 1980s but I think little of my description is outdated. My instructor's comments are below the piece.


What do Anne of Green Gables and the Cajuns of Louisiana have in common? The answer lies in a jewel of an island nested off the coast of New Brunswick.


Prince Edward Island is Canada's smallest province A half-hour ferry ride across the Northumberland Strait and you are transported to another age. The air feels softer, your cares distant. One of the first things you will notice is the bright red soil of the exposed cliff faces. The brilliant colouration comes from the rust in the soft sandstone.


The French Arcadians were some of the first settlers and made good use of the fertile soil. Unfortunately they became victims in a larger drama played between the superpowers of that age, England and France. After France lost the Battle of Louisbourg in 1758, the Arcadians were forcibly repatriated. Some went to Louisiana and became the Cajuns, a corruption of Arcadian. Still others risked their lives and fled to the woods. They not only survived but thrived. Today one islander in seven is an Arcadian and a descendant of those stubborn refugees.


If you come in the right season you may come across an Arcadian festival. They were having one at Abram-Village while I was there. Dancers whirled to the beat of Arcadian folk songs, while stalls offered enticing culinary delicacies. Nearby, contestants were demonstrating traditional feats such as wood chopping and the horse team pull. Every other family is named Arsenault. That's how small a group of families the original settlers were. Their language is a linguistic snapshot of 17th century French.


Wandering out of the fairgrounds you are likely to come across a small crafts shop or artisanat. On display was an antique quilt with an intriguing story. Back in the 1930s, the artist, an Arcadian housewife, saw a plane in the sky for the first time in her life. It made such an impression on her that she recorded her impressions with quiltwork.


On the other side of the island, near Cavendish, is Green Gables. This is the house Lucy Maud Montgomery lived in with her cousins. Lucy was the creator of that spirited character, Anne of Green Gables, so beloved by children all over the world. Her heroine is based in no small part upon herself. A short distance from the house is a serene, wooded walk where Lucy must have spent many a happy hour as a child, listening to the babbling brook and the sounds of nature.


During your drive around the island you will come across blandishments to stop and indulge in an all you can eat lobster feast. Give in to temptation once. You will be shown to a buffet table groaning with hearty side dishes. A short while later, your pièce de résistance arrives, a lobster boiled as red as the soil of the island. After the dinner, as the twilight ferry bears you towards Nova Scotia, perhaps you will understand why the Arcadians were as reluctant as you are to leave.


My instructor commented that I had used a couple of hackneyed phrases: jewel of an island, and babbling brook. I notice that I had a chance to make the account a bit more personal when writing about the aeroplane quilt, instead of being an anonymous reporter, but missed it. I also see now that I used impression twice in one sentence. And looking up Montgomery's biography reveals that her days in Cavendish were mostly lonely and her imaginative mind provided companions so my description was a bit inaccurate.

Writing a blog is hard

For me that is. An entry can take a couple of hours.


The reason is that most of my blogs are travelogues, generated from old travel diaries. First of all I have to decipher my own handwriting. Ok, that's my problem. Actually that doesn't take too long except for the odd word or two.


In the case of old diaries I have to dredge up the memories associated with the events recorded. I have to ask myself, was what I remembered plausible and consistent with the record? Why did I phrase things a certain way? I'm a stickler for accuracy, you see. But this phase is good to shed light on the details.


Then I have to find les mots justes to entertain the reader. This is the fun part. I have to avoid cliches, and overuse of certain words. I have to make the tenses consistent. I have get the tone right. And sometimes I have to check that a word means what I intended. This is good practice for a writer actually, to truly understand the meanings of words.


Then I have to add background information and hyperlinks. I must make sure that I spell names correctly. I must present the correct facts and not guesswork. Wikipedia is my friend here. I learn quite a few facts in this phase, long after the journey has been completed. It's humbling to discover that sometimes what I took to be the case was somewhat in error, or not the whole story.


In the case of my opinions, I have to be fair-minded and label my prejudices as such. It's not a matter of political correctness. Part of the spice of life is comprehending how there can be so many aspects to everything.


Finally I have to proofread and correct minor mistakes like mismatch of case, tense or number. Or poor phrasing with misdirected referents. Sometimes this correction continues even after publishing.


Sometimes I forget to include an anecdote and have to go back to amend the entry.


I have to insert pictures at appropriate places. It's kind of fun to look for the good shots in my collection. I often wish I had taken more shots so as to have more candidates.


And of course, I like telling jokes and playing with words. And playing with readers' expectations.


All in all it's an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.


So, if you would like to enjoy some of my travel blogs, follow the links from this page.

