Facebook reminded me this morning of Prince Edward Island, the island of my dreams: Thirteen years ago today, according to the Facebook photo-memory that popped up in my feed (I hate that term, “feed”), we took a horse-and-surrey ride from the ancestral home of Lucy Maud Montgomery over the waving fields of wheat and barley toward the red cliffs above the ocean at New London, P.E.I., and I snapped a picture of my son, Teddy, laughing as he bounced in the back on the hard wooden seat. He was wearing navy-blue shorts, white socks decorated with the image of Lightning McQueen from “Cars,” and a fox-fur stole borrowed from a trunkful of vintage-clothing costumes and props provided by the tour operator.
I was laughing, too, that day. Rural P.E.I. is the most congenial place I ever visited and the surrey ride the best ultra-touristic experience I ever had in my life. There was no one around. It was just blue high-July sky, a vast and empty red-sand beach, and, behind us, the farmhouse with white shingles and green trim where the author of “Anne of Green Gables” was born in 1874, still decorated with white-painted bedsteads, hooked rugs covered in pink-red roses, and pink-red roses on the picket fence outside the window, around which the white Scottish-lace curtains moved softly on a light summer breeze.
I’m not sure how I knew, when I was 12 and actually (not figuratively, but actually, to a degree that would probably have been medicalized and treated as a psychological issue if this had happened now, rather than circa 1980) obsessed with the “Anne of Green Gables” books that P.E.I. was the perfect place for me, but somehow I did know. When I finally got to visit the place, so many decades later and as the parent of a 6 and a 3-year-old, it was better than I’d even imagined.
P.E.I. was un-ruined. There were no driveway gates, no massed arborvitae hedges, and you could see all the way from the top of a rolling hill planted with the low green of a potato crop to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where the water temperature in midsummer was 70, as warm as the ocean back home at Main Beach in East Hampton, but far warmer than the ice water of Nova Scotia, where our family was living at the time. There was no one on the beach at New London but us. No one. My perfect day -- what I imagine heaven will be, when I get there and reunite with my lost friends -- involves a salty ocean swim and an afternoon tea with home-made preserves and home-baked cakes (orange chiffon, lemony madeleines). P.E.I. may be uncrowded -- by our Hamptons standards, although probably not by the standards of its natives -- but it is the global leader in teas and private saltwater swims. I’ve got a lot of patience for a doily (as long as it’s the auntie-made kind rather than the sweatshop-in-China polyester sort).
Making the rural corners of P.E.I. even more enchanting is the fact that you are never more than an hour of pleasant driving down unbusy roads from the capital city of Charlottetown. It’s not actually a city. It has only around 40,000 or 50,000 residents, according to Google, but it boasts a gargantuan farmers market with 60 vendors selling their sheep cheeses and raspberries and smoked fish, and many unpretentious restaurants where you can sit under an umbrella and eat P.E.I. mussels with lemon butter until your face is as blue as the mussel shells. In the quiet harbors by the quiet shore on a quiet evening, as the sun sets in burnt-orange, the fish boats bob at mooring.
Whenever things are looking grim, grim, grim down here -- the president swings his unpermitted wrecking ball at another historic landmark in yet another display of what the psychologists might call a “nihilistically destructive impulse”; another immigrant or citizen is killed by ICE; and I can’t figure out how to stop the wily and sinister A.I. that’s sprung up, unbidden, in my email from composing messages in my name -- my thoughts wander to the best island of them all, Prince Edward Island, where, at least as of 2013, the “mobs of tourists” numbered around 400, tops, and the lobster suppers cost only $20. It’s my Xanadu, my Manderley. Someday, children, we will go back to Park Corner again. We will walk the endless, empty wood boardwalk over the white, rolling parabolic dunes of Greenwich National Park, stopping to push our faces into the wild roses.
I haven’t been to P.E.I. since 2015, when we spent five nights in the cottage colony at Shaw’s, the oldest family operated hotel in Canada (circa 1860). That’s a long time ago in gentrification and resort-ruination years. I never saw an influencer on P.E.I. back then, but this was before influencers became a menace to society. I do want to go back to my island, but I’m also a little afraid to look.