Waterville, Maine

 

When I reached Bangor and the more populous southern third of the state the Carnegies started coming fast and furious, two the first day and four the next.   The first came on the campus of the University of Maine in Orono, eight miles north of Bangor.  The sprawling campus of 11,500 students resides on an island formed by the Stillwater and Penobscot rivers.  It was largely populated with red-brick buildings.  The monumental Carnegie was the lone exception constructed of grey stone accentuated by two monolithic columns.  It stood alone on a slight rise in the center of a large quad as if it were a place of worship.  It ended its days as a library in 1947 and has been renamed Carnegie Hall, serving as home to the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction Laboratory (VEMI). 

Just five miles to the north in a town bearing the name Old Town was a public library funded by Carnegie.  It was a monument of a building too, though of a more modest scale.  The entry stated “Open to All,” but one had to enter around back through a large addition beside a sizable parking lot.  The ride from Orono and onward took me past several ice rinks.  With skating a popular pastime the university is a hockey powerhouse having won the national championship twice. 

I would have had a third Carnegie for the day in Pittsfield, forty-five miles southwest, but the imminence of rain forced me into a motel eight miles before I reached it.  

I could have pushed on, as Pittsfield had lodging as well, but it was a higher-priced inn.  I was happy to opt for a typical small-town motel emblematic of Americana rather than something more opulent.  It didn’t offer breakfast, but had a couple of bowls of leftover Halloween candy that I took full advantage of. 

The next morning when I reached the exemplary domed Pittsfield Carnegie at eight a.m., two hours before it would open,  I was somewhat regretting I hadn’t pushed on the afternoon before and paid the premium of staying at the inn so I could have had the pleasure of standing under the dome of the Carnegie and marveling at it’s interior as well as exterior. As the Carnegie in Old Town, it had a large, unobtrusive addition.

It had been one stunning Carnegie after another and the next kept the string going.  It was almost too much for one day.  It is the first building one encounters on the campus of Good Will-Hinckley, a charitable organization founded in 1889 by George Hinckley dedicated to educating youth and changing lives as a boarding and day school.  The library now provides space for offices and classrooms.  When I rolled up on my bike an administrator entering the building regarded me with suspicion and asked what I wanted.

It was twelve miles south on a hilly, trafficless road to the next Carnegie in the small town of Oakland.  It was on a more modest scale than the previous four, but continued the neo-classic style with a pair of columns.  It had an addition behind it.  I was happy when a woman parked her car on the street in front of the library rather than going into the parking lot behind and walked right in, as I feared it would be another expanded Carnegie requiring entry on the side or in the back.  Just inside the door a plaque gave credit to Carnegie and a woman who provided the land for the library.  

Just five miles away over a long climb and under Interstate 95 I had my fourth Carnegie for the day in the large city of Waterville.  Rather than columns it had a tower. Including the lower level, it had four floors, double even the larger Carnegies.  The fourth floor had two reading rooms.  The floor below had a fireplace accompanied by the portrait of Carnegie with an open book on his lap.  An addition to the side and the back were so seamless it was hard to tell they weren’t part of the original building.

Of the twelve remaining Carnegies on my sweep of New England only three will require a jaunt of more than twenty-five miles. One however is out on an island that will take an hour and fifteen minutes to reach by ferry.  I’m already looking forward to that usual jolt of pleasure upon my first glimpse of it, knowing that the anticipation will be building while at sea. 

I have my route plotted all the way to Schenectady, where four final Carnegies in the vicinity await me.  I’m somewhat regretting I won’t be catching the train home in Rochester, as I just learned from Diane Jenks on her latest edition of The Outspoken Cyclist Podcast that Rochester is the home of the women-specific Terry bicycle company.  If I’d known before I set out on these travels, it would have been my first destination when I got off the train.  

It was founded in 1985 by Georgena Terry, who traced her career in her wide-ranging conversation with her long-time friend Jenks on the podcast.  She’d been a mechanical engineering student at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh.  When she graduated and began work in Rochester with Xerox, she began making bicycle frames for friends with geometries better suited for women.   Within a couple of years her business grew from a handful of frames to hundreds.  Before long she she expanded her business to other woman-specific cycling gear, including saddles, pioneering the middle cut-away.

