This chapter is an excerpt from Karen Babine’s memoir, The Allure of Elsewhere, out May 20, 2025 with Milkweed Editions.
I leave Fundy National Park and its unreasonable infestation of black flies under clear skies and brave the grade down to Alma, where the tide was out. I didn’t get lost on my way to Moncton, which was unexpected, but when I got there, the mood inside the Atlantic Superstore where I stop to buy more silverware is quiet in a way I don’t understand. I go looking for tortillas, which cannot be had for love or money, and I pick up canned goods that will keep me through my three days on Prince Edward Island, because they’ll be easier to keep than frozen vegetables. I grab some jarred curry sauce, make sure it’s vegetarian because it’s often not, and flash back to the Hamburger Helper of my childhood camping. Mostly the food I’d had in the camper up to this point has been cooked over the campfire, but the weather forecast on PEI is going to be too stormy for fires, so I need to reconsider Scamp Food, and I will actually start cooking. It won’t be anything fancy, but the first step is using my little crock pot. It would be several more years before I add a thrifted rice cooker to my Scamping appliances, so I won’t have to rely on packaged instant rice.
When I get to the checkout with my cart, the look on the cashier’s face is the mask of someone holding it together so tightly that when release comes, it will shatter something inside of her.
It was his brother who was shot, she tells me, nodding to the tall man who had just exited the lane.
That’s awful, I say. I don’t need to know what she’s talking about to find the situation terrible.
I walk back across the parking lot to where I’d parked the Jeep and the Scamp, stow the food in the camper, and pull back onto the road, not sure what I just walked through, and as I’m attempting to get onto Hwy 15 to Hwy 2, the roads are nearly empty in the direction I’m going and nobody in the oncoming lanes. It’s incredibly eerie, but I have no frame of reference. In hindsight, it was wrong enough that I should have turned on the radio, but that didn’t occur to me at the time. Maybe I just wondered if it was another sinkhole, another detour, like that day in Ontario. It felt different, though, and in hindsight I wonder why I didn’t listen to my gut.
Police cruisers with flashing lights block the road in front of me, so I say a prayer of gratitude for the Jeep and Scamp’s turning radius, turn around, and head back towards Moncton. This is the easiest and fastest way to get to Prince Edward Island, so I’ll need to find an alternate path. Without conscious thought, what I’m doing is ignoring that history is literally happening right in front of me, intersecting with the road I’m on.
The gas station is empty when I pull in.
You look lost, says the attendant.
Not yet, I say, but I’m getting there. I say that they’ve shut down the road and I need another way to get to PEI. Later, I would think about how my risk management and rigid mapping that kept me sane as I started the trip has loosened into something a little bit more freeform, something more comfortable with uncertainty and gaps in knowledge. I have to have faith that the road I need will be there and there will be a campsite when I arrive, because my form of faith simply takes it as a given that everything will work out all right.
Haven’t you heard? he says. Most of the city’s shut down.
Then he tells me about cops getting shot and I say I’m not from here. I didn’t know.
He asks where I come from, in the voice of someone who expects that I would have had to be on Mars not to know what’s going on. Later, I would imagine people camping on 9/11, coming back into a world that had changed utterly while they were unaware. I say I’ve been in Fundy National Park for the last couple of days and he nods, as if this is acceptable ignorance. He pulls a newspaper off a shelf and hands it to me.
What I would find out later is that a heavily armed 24 year old Justin Bourque would go on a shooting spree that left three Mounties dead and two injured. The city shut down transit, businesses and schools closed, and Moncton turned into a ghost town while they searched for him and it was this ghost town that I stumbled into on my way to somewhere else. Twenty eight hours of city-wide terror for Moncton, until Bourque gave himself up. But we don’t know that now. Right now, we’re fighting against fear.
The gas station attendant looks at me and says, My advice, get out of town. There’s no snark in his voice. He’s worried.
Trying, I say, more flippantly than I should have.
He gives me directions for an alternate route and I pull back on the road. The ease with which I leave Moncton and its terror behind unsettles me a little, because I do have the privilege to simply drive away.
A couple hours later, I underestimated the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island and it wasn’t nearly as exciting as I wanted it to be. Part of the problem with bridges of any magnitude is being a solo person driving and needing to pay attention to the road instead of looking at the scenery. Rain starts when I leave Moncton, but it’s cleared by the time I get to PEI and the clarity of sky and water around the Confederation Bridge is like driving into eternity. And it is not interesting.
