The Well Run Dry

The Well Run Dry

By Ed Staskus

   Cavendish is an unincorporated community on the central north coast of Prince Edward Island, a half hour drive from Charlottetown, the capital of the province. The population is less than 200, although in the summer it swells to more than 8,000, who sleep in tents, campers, motels, cottages, and resorts. In the dead of winter it is a ghost-of-a-place, with only a red fox or a white hare crossing Route 6.

   It was founded in 1790 and named after Lord Cavendish, Colonel of the 34th Regiment of Foot.. In 1893 the world-record holding clipper ship Marco Pole got caught in a storm, grounded, and broke apart on its coastline. Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of “Anne of Green Gables,” grew up there. She is buried in the Cavendish Community Cemetery. It was largely a quiet farming community through the first half of the 20th century

   In the second half of the 20th century campgrounds, amusement parks, and bars and restaurants were built. The PEI National Park was created along 40 miles of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some of the province’s best beaches are in the park, including Cavendish Beach. There are four championship golf courses, each one only minutes from the others.

   Cavendish caters to family vacations, romantic getaways, and golfers. It wasn’t always like that. It was once more like Dodge City and Thirsty’s Roadhouse was where to be and be seen.

   “Cavendish was the place to be on Prince Edward Island,” said Rob Gibson, who was the long-time general manager of the roadhouse. “And Thirsty’s was the place to be in Cavendish, bringing in up to seven hundred people on a Saturday.”

   My wife and I first discovered Cavendish the second summer we went to Prince Edward Island. We had been on an improvisational road trip around Nova Scotia three years earlier when somebody we met in Halifax suggested we take the ferry to Prince Edward Island for a look-see. 

   “What is Prince Edward Island?” I asked.

   “It’s a big island on the other side of the Northumberland Strait. It’s one of Canada’s original provinces. Mapmakers sometimes forget to include it on their maps. I shouldn’t say so, I suppose, but it’s even nicer than Nova Scotia.”

   “I’ve never heard of it and I’m from Canada.” I said. 

   I was born in Sudbury, Ontario. My parents were refugees from the Baltics, which they fled after World War Two and before the Iron Curtain came down. My father worked in the nickel mines of the Sudbury Basin for almost ten years. My mother worked as a nanny for thirteen children until she began having children of her own. They left for a better life in the United States once they had saved enough money to make the move. Even though I lived in the United States ever after, I had dual citizenship, which meant I could say I was a compatriot whenever I went to Canada. That and some loose change meant I could get a cup of coffee at Tim Horton’s.

   We took the ferry to Prince Edward Island. We had a Rand McNally road atlas but had no idea where to go. We ended up in Cornwall. When it started to get dark we started looking for a place to sleep. We found the Sunny King Motel, which was clean and affordable. We stayed there three nights. We spent two days roaming around the island. It was on the second day, the day before we had to go home and get back to work, that we stopped in North Rustico to get a bite to eat. It was late morning. There was an unassuming place called Lorne’s Snack Shop on the side of the road. They had a fisherman’s breakfast that amounted to an all-you-can-eat plate. The plate was full to the gills of eggs, a slab of bacon, sausage, grilled tomatoes, chunky home fries, and thick toast with jam. There was a side of baked beans. We took a pass on dinner that night.

   A woman speaking a dialect of English we had to pay very close attention to suggested we take a drive along the coast on the Gulf Shore Parkway. We found out later she was from Newfoundland. We also found out later about poutine at Lorne’s Snack Shop. It wouldn’t be long before we started dashing in for the French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. We took a drive along the coast and discovered the landscape was pretty as a postcard. 

   We decided to come back the next summer for a two week in one place vacation. There were several groupings of cottages on the Gulf Shore Parkway between North Rustico and Cavendish. One was across the street from MacNeills Brook, but it was too expensive. One was on a hillside overlooking North Rustico Beach, but it wasn’t to our liking. We stopped at the Coastline Cottages across from Doyle’s Cove. It was just right. We made a reservation for the next year.

   Thirsty’s opened the summer of 1984, except it wasn’t Thirsty’s at first. It was G. J.’s North. Phil Manovilli, who was part owner of Gentleman Jim’s in Charlottetown, created the near-to-the-beach bar. He changed the name the next year. It became one of the two most popular watering holes in Cavendish. The other one was the Cavendish Arms, which later became Chevy’s. A sign behind the bar at Thirsty’s said “Hangovers Installed and Serviced Here.”

   Loose-knit groups of the young ambled across the street from nearby campgrounds for drinking, dancing, local bands, high-spirited conversation, and Silly Olympics. When the night was done there was no need for designated drivers. Everybody walked back to their  campgrounds. There was plenty of grass to cushion face-first encounters.