The podcast was a most informative and entertaining conversation between two feisty, outspoken women who have been in the bike business for decades.  Terry is ever mindful of the female perspective.  Her website states:  “I hope I’m part of a movement that encourages women to think for themselves. To be stubborn. To break the rules. And not be afraid to be a pain in the butt sometimes.”  

On the podcast she pointed out several differences between men and women.  She says she’s never had a woman request a carbon-fiber frame, saying that men always want the latest technology, while women are content with what has worked in the past.  She said many of her clients are women who tell her they always wanted a Terry bike having heard about them years before.  Jenks chimed in that women remember things, while men don’t.  Georgena added, “And men don’t always listen.”  It was almost as if they’d both just seen “Barbie” and couldn’t resist lampooning the patriarchy. 

Bangor, Maine

 

There were nine cars ahead of me on the bridge over the Saint Croix River from St. Stephen in Canada to Calais awaiting to enter the US.   I checked my watch to see how long of a wait it would be.  It was 5:17, soon to be 4:17 when I crossed into Eastern time, forty-five minutes before sunset.  And I’d have to set my watch back another hour the next day with daylight savings, forcing me to stop riding two hours earlier than I had been for the past two weeks.  I had done well to arrive in time to get into the US  and out into the countryside to camp before dark.  If the headwind of the day before had persisted I would have had one more night in Canada.

It was taking over a minute for each car to be let in.  After the second the official in the guard house noticed me.  He stepped out and waved me forward, saying I could go inside and be taken care of there.  Three uniformed officers, two women and a guy, sat behind two counters, each facing a computer.  They too were as cordial and welcoming as the officer outside, not a grim, authoritarian face among them.

As one of the woman entered information from my passport into her computer, she engaged me in conversation rather than interrogation, as one is generally subjected to at border crossings.  She wondered how long I had been a touring cyclist, not how long I had been in Canada or what had drawn me there or if I had a criminal record or what I might be bringing back into the US. I would have been happy to tell her I wasn’t bringing back anything I had bought, just two license plates from Nova Scotia and two from New Brunswick and a Canadian flag attached to a car window antenna that I had found along the road.

The woman commented that I reminded her of an Irish guy who had run around the world pulling a cart who had passed through a few years ago.  She had followed his travels and wondered if she could do the same with mine.  She was nice enough to have been Canadian.

I asked if many Canadians came over to shop at the Walmart in Calais. She said lots do especially for milk and eggs.  I said I had been surprised how expensive milk had been in Canada and wondered why.  None of the three officials could provide an answer other than it might be because they put less hormones in their milk.  I said my first stop in the US would be at the Walmart for half a gallon of chocolate milk, and hoped it wasn’t sold out.  

The parking lot of the Walmart was half-filled with cars with New Brunswick license plates.  The shelves were still well-stocked and there was lots of milk and not at an inflated price.  A half gallon of chocolate milk was still $2.12, quite a difference from the $5.58 I had been paying in Canada.  I was happy to see an eighteen-ounce jar of peanut butter was $1.84, the first time I had seen it under two dollars on this trip, and back to what it had been in pre-inflationary times.  Maybe inflation had finally ebbed during my time away.  The best find was a rack of mini-sweet potato pies on sale for forty-four cents, marked down thirty cents.  Before inflation hit they had been fifty cents, a remarkable price for 270 calories of tasty eating.

My final seventy miles in Canada included a short stretch along the Bay of Funday.  I had to take a minor detour from the only road connecting St. John to Calais to ride along the water, enticed by a sign that promised much more than it delivered.  

The road only included three miles of shoreline, the rest just more forest.  I was about the only one making the detour, so that was its best benefit, fifteen miles of no traffic. It was low tide, so I could see evidence of its legendary biggest tide on the planet.

My final Tim Hortons came forty miles from the border.  I was hoping to spend the last of my Canadian change.  I knew I had a two dollar and one dollar coins and a few quarters and nickels.  My change had been supplemented by the first coins I had seen on the road in St. John and afterwards.  I thought I might have collected enough for two muffins.  I was thirty-five cents short, so had to settle on a muffin and a cookie.  I didn’t realize the cookie I selected was deluxe and cost a dollar more than the ordinary, so I had to change my choice.  I told the cashier I was leaving the country and trying to spend the last of my change. He charged me for the cheaper cookie, but gave me the more expensive one, a final act of Canadian kindness.

