West Point Tidewash

Prince Edward Island is called, among other things, “The Cradle of Confederation”.  In 1864, representatives from the British colonies of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and the Province of Canada, comprised of Ontario and Quebec, met to discuss Confederation.  This meeting, the Charlottetown Conference, eventually led to the creation of the country of Canada in 1867.  And although Prince Edward Island did not join Confederation until 1873, the province is proud of its contribution to the building of the nation.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, copyright expired.

2014 marks the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference.  All over P.E.I. there will be festivals and events, especially in the Charlottetown area, celebrating this historic event.  Sitting in my new home in Ontario, I know that P.E.I. will go all out to mark the occasion.  It got me to thinking about celebrations of Canada in which I have taken part, growing up and living in P.E.I.  One of the big celebrations was always Canada Day.

When I was young, West Point was not as developed as it is now (Those of you from away would probably not consider it developed now, but those who live there, I think you know what I mean).  The big deal for me at the end of June was that we were getting out of school and hoping we could go to the beach.  Also, my birthday falls around that time, so I wasn’t really thinking about much else other than my birthday party.

But with the creation of the West Point Development Corporation, mentioned previously, community events became more common.  And I guess, I probably just became more aware of things.  Canada Day celebrations became a regular event.  I have scoured through my pictures, both hard-copy and digital, looking for pictures of my kids in a wagon covered in red-and-white flags in our community parade/walk from the lighthouse to the Harbourside Centre, but for the life of me, I cannot find them.  If anyone has any images of Canada Day in West Point they want to share, let me know and I’ll add them to a gallery.  Trust me, people there are proud of our Country of Canada.

All the talk of Confederation has led me think of a very special Canadian.  My grandfather, Ernest MacDonald, was a very important person in my life.  I think anyone who knew him would confirm that he was a special man.  I say special and not great, as Granddad was not grandiose.  He was a wise man with a quiet manner.  He was giving, gentle, and had a sense of humour which would sometimes take you by surprize.  But he was great in that he was an example of how a peaceful person can exude strength in being calm.  Granddad lived to be 103 years old; his funeral was full of people mourning the loss.  But I feel he probably would have been overwhelmed with all the fuss.

West Point Class Picture 1912 – Granddad is under the teacher’s arm in the back left.

Granddad was born in 1903.  Think about it: PEI only joined Canada 30 years before he was born.  (Ok, if you live in Newfoundland, there are still people alive when your province joined Confederation in 1949, but give me this.)  His grandfather, William MacDonald, was the original lighthouse keeper in West Point.  Granddad himself was a fisherman and a cook on a schooner.  I remember when I was a kid going to Nana and Granddad’s house and he would give us paper on which to draw that had printing on one side only.  Nana would make us draw a pig and then close our eyes to attempt to put the eye and the tail on.  We thought it was great.  I still try it on occasion.  Turns out those books of paper were reports from the Coast Guard.  Granddad was also the fog-horn keeper at the Point and as a result used to get reports from them on a regular basis.  He hated to see good paper go to waste, so he made sure we put it to use before he disposed of it. He took care of the fog-horn in West Point until it was removed, the exact date I do not remember.

My paternal grandparents, Ernest and Beatrice MacDonald.

Granddad never got his license.  He walked everywhere.  As a kid, I didn’t think much about it; but, as an adult, I cannot imagine living in West Point without having a vehicle.  He told us stories of walking home from Summerside in a snowstorm and about how a horse put its head through the back window of someone’s car.  He walked a great deal through the woods behind his house, wearing down paths that we kids would use to walk between Nana and Granddad’s house and Aunt Phosie’s cottage.  (One of my vivid memories is going  through that woods on the back of a banana-bike with my cousin Glen furiously pedaling.  Considering the dips and tree roots, I don’t know how we did not break our necks.)  But I think a major contributor of Granddad’s longevity was his physical activity in the form of walking.  And good genes, of course.

Although he lived at home until a surprizing age, making homemade banana bread and brown-sugar fudge with peanuts, by the time he was 99, Granddad was living in O’Leary at the Lady Slipper Villa.  That year, his son Gordon decided that he would help Granddad walk back to West Point.  As described by my cousin Wayne in this commentary on centenarians and by Eva Rodgerson in the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, the men broke the 18-km journey into 19 treks.  Gordon would take him back to where they had left off during the previous walk the next time they went out.  If my calculations are correct, at the time, Gordon was 76 years old himself.

