Prince Edward Island’s Bridge to the Future May Break a Link to Its Past

Tiny Prince Edward Island has always defined itself as a place apart from the rest of the world.

Pre-Columbian Indians called it “the land cradled on the waves.” Today, the 135,500 people who live here invariably refer to it simply as The Island, and divide themselves into “Islanders”--those born here--and “CFAs,” which stands for “Come From Away.”

The gentle, rust-colored hills furrowed with potato plants and the clapboard houses fronted with wide, covered porches seem unchanged from 100 years ago. Even at the height of tourist season, it is possible to drive the main roads for miles without seeing another car.

Much of the ambience stems from the difficulty of getting to the island, a 175-mile-long crescent that is tucked into the Gulf of St. Lawrence on Canada’s Atlantic coast. There’s the little airport near the capital of Charlottetown and two ferry routes, only one of which runs all year.

But that is about to change as the longest bridge of its kind in the world, spanning a nine-mile strait, nears completion. After the bridge opens June 1, the island will be just a 15-minute drive from the mainland, instead of a 45-minute ferry crossing that can drag out to four hours in dead winter when the strait is blockaded by ice.

There is a certain ambivalence, to say the least, among residents about the differences that the “link”--to use the local parlance--will mean for life here.

Betty Howatt can’t see the big concrete bridge from the vegetable field that runs down toward the river from her farmhouse in Tyson Point. The as-yet-unnamed span is hidden by a small peninsula on the farm’s western border.

“Thank God I don’t have to look at the damned thing,” Howatt said, hands on hips. “If we ruin what we’ve got, what’s the point? People come here because it’s a beautiful, pastoral, green place. If we get as many visitors as they say we will . . . we’re going to lose that.”

But Howatt, formidable in size and demeanor, matriarch of a family that has farmed this land for nearly two centuries and organizer of a group formed to fight the bridge, admitted that she is beaten.

The link will be built, and most on the island will welcome its completion. If it changes things, folks figure, that’s the price of progress. With an unemployment rate of 14.5%, Canada’s smallest province maybe can use a little progress, the reasoning goes.

Until recently, the island regarded its insularity as a virtue.

It was settled by the French, then occupied by the British in the 18th century, but it was spared the warfare between the two colonial powers that scarred much of the rest of the continent in that period. In 1864, Charlottetown hosted a meeting of colonial leaders that led three years later to Canada’s peaceful independence from Britain. Typically, though, island leaders waited until 1873 to join the new nation.

Farming and fishing have long been the props of the local economy, only recently joined by tourism.

The island supplies most of the potatoes consumed in Canada and a great number of the frozen French fries to fast-food outlets across North America. In a nod to the indigenous fishing industry, you can order a McLobster sandwich along with your fries at the local McDonald’s.

A less-discussed aspect of the island economy is the reliance on government handouts, mainly unemployment payments.

Despite economic growth of 4.7% in 1995, year-round jobs remain in short supply. More than a third of the income generated on the island is attributed to federal programs.

Government largess is on the wane here and throughout Canada, strengthening the economic argument for the bridge.

Officials argue that the span will speed the transit of farm products off the island and lure manufacturing plants and tourists onto it.

Support for the project, a scant majority before work began in 1995, has risen to 75% in recent polls.

“What the construction has done is eliminate some of these doubts people had,” said Kevin Pytyck, who runs the project for Strait Crossing Development Inc., a consortium of Canadian, Dutch and French companies that will build and operate the bridge using a $514.5-million government-guaranteed bond sale and $31 million in annual government payments for the next 35 years.

Construction has also provided jobs for nearly 2,500 people, mainly from the island and other nearby provinces stricken with high unemployment. Most work in a sprawling yard at water’s edge, where the pieces of the bridge are fabricated from steel-reinforced concrete and then lined up along a pier like towering Lego pieces.

The components are hauled from the yard to the bridge site on a specially built barge, then lowered into the sea and assembled.

It’s described as the “world’s longest continuous multi-span bridge.” That means that while there are longer roads across water--in Chesapeake Bay, for example--they include causeways or tunnels or interruptions such as islands. The island bridge will be a series of repeated 800-foot spans. At its highest point, drivers will be 200 feet above the water. Near the center, motorists will be out of sight of land.

The bridge is similar to shorter spans in Denmark and Hawaii, Pytyck said. “We just took the construction methods one step further.”

The principal engineering problem was protecting the bridge supports from the pressure of the winter ice pack. Special concrete shields designed to withstand 15,000 pounds per square inch have been designed for the 30- to 50-foot portions of the supports within what Pytyck calls the “crushing zone.”

Still, there are those on the island who believe that the builders have underestimated the power of the ice.

“They’re taking a Titanic attitude, that this is unbreakable. We’ll see, and we’ll see soon,” said one skeptic, Rory McLellan, managing director of the provincial Fishermen’s Assn.

Critics are also worried that the bridge will damage the island’s fishing grounds and even change the weather by delaying the annual breakup of ice in the strait.

Pytyck waves aside such concerns and argues that the debate over the bridge’s impact on the island’s lifestyle is overblown.

“This won’t change the fact that this is P.E.I.,” he said. “As for all this talk about the island way of life--there may be as many definitions of that as there are people you talk to.”

Perhaps, but the whole point of the bridge is to bring change to the island--in the form of a more stable economy.

All along Canada’s impoverished Atlantic coast, the struggle is similar. As the mainstay industries of fishing and forestry have played out, political leaders have searched for ways to prevent the area from slipping into a sort of picturesque, genteel poverty. In defiance of the region’s unpredictable weather and brief summers, increased tourism has emerged as a favorite theme.

“I think we’ll have an amazing number of tourists coming over the link,” enthused Catherine Callbeck, the provincial premier and a strong backer of the bridge.

Prince Edward Island’s tourist brochures promote uncrowded beaches, peaceful seaside inns and its identification with a long-dead author of children’s books, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Montgomery spent a lonely childhood under the care of austere grandparents in the village of Cavendish at the turn of the century. From her second-floor bedroom window, she could look up the hill at the green, peaked roof of a neighboring house, which inspired her to write the classic “Anne of Green Gables,” published in 1908.

“Anne” is now the major marketing force on the island, akin to what Disneyland is to Anaheim; her image even appears on the province’s license plates. The Green Gables house is preserved in a national park and draws 320,000 visitors a year.

If the expected upsurge of tourists materializes after the bridge opens, the challenge facing the island will be to absorb them without demolishing the rustic environment that lured them in the first place, said Douglas Heaney, the youthful park ranger who oversees the Green Gables site.

“It’s certainly a risk that people apparently are willing to take,” he added, choosing his words carefully. “Now we have less than a year to go before the link meets in the middle, so to speak, [and] we have to prepare ourselves for more people on our roads, more people looking for places to stay, more people on the beaches.”

Already, carnival attractions are creeping onto the island. A wax museum and an amusement park advertising a replica of King Tut’s tomb are just down the road from the Green Gables house. Elvis’ 1956 pink Cadillac is the latest addition to the local car “museum.”

Howatt decries the commercialization and notes that a few years ago the provincial tourism agency used her farm for a promotional photograph.

“This is what they’re picturing,” she said, pointing in the direction of her orchard, “but at the same time, they’re doing something that will destroy it.”