I no sooner cross the bridge, noting how much it would cost me to leave the island—$45 + $7.50 per axle—than I am drowning in Anne of Green Gables kitsch and I stare at the bottles of raspberry cordial, torn between actually wanting to buy some and feeling faintly nauseated at the pandering. This is high quality pandering to the greatest of childhood nostalgia among us and I’m not mad about it. I grew up on the 1985 Anne of Green Gables, Megan Follows, Jonathan Crombie, and Colleen Dewhurst, puffed sleeves and the exasperation of twenty pounds of brown sugar. Gilbert Blythe ruined me for all other men, I swear.
Prince Edward Island is a different kind of allure of elsewhere and there’s always a moment where you’re standing in a place that you’ve only seen in movies or know from books, a world that is not real, and you think wow, it really does exist. I remember that reaction outside Radio City Music Hall, in front of the Declaration of Independence, the Golden Gate Bridge. Maybe that’s enough of a reason to be here, because I’m curious and the place is beautiful and wonderful and I want to be here.
Cabot Beach Provincial Park may be one of the few missteps in my nearly blind trust of Canadian provincial parks. It’s mostly open, without many trees, and everything is old and worn. It’s out of the way on the north side of the island, so I hope I haven’t made a giant mistake, given the impending storm.
When I pull up to the gatehouse to register, I tell the woman inside that I want three nights, water and electric.
She looks at me, dumbfounded. Have you seen the weather?
I have. Nothing to be done about it.
She tells me to pick whatever site I want.
I nod and pull through.
I choose Site 9 and start to set up: making sure that the Scamp is level, putting chocks around the tires to keep it in place, cranking up the jack to take the camper off the Jeep hitch, and then I discover, to my horror, that it’s on enough of an incline and the grass is wet and slippery enough that the Scamp, even with the chocks, slides gently down the incline and directly into the back of the Jeep.
I think I startle the local wildlife with my colorful language. Maeve gives me 8/10.
Thankfully, there’s no damage to either and once I recover from the horror of it, of trying to stop the slide of the Scamp with my own body, which, admittedly, is not my finest problem-solving hour, I’m also grateful that the campground is empty enough of people that my humiliation will go unnoticed. I manage to reset the chocks, move the Jeep forward, and watch it slide down a second time.
Maeve gives me a 9/10.
There will not be a third time, so I hook it back up and head for the flat sites I should have picked the first time around.
In the morning, the wind is in full force and I’m glad to be inside fiberglass, rather than the wet canvas of my childhood Starcraft pop-up. Even so, I hear my dad’s voice complaining about wet canvas as I do every time it rains while camping. The weather seems to be more wind than rain so far, and I don’t have any window leaks, which has happened many times before. If the weep holes in the windows are clogged, the windows will leak right onto my bed. This PEI weather is hardly a rain at all, so Irish in nature that I almost taste Assam in a dark pub. Many of my travel place-memories exist as literal flavors, so that weather patterns, or angles of light, or the movement of air taste of citrus, or umami, or spice. The rain here is more of a thick mist, tiny drops, with the force of wind turning it into something intense and sharp. The sky is one uniform shade of medium gray, so I can’t even tell which direction the rain is moving, if it’s moving, or if it’s just sitting on top of us.
Yogurt and fresh raspberries are my breakfast at the front dinette, along with my tea. Mornings while camping taste of Rice Chex, the single solitary cereal our family of five could agree on. Raisins on our cereal. Mornings taste like Tang in a Tupperware jug we pretended was orange juice and thrilled at the novelty of it. We never got Tang at home. We rarely ate inside the pop-up, even on the coldest mornings, the picnic table spread with the flowered plastic tablecloth my parents still carry, the plastic Tupperware bowls and hand-me-down silverware. One spoon had a rose on it and my sisters and I always fought over it. Whoever’s Day it was got to use it. A few years later, my parents swap out the silverware in their camper and I snagged the sentimental stuff and now it’s my Scamp silverware. Now I don’t have to fight anybody for the rose spoon.