The ninety-five miles from Calais to Bangor was much like my riding the past two weeks in Canada through thick forests and undulating terrain with just small dots of civilization, except there was a lot more climbing, with 4,735 feet for the day, the most of the trip, ten per cent more than the previous high.  There were no service stations, just a lone diner attached to a motel and campground after fifty miles where I was the only patron.  I stopped at the diner hoping it would have Wi-Fi, as I hadn’t encountered any all day.  The waitress confirmed there was Wi-Fi, so I ordered a burger.  After I sat down and spent several minutes trying to connect, she said it didn't always work.  It was the first time in the month of these travels I went a day without Wi-Fi.  The satellites must not hone on this area, as when I set out in the morning it took my Garmin a mile to pick up a signal, the longest by far I’ve experienced just about anywhere.

On the outskirts of Calais came the official welcome to Maine sign with the state motto of “Welcome Home.”  I was feeling it without having to be told.  I felt as if I were in the home stretch of these travels, although I could be on the road a couple more weeks getting to Schenectady with twelve Carnegies to gather in Maine, seven in New Hampshire, one in Vermont and four in New York. Back on home turf I could start looking forward to movies with Janina and time in the forest with Jan, Chris and Kurt cutting out honeysuckle and buckthorn and riding with Tom, Mark, John, Julie and the rest of the gang and hiking with Marj and Jeff and catching up with others.

St. John, New Brunswick

 

If the library advocates in Sydney, four hundred miles away at the eastern end of Nova Scotia, saw the majestic library Carnegie provided St. John in 1904, a year after they had their Carnegie Library in-waiting derailed by its city council after having approved it, they would have been distressed beyond description.  Here was an edifice of great renown that could have graced their town if not for the shortsighted of their town council.

It would be beyond any sensible person’s  comprehension that such an incredible, long-enduring gift could be rejected.  One can’t help but look upon the beauty and stature of St. John’s library and have their spirit elevated and drawn into its equally majestic interior highlighted by a domed foyer.   It is another of the hundreds of Carnegies that is the center of a community and something to be proud of. 

It was replaced by a much larger library in a vast mall on the waterfront a few blocks away in 1983, but continues to serve the community as an Art Center.  It was a hive of activity late Friday afternoon with an early evening opening just commencing. I rushed to the replacement library fearing it would close at five, and was a few minutes late, delayed a blocked road due to construction. I had hoped to make it to St. John by four, but was deterred by a ferocious wind off the Bay of Fundy, so I missed out on the opportunity to ask its librarians if they were aware of the sad saga of Sydney”s Carnegie.

Even with a population of 70,000, the second largest in New Brunswick behind Moncton, the Carnegie remains the most prominent building in the city, facilitated too by its location in a central plaza on a hill.  St. John is Canada’s oldest incorporated city dating to 1785.  Its population was inflated after the Revolution to the south by a mass of Americans who wished to remain under British rule. Along with the distinction of having the lone Carnegie in the Martine Provinces and the eastern most Carnegie in North America, St. John can also lay claim to Donald Sutherland, who was born there in 1935 and went on to have a storied cinema career starring in M.A.S.H., Klute, 1900, Ordinary People, The Hunger Games and countless others.  In 2017 he was given an honorary Oscar.  He is considered the most noteworthy actor never to have received an actual nomination. 

Other than the late-in-the-day headwind that picked up as I neared the Bay of Fundy, I’d had a fine day, the first in six days where it had warmed up enough that I could shed my puff jacket.  It was just twenty-four when I started the day with two frozen solid water bottles on my bike.  I wondered if they’d thaw by the day’s end.  It was all garb on deck when I set out, wearing two pairs of socks, two pairs of gloves and the hood of my jacket over my wool cap, forcing me to open the tightening strap on my helmet as far as it would go.  

As has happened in the past, I had found a large insulated workman’s glove with a rubber exterior the day before which was just what I needed.  It was left-handed, just what I needed as my right glove was larger than the left and could accommodate my thinner glove, so I could wear them both when the temperature dropped to freezing.  My thinner glove wouldn’t fit under the slightly smaller mismatched left heavier glove i had set out with for when the temperature dipped below forty-five. The only extra layer I could use with it was a plastic bag, so finding the glove on the road was a godsend.  It was nice to learn I could easily survive sub-freezing temperatures on the bike and in the tent too, though I had to put on extra layers when I zipped myself into the sleeping bag for the night.  My feet were fine, but for the first time I awoke with cold hands and had to put on gloves.

