"TO CATCH LOBSTERS, you have to think like one," says Allan MacDonald, who has been setting traps off Prince Edward Island for more than five decades. From his dad he had learned where the lobsters migrate and when, but he wasn't revealing any secrets to someone "from away," like me.
With his son, Charles, his daughter-in-law, Shelly, and their golden retriever, Duke, we had set out at 5 a.m. under a full moon from the island's south shore, red harbor lights shimmering in our wake. Also on board is Steve Ryan, a biology technician who is surveying the lobster catch as part of a study of the environmental effects of Confederation Bridge. The eight-mile-long ribbon of concrete, which opened in June 1997, connects Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province, to the mainland for the first time in 5,000 years. But it also cuts right through MacDonald's lobstering grounds in Northumberland Strait.
For five hours we've been hauling up lobster traps within sight of the bridge, which looks like a Roman aqueduct, its rounded arches disappearing into the fog. Every trap Charles hauls up on the hydraulic winch is coated with rock crabs, which scuttle off sideways across the deck. Steve measures each lobster with a pair of calipers and throws back females whose undersides are "berried" with black eggs.
MacDonald has been a vocal opponent of the bridge, arguing that a tunnel would have been less risky to the fishing industry, which brings in 70 million dollars (U.S.) a year, making it the island's third most lucrative industry, after agriculture and tourism. After a three-year ban on fishing in the construction zone around the bridge, MacDonald and others have been setting traps in its shadow — with rewarding results. Prices are high, and so far lobsters are plentiful. Dredging for bridge construction created ideal habitat for shellfish: Each of the 44 main pillars sits in a large, steep depression pitted with cavities, where lobsters and crabs have taken up residence.
Nevertheless MacDonald is dubious. "Here in the strait the lobster population goes in cycles. We've had ups and downs in my lifetime and in my father's before me." It's too early to tell, MacDonald says, what, if any, effect the bridge will have on his livelihood.
While people debate how the bridge may alter the environment of Northumberland Strait — from the swirl of the currents to the spring breakup of ice -- it is already changing the ebb and flow of life on the island itself, a place long defined by close-knit communities and a slow-paced way of life.
Prince Edward Island (P.E.I. for short) has only 137,000 year-round residents, but 740,000 tourists came over by ferry or plane in 1996. In 1997 the number swelled to 1.2 million-a direct consequence of the bridge, which can carry up to 4,000 vehicles an hour. Few dispute the convenience of driving off the island in 12 minutes instead of enduring summer waits of two or three hours for a 45-minute ferry trip. But many islanders worry that the bridge will bring crime and increase the pressure to build resorts along the unspoiled shoreline.
On P.E.I. change has often come slowly. Some parts of the island got paved roads and the lights," as electricity was called, only in the early sixties. The 1970s finally saw the demise of the one-room schoolhouse, and even more recently small family farms have given way to agribusinesses- operations of up to 3,000 acres that grow potatoes to feed the North American appetite for french fries. How islanders come to accept this newest-and potentially most far-reaching-form of change remains to be seen.

TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD Prince Edward Island seems a bucolic paradise. The first thing you notice is the red earth, and as you drive around the countryside in summer, you see potato vines blooming in white or purple, and tidy fields of golden grain and green clover stippled with bronze bales of hay. Around every corner, it seems, you glimpse the sea, with whitecaps dancing on the waves. Then you come to a village, with a shingled neo-Gothic church and a main street lined with trim wood-frame houses painted in yellows, greens, and reds.
"The words I associate with the island are intimate, compact, and pastoral," says Heath Macquarrie. Still fit at the age of 78, Macquarrie represented P.E.I. as a member of Parliament and a senator for 37 years, after starting out as a teacher. His white hair and sideburns frame a ruddy face that quickly dissolves into broad grin. "In summer I go swimming at the beach here in Victoria, and every day someone walks by who I've known for 40 years or more. You know your neighbors so well that you can help them out without offending their pride."
When someone dies on P.E.I., the family is inundated with casseroles and offers of help. Islanders are so tightly knit, in fact, that a local historian once quipped: "Everyone feels he has the divine right to know exactly what his neighbor is not only doing but thinking!"
"The dark side of the sense of community the lack of privacy, the lack of freedom to speak your mind," says David Weale, a silver-haired professor of history and native studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. Weale spoke out against the bridge and was criticized for it. He says that many prominent people — doctors and lawyers, for example-were afraid to take a stand one way or the other for fear of losing clients. "You can't openly offend anyone, because you're going to see them the next day and for the rest of your life."
But, Weale adds, "We islanders still know who we are and where we belong. Like the woman who was asked if she had traveled much. 'No,' she said thoughtfully.'Didn't have to. I was born here!'