Food in the Starcraft was about finding the balance between no refrigeration and frugality. We just had a red cooler that was always stored just inside the door of the camper when in transit and would refill with ice each day. We’d stop at rest stops for lunch, sandwiches and Pringles, which were another treat because we never got chips at home. Our lunch choices were either peanut butter and jelly or meat and cheese. Dad would cut the block of Colby on the top of the cooler with his Buck knife and inevitably make some sort of comment about not remembering if he’d cleaned it after gutting his last deer. Predictably, it grossed us out, as intended. After my sisters and I had run off some energy at the playground, we’d go back into the Blazer, or the Suburban that replaced the Blazer in later years, and settle in for another couple of hours towards our daily destination.
At some point, I realize that I’m not any less fussy in the camper—I just care about different things. Some people get precious about cooking on the stovetop—or the fire—when they camp, but I can’t live without my microwave. A potato, scrubbed up and tucked into a little cloth envelope, is easy in the microwave. I can make better pastina in the microwave than I can on the stovetop. It’s easier to make oatmeal and popcorn. I’d say I’m kind of lazy about food in the camper, but that’s not exactly true. In the days before I left for Nova Scotia, I pulled out the induction burner, set it on my parents’ counter and practiced all the meals I could make, so I knew if they worked or not. Maybe that takes away the anticipation, but I’d rather know I’m not going to go hungry.
As I leave the campground, I stop at the entrance gate:
Any news on the Moncton shooter?
Yes, he gave himself up, she says—and I did not see that coming, because I expected suicide by cop.
The woman nods. She hadn’t either.
The weather?
Yes, it’s supposed to clear by tomorrow.
Nearest post office where I can mail my postcards? She gives me directions.
I hadn’t expected to encounter anything Babine on PEI, particularly because none of my family records place us on PEI at any point, but I stopped at several churches to walk their churchyards in my polka dot rain boots, and it didn’t bother me that I couldn’t read any of the gravestones in French. These were not my people, but they still told the story of this place in a way that Anne of Green Gables didn’t. On the way back to the Scamp, it was the small cemetery in Malpeque that pulled the Jeep to the side of the road. The cemetery is very Scottish, I discovered, which contrasts with the French and Irish of the other island cemeteries.
I don’t romanticize cemeteries because they’re such an important part of how I’ve constructed the family archive, how cemeteries in Ireland are one of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon. Cemeteries are the data that tells me what the original language of the colonizing settlers was and just by watching the gravestones, I can see when that language shifted into English. I’ve walked the cemetery at Chisago Lake Lutheran Church in Center City, MN, the stronghold of my Swedish ancestors, where my three-greats grandparents, Lars and Ingre Thorsander are buried, sharing a stone with their son Peter, who dropped dead of a heart attack at his kitchen table at the age of 33. His wife remarried and is buried elsewhere. I’ve traced my fingers over the hvila i frid on the grave of my three-greats grandfather Oke Dahlberg, who died in 1926 at the age of 100, with his wife Bothilda, the parents of my great-great grandmother Carolina. I know that född i Sverige means born in Sweden, even though my own Swedish is rusty. Over the decades, the language evolves into English in ways I can also trace in my own family history. It’s not even that I hunt cemeteries for stories I know are there, or the stories untold, or how they record stories. The graves of my great-uncle Walt and great-grandmother Catherine say nothing how they came to be there and I remember the exchange between my father and grandfather at their funeral:
If I didn’t tell them I loved them in life, it makes no sense to do it now.
And yet, when Marion died, my grandfather visited her grave every week.
I very, very rarely feel anything in cemeteries, one notable exception being the mass grave of the Irish on Grosse Ile in Quebec. But here, at the small cemetery in Malpeque, the grief nearly choked me. I don’t usually have that kind of reaction, but it was deep and it was visceral and it was very real.
James Woodside, lost at sea, 1919.
John McKay, age 54, drowned, April 6, 1876.
Twin brothers Jacob and Thomas Clark, drowned, July 22, 1852.
Francis H. Shields, buried in France, April 20, 1918. His wife, Annie, died in 1981.
Buried elsewhere.
Lost at sea.
Flight Sergeant Gerald F. McNutt, missing in action, May 15, 1942.
A monument to the twelve unknown American seamen buried here.
