The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I wonder what Steinbeck would think…’
America’s great chronicler described the Fall foliage in Maine, but across the border in New Brunswick Chris Leadbeater relishes Canada’s quieter version
Little Louis’ does not look like a restaurant that is about to seduce my taste buds. Set into a cluster of retail units on the west side of the small New Brunswick city of Moncton, it resembles, at first glance, more a place where I might take my dry cleaning than eat well.
But I have been advised to try it – and the suggestion proves well founded. The blue pearl oysters are local heroes newly plucked from the ocean; the scallops in green curry are just as fresh. Both are recommended by a waitress whose accent flits between Anglo-Saxon and Gallic; the Canadian compromise. When I set down my dessert spoon, I am happy and full. And I wonder, not for the last time, what John Steinbeck would have made of it.
It is not as odd a thought as it sounds. In the autumn of 1960, America’s great chronicler of the Depression era embarked on a meandering road trip around his own country. The resultant book, Travels With Charley (Charley being his poodle), found him relishing (for the most part) an odyssey of back-roads, unheralded towns, little eateries and random conversational encounters. And it still felt gloriously alive on the page back in 2010, when I tracked the route of its early chapters along the shore of New England.
It was not difficult to pick up the trail. Steinbeck documented his movements diligently – through
Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire; then, with growing affection for his subject, along the rocky flank of the region’s biggest state. “I moved up the coast of Maine,” he remembered, “through Millbridge and Addison and Machias and Perry and South Robbinston, until there was no more coast. I never knew or had forgotten how much of Maine sticks like a thumb into Canada – with New Brunswick on the east.”
Of course, his talk of “no more coast” referred only to the USA. Committed as I was to roll in his tyre prints, I felt a tinge of regret as I turned left for the upper reaches of Maine – rather than right across the border. The latter would not only have let me visit New Brunswick – one of the four provinces which make up Canada’s Atlantic shoulder – but continue my tracing of the continent’s jagged edge along the Bay of Fundy, the corridor of famously epic tides and climactic mood swings, which separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia.
So Moncton, on a September morning eight years later, feels like unfinished business. Not least because it is a logical start-point for a journey in search of the bay – a functional red-brick hub short on flourishes but poised on the Petitcodiac river where it flows south to the sea. I follow it, drifting out of the city and into the sort of small-town realm that Steinbeck eulogised in Travels With Charley – Stoney Creek, and its white clapboard churches; Hillsborough, where the ghosts of the branch line which once connected it to the wider world rust in retirement at the New Brunswick Railway Museum – dead rails superseded by Route 114.
I am also seeking a vision that is scarcely a secret, yet is also “hidden”. The New England “Fall” is America’s great seasonal showpiece; a rustic rainbow which caught Steinbeck’s eye in 1960. “The trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe,” he mused. “It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though
Follow in the footsteps of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States
The tight entwinement of the American and
Canadian coastlines, where the Bay of Fundy meets the Gulf of Maine, is exemplified by Campobello Island – an outcrop where the Maple Leaf flies but the Stars and Stripes might as easily have fluttered. It was squabbled over by the British and the fledgling US in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and even now is far closer to its neighbour than to the New Brunswick mainland. The only way to reach it by road is through Maine, driving over the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge, which spans the tiny channel that separates the island from the American town of Lubec. If you want to visit it from Canada, you have to catch a boat from St Andrews or
Deer Island. Roosevelt’s name rings across Campobello. The 32nd US president (seated, left of picture) spent many summers on the island, initially as a child in the
1880s – when it was a holiday hotspot with hotels for well-to-do tourists. His parents bought land – an investment that eventually led to the construction of a large family home. Visitors
can tour this politely furnished property – now part of Roosevelt Campobello International Park (fdr.net; free) – which hosted the young politician’s getaways with his wife, Eleanor, and their six children in the 1900s and 1910s, and framed three breaks once he was in the White House (1933, 1936, 1939). It was also here – in August 1921 – that he felt the first effects of polio.
Jolly Breeze runs Campobello day tours from Saint Andrews ( jollybreeze.com; C$130/£76).