I finished off my candles before I fully wrapped myself in my sleeping bag, so was happy to come upon a Dollarama in the morning, where it would be much less of a hike around its aisles than the nearby Walmart to find them.  A clerk stocking knew exactly where they were.  It was the first dollar store I’d ventured into in Canada, so didn’t know they only had one aisle of food and no dairy.  It hardly seemed a dollar store without ramen or peanut butter or baked beans.

I had to go to the Walmart after all for chocolate milk, which meant I could avail myself of its Wi-Fi, which Dollarama didn’t offer, unlike some of the dollar stores in the US.   The dollar store may not have had milk or Wi-Fi, but it at least had a garbage can out front, which none of the three chains of US dollar stores provide, a most customer-unfriendly cost-saving measure, almost enough reason not to patronize them, though I often have no choice out in small-town America.  

From St. John it’s just seventy miles back to the US.  It won’t be any warmer there, but I’d like to think it will be less rainy.  As long as I’m dry I can manage the cold.  After riding in twenty and thirty degree temperatures, fifty seemed almost toasty.  It took several hours to get that warm,  and when it did, all was well with my world. The fifty held all the way to quitting time.  It’s no hardship whatsoever to slip into the tent when it’s fifty, even if it’s going to drop into the thirties,  

After a night in a motel the tent is all the more welcoming.  I may have gained a little extra benefit staying at the Holistic Healing Center.  I’d had an inexplicably sore and inflamed shin for several days.  I don’t know whether I bumped it, or a limb had scratched it or poisonous leaf brushed it in the forest in the night when I got up to take a leak or if it might have been bitten by a spider or some other insect.  By days end it was slightly painful to walk on or to pedal with much exertion.  

It always felt better in the morning, but the swelling hadn’t gone down and was still slightly painful to the touch.  After several hours of pedaling the pain would gradually make itself known once again.  I was tempted to have the master healer give it a look and maybe perform some acupuncture on it, but I didn’t want to be told to take a day off.  Turns out I didn’t need to as after my night in his premises, the the positive vibes was all the healing it needed.  I didn’t want to think my hours and hours  of daily pedaling had exacerbated something, as this had never happened before.

Amherst, Nova Scotia

 

A second wintry blast of cold air dropped the temperature to below freezing once again and this one brought some snow with it.  It was no fun biking in wet, sleety flurries that soaked into my leggings.  It came in mid-morning and fortunately only lasted an hour.  There was no escaping it out in marginally settled Nova Scotia.  Though it had me shivering, once it passed I quickly dried out and warmed up and regained the pleasure of being on the bike. 

It wasn’t so easy to stay warm the next day when I began riding at 7:30 with a temperature of thirty-two degrees that never got warmer than thirty-seven, not warm enough to melt all the lingering snow from the day before.

I stopped after a couple of hours for a slice of pizza and didn’t remove a single garment, not even my wool cap and helmet, in the half hour I spent out of the cold.  My hands at least gained full feeling and having been fully thawed managed to stay warm after I resumed.  Though I slipped into my tent the night before when it was thirty-nine and was able to ward off the cold with a candle, raising the temperature in the tent to fifty,  I didn’t care to retreat to a tent after a day of borderline warmth and a predicted night time low of twenty-three, so availed myself of a hotel for the second time in three days.  I was lucky I had a cluster to choose from in Amherst after sixty-one miles for the day just as another wave of flurries came through.

 Booking.com revealed accommodations at an Indian-run Holistic Healing Center in the middle of the town.  Nothing on the front of the building advertised that there were four rooms on its second floor available for lodging.  The proprietor said he originally made them available for out-of-town clients, but began advertising on-line for others.  With a shared bathroom his rate was less than half of other nearby motels along the Trans-Canada Highway, also known as the Highway of Heroes and Miners Memorial Highway.

He’s happy if he manages to rent one a night.  That’s enough to cover his daily expenses and helps supplement his healing income.  He moved here two years ago from Toronto to escape the “concrete jungle” and his heavy overhead.  There he had ten or more clients a day.  Here he is lucky to get ten a week.  Amherst has a population of eight thousand, though he attracts clients from as far as Halifax and Sydney, mostly the elderly with aches and pains that if they went to the hospital they’d have to wait twelve hours or more to be tended to.   And they could wait days if they wanted an appointment with a family doctor.  He does acupuncture as well as massages and herbal remedies.  Most of his clients are referrals.  He doesn’t expect to see a client a second time, as he likes to think he can heal them in one visit. 