   The next summer, after miscalculating our ability to drive 1,236 miles from Cleveland, Ohio to North Rustico in one-and-a-half days, we got to the intersection of Cavendish Lane and Route 6 at two o’clock in the morning. When we did we realized we had little idea of where the Coastline Cottages actually was. Everything looked different in the dark a year later. We pulled off onto the shoulder of the road in front of Shining Waters. We were standing outside of our car looking at everything with no lights on anywhere when we heard talking and laughing. Four men were sitting by the light of an electric lantern on the front deck of one of the Shining Waters cottages drinking beer. We explained out predicament.

   “From the States, are you?” one of them asked.

   “Yes, but I’m originally from Canada.”

   “Ah, then,” he said. “Just go that way to the ocean, follow the road to the right, and you’ll come to the Coastline Cottages soon enough. If you get to North Rustico, you’ve gone too far.”

   We found our beds without any trouble and fell into them without unpacking. We woke up to a lashing rainstorm that cleared up by noon and became a sunny day. We were at the top on a long gradually sloping  lawn that ended at the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Every so often a flock of cormorants flew past.

   Now and then Thirsty’s was cited for something. Overcrowding was one of the things they were cited for. “The Prince Edward Island Liquor Control Commission has suspended the lounge operation as well as the liquor service in the dining-room of the licensed premises known as ‘Thirsty’s Roadhouse’ located in Cavendish, PEI, for a three day period. The violations of the Liquor Control Act Regulations are ‘A Licensee shall not admit more persons in his licensed premise than the capacity established and posted by the Fire Marshal’s Office’ and ‘A licensed premise shall comply with the Fire Prevention Act.’”

   We stopped in a few times, although we never stopped in on a weekend night when there was barely enough room to stand or turn around, much less find a table or a bar stool. The drinks were abundant, the food was fair, redeemed by its agricultural island roots, but the music was mostly unremarkable, cover bands skilled at a few chords and not much else. We saw Mis-B-Haven there, who were three guys and two gals who knew what they about and were fine to listen to.

   “I still have the note my mother wrote allowing me to perform at Thirsty’s when I was under age,” said Janet Boulter, who was one of the gals. “Man, did we have fun!”

   We discovered the roots music of the Maritimes and started going to a Women’s Institute in Stanley Bridge,  a Lion’s  Club in Cymbria, and a community hall in Brackley Beach to hear it. The music is based on Scottish and Irish and Acadian traditions. We especially liked Acadian music. We went to the Agricultural Fair in Abram-Village to hear Eddie Arsenault and to Charlottetown to hear Barachois. We went to the Piping College in Summerside to hear everything else, including a bagpipe marching band.

   Somebody once said a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn’t. There were no gentlemen in the marching band. You could hear them a mile away.

   Thirsty’s closed at the end of the Labor Day weekend in 2010. “The 1980s and after the bridge opened in 2000 were good to Thirsty’s but the downward spiral began in 2005,” Phil Manovilli said. “Part of it is my fault, our fault. I’m 52 years old now. When I started I was 28. I’m out of that loop,” He was sitting at a table near the dance floor. “Successful bars need to be in touch with their age groups. I’m just so far removed from that now. Kids here now could be my kids.” He watched his two growing children playing on top of a pool table.

   “Cavendish has been changing over the last 10 or 12 years,” said Donald McKearney, the Chairman of the Cavendish Resort Municipality. He said it wasn’t going after the party crowd any longer. “We don’t want the party people. They bring some money to the economy but basically they’ll pitch a tent, 25 people will be there, and they just drink, fight among themselves, and generally carry on. That’s not what we’re looking for.” He said the Victoria Day weekend in Cavendish had gotten to be nothing but a boisterous party weekend on the north shore.

   All things come to an end. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It usually means something else is about to begin. The goal of a song isn’t to get to the end but if it doesn’t get there it doesn’t reach its goal. Every sunrise is the frontside of a sunset.

   “Thirsty’s holds a special place in people’s hearts and I think they’ll remember it fondly,” Rob Gibson said the day of the roadhouse’s closing day while standing behind the bar in front of signs for Alpine and Moosehead.

   Twenty six years after a moment’s beginning Thirsty’s Roadhouse ended in a moment.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

“A Rust Belt police procedural when Cleveland was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1LM1WF9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MYAQAOZIC2U9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hTm7BGbiQbSe5ZapFwYPPfcwOpTe-Vdg6VLE4aGyTyk.Z0R-VNBWWEcvKcNaO9LdCOUnNIOOXgvYkRS_FXiXuHk&dib_tag=se&keywords=bomb+city+ed+status&qid=1742136726&sprefix=bomb+city+ed+staskus%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1

Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. Nothing goes according to plan.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication