Saint John

Saint John announces itself with fog before it announces itself with anything else. I arrived by car on a July morning that should have been bright and instead was wrapped in a grey blanket so thick the harbour cranes appeared as silhouettes before they appeared as objects. This is Canada’s oldest incorporated city — chartered in 1785, when Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution landed here and built a working port from scratch — and it wears its age unapologetically, in Victorian rowhouses gone slightly gray at the edges and a downtown that never bothered to prettify itself for tourists. I liked it immediately, the way you like a fishing town in Brittany that has not yet discovered boutique hotels.

The city’s relationship with water is its whole personality. This is a port that has always worked for a living — pulp and paper, dry docks, container ships — and the Bay of Fundy’s tides make sure nobody forgets who is really in charge. I spent a morning at the Reversing Falls, where the Saint John River meets the bay in a narrow rocky gorge, and watched the phenomenon that gives the spot its name: at low tide the river rushes out toward the bay over underwater ledges, and at high tide the incoming Fundy water is so much higher that it forces the river to flow backward, upstream, through the same gorge. Locals now call them the Reversing Rapids, since “falls” oversells the vertical drop, but the reversal itself is entirely real and genuinely strange to watch — a river changing its mind twice a day because an ocean tells it to.

Irving Nature Park

Just south of downtown, Irving Nature Park surprised me more than anything in the city center. It is a chunk of coastal peninsula — salt marsh, rocky beach, spruce forest — donated and maintained by the Irving family (whose name is on half of New Brunswick’s industry) and kept almost entirely wild. I walked the Ragged Point trail at low tide with fog still clinging to the spruce trees, and came around a bend to find a bald eagle standing on the exposed mudflat, entirely unbothered by my presence, working through a crab it had caught. Harbour seals hauled out on the rocks further along, and the trail signs mentioned migratory shorebirds stopping here by the tens of thousands during the fall passage. It is free, it is fifteen minutes from downtown, and almost nobody outside New Brunswick has heard of it.

The Old City Market

The Saint John City Market, operating continuously since 1876 out of a hall with a hull-shaped wooden ceiling built by ship’s carpenters, is where I understood the city’s food culture best. Dulse — the dried purple seaweed harvested along the Fundy shore — is sold here by the bag like a local snack food, salty and strange and something I now genuinely crave. I bought a bag, ate it walking the waterfront, and understood why Maritimers treat it the way the French treat a good saucisson: an acquired local pride they will happily explain to you at length.

When to go: June through September, and check tide times before visiting the Reversing Falls — you want to see it near both high and low tide if your schedule allows, ideally six hours apart on the same day. Expect fog most mornings even in summer; it usually burns off by early afternoon.