I was hoping the psssword for his Wi-Fi would be something exotic, but it was merely Guest123. As in Burlington, Vermont, he warned me to lock my bike as there were a lot of drug addicts in town.  There were none hanging around the library or out and about in the wintry weather.

The temperature will be back into the fifties by the weekend, but the nighttime lows will still be dipping into the low thirties and twenties.  I may have to avail myself of Amtrak in Bangor.  I’ll have ridden over two thousand miles by then, my usual fall quota.  I’d hate to forego a string of Carnegies in southern Vermont and New Hampshire and a visit with Laura and Ken in Williamstown in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, but it’s November, later than I’m usually touring.  They can await another tour that will include Carnegies in Schenectady and the northeast corner of New York.

I should be able to cope with the cold a little better in the US with small town libraries and franchise food outlets more plentiful as places to warm up.  Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are so sparsely settled I can go all day without any such refuge.  Small, isolated homesteads are scattered here and there.  If anyone had been out in their yard yesterday evening I would have been tempted to ask if I could pitch my tent in their barn and maybe borrow a blanket for extra insurance against the cold.  My sleeping bag proved adequate enough that I didn’t need to put on leggings or extra layer on my torso. The extended head flap was all I needed.

No one has expressed concern for someone biking in such harsh conditions.  Those carving out an existence in the semi-wilderness would think nothing of it.  They may regard me as one of them.  I haven’t been inflicted with any belligerence from passing motorists, not a single get-off-the-road blast of a horn, just an occasional friendly, affirming toot, most often from vehicles coming towards me.

When Rick of Lansing bikes this way next summer he’ll have a fine time with the long days and warm temperatures.  It will be hard to stop biking.  I’ve done just fine in less than optimum conditions and am glad I didn’t heed his warning to stay away in October.  Thankfully he didn’t go on to tell me how much worse it would get in November, as then I might have been deprived of this wonderful experience.  As it is, I have put in seven or eight hours a day on the bike in the little over ten hours of light available to me to limit my overlap with November.

Antigonish, Nova Scotia

 

Finally, on Day Twenty-six of these travels, I availed myself of a motel.  I held off as long as I could until I was beset by the twin demons of a temperature in the low forties and rain.  The rain came right on schedule a little after noon and was forecast to continue into the night.  I reached the motel I was targeting forty miles down the road just as the rain was commencing.  It was barely a drizzle, not enough to normally derail me, but I wasn’t about to mistrust the prediction of how long it would last, as forecasters don’t much get it wrong these days.

The day had started out with a patchy blue sky and no ominous clouds on the horizon, so I thought maybe the rain had diverted, but knowing the accuracy of the forecast, that was mere wishful thinking, though I did want to have an afternoon off to tend to a host of chores I’d been neglecting for days, including laying all my gear out and letting it thoroughly dry.

The motel offered breakfast, but since I wished a dawn start the next day before breakfast was served, the Asian attendant let me have my breakfast early.  She was most generous asking me how much of each item I wanted, so I got three hard-boiled eggs, two bagels, two cups filled with Raisin Bran, two packets of oatmeal, milk, orange juice, and several containers of peanut butter, cream cheese and jam.  I could feast.

I had a bunch of wash to do and tended to that first so it would have a chance to dry.  It will feel especially nice to put on clean tights in the morning.  I was hoping dumping out my panniers would reveal some food I had forgotten about.  I still had two emergency energy bars I had started with, but no more.  It was hard to tell whether my various items were a bit damp or just cold.

In the parking lot of the sprawling motel was a mini-U-Haul truck.  I had seen many of them on Cape Breton, going in both directions.  Evidently there is a high turnover of labor in Sydney.  Someone asked me when I was headed in that direction if I was planning on spending the winter there, assuming I was another job-seeker drawn by an abundance of jobs.

I found a secondary road with virtually no traffic for fifty miles on my return from Sydney between the two main highways mostly along Grand Lake.  I could truly soak in the pristine scenery.  At the tip of the lake past the town of Grand Narrows I had the option of taking a ferry across Little Narrows or continuing along another lake.  Taking the ferry would lead me to a town with a Tony Hortons, my only opportunity for Wi-Fi for the day, but there was so little traffic I wasn’t sure the ferry would be operating or how often.  The decision was made for me when I came to the intersection where I had to make my choice, as a ragged sign reported the ferry was operating five kilometers up the road.

