I have never considered rain and riding to be a match
made in heaven. I have been known to howl loudly when rain annihilates whatever
fun might have been had in its absence. Fortunately on this particular day precipitation
proved to have a silver lining: the day was hot and I soon discovered that in a
swelter rain provides welcome, natural air conditioning. I changed my mind, took
off my shirt, enjoyed the cool.
On the way to Centreville Jan and I were joined by
frequent loud thunderclaps. I tried to recall how many people caught out in
open country are killed each year by lightning strikes. In the village we
spotted Foote’s ice cream parlour and stopped for shelter and a calorie upload.
I was barely into the first scoop of my triple-decker when all hell broke
loose: a torrent the like of which I’d experienced only once before, years ago
during a flash flood in Tucson, Arizona. Slight chance of showers indeed.
Soon enough the rain stopped as suddenly as it had
started.Back on the bikes, sun emerged from behind the clouds and the sweltering
heat returned too. I almost yearned for a cooling shower. The back roads of Kings County provide
abundant charms for a slow-pedaling cyclist from away: sparse motorized
traffic, birdsong, grand old houses, verdant countryside, and occasional
serendipity. We chanced upon diminutive Gibson Woods United Baptist Church and
learned from an interpretive panel that the community had been settled by black
families descended from slaves, free Black Loyalists and War-of -1812 black
refugees. I’d had no idea.
That was just one of the history lessons. Always on
the lookout for war memorials, at Canning we admired the 1902 Hamilton
MacCarthy bronze bust of Lt. Harold Lothrop Borden, killed in action at
Witpoort two years earlier, during the South African War. At the Canard cemetery
Jan spotted a white bronze grave marker looking every bit as crisp and clear as
the day it was installed in 1888. `White bronze` is actually zinc; markers made
of it endure wonderfully well, having no natural enemies and only one human one
– vandals.
Having already inspected Henri Hebert’s fine,
evocative bronze of ‘Evangeline’ at the Grand Pre national historic site, where
the shameful 1755 deportation of French Acadians is commemorated, we found
another facet of the same story: at Starr Point a cairn records the arrival in
1760 of the first ‘New England Planters’ brought in to replace the expelled
Acadians. A tablet on the cairn notes that the surroundings include some of the
most fruitful agricultural lands in all of Canada. The Acadians had known all
about that.
The next day we rode 40 km in Annapolis County.
Granville Ferry availed a further array of fine, gingerbread-festooned old
houses, and Mills Cemetery, devoted to a single family, some of the gravestones
nearly two centuries old. We stopped at L’Etablissement Melanson – Melanson
Settlement – another community of Acadians expelled after close to a century of
peaceable and productive life on the banks of the Dauphin River (renamed Annapolis
by the British evictors).
At Port Royal the history is older still. We stopped
to contemplate the replica of the 1605 habitation established by Champlain and
friends more than four centuries ago. 
We climbed North Mountain on the bikes
and rode the shore road along the Bay of Fundy. One of the rewards of riding a
bike 40 or 50 kilometres is the entitlement one feels to make a pig of oneself.
We dismounted at the Crow’s Nest at Parker’s Cove, reveled in fresh seafood
then paused at the community’s tiny harbour where the lobster boats sit on the
harbour bottom until the world’s highest tides return to lift them up again.
The showers may not have been as light as
Environment Canada mooted but we didn’t grumble: the history lessons edified
and the ride boosted our confidence that even as old age encroaches we retain a
modicum of fitness and viability. Yahoo!
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