Even as I’m standing there, a quote from my favorite Irish essayist, Tim Robinson, occurs to me: “I like fossicking and yoricking about in graveyards, scanning the headstones, stopping for a closer look at one or another, as one takes down a book from a bookshop shelf to see if its opening words live up to its title. One of my desiderata for a well-run world would be that every tombstone carry a brief biography (and, at the foot, ‘For notes and sources, see over.’” I consider fossicking and yoricking as I wander these stones in the mist, thinking about the waves of the land at the mass grave on Grosse Ile, about how the collective stories in these stones function differently than the individual.
Later, I drive Highway 2 towards Charlottetown to follow the top half of the Anne of Green Gables/Central Scenic Tour. I’m sure it’s lovely, but I can’t see the coast for the rain, and it feels a lot like my Alma wanderings: the experience feels like an object to be collected. I avoid the Anne of Green Gables tourist traps and instead I park across the street from the cemetery where L.M. Montgomery is buried, but I don’t go hunting for her grave immediately. I go wandering first. When I find it, it’s freshly planted with bright begonias but I never know what to do at the graves of historical figures. Am I paying respects? I don’t even know what that means. It mostly feels like a moment to check off an invisible checklist.
This cemetery has a much different feel than the others I visited—and here I saw too many children, too many women of obvious childbearing age. It’s easy to think of infant and maternal mortality as of a bygone era, when it’s currently on the rise after the fall of Roe. Women still face these dangers, and it’s much more dangerous for women of color, but it’s not as it was for our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, as it was for Mary2, Julienne3, Victoire4, Elisabeth5, Cécile6, Anne Marie7, Anne8, and Marie9 Babin. Most mothers would have lost at least one child—not even counting miscarriages, which are rarely recorded in the data. I see it every time I spend time in the genealogical records, dates that line up too closely. It makes me wonder about what’s not written down, like my great-grandfather’s death certificate reading accident, so he could be buried in consecrated ground. Catherine’s death certificate reads homicide. So does Walt’s. Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States and I wonder how far back that goes into what’s not recorded. I wonder which stones would read cancer, or childbirth, or car accident if we let them and I wonder what difference it would make if they did. Maybe none.
It’s hard not to read these documents and gravestones without a 21st century mindset. In one record, above the entry in the family Bible for the birth of my grandfather and his twin, an entry for a boy—stillborn, November 14, 1923. Grandpa and Walt would arrive eleven months later, which means she’d only miscarried two months before she became pregnant again. I wonder if the baby was buried, if he was buried outside consecrated ground because he was unbaptized, I wonder if my great-grandfather was responsible for the burial of his son as men often were in those days, and I wonder about the kindness of the medical examiner twenty years in the future that would allow his father eternal rest of the sanctioned kind. Bill and Catherine were Catholic and the loss of their child was decades before the Catholic Church recognized the abject human cruelty of unbaptized children in limbo, of not being buried in consecrated ground.
The Catholic church had strong opinions on right ways and wrong ways to do children. My grandparents married on April 4, 1948 in a flash of sweet peas, Marion’s brilliant smile, and my grandfather looking at her as they walk back down the aisle like he can’t believe how he got so lucky. The way he looks at her—it’s everything you’d want in that moment. Walt and Ada married just three weeks later, so my dad says Marion always felt like they stole her bridal spotlight. Ada was also four months pregnant, David born six months before my father, which my father also imagines stole Marion’s attention as the rightful bearer of the first grandchild. That tracks. My grandmother was unforgiving about that kind of thing. There was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things.
But here’s the moment of embodied history I return to:
My grandmother miscarried between Brian and Teresa, something I had heard once, nothing anyone would talk about so I’m not even sure when it happened. We still don’t talk about pregnancy loss, this sibling of my father’s that nobody ever got to know except Marion. Dad doesn’t remember much about the time, except that she was very sick. It’s a literally embodied hurt she kept private, carried alone and there’s something deeply human and vulnerable about that kind of loss, especially for a woman who never let anyone but my grandfather close. Women carry fetal cells decades after birth, so her lost daughter was never in the past for my grandmother, and I think about all the miscarriages I know of for women in my family, my mother, grandmothers, my great-grandmother Catherine, the embodied history they carried.
How do we talk about the wonder that is the cells that would become my cousins were already inside my aunt Teresa when Marion was pregnant with her?
At my grandmother’s funeral, a year after I return from Nova Scotia, she left a letter to be read in which she referred to the baby as Marion. Afterwards, in the intense treeless heat of a California September, I said to my father and grandfather that I didn’t know the baby’s name was Marion.