I had further confirmation when a couple of cars passed me.  The narrows were so narrow  the ferry zipped back and forth whenever a vehicle showed up.  I had no wait, arriving just after two cars had boarded, and in a couple of minutes I was across and back riding.

I wasn’t in dire need of charging at Tony Hortons, as I had stopped at a rural fire station that had an outside outlet.  The station also had a Little Free Library version of a pantry of food.  It was well stocked.  No one stopped while I was there or even drove past.  I was tempted to take a box of breakfast bars to let those maintaining it know that it was being used, but left them for someone else to make that gesture.

While confined to the motel, as I did my wash and other chores, I listened to a tv station broadcasting the proceedings of the parliament in Ottawa.  There were lots of complaints about the price of food.  One representative said his constituents were crossing into the US for their groceries.  I can attest food is more expensive here.  Chocolate milk is double the price of what I pay back home and cereal too and that’s discounting the exchange rate of $1.39 for a US dollar.  Bananas surprisingly are cheaper.  Prime Minister Trudeau had summoned the CEOs of the five largest food chains to put on a show of dealing with the problem.  

Another complaint was the price of heating oil for homes.  The Maritime provinces had waived the considerable tax Trudeau had imposed on it in response to climate change and representatives of other provinces wanted the same benefit.  One representative was reprimanded by calling Trudeau by name. Evidently there is a rule that one can make personal attacks.  One can refer to others only by the title of their office.  There wasn’t a single mention of Israel or Gaza or Palestinians.  Among the dozens of channels at my disposal was one from Boston that was broadcasting Monday Night Football. 

Sydney, Nova Scotia

Wikipedia generally gives the addresses of Carnegie Libraries, which is very helpful, especially when they no longer serve as a library.  It didn’t list the addresses thought of the two in Sydney, just the year the funds were granted, both in 1903, and the architects of each.  Though both were color-coded as still serving as libraries, I wanted to be sure I reached Sydney during their hours when they were open in case there were any complications.  I was set to arrive in Sydney on a Saturday, when smaller town libraries aren’t always open or have limited hours.  Sydney being a sprawling port city with a population of 30,000 thankfully had Saturday hours of ten to four-thirty.

I began the day sixty-two miles east of Sydney.  I had been held under seventy miles the past two days by hilly terrain, which had the possibility of relenting as my route followed the shoreline of scenic Bras d’Or lake. 

But it was still up and down terrain with several six per cent climbs of a mile over high humps gaining three hundred feet each, so I had to limit my breaks and keep plugging away.  I made it to the library with an hour to spare.  At first glance it looked like another Carnegie that had been disfigured/mutilated by multiple-additions as three of the four sides were of somewhat modern brick and glass.  There didn’t seem to be a single feature that made it a historic building other than possibly a back wall of plain red brick that might have dated to 1903.

I asked the pair of librarians at the circulation desk if this library had been funded by Carnegie.  It hadn’t, as it was built in 1960 and replaced a library that had been in the courthouse that had burned down in the ‘50s.  They knew nothing of there having been a Carnegie Library in Sydney.  That was deflating, but I was greatly relieved that I had arrived when the library was open to give me the opportunity to find the Carnegie.

I told them of what I knew from Wikipedia.  The younger male librarian said he vaguely remembered reading a while ago that the city had been granted a Carnegie, but it had never been built.  Meanwhile, both he and the older woman librarian went at their computers trying to solve this mystery.  A third librarian joined in on the search on a third computer, all there at the circulation desk.  They found it highly unlikely that there had been two libraries and speculated that since the two grants were two months apart that the second superseded the first.  One of them found that the architect of the second grant listed his design of the library among his work, though there was no picture of it, the first confirmation that there had been a Carnegie.

The woman librarian disappeared and returned with a manila folder full of yellowing newspaper clippings from the time when the present library was built.  As I rummaged through them I came upon an article titled, “The library that was not built.”  

At the same time the librarian who was on the trail of the architect of the library discovered a 1910 court case before the Nova Scotia Supreme Court of the City of Sydney versus Chappell Brothers and Company with the architect seeking to collect his fee for designing the library.   The three-page judgement that the librarian printed out for me revealed that the city had reneged on its pledge to build the library.