To me, while the walk speaks to Granddad’s exceptionally good health at an advanced age, he was so much more than that.  He was a gentleman in every sense of the word.  He told the best stories, and just when he had you captivated he would throw in some twist and you would realize that he was telling you a tall tale.  He saw the advancement of P.E.I. from when there were no cars and no electricity, through to when the internet was starting to invade our spaces.  The changes in our small community, let alone the world, over his lifetime would have been immense.  He took it all in stride, no pun intended.

My grandfather, Ernest MacDonald is on the left and Harry Stewart is on the right. Harry used to own the property on which the cottage now stands, but basically gave it to my mother to create the bed and breakfast in order to remember the Stewart’s in West Point.

In 2003, Granddad was interviewed by Reg Thompson for the IslandVoices Project.  If you would like to listen, it can be found at on the U.P.E.I. Robertson Library website.  (It is a very emotional thing to hear the voice of a loved one who has passed.)  As we all celebrate the 150th anniversary of the discussions which started our country, we should take the time to talk to our seniors so that we remain connected to them and their stories which helped define our families, our communities, and our nation.  We spend a lot of time taking selfies and documenting every minute of our lives, fearful that who we are will be forgotten.  Don’t forget to take the time to listen to the story of someone from an older generation and help keep those memories alive.  You might learn something about yourself in the process and those who come along later will thank you.

Today on FaceBook, I came across Welcome P.E.I.‘s list of the “top 5 “must-see” PEI beaches”.  The beach at Cedar Dunes Provincial Park is on the list.  So I thought I might muse about the beach and the park for a bit.  This is not a historically-sound post, just my personal memories and thoughts.

Westpointharmony.ca has nice map of West Point, except they show the Harbourside Centre as being the fishermen’s baithouses.  Those would not be the nicest place for a wedding reception.  I, on the other hand, have a drawing I created in GIMP.  I hope you like it.

Growing up about a mile from the harbour, we spent a great deal of time on the beach, in the water, or on a boat.  When I was younger, the lighthouse and park were in disrepair.  That changed when a group of local people formed the West Point Development Corporation.  They worked hard to bring about improvements to the park and turn the Lighthouse into an Inn and Museum. (The members have changed with time, but their mandate of improving the community has not.)  But as a local kid, we didn’t go to the park beach.  We went where the locals go: to the beach by the wharf.

We took swimming lessons there, built sand sculptures, spent hours in the water, dug for bar clams, looked for sea glass, and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  We went to the wharf and to Freddie’s, the local store at the time.  Family would “come home” and we would spend time with cousins who lived the rest of the year somewhere else.  You cannot beat summers in West Point.

When I got older, I became the naturalist at Cedar Dunes Provincial Park.  I ran the interpretive programs there for two summers.  I had beachwalks and walks through the woods.  I spent time with children staying in the park and from the local area painting pictures, painting seashells, painting faces.  My skills at making sand sculptures came in handy.  And we had bonfires twice a week where I would take my guitar to the beach and we’d sing for hours.  It was a great job for a university student, except for the fact that I couldn’t go in the water.  I was jealous of the lifeguards on hot days, although they got pretty baked sitting up on the big chair.

I also did tours of the lighthouse.  I climbed up and down those stairs many times and met a lot of great people.  I still remember a couple from Texas wondering what was in the barrels that people kept beside their homes.  I explained that it was furnace oil for heating our homes.  Another thing that sticks in my mind is that people would say that our houses were colourful.  Now that I live where all the homes are brick, I understand why they would say that.  At the time the furthest I had travelled was to Ottawa, Ontario, but the world came to me through working at the park.

So, back to the beaches.  I already talked about the beach north of the lighthouse, which is a beautiful and quite untouched most of the time.  The beach at the lighthouse, on the other hand, gets very busy in the summer, for this end of the Island.  (But not as busy as the beaches I have encountered here in Ontario like Wasaga or the beaches along the lakeshore in Toronto.  Or for that matter, it is not as busy as Parlee Beach in Shediac.)  If you take your car from the cottage, it is less than a two-minute drive to where you can park your car and go to that area.  It is a very short bike ride or a reasonable walk along the road.  Or you can walk down to the unsupervised beach, to make your way along the tidewash around the point and get there with sand between your toes.

If you do not feel the need to have a life guard, then just walk from the cottage down to where I have marked “great unsupervised beach”.  Put down your towel and enjoy the sun, the sound of the waves, and the warm water.  And feel like it is to be home.