It was the summer of 1980 when we took our first big family trip. We were not one of those families that took vacations to places like Florida or out west. We only went on one or two in my childhood / teen years. We did more day trips — hiking, visiting local or close-by places, especially many trips to the woods or campouts at our favorite lake in the mountains. To this day, I am the same way — king of the day trips.
A few years before our trip, in 1973, Dad and Mom had purchased property up in New Brunswick, Canada because there was nothing available in Maine. They were going to live off the land and homestead — which sounded exotic and wild to Matt and I. “Wow, we have land in Canada?! 88 acres?! That’s so huge!” We would get the big map out and Mom would show us all the way at the top of Maine, just across the border in New Brunswick, that was where our land was. Village de Lac Baker, which had about two hundred residents at the time, was located on the beautiful 1400 acre Lac Baker and established in 1855. We owned almost 90 acres of forest, hills, and meadows (now covered in small evergreens as it was returning back to woodlands).
Our land in Lac Baker, New Brunswick, CN
Dad had a 1965 blue Chevrolet pickup with a short bed. There were no extended cabs or 4 door trucks in those days to speak of, but that is what we drove the 540+ miles / 9+ hours to our land. Now you see, we didn’t have a cap for this truck, but Papa had one on his truck, so he took the cap off his brand new Chevy 1500 and let Dad put it on his truck (which was Papa’s former truck). Papa had three trucks in my lifetime – a 1965, 1980, and a 1992, and all of them were blue. Anyway, the cap was for his 8’ truck bed which meant that it stuck out almost 2’ past the bed of Dad’s truck. No worries, Dad said. He just made a plywood shelf to fit that overhang, and voila! — instant table when the back window was opened up and tailgate was put down. Dad built a base for a bed which allowed for storage under it, and a mattress on top. And you guessed it, that is where Matt, Sara, and I spent the hundreds of miles to Canada.
Times were different then. There were not seatbelt laws and safety concerns the way there are now. Sara was pretty young – maybe two or so, so she stayed up front with Mom for some of the trip. Matt and I were in the back, watching the cars pass us and looking through the window into the cab. There wasn’t a sliding window between the truck and the back, so we couldn’t talk to Mom and Dad. Instead, we wrote notes and held them up. I don’t remember much of the road trip other than it rained a lot. I’m sure I read a lot and Matt and I probably made up all kinds of stories. I was probably around 8 or 9. One thing I do remember about the journey was that as we continued north through NY, we came to the border at Montreal. At some point, Dad must have taken a wrong turn and somehow we found ourselves going underneath the St. Lawrence Seaway through the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel. No GPS or Google maps in those days. Pretty sure we had to turn around and go back through, so I remember Dad saying, “We just went underneath the St. Lawrence Seaway!” It was definitely my first time going through a tunnel, let alone going underneath a river! Matt and I were pretty excited.
Mom, Sara, Matt and Josh at the property, Sara and Josh in the back of the truck, Sara, Matt and Josh at the campground, and a finely illustrated report I did in 3rd grade about the trip.
When we arrived in Lac Baker, I remember seeing the big lake, there was a dam at one end of it, and I recall stopping at a small store where people were speaking French. The road to our land was gravel, through farm fields and woods. There were mountains in the distance. It is very rural and wild land up there and the largest nearby town is Edmundston. We set up camp using the truck as our main base, and Dad stretched tarps to poles that he cut from trees. We had a fire and explored the land throughout the days that we stayed there. One memory I have was that there were huge piles of rocks (at least as a kid they seemed massive) and Matt and I each brought home a large rock encrusted with quartz crystals. I still have mine, sitting on a shelf all these years later. We had baked potatoes and roasted marshmallows by the fire, and according to a little report I wrote in 3rd grade, there were lots of moths that summer. (I looked it up and sure enough, there was a gypsy moth invasion in the summer of 1981 that really impacted agriculture and the forests of Canada and the northern US.) We also got to stay at a campground in Maine at Lake Blue (at site #17 according to my always detailed drawings) and go swimming in the “big lake.”
I still have fond memories of that trip. It was the only time I ever visited our land in Canada. We kept it until after I was out of college but I never made it back there. They sold it in the late 90s as I recall. I still shake my head at the thought that we drove all that way in the back of a pickup truck! As a matter of fact, we actually did it again as teenagers — riding in the back of Papa’s truck from Hagaman to Connecticut … but that’s a story for another day.