Charlottetown : Features
Anne-iversary
By Randall Shirley
Jun 1, 2008

I meet my cousin Anne Shirley, of Green Gables, shortly after a three-legged race on the tree-fringed meadow of a country fair. Her red braids nearly stand on end with excitement and disbelief. She exclaims, “A cousin! And me an orphan all these years! Where have you been? Look, Diana, I have a cousin!”

Anne’s best friend, Diana Barry—of the Avonlea Barrys—seems a bit surprised by the impromptu family reunion. I hand her my camera for a quick photo with Anne before the girls dash off to participate in a village music concert. Inside the nearby white clapboard church—most likely Presbyterian, now a music hall—Anne and her Avonlea friends crank up the fiddles, guitar and accordion and darn near rattle the rafters.

During a five-day summer visit to Prince Edward Island, I encounter Anne seven different times, including this Anne at the Avonlea Village theme park.

Despite the fact that she’s technically 111 years old, Anne hasn’t aged a bit. Luckily for P.E.I.’s tourism industry, neither has the red-soiled island she calls home. After 100 years, much of the Island still feels like she belongs.

Anne Shirley, of course, never existed: she’s pure fiction—the brainchild of author L.M. Montgomery. This year marks the 100^th anniversary of Anne’s first appearance in print: the publication of Anne of Green Gables, which made Montgomery famous and gave P.E.I. an icon that’s much more interesting than ocean breezes, modern golf courses and ubiquitous spuds.

Meeting Anne falls between fact and fiction. Each Anne I encounter has a slightly different take on the character: a special shade of orange in her wig, a unique gingham to her dress and a different ability to respond to a traveller who shares her character’s uncommon surname, Shirley. Other than Anne at Avonlea Village, the responses are more, “Oh… are you enjoying P.E.I.?,” the same as they say to visitors surnamed Jones or Takagi.

I encounter the strolling actresses in the “Haunted Woods” at Green Gables Heritage Site, in the theatre foyer at Anne of Green Gables: The Musical, greeting tourists on the streets of Charlottetown and at Avonlea Village.

Like Anne, Avonlea never existed, although Montgomery was inspired by the real-life villages of P.E.I. Today’s Avonlea is very real, as a theme park. Unfortunately, it shares Cavendish Road with blissfully unrelated attractions like wax museums, water parks and museums of the strange.

Developed in 1999, Avonlea Village is a collection of both new and beautifully restored historic P.E.I. buildings that replicate Anne’s fictional town with homes, a barn, a general store and the church. Each year, about 40,000 visitors pass through the gates of this privately owned, perfectly manicured attraction.

If your kids are hooked on Anne, Avonlea Village can be the pièce de resistance during a P.E.I. visit. Despite an entrance fee of about $64 for a family, moms and dads seem genuinely relieved as their kids race off to play with Anne & Co.

And I mean play. An afternoon at Avonlea basically replicates an impossibly idyllic day in 1908—complete with the country fair, three-legged races, square dances (with adults dragged in), singalongs and re-enactments of scenes from the books. Kids get wiped-out tired, parents relax on the sidelines, and suddenly $64 seems like a babysitting bargain… even if you get sucked into the gift shop for everything Anne—dolls, T-shirts, and Anne-brand raspberry soda, replicating “raspberry cordial,” the beverage behind one of the book’s most hilarious passages.

Wisely, the theme park’s owners haven’t built a version of Green Gables, since the real thing is just over the hill at Parks Canada’s Green Gables Heritage Site.

Green Gables is postcard perfect. The house—painted exactly the way I imagine it with white cedar shingles, green shutters and green gables—was owned by one of author Montgomery’s grandfather’s cousins. I tromp through it on a self-guided tour, examining rooms furnished in early-1900s styles common to the region.

I never thought of Parks Canada as creative fiction types, yet inside Green Gables, rooms are not named for the people who actually lived there, but for characters that never actually lived.

I’m slightly shocked as I pause in the upstairs hallway, listening to a guide explain the house’s layout as it appeared in print. Other information at the site clearly explains the historic facts, but it’s all so surreal that I almost start to believe Anne lived… there.

In Lover’s Lane, I don’t meet Anne. Instead, I share the trail with a busload of Asian tourists, and I’m reminded that Anne has a massive following in Japan. Canadian author Margaret Atwood, in an article that ran in The Guardian in March, suggests several possibilities for the obsession. Among them: The book was first translated by a popular Japanese author; there were a lot of orphans in Japan after Word War II; Anne’s temper offers a vicarious release to Japanese youth forbidden to lash out.

Leaving the town of Cavendish, with its Anne Shirley Motel & Cottages (no discount for people named Shirley, unfortunately), isn’t the last I see of Anne. And it’s not the last I’ll likely spend on her this trip.

