Prince Edward Island: Connections

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

No one who has seen its reddish sandstone cliffs, its beaches, and its
old wooden farmhouses will easily forget the beauty of Prince Edward
Island. Island residents Wayne Barrett and Anne Mackay have captured the
terrain and the culture in striking color photographs that are
accompanied only by captions.

There are dramatic photos of the new Confederation Bridge, which joins
the Island to mainland New Brunswick. The “fixed link” spans the
narrowest point of the Northumberland Strait; at 12.9 kilometres, it is
the longest bridge in the Western hemisphere.

The Island’s dependence on agriculture, the potato, and the family
farm is captured in images of a rustic red barn in Milburn, of golden
fields of wheat at Park Corner, and of a harvest moon over a picturesque
North River barn and farmhouse. Intimate closeups of flowers by the
sunny porch of the house where Lucy Maud Montgomery was born, of an old
tackle box serving as a planter on a shingled wall, and of cattle
grazing at sunrise convey the texture of life lived close to this land.