The year of the Tent Dwellers festival is here

He went over to Eddie, and said, "Tell me about it, Eddie. Where are you going, this time?"

His friend unfolded to him what Paine thought was a marvelous plan. Eddie had been dreaming about a place in Nova Scotia, a place where he had been before, but this time he was thinking of farther out into the wilderness, the deep unknown, somewhere even the guides had never been. Stray loggers might have been in there, and perhaps some native people, but sportsmen never. Not even the government had made complete surveys of the area.

The main thing was that the area swarmed with trout, in one area the trout supposedly the size of a man's leg. The two men were excited as they talked together, making the trip in their imaginations. "Somewhere through the night, across a waste of cold, lay the land we had visited, still waiting to be explored."

And thus began the celebrated journey of the Tent Dwellers, which took place in 1908, and which this year is being celebrated in a series of events that promises to be one of the province's most important attractions.

Eddie Breck went on ahead, in April, to lay the groundwork for the trip, leaving Paine behind to purchase supplies. In June, he joined Breck, taking the steamer from Boston to Yarmouth. The night he sailed there was a storm, Paine clinging to his bunk and groaning, but in he morning he found a wholesome restaurant in Yarmouth and tucked into good salt ham, eggs, and both pumpkin and mince pie.

Paine, a close friend of Mark Twain, wrote in his famous book, The Tent Dwellers, that he had always wondered where the pie belt went after it reached Boston. Now he knew that it extended across to Yarmouth, and up through Nova Scotia to Halifax. More than 100 years before, he said, certain New Englanders, fonder of King George than of George Washington, went to Nova Scotia and took the pie belt along with them. "They maintained their general habits and speech, too, which in Nova Scotia today are almost identical with those of New England."

Paine took a train from Yarmouth to Annapolis, and went inland by horse and wagon to the edge of the wilderness, Milford, where the hotel he stopped at still exists as the outstanding Milford House resort. From there he, Breck and a pair of guides, Del Thomas and Charles Charleston, made their way to Jakes Landing, in what is now Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site.

They embarked on a fishing, canoeing and camping expedition that took them through the waters of the Park, through the backcountry and down into what is now the Tobeatic, their adventures all recorded in The Tent Dwellers. That book has now been reissued by Nimbus Publishing, bound with a large Department of the Environment map of the Tobeatic, and last week was high on the provincial best-seller list.

Organizers representing a host of public and private organizations have been hard at work planning the centenary celebrations. In May the festival will be kicked off with a recreation of the original journey, the launch to take place at Milford House on May 17. The public is invited to attend the launch events, which will also take place at Jakes Landing in Kejimkujik. A group of paddlers will retrace the journey taken by the tent dwellers. People will have a chance to relive a part of the journey, one of the opportunities being on Tent Dwellers Rivers Day, June 8, which will also celebrate the tenth anniversary of the designation of the Shelburne River as a Canadian Heritage River.

A Nova Scotia Guides Meet will be a featured Tent Dwellers event in July, as will Parks Day events at Kejimkujik, all celebrating the journey. In August, a major canoe festival at Kejimkujik will feature paddle and canoe building, fly fishing, wilderness food preparation, basket making, seat caning and canoeing. Interpretive programs will enable people to take part in the magic of the Tent Dwellers' trip.

There are dozens of other events in the works, and I will keep you posted.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com.