It’s $50 (and up) for an adult evening ticket to see Anne of Green Gables: The Musical, written by Don Harron (of Charlie Farquharson fame) and Norman Campbell. While waiting for the curtain to go up on the 44^th annual production at Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre theatre, I strike up a conversation with a young dad sitting next to me. He’s a professional guy from the New York area, with his wife and two kids in tow.

 “You’ve got a lot of vacation options; what led you to P.E.I.?” I ask.

“My daughter loves Anne,” he shrugs.

 

Frankly, I think Dad will be asleep by the time the first show tune rolls around. Au contraire, he is wide awake, tapping his toes, and by intermission he’s raving about the production, saying it’s the best thing he’s seen since Cats on Broadway.On stage, Anne sings about ice cream. She dances with spoons and eggs. Amazingly, it was no less than Queen Elizabeth II who got Anne on this stage in the first place. The story is that in 1964, the Queen came to open the Confederation Centre, was entertained by a song about Anne, and wondered where the rest of the story was. The next year, a full-scale production opened, and over the years more than 2 million people have seen the show. Even with the same surname, I’m feeling a bit Anned-out, but friends recommend I take in a second, newer musical. Called Anne & Gilbert, this one plays in Summerside, P.E.I.’s second-largest city. While Charlottetown’s show is filled with traditional show tunes evoking Rodgers & Hammerstein, Anne & Gilbert is proof that P.E.I. can re-imagine their most marketable brand. It’s loaded with music that reflects the Island’s maritime rhythms—the kind of tunes you might hear in a modern céilidh or a P.E.I. pub.

And a pub’s exactly what I need to temper Anne-mania. Thank God for a sampler tray of local brews at The Gahan House in Charlottetown’s laid-back downtown. Despite being around the corner from the Anne of Green Gables Chocolate Shop, Gahan’s is exactly what a pub should be: dark, mysterious and hopping with friendly locals. Over a pint of Sir John A’s Honeywheat Ale, I realize that if you don’t have kids, P.E.I. works on a different level. A tour of Green Gables is still required, but Avonlea Village is not. Much of Charlottetown itself evokes the Anne aesthetic, with restored, Victorian-era architecture you can shop, sleep and eat in.

In the centre of it all is The Great George, a collection of 15 historic buildings (one sells corsets; one is an oyster restaurant) that have been transformed into a luxurious spot too rich for Anne’s blood. Each time I enter the lobby, I feel transported into a slice of the past. It doesn’t hurt that the inn’s night clerk sells me a glass of red wine and proves Islander hospitality by chatting into the wee hours before sending me off to my comfy room.

With Anne still not entirely exorcised out of my system, I head to The Dunes Studio Gallery & Café. I catch artist/owner Peter Jansons at a lucky moment: he’s ready for a break from his pottery wheel and happy to show me his art and his latest furniture designs, inspired by and manufactured in his partner’s homeland of Indonesia.

But it’s The Dunes’ kitchen and dining deck that keep visitor interest. Chomping on a P.E.I. lobster sandwich while gazing across unspoiled, seaside pasture is an easy way to lose track of time, a reminder that before Anne and tourism, agriculture and aquaculture drove the Island’s economy.

Both continue to play crucial roles. From the sea, mussels are a modern cash crop. In the 1970s, growers began culturing blue mussels in mesh sleeves in the Island’s nutrient-rich bays.

During five days here, I order mussels six times. A summer breeze on the deck at Flex Mussels near Charlottetown Harbour accompanies delicious, imaginative food. Flex’s menu lets me order mussels with almost any kind of sauce, from Bombay to Peking to traditional celery broth. But P.E.I.’s mussels are so fresh and plump they need little help. And one piece of advice: if you’re new to mussels, never try to cut one in half. They’re delicious, not pretty.

P.E.I.’s other cash crop is equally unsightly. The humble spud has been grown in the Island’s red soil since 1790. I’ve heard that a local farmer, Raymond Loo, is using some creative growing to take spuds back to basics with organic farming. I drive to his Springwillow Farms, almost at the geographic centre of the Island, passing free-wandering geese, turkeys and ducks on my way up his drive.

Raymond shows visitors around with gusto, including the rows of potatoes behind the house his family shares with an ever-changing cast of organic-farm volunteers, some of whom come from Japan for the opportunity to learn his innovative techniques.

Raymond tells me his organic produce is an export success story, with increasing demand in Japan, a market he personally explored, capitalizing on the Japanese interest in organic produce. Currently the market is in jams and preserves, with spuds just around the corner.

But he’s riding something uniquely P.E.I., too. Raymond sells produce under the brand Anne’s P.E.I. Farm, and it appears the Japanese are eager to devour Anne any way they can. Munching on food from the same soil that’s inspired her legend is as close as most can come, save for approaching a local look-alike in summer’s tourist season, claiming a familial relation and bagging a photo to remember it by.

For more information, visit anne2008.com.