I didn’t either, my grandfather said, a bit bewildered.
At the Eglise Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel on Prince Edward Island, which is Acadian in origin, the starkness of white gravestones against the blue-gray of the storm just off shore is intense. I can’t read any of the inscriptions, but what’s particularly arresting about this churchyard is the blank space down the center of the rows of gravestones, and I’m put to mind of Grosse Ile again, that a landscape can tell a story without words. A large marker reads Identified Children Buried in This Cemetery With Unknown Graves and among them, so many enfant anonyme. Was this once unconsecrated ground, newly consecrated? Or did it remain in limbo? But the lack of markers, the enfant anonyme, speaks to me of the unknowing, the untelling, and the physical evidence—or lack thereof—of planned forgetting.
There’s so much silence around women and childbearing, the choice of children, the choice when to bear those children. It’s hard not to look at the records of my foremothers and all the children they bore and rest my own worldview on them, projecting a lack of power onto their lives, their marriages at sixteen, motherhood at the whim of husbands who were decades older, a rural life that demanded as many children as possible to serve as family labor. Just because it’s a life I would have chafed against, one that likely would have broken me, it’s just as problematic to assume that the women in my ancestral line would have felt the same. What if they had exactly the life they wanted? Sometimes I wonder about the construction of families, what’s only left behind in the records, what records a hundred years from now might say about me. I expect it will say little. Pope Francis recently said that a life with only pets and no children is an unfulfilled life, empty, a refrain he will return to many times. I’m not Catholic, but it’s difficult not to stand in this physical place, and this place in time, and still be in a place where the lives of women are measured by their relationships to other people, to husbands, to children, instead of on their own individual merits as human beings, and it’s difficult to shake that feeling right now. I’m not in a bad mood as I get back in the Jeep, but I’m close. I’m tired of being told my life has no meaning or value because I’m not married and don’t have children. It comes from so many directions and it’s exhausting.
When I return to the Scamp, the cats are asleep on the bed. This life is not unfulfilled, not even close to empty. This is the best kind of life and I hear the British singer Cordelia crooning I think I like this little life, this little life in the back of my mind. The campground is still pretty quiet. The A-liner is still here, but I haven’t seen any people, but with the weather I wouldn’t be outside either. The Class C next to me left this morning and there’s another Class C two rows over. I turn on the heater, make myself a pot of tea, and settle in at the front dinette to download my pictures to my computer. It can’t all be good weather, but at least there’s no wet canvas.
The weather starts to clear a little bit as we approach the dinner hour, so I pull out my little crock pot with a jar of curry sauce, a potato, an onion, half a can of chickpeas, half a can of peas and carrots. I make sure I’m not going to burn down the Scamp and then load up my camera to go down to the beach to see what there is to see. The wind is strong, but the visibility is much improved. The tide is out and it’s still storm-cold, but I stay out there for a while, breathing gray skies and red sand.
Later, tucked up at the front dinette with my dinner, with Maeve on the opposite seat, both of us staring at the gray out the front window, I think about travel stories and how we tell them, how we remember the flavor of them on our tongues, and just how many of our best family stories are food and travel, and I wonder what it means that I could trace my dad’s Air Force travel through food. Sangria and paella in Spain. Steak in Uruguay. I wonder if his memories have flavors for him, in the way that mine literally do. Mushrooms put me on the Aran Islands, yellow curry on PEI, Maritime Mist tea at Mackinac Island.
I think about how his stories, though not in combat zones, have the same feel of the World War II stories of my grandfathers—amusing and of little substance. Maybe food stories stick because they are visceral, not just sensory, a moment literally taken into our bodies, broken down, and filtered into our cells. Is this how genetic memory works? That perhaps I carry that t-bone steak in my cells, passed down from my father? Do I carry the bread full of weevils from my maternal grandfather’s Coast Guard convoy in the South Pacific? Do I carry the legacy of Yarmouth fisheries, Acadian grain? What flavors will remind me of this place and the experiences I have consumed here?
In the morning, the sun is bright enough that I am very tempted to stay another day on Prince Edward Island, but I cannot. Halifax is calling in Acadian voices, even though I do not know at the time there are Babines among them. The drive to the Confederation Bridge is magnificent in the sunshine and I feel a certain regret in leaving.
