When speculation of an “Atlantic Bubble” began—quarantine free travel to neighbouring provinces—I was skeptical: why on Earth would we want to leave PEI at a time like this!? And why would we want people from away in our midst (both for reasons of COVID and because it would disrupt our once in a lifetime tourist-free aerie).

But then, this weekend, with the Bubble a real thing as of Friday, our friend Yvonne texted from Halifax, inviting us to visit before she heads west to Saskatchewan next week.

There aren’t many people in the world I’d bubble for, but Yvonne is one of them, so plans were quickly thrown together: EV charging stations pinpointed, sandwiches made, support workers furloughed.

And so off we headed this morning, east to Wood Islands to catch the ferry to Caribou, NS. The plan is to fast-charge in Stellarton, and perhaps again on the other side of Truro.

We’ve packed a deck of cards, and plan to resist the urge to indulge in Big City Living: Yvonne has held out promise of pie-baking, and I suspect Crazy 8s will be played.

This will be our first trip off the Island in eight months.

Last night on the regular family zoom it was trivia night. Oliver made up the teams: OG Canada, OG USA, New Canada. I made up the questions, questions like:

The following pairs of NHL players are each related to each other. For each, what is their family relationship? Ty & Jack Arbour (brothers). Don & Riley Barber (father and son). Toe and Mike Blake (Uncle and Nephew). Red Kelly and Mark Jankowski (grand uncle and grand nephew). Guy Carbonneau & Brenden Morrow (in-laws).

and:

Here are some capital cities; what are their countries? Riga, Vilnius, Chișinău, Ulaanbaatar.

But also family-related questions like:

When Mike and Peter were little, Mike would tell stories about what fictional band of heros?

Surprisingly, the questions that seemed to stump almost everyone were:

Name three significant inventions that didn’t exist when Frances was born.

Name three significant inventions that didn’t exist when Karen was born.

Name three significant inventions that didn’t exist when Oliver was born.

The teams eventually squeaked out the answers, but it was a lot harder for them than you’d think (“Alexa” was one of the answers for the last one; surely there’s something more significant than that that’s come along in the last 20 years?!).

This got me thinking about nuclear weapons, which didn’t make the cut, but arguably have been one of the most significant inventions in the last century, if by “significant” we mean “existential threats to humanity.” Right up there with the internal combustion engine.

The threat of nuclear winter was a palpable part of my childhood in a way that people of Oliver’s generation will never understand. When The Day After aired in 1983, it seemed like a real possibility that it described our future. We watched Dr. Helen Caldicott in the 1982 documentary If You Love This Planet in high school and her warnings about the dangers of the nuclear age were more than just academic.

So the idea of going into a bunker when Buffalo, New York was hit by Soviet missiles, only to emerge sometime later into a much-changed world, seemed like something that might be part of my future, a possibility helpfully illustrated for my teenage imagination by Jason Robards, Steve Guttenberg and JoBeth Williams:

(Still from The Day After, 1983)

Today was the first day the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market was open, in something approaching its usual fashion, in 17 weeks, and there was no way that Oliver was not going to seize the opportunity to latch onto some pre-COVID routine comfort, so I concocted a reasonable simulation of our regular Saturday morning, mindful that the market, while open, was not operating at full strength and thus was going to be missing some important components.

I started the day making a smoothie-to-go for Oliver, as this was something I knew he’d be missing. Then we headed for Gallant’s in the industrial park, where Tyler helpfully had a couple of smoked salmon bagels waiting for us to pick up. Bagels and smoothie in hand, we parked in the UPEI parking lot across the street from the market, waving at friends and neighbours coming and going.

We managed to time our arrival perfectly: there was no line-up at all, as the early-birds were gone and the late-birds were yet to arrive.

The market was set up in a large loop in the parking lot, the market building itself closed. Oliver was initially flummoxed that the vendors were in a different order than our usual loop sees us encountering them: John Macfarlane was near the beginning, not the end, for example. Oliver was also perturbed that the instructions from the market were to move right along and not dawdle with the usual small-talk, something he described succinctly in an after-action blog post.

While the effect was rather more pleasant than emerging from a bunker into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, it did have the effect, more than anything else I’ve encountered in the months since March 7, of reinforcing that everything is different now.

We walked the out-of-order loop, making the best of the topsy-turviness, buying Peach My Cheeks iced tea from Willow, spinach and bok choy from Paul and Jen Offer, chocolates from Katlin, romaine lettuce from Sam, and perogies from Lori. We’ll be eating salads every meal this week, I think.

We did manage to fit in a tiny bit of kibitzing, not nearly enough for Oliver’s tastes, and not enough, thankfully, to exact penalties from the COVID-enforcement monitors.

The end effect was something equal parts pleasantly familiar and eerily different.

Who knew that 1971’s The Andromeda Strain was the film I should have been paying attention to when looking for the apocalypse in my future.