OVER THE CENTURIES "The Island," as most people call it, has gone by a variety of names. In 1758 the British claimed one of the jewels of France's New World empire, later naming it after Prince Edward, the father of Queen Victoria. To the Micmac Indians, whose roots go back at least 2,000 years, it is Epekwitk (or Abegweit).
White settlers tried to push the Micmac off the island, clearing the land and exterminating the walrus, caribou, and bear the Indians depended on for food and clothing. Until 1970 most Micmac youngsters were sent away to residential schools and forbidden to speak their native tongue. Today fewer than 5 percent of Micmac, mainly elders, still speak their flowing, musical language. Healing sweat lodge ceremonies were also banned.
John Joe Sark, the first Micmac to graduate from the University of P.E.I., in 1979, calls it "a calculated case of cultural genocide." On the Lennox Island Reserve, one of four small areas set aside for the Micmac, I met Tommy Sark, 57, a distant cousin of John Joe's. Tommy, one of the last traditional artisans, makes elegant baskets of white ash. He was sent to a Roman Catholic residential school in Nova Scotia at the age of five, not knowing a word of English. His native name, Dummage, was changed to Tommy, and he was beaten by the nuns every time he spoke Micmac.
"Residential schooling wasn't exclusive to P.E.I.," says David Weale. "It was a national policy to efface as much native culture as possible in the belief that this would enable Indians to fit into mainstream society."
The Canadian government now admits this program had the opposite effect, banishing them to the margins of society. Forty percent of Micmac are unemployed or on welfare, including John Joe Sark, who lost his job as an economic development officer for the provincial government in 1994 due to downsizing.
What of the future? "I don't think the bridge will make any difference for my people," John Joe says, because few Micmac work in tourism. "To get the confidence we need to improve our lives, we have to develop pride in ourselves by discovering who we are and who we were."
To raise the visibility of his people, John Joe is writing a history of the Micmac, organizing exhibits, and reviving the sweat lodge ceremony, for which he gathers medicinal plants and tree bark and boughs. He goes to the wooded hills of the island's central dome to collect boughs of Canada yew on 55 acres owned by his friends Malcolm and Christine Stanley. A fern-lined path under a shimmering green canopy of sugar maples and birches leads to the Stanleys' front gate. Mounted on it is a clay sculpture of a man with bushy eyebrows and mustache, sticking out his tongue.

MALCOLM, 42, is a sculptor and potter with a puckish sense of humor. He has a flame-red beard and wears his long hair in a neat ponytail. Christine, an expert carpenter, built their rambling, cedar-shingled house with the help of friends and neighbors. As we drink coffee in their luxuriant garden, ruby-throated hummingbirds dive-bomb the scarlet runner beans blooming on the trellis, and their two enormous, woolly Newfoundland dogs try to snitch cinnamon rolls from the table.
The couple were part of the back-to-the land movement that began in the late 1960s and brought more than a thousand young people to the island from all over North America. "We wanted a place with lots of room where we could raise our children and keep animals," Christine tells me. "And P.E.I. has a reputation as a good place for craftspeople."
With their tie-dyed shirts, beads, and long hair, these newcomers stood out in P.E.I.'s conservative rural communities, and they had an influence far greater than their numbers. Some became journalists and environmental activists, while others, such as the Stanleys, flourished as artists and musicians, adding a new cultural dimension to island life.
Like many of their neighbors, including a violin maker and a tinsmith, the Stanleys don't lock their doors. "One time Malcolm put the 'Back in Ten Minutes' sign up at the pottery studio," recalls Christine, "but when he got to the house, the goats had all escaped. By the time he rounded them up and had some lunch, there was a group of Texans sitting around the porch at the studio. They kept saying,'Where can we sign up for this lifestyle?'"
I saw the same trusting attitude at the fruit and vegetable stands along the island's twisting roads. Prices are marked on a board, and you leave your money or take change from an unlocked box. Many islanders I met, the Stanleys among them, wonder whether self-serve stands and unlocked doors will become a thing of the past as increased traffic over the bridge depersonalizes P.E.I. But the Stanleys aren't going to change their ways. "None of our locks have worked for years, and I'm not going to get them replaced now," says Christine. "If we get robbed, our attitude is that anyone who wants something that desperately can have it."

