Vivek Menezes started a site with this ID, but pressure of other activities
kept him from continuing with it. My slim grasp of Konkani/Hindi put me at a
loss for grasping the significance, but dear late wife was quick to
exclaim---"Ah! Red Earth, just like your Canadian home district". Receiving
a post card from 'PEI' I scanned it for Vivek and wrote a little about it.
Vivek compliments me by encourage to let others read it too: So here it is.
. . . . .
If you look on the map you'll see that my 'Island Home' (Prince Edward
Island) is smack in the middle of the mouth of St. Lawrence River. The
Geology/Geography is interesting. The red sandstone of PEI is quite unlike
the neighboring regions; New Brunswick is 'black loam' and most of Nova
Scotia is granite and slate. I think that the geologists claim PEI to have
been built up over eons of time by the silt from St. Lawrence River bottom,
deposited at the river-mouth. As you may know, the St. Lawrence Seaway is
perhaps the biggest canal system in the world, allowing all mercantile
traffic to access Great Lakes Ports---such as Chicago.
PEI was first colonized by the French ('Isle St. Jean'); the aboriginal
population was a very gentle race of Indians (the Miq-Maq) who wove colorful
baskets from willow wood and lived mostly on shellfish---lobsters, clams and
oysters. One of the leading oyster contenders for world's greatest
restaurants is 'the Malpeque Oyster'---Miq-Maq name. As I kid I would stand
around a jute bag containing oysters fresh from the shore, and have a dozen
of them 'on the half-shell'.
The British got the idea that the French were getting too cozy with the
aboriginals, so they came up from 'New England', rounded up the 'L'Acadie
French'; sent them adrift, and burned their villages. Thus came about the
epic poem by Longfellow entitled 'Evangeline'---"This is the Forest
Primeval. . .". Those French people went all the way down the Mississippi
Valley to New Orleans, where they can be found ('Cajun'---corruption of
'Acadian') to this day. They speak a 'patois' type of French, and Tobasco
Sauce is their gift to the rest of the world. Fiddle players in French
Canada play the same tunes in the same fashion as can be heard in the Gulf
of Mexico Coast!