(Still from The Andromeda Strain, 1971)

Allan Rankin writes about Lowell Croken in the Eastern Graphic:

From the outset there was strong resistance to this new Waste Watch program.

Enter Lowell Croken, a junior level public servant at the time working as a mapping technician. His unique communication skills and proactive approach, and qualities of reasonableness and charm, made him the ideal person to assist the implementation of Waste Watch.

Not that Lowell accomplished this all by himself of course, but change often requires a special agent, and when it came to convincing a reluctant general public that separating garbage was important, he was the right person for the job.

Lowell Croken went on to serve as Prince Edward Island’s Chief Electoral Officer from 2005 to 2013. Now retired, he can look back on an outstanding career as a public servant, having served Islanders with honour and integrity.

There are other Lowell Crokens within government ranks, employees who make a big difference in positive and constructive ways, and I believe we should celebrate their often-unheralded contributions.

Lowell would be the last person on Earth to seek singling out for special mention like this, which is all the more reason that he deserves it: I worked with Lowell at Elections PEI for 17 years, and everything that Allan writes is true.

I’m proud to call both Lowell and Allan friends, and, truth be told, much of what Allan writes about Lowell could equally be said of Allan.

My PiSound arrived today in the post from Lithuania: it’s a sound card for a Raspberry Pi, and will be the heart of my plot to create a box to stream the sounds of Prince Edward Island to the world 24/7.

The PiSound itself, and its accompanying snap-together case, as well as the website that describes, sells and documents them, are all things of beauty.

Clint Eastwood talks to Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show about how he was pegged to fill in for the absent Charlton Heston at the 1973 Academy Awards.

Here’s the broadcast itself, with Eastwood appearing at 11:25.

According to the Academy, “Charlton Heston got a flat tire on the way to the ceremony and arrived late.”

Oliver was distressed this morning that almost all of the usual Canada Day routines had been erased from the schedule, either due Catherine’s death or COVID-19. So there was to be no music in Victoria Park, no Goat Parade in Rustico, no seafood at the Blue Mussel Café, no fireworks. While I might have preferred that his distress had been expressed with less ferocity, I had sympathy for its roots, and resolved that we should carve some new July 1 traditions out of the darkness.

So here’s what we did:

1. Drove to Souris. It was a beautiful day: sunny with a touch of mist, not too cold, not too hot.
2. Had lunch at The Poké Shack on the beach. Excellent.
3. Charged our Kia Soul EV at the new fast charger Irving on Main Street.
4. Takeout cold brew coffee and a smoothie at Evergreen Café. Excellent.
5. A walk on Sally’s Beach on Spry Point.
6. Hot fudge sundaes at Gillis’ Drive-in in Montague.
7. A visit with our old friends Wennie and Kenny in downtown Montague.
8. Takeout fish & chips from Water-Prince Corner Shop.

We will finish up in a few minutes with something called “virtual fireworks” on the CBC, the nature of which I have no idea.

We missed Catherine–we talked about her many times over the day–and Rustico and the goats and the rest. But we managed to enjoy the day as best we could, and, at the very least, ended on a higher note than we started.

Packed into this sign, posted at the head of a trail at Sally’s Beach in eastern PEI, is a potent set of only-in-Canada assumptions: that anyone will read such a wordy sign, that anyone has the vaguest notion of what 1.83 meters apart represents, that we require the paternalistic advice of the state to guide what are ultimately common sense decisions. 

Gianfranco Chicco, editor of The Craftsman, speaks with Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino about ”craftsmanship, repairability and design for longevity” on the Catastrophic Candour video series (via Peter Bihr).

The restaurant in Thunder Bay where my grandparents met in the 1930s has declared bankruptcy and may (re)reorganize as a cooperative.

Next week the “Atlantic Bubble” will allow the influx of hordes from away, with their COVID-19 and their strange modern ideas; as such, this was the weekend for Islanders to get out and take one last breath of COVID-free summer air before locking ourselves back inside our houses until the snow flies.

For Oliver and I this meant our usual start-of-season trip west. We started with Factory Coffee and hot chocolate at Island Chocolates:

With the late great Landmark Café no longer with us, we went to the brand new Casa Mia By the Sea at the end of the wharf for bao buns, enjoyed under the shade of a tree in front of Englewood School. 

From Victoria we drove north to New Glasgow for the usual second stop on the loop, an iced tea at the PEI Preserve Company and a walk in the Gardens of Hope, with the added bonus this year of a top-up of the charge to our Kia Soul using the EV charger hosted there. 

In the Gardens of Hope we found a bench in a shady grove we hadn’t seen before, and enjoyed some time out of the sun, looking out over the lily pond and the ponies beyond:

Our souls fed and our EV charged, we headed back to town for some late-Sunday shopping for socks, shirts and pyjamas, Oliver’s haberdashery-replenishment now falling under my watch and left fallow too long.

As we drove in on Route 2 there was a sprinkle of rain, just enough to take the edge off the heat.

We’ll see you at Thanksgiving.