Glue stick and lip balm stick

Hmm, just noticed that a glue stick looks like a lip balm stick, except larger. Looks like an accident waiting to happen. Wonder if I can use the idea in a story. :)

Travessia

I recently got hold of the lyrics of the Milton Nascimento classic song Travessia (Bridges). One thing I have noticed often is how the lyrics of Brazilian songs change going from Portuguese to English. It says something about the Brazilian and the US world views.


The Portuguese lyrics of Travessia by Fernando Brant speak of loss, and determination to survive. The last stanza goes:



Vou querer amar de novo e se não der não vou sofrer / Já não sonho, hoje faço com meu braço o meu viver (I will want to love again and if not, I will not suffer / No longer a dream, today I build my life with my arms)

However, the English lyrics (of the same ending, by Gene Lees) are about a wanderer and a searcher, and more optimistic:

And I call across to tell her where I believe the bridge must lie / and I'll find it yes, I'll find it if I search until I die

But sometimes it goes the other way. Manha de Carnaval from Black Orpheus became A Day in the Life of a Fool where the singer berates him/herself for losing a lover. In the original, it simply speaks of the beauty of the morning, music and love.

Flex fuel vehicles

A recent issue of a motorists association newsletter mentioned trials of flex fuel vehicles using E85 from household waste in Australia. This reminded me that on my recent trip to Brazil I had been given a ride in a flex fuel car but had not mentioned this in the blog. The driver explained to me that it could burn any mix of alcohol or petrol, the engine simply adapted. Brazil is in the forefront of this technology as it has been substituting alcohol from sugar cane since 1976 and has worked on generations of flex fuel vehicles. It is in a good position to do this due to its large amount of arable land and abundant sunshine, as well as a large internal market.


Those Wikipedia articles are quite detailed and would make good reading.

Two Santana classics

I had a gift voucher for a music download site and after buying a main album I had a couple of dollars left so I picked two instrumentals I love from the Santana body of work: Incident at Neshabur and Europa.


Incident at Neshabur comes from Abraxas, what I regard the best of classic Santana albums. The cover painting is very psychedelic. The nomenclature of the album is steeped in intrigue. The album title is taken a line from Hermann Hesse's novel Demian. Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of the tracks, was also the leader of the first successful slave revolt in Haiti. And I was sorely puzzled over what incident happened at Neshabur. This was pre-Internet, so it took me many years to discover that Neshabur, or Nishapur, was a great city in Persia, now Iran. Still that didn't explain what incident happened there. Recently I came across this article in KeyboardMag that had a bit more detail about Alberto Gianquinto, the co-composer with Carlos Santana of and the blues pianist in that piece. The album was released at the tail end of the heady days of flower power and Gianquinto was making some kind of political statement, but nobody was sure what, they just thought it was a cool name.


As for the piece itself, it is extraordinary the changes of pace and metre it goes through. It starts off as a hard-driving jam by guitar, bongo, electric organ and piano. It's a showpiece for the guitarist where he gets to employ distortion and sustain but also delicately pluck notes. But the pianist also gets to carry a lovely melody towards the end. For some reason, when listening to the second half, I have always had a mental image of a cavernous room in dim crimson light while the sustained notes resonate through the room, and as the piece progresses towards its gentle finish, you could hear a pin drop as the audience is rapt in silent appreciation. I have lost track of the number of times I've listened to it on headphones in the dark.


As for Europa from the Amigos album, the name comes from the Greek myth of course, because of the secondary title Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile, but I don't think any overt statement was intended, it is just a very lyrical showpiece for electric guitar. It has an amazing prolonged sustain towards the end.

The Feng Shui Detective

I'm reading this series of detective novels by Nury Vittachi. It's not high literature but I find it entertaining.


The stories are actually more comedy than mystery. C.F.Wong, the Feng Shui master, is a veritable scrooge and always looking for ways to earn more consulting fees, all the time penning fables of Eastern wisdom, which provide interludes to the tale, for his magnum opus. He is neatly set off against a teenage intern, Joyce McQuinnie, foisted upon him by a regular client. She is British-Australian but speaks a language called Teenager where Whatever means yes, and As if means no. So the stage is set for the hilarious clash of opposites: East versus West, age versus youth, tradition versus modernity.


The stories are set in Asia, locations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, with excursions to cities like Sydney. Nury Vittachi lives in Hong Kong, and was a magazine contributor for many years so the behaviour of his colourful characters (we meet some members of The Union of Industrial Mystics), his depiction of the locations, the descriptions of the street food, and the rendering of the patois—snippets of Cantonese, Malay, etc., are spot on. I can't vouch for the Feng Shui bits, but the terminology sounds realistic.


C.F. Wong's observation that there should be more destruction, in the sense of discarding of acquisitions, in the later half of life so that one would move from the material to the spiritual, and end life gloriously unencumbered, appeals to me. I suspect that he was giving voice to a piece of the author's philosophy there.