Canada’s only officially bilingual province? Not Quebec, but New Brunswick, bien sûr. The English/French split is around 50/50. But New Brunswick French, you can’t help notice, sounds different. Like you’ve just dropped into Lafayette, Louisiana and ordered the catfish. That’s Acadian (“Cajun” as they say down south). The settlers of New France were purged by the British in the mid-18th century (the local Mi’kmaq Aboriginals fared even worse), and the places on New Brunswick’s north coast they were pushed to—or found their way back to—are now some of the prettiest and most interesting villages in Atlantic Canada.
Call it the watermark province: rivers and ocean have imprinted New Brunswick. Defined it. Look around and see. The famed “flowerpots” in Hopewell Rocks near Moncton: squat little islands that, when the water recedes, become towering sandstone columns sculpted by those world-beating Bay of Fundy tides. (Those same tides create strange natural phenomena like the “reversing falls” near Saint John. The full-flood tide trumps the river and pushes it backward.) Or, again, the rugged shore of Grand Manan Island. For literally hundreds of species of migratory birds it’s a touchdown point, a chair in a dance marathon.
In some places, New Brunswickers have picked up the finishing brush themselves. Madison County, for example, has nothing on Carleton County, NB, home to the world’s longest covered bridge. The province has 62 covered bridges, most dating from the early 1900s, and you can put together a nifty drive-and-shoot tour from the good maps available.
For sure, New Brunswick’s famed Restigouche and Miramichi Rivers shaped not just the banks they cut, but the settlers and traders they carried and fed. More recently, they’ve fed less hardscrabble types like Tom Cruise and Jack Nicklaus, who’ve joined the pilgrimage to these world-famous salmon rivers. David Adams Richards once explained why he sets so much of his fiction in the Miramichi Valley. Rugged yet poetic, it says all he wants to say about what it means to be human.
New Brunswick in a nutshell:
Official slogan: “Maritime Magnifique!”
Nickname: “The Loyalist Province” (after the American settlers that founded St. John)
Written in stone by: David Adams Richards, Antonine Maillet, Bliss Carmen
Other native sons and daughters: former Governor General Roméo Leblanc, former teen idol Roch Voisine, former body snatcherDonald Sutherland.
Lyrics by: Stompin’ Tom Connors, Julie Doiron
Local fare: a kind of cinnamon roll called pets de soeurs (you look it up), Atlantic salmon, meat pie, fiddlehead omelette
Local tipple: Alpine lager (by Moosehead)
French immersion: the historic Acadian town of Caraquet (time your visit for the Le Festival acadien de Caraquet (Acadian Festival) in August)
Contemplative space: the beach on historic Miscou Island
Physics-defying curiosity: Magnetic Hill
Reading list: Lines in the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Mirimachi (Richards), La Sagouine (Maillet)
Festivals: Summer: Fiddles on the Tobique festival
Winter: World Pond Hockey Championships, in Plaster Rock (February)
***Learn more about New Brunswick at Atlantic Canada House night at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Feb. 23.
www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca
video:
Acadian Festival in Caraquet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SoueOQfdmk
Festival Acadien
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cw-kxuzX38&feature=youtube_gdata
Le Pays De La Sagouine (English)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yfqAJ6PJz8
Le Pays De La Sagouine (French)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQUJRoVKajs
Hopewell Rocks and the Bay of Fundy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoRwlncuyxk
Urban Moncton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiE5_OdbzFM
Les atouts de la ville de Moncton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwKokuMdtNo
Read about Canada’s 13 provinces and territories
