A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

The Train Don’t Run by Here No More

Kensington is a small town on Prince Edward Island. There’s an intersection with stoplights and on one of its corners is a filling station with a Tim Hortons coffee shop attached to it. There’s a Mels coffee shop across the street, an Atlantic competitor to the national chain. There’s a grocery store and a hardware store. A little beyond the traffic congestion is the Frosty Treat dairy bar whose grilled whistle dogs are worth crossing the country for.

The town is an easy, pleasant and scenic 40-minute drive along the Veterans Memorial Highway from Charlottetown, the provincial capital. Kensington is inland on the island’s isthmus and so Summerside on the Northumberland Strait and Malpeque Bay on the Gulf of St. Lawrence are almost equidistant, approximately 15 minutes away. Kensington was a stop along the railroad steel that once connected Charlottetown to Summerside.

Discounting the spooky, mock-Tudor HAUNTED MANSION, Kensington’s main adult attraction is its RAILYARDS. Or RAIL YARDS. Or RAILYARD. The various signs and scraps of promotional literature refuse to tell a consistent tale. The Yards (as the development shall now be known for the purposes of meGeoff) are a civic accomplishment to be celebrated. Somebody in Kensington’s local government in this town of less than 6200 permanent residents had the vision and wherewithal to transform derelict rail infrastructure into an asset as a tourist destination whilst respecting the town’s heritage as a station on the mainline. Bravo!

The preserved stretch of weedy, single track right of way is about half as long as a Canadian football field. Low boardwalks twin the rails on either side; step down and step across and step up, stroll around in your summer clothes and tease your wallet. The hub of Kensington’s Yards is a pub called Island Stone. The proprietors did not run up their credit card at genericpubfixtures.com. There’s a platform patio of course. The room with the bar is intimate, the separate dining room not much bigger. The menu is limited but not without variety and so they’re very good at preparing what they do offer; the always-on-feature crab and lobster club sandwich is a destination dish. Canny locals make reservations during prime mealtimes.

Behind the pub is a provincial liquor store. The outlet is notable for its stone exterior which compliments its public house neighbour’s. Again, somebody thought this project through and imposed the appropriate architectural controls. This is a model that can and should be applied to larger scale urban reclamations. Cutting corners and chintzing, redeveloping on the cheap are aesthetic crimes against citizens’ quality of life.

(A personal though apropos digression: every Canadian should be absolutely livid over the Fairmont hotel chain’s plans to add a 147-room Soviet Brutalist wing to Ottawa’s legendary greystone and gothic Chateau Laurier hotel. I further submit that the use of public funds to rehabilitate 24 Sussex Drive, the abandoned and neglected residence of Canada’s past prime ministers, isn’t even worthy of debate. Do it.)

Kensington’s original railway station is a little further down the line. The heritage building, at once a familiar and classic design, has since been transformed into an art gallery highlighting the works of the region’s creative community. Works of art or crafts in a place that thrives on tourism can be problematic whatever the level of talent because clichés sell. Therefore the browser will find paintings of white lighthouses with red roofs or white homes with green gables. There will be patchwork quilts replicating the island’s rolling farm fields of green, red and brown; green and blue seaglass jewelry abounds as does red clay pottery. Take it all in with a dash of salt because the lines between fine art, folk art and crafts, whimsical kitsch and utter crap are as fluid and grey as the ocean. Season to taste.

Across the track is a shingled seafood take-away shack called Go! Fish. The restaurant’s weathered cabana, a walk-by with picnic tables and not a drive-in, is not out of place in the Yards. Its incongruent neighbour is a hair salon. The elegant pink script above the door does not hark back to those primitive days of mere tonsorial arts. Beside the holstered blow dryers and the tins of Adorn is one of those ubiquitous and irksome shoppes: a crammed emporium purveying precious platitude plaques and scented candles, the sort of store that just incites rage, demands a mad bull for inventory control. But it’s always WINE O’CLOCK! A TIME TO BE TREASURED AND SHARED WITH FRIENDS, FAMILY and DOGS! LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE AND FLOSS! Thank Christ the liquor store and pub are mere steps away because if you decided to just lay your head on the track and wait, well, nothing good can ever come of that no 

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