A cycling visitor’s experiences in Atlantic Canada

by Christopher Lee

There are stories in my journals of random acts of kindness from strangers all across Canada. Each was an uplifting diversion on a bike ride across your wonderful country—but the concentration was especially high in the Atlantic provinces.

These stories range from windfalls given by well-wishers, to motivating pick-me-ups that eased the burden of the ride, to recounted lessons taught by long lives lived. Each character was a fine ambassador for Canada, and each interaction brought me closer to the “generous heart” of your country—the perfectly concise phrase used by Barbara Kingscote in Ride the Rising Wind, her beautiful account of riding a mare from Mascouche, Quebec, to the west coast of British Columbia back in 1949.

There was material generosity. In four days on Prince Edward Island, two ladies each gave us $25 in separate “transactions” (for want of a better word). Both ignored polite attempts at refusal, (“thank you, but we have money!”) instead insisting the money be spent on nourishing food to fuel our onward riding. One donation came with the demand that we buy pizza; the other with the instruction to “treat yourself to something nice.” The olives, chips, smoked meats, and dips of the resulting picnic were haute-cuisine after the months-long monotony of porridge and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Staff were giving away free baked potatoes outside the store where we bought this picnic, too—further kindness made manifest as food. We each had one on the way in and, thanks to the generosity of the potato quartermasters, one on the way out. That day we paid for no meals.

There were gestures of kindness, too. A campground owner at Englishtown, NS, reopened the closed-for-season clubhouse and sauna, despite us being the only people staying. Her yes-that-could-have-so-easily-been-a-no saved us from having to spend more time in the relentless drizzle that had followed us around the Cabot Trail.

A full cast of people had helped us retrieve our passports in Skir Dhu, a few miles earlier that day, after one of our party mistakenly left a small bag behind in a diner. We realised later in the day after the diner had closed and, while despairing slightly at our limited options, a shopkeeper orchestrated a relief effort involving several townsfolk that reunited us with our passports and saved us several hours of stress.

The effort people put in caught me off guard every time. One local woman went out of her way to meet us in a bike shop in Charlottetown, the day after, and 30 kilometres away from, where we’d originally met. That she went so far out of her way really made an impact on me, as did her note: “Take care, stay safe, cycle hard. Please take this gift certificate as a reminder of how friendly & caring Islanders really are.” By that point in the ride, I didn’t need a reminder.

Then on Highway 1, in the final few kilometres of our ride from Vancouver to St John’s, Newfoundland, a driver pulled ahead of us in the shoulder and flagged us down. I wondered whether we’d done something wrong: whether we were we about to be told that this road is no place for cyclists, or that one of our bags had fallen, unnoticed, several miles prior. But no. Instead, as cars roared past us, he wrote his name and phone number on a scrap of paper and told us to “call if you need an extra bike or a place to stay when you get to St John’s.”  We were touched by this completely unprompted and spontaneous, big-heartedness.

There was wisdom, insight, and advice, all profound and freely given from vantage points so different to my own. Everything from tips on where to camp that night to lessons we could carry forward into our futures. “Buy a piece of land, far enough from a big city so it’s cheap but close enough that it’s easy to get to,” a kindly old man told me. There were book recommendations: Ride the Rising Wind, mentioned earlier, came from a man in a car park who saw similarities between that journey and ours.

I haven’t been able to figure out whether the ratio of kind, generous people we spoke to was a coincidence, a Canadian inevitability, or the result of some type of magnetism. Do bicycles ridden by slightly dishevelled young men attract the type of people prone to share their what they have in all forms? Part of me enjoys this question remaining rhetorical.

The generosity and kindness in Atlantic Canada felt different when compared to what I’d found further west, closer to the big cities. The other hotspot of warmth and spontaneous kindness was deep in the prairies, far from the tourist track, on the long, straight roads connecting backwater towns. (That’s not to say, by any means, that people weren’t generous elsewhere: It just felt different.)

Here, people waved us down on hot roads to issue bottles of water, apples, pieces of flapjack, and nuggets of intel about the coming roads. A man awkwardly proffered $5 from his car window to “get yourselves drinks, or something,” as we sipped on ice-cold, just-bought cans. Pickup drivers offered lifts up particularly steep hills. Conversation flowed from all quarters, all genuine, all welcoming.

Elsewhere there were invitations to stay in cabins—one owned by a renowned nudist, another by one of two neighboured families competing to be the most hospitable. Another man, living rough, forced $5 into my hand outside a launderette, and suggested I use it to start a new life in his town. It was apparent that, materially, I had more than him; but as with everyone else, he refused to take the money back. Beyond a point it felt ruder to turn it down than to accept. This exchange best exemplifies the ambiguity around accepting gifts from strangers.

I often wondered how to repay people, and always came up against the same answers. To attempt to repay their acts of generosity would detract from them, because they weren’t done with an expectation of reciprocity.

One person said, when I raised this topic in conversation, that they felt they were repaying us, for bringing something new and novel into their day. Or for reminding them of adventures in their own pasts, or for reminding them to stop putting off the ones planned for their futures. One man, sporting a STOP sign and the biggest, whitest beard I’ve ever seen, regaled us with his plans to “ride across Canada one day.” He was in his late 60s. I wish him the absolute best of luck in his endeavour.

It’s undoubtedly lovely to experience munificence, in any form. “You inspire people,” a tour guide told me at Cape Spear. I found it hard to believe. I still do. Somebody else said that “yesterday we biked 40 kilometres and were feeling pretty proud of ourselves! It’s hard for us to imagine biking from the west coast to the east coast of Canada!”

It’s humbling to be told such things. They are conversations that get closer to the marrow of life; fleeting interactions that move beyond small talk and chit-chat to create lasting impressions for both parties.

I am grateful for each one, and I look forward to stopping to say hello when I see people on journeys of their own. To offering a patch of grass in my garden for a passing traveller to set up their tent, or a bed in my spare room when I live somewhere big enough. To waxing reminiscent when a young person, many years from now, tells me about some planned adventure.

Likewise, I look forward to picking up more hitchhikers beside roads on future journeys, and to hearing their stories of generosity received and given. To continue this beautiful chain of human interactions that so graciously extended itself to us, asking for nothing in return but an unspoken agreement for us to extend it to others.

Canada is most definitely a country with a generous heart. Long may it continue beating. 

(Editor’s note: The annual Tourism Industry Association of Nova
Scotia (TIANS) awards banquet includes the “Pineapple Awards”
which acknowledge ordinary workers in the industry who go out
of their way to assist or otherwise accommodate visitors.
Such gestures are considered significant in enhancing the
region’s reputation for friendliness. Englishman Chris Lee
and several friends bicycled west to east across Canada
between June and September 2017. Saltscapes has already
published an account of the rigors and discoveries of the
epic journey, but the author wrote to us outlining and 
expressing gratitude for the many gestures of kindness and
generosity experienced along the way—especially in the
Atlantic area. We thought it was worth sharing with you.)