At last, we’d gotten to the bottom of the mystery of the library that wasn’t.  It was almost as thrilling as actually finding the library.  The thrill overcame any feeling that I had wasted a week biking to see something that wasn’t there, as it got me to Nova Scotia and a couple of license plates as souvenirs, including a battered bright yellow commercial one that I rarely saw.  I could only chuckle that this long ride had seemingly been for naught, though no bike ride is ever for naught.

The writer began his story wondering how many citizens of Sydney knew that just after the turn of the century the town had been offered $15,000 by “none other than the late Andrew Carnegie, the famous American industrialist and philanthropist” to build a library in Sydney “long before the era of regional libraries.” It was a good question to ask, as none of these librarians, sixty some years after the article had been written, knew it.

The article stated that the town council gave the go-ahead to purchase a plot of land for the library and pledged an annual sum of $1,500 maintain it.  It went on to say, “Then the roof fell in…one is left in utter bewilderment as to why this splendid and advanced project went up into thin air.  Equally bewildering is why the good town fathers of the day refused to pay for the plans and specifications which had been called for and approved and adopted by the library committee.”

The article then explained that the town refused to pay the architect for his plans forcing him to take the town to court to recover his fee of $426.63.  The court granted him $250.  The town appealed to a higher court, which sided with the architect ordering the town to pay him the full $426.63 plus expenses.  The article concluded, “The architect got his money, but the town didn’t get its library.  Perhaps some student of Sydney’s history might be able to furnish us with the behind the scenes story of the building that was never built.”

It had to have been a highly divisive issue at the time between the readers and non-readers of the community with the non-readers winning out not wishing to raise their taxes a modicum to support the library, no doubt infuriating the readers when they thought they had won the battle to have a temple of a library that would still be standing to this day.  It had usually been women’s groups that spearheaded the drive for a library.  One can well imagine their anger and fury when the male elected officials reneged on their initial promise of accepting Carnegie’s funds and the conditions that came with it of providing land for the library and an annual maintenance fund of ten per cent of his grant.  Several times as we unraveled this story, all three librarians muttered it sounded like current times, as they could use further funding, which the community is disinclined to contribute.

A further mystery is why Wikipedia bungled this issue and that no one has righted it. As we googled Canadian Carnegie libraries, of which there are 125, or rather 123, the several articles all referenced Wikipedia as having the definitive list of the libraries. I would have thought the person who wrote a book on the one hundred or so Carnegie Libraries in Ontario, might have had an interest in the handful of others scattered in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Yukon and New Brunswick, though not Quebec, and righted Wikipedia’s mistake that the duplicate grants to Sydney never resulted in a library.  Evidently whoever posted the list of Carnegies in Canada went by a list of grants Carnegie had given.

I felt no fury towards Wikipedia, just thanked it for providing me a nice ride from one end of Nova Scotia to the other and back.  It’s far from the first mistake I’ve discovered on its addresses and status of Carnegies, but easily the most extreme.  Wikipedia isn’t the only one to make mistakes regarding Carnegies.  Many of the plaques in front of them dispense faulty information.  The Fort Fairfield plaque in Maine said it was one of seventeen Carnegies in the state, when there are actually eighteen plus two more on college campuses.

I asked the senior woman librarian if she knew of a cheap motel.  She said she did but she wouldn’t even send her worst enemy there, as just in the past week it had been in the news with several arrests made there.  She conducted a search similar to the one I had already made and found nothing cheaper than $109 Canadian, about $80 US.  She said she had just returned from a vacation in Perth over in Ontario and the hotel prices had nearly doubled since a year ago, so she wasn’t surprised at there being nothing under $100.  I glanced at her computer screen and noticed one for $99.  She said that was the one she had been telling me about.

I was prepared to pay whatever the going rate was, but with a rare sunny day and a temperature of an unseasonably balmy seventy and two hours of light left I couldn’t resist riding in these ideal conditions.  It would be like wasting a strong tail wind.  Rain is in the forecast for the coming week, so I gladly pocketed my night in a motel for later. I headed out excited with the prospect of a night in my tent rather than in some cell or another.

The librarian recommended the alternate route I had avoided thinking it would attract more trucks and would entail more climbing, but she said locals don’t prefer one over the other and that they are through similar terrain and have an equal amount of traffic. The last twenty miles of the road I had come in on was thick with civilization, which would make for difficult camping,  so I was happy for the other, less developed route. Now it’s four hundred miles to the next Carnegie in St. John, New Brunswick, which Wikipedia provides an address to, then two hundred miles to the next in Maine, where a bunch await me and I don’t have to worry about a day without a Carnegie.

St. Peter’s, Nova Scotia

 

The past two nights I was thwarted by very spongey, marshy turf at my first attempt at a camp site, forcing me to resume riding in the near dark. And both nights within a mile I came upon a dirt road that led to higher, more solid ground.  The first night I stepped into swampy water, meaning I ended the day with one wet shoe and sock.  Wet feet have been one of the themes of these travels.

Now that I’m well out into the North Atlantic, precipitation never seems far away.  Even when there is no rain predicted, that doesn’t mean a heavy mist of near rain won’t settle in.  I’ve been fortunate in my six days in these Maritime Provinces to have suffered nothing worse and have never been soaked, just damp.

I closed to within eighty-five miles of Sydney when I crossed the mile-long Causo Causeway, the lone link of western Nova Scotia with its far eastern island, Cape Breton, separated by the Northumberland Strait.  It seems to be a popular tourist destination, as just across the causeway in Port Hawkesbury I came upon a cluster of motels, both high end and budget.  It was late in the afternoon and though I am in need of a motel I planned to save that for Sydney, where I could celebrate reaching my distant destination.  

I have been making note of the occasional motel I have passed as i’ll be retracing the past 250 miles and could be in need of shelter for the night should the weather turn nasty.  The only alternate route is the divided four-lane Trans Canadien highway.  Bicycles are allowed but it’s not very amiable.  I’ll return to Moncton then turn down to St. John in New Brunswick on the Bay of Fundy for its Carnegie.  Someone corrected me when I referred to it as St. John’s, as there is a St. John’s in Newfoundland, while that of New Brunswick lacks the ending  “s.”  It will be interesting to see if I end up camping at any of the spots I camped on the way out.  I am looking forward to returning to Pugwash as it had an area for a farmer’s market with lots of electrical outlets and water, though its rest room was locked. 

I had the choice of two roads to Sydney when I crossed to Cape Breton Island, one to the north of a cluster of lakes and one south of it.  The northern route was a more recent highway through mostly unsettled terrain.  I was tempted to take it as there was a wind from the south that would have taken me up to it, but I opted for the older, original highway, as I have come to learn that the older roads tend to follow the contour of the land and require less climbing, while the new highways go in a direct line up and over the hills.  The more straight, direct route of the newer roads always look more inviting, but they are more strenuous and take longer, while inflating the number of feet I climb for the day.

Before crossing the causeway I stopped at a Tim Hortons for my daily muffin.  It was the first Hortons that didn’t have Wi-Fi, forcing me to stop at the next one five miles away in Port Hawksbury.  While I was eating, an older gentleman asked if I’d heard about the mass shooting in Maine.  I said yes and that Canada was lucky not to have to worry so much about such things.  He corrected me and said there’d been one over in New Brunswick a year ago and one never knew when the next might occur.

I’ll be passing through Lewiston in a couple of weeks, as there is a Carnegie there, one of a dozen I didn’t get to in my passage of northern Maine.  The town will no doubt still be in mourning.  Though Canada has been most pleasant, I’m looking forward to returning to the States where I will have a Carnegie or two to look forward to every day.  My daily goal in Canada has just been to get as far down the road as I can so I can all the sooner reach my goal of Sydney.  

Though the map would seem to indicate I am way off the beaten path,  there are Walmarts and an occasional McDonald’s and Subway and KFC.  I am just sorry that libraries are such a rarity.  The only one I’ve encountered was part of a Community Center and not open.  I was at least able to take advantage of its Wi-Fi and  left a golf ball by the door in appreciation.   I’d been carrying it since before Burlington when my Warmshowers host didn’t care to accept it as a gift, just a paint brush and heavy vest I’d picked up along the road.  He said he refers to such items he scavenges along the road

as “roadkill.”

It seems as if I’m way north, but I’m not as far north as I was last year when I sought out the Carnegie in Thunder Bay on Lake Superior.  Other than the one night and morning when the temperature dropped to freezing, the cold hasn’t been as much of a factor as it was last fall. I’ve had no concerns of my iPad freezing or having to overly bundle up in the tent at night.  The tent generally warms up comfortably from my breathing and whatever heat my body is radiating.   But November is just around the corner, which is later than I cycled last year.