AS WITH ANY MEGAPROJECT, Confederation Bridge has its champions as well as critics. For Pat Binns, Prince Edward Island's 50-year-old premier, it represents a tremendous opportunity. "It's going to make our exports cheaper and bring economic development," he says, predicting that the new accessibility will attract food-processing and high-tech companies.
But Heath Macquarrie, the retired senator, says the bridge may make it more economical for companies to centralize their operations on the mainland. A plant producing frozen french fries, for example, could truck potatoes directly to New Brunswick for processing, thus avoiding the need to operate a separate plant on the island, where land is more expensive.
The bridge is a boon for island exporters, such as Blair Horne, a third-generation potato farmer. His thousand-acre operation grows seed potatoes, which are sold to farmers for planting.
"Competition in the potato industry is fierce," says Blair, who exports his crop as far away as Florida. "You're up against every other grower in North America, and we need every edge we can get. With the ferry we had trucks idling for hours on the dockside, and there were days in winter when the boats weren't running because the ice was bad. Now we can get our product to our customers faster, and we can guarantee when it will be delivered.'"
Judging by the sharp increase in the number of visitors to P.E.I. after the bridge opened, tourism is another sure gainer. "If it's handled properly, tourism can be a wonderful resource," says David Weale, the history professor. "If it's not, it can be the death of the community. Assessing the latest fad and then gussying ourselves up to meet it is really a form of prostitution. And we've done a fair bit of that, with theme parks featuring King Tut's tomb and the space shuttle. What do they have to do with P.E.I.? We've destroyed dozens of vistas on the north shore, and if you fast-forward this trend, I think much of the charm could be eroded."
It's hard to imagine anything undermining the sites associated with the Anne of Green Gables books, written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. These Canadian classics, which draw hundreds of thousands of tourists to the north shore every year, tell the story of a spunky red-haired orphan named Anne Shirley, who comes to P.E.I. when she is adopted by an elderly man and his sister. They had requested a boy to help with the farm chores, so when Anne arrives, she is at first unexpected and unwanted.
Anne's most enthusiastic fans are the 12,000 Japanese, mainly women, who visit P.E.I. every year. The novels are studied in Japanese schools and have attained cult status there because of their portrayal of the island as a rural paradise.
"Happy, happy, I'm so very happy," says Yoshiko Aono, who has traveled halfway around the world from Yokohama, Japan.! "For 30 years I dreamed of coming here. It's so green, so peaceful."
Why the fascination with "Anne of Red Hair," as she is known in Japan? "Anne is the girl I wanted to be when I was growing up," Mrs. Aono says. While the novels are often seen as sentimental children's literature, they have strong feminist themes, and Japanese girls and women admire Anne's plucky spirit.
In a minibus with Mrs. Aono, her husband, and 20 other Japanese visitors, mainly women, I spend a day visiting New London, where Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874, the farmhouse at Park Corner where she was married, and her grave in Cavendish. This garish town is the epicenter of Anne memorabilia, and every other store is named after Marilla, Matthew, or another character from the novels.
Our driver tells me that he brought us here from Charlottetown, the capital, by a route chosen to avoid as much unsightly strip development as possible. The goal: a rural image of P.E.I. for Japanese visitors.

PAT BINNS, the island's premier, acknowledges the risks of dressing up P.E.I. His government plans to introduce stricter zoning laws to prevent the spread of what he calls "Coney Island development." Binns wants to encourage sea kayaking, bird-watching, and other types of ecotourism activities that local outfitters are now beginning to offer. "The challenge," he says, "is to preserve the best of what we have."
For 30 years Ian MacQuarrie, a biologist and one of the founders of the Island Nature Trust, has been fighting to keep commercial activity off the Greenwich Dunes on the northeastern coast. In addition to extensive sand dunes, the thousand-acre site protects a diversity of habitats, including boggy areas with rare orchids and a secluded beach where the piping plover, a threatened bird, nests. The trust has staved off plans to build condominiums, a golf course, and a marina on the peninsula, which is now slated to become part of P.E.I. National Park, the only one on the island.
Ian and his wife, Kate, the executive director of the trust, invite me to hike into the dunes. Ian points out how the sand hills have engulfed a spruce forest and killed the trees. "All it takes is one good storm. It's amazing how things can shift." As the dunes move, they leave behind crescent- shaped relict ridges -- the only known example of this landform in North America.
At the beach -- so dazzling in the August sunlight that I have to squint -- a few couples are lounging under umbrellas, their kids collecting shells or leaping over the waves. After walking a hundred yards around a point, we are alone, except for a pair of great blue herons fishing along the shore, as still as driftwood. "The way to appreciate a place like this is to sit and soak it up for a few hours," Ian says.
Kate spots an osprey carrying a wiggling fish in its talons. Then two bald eagles fly over us, a species the MacQuarries now see more often. Since DDT was banned in the U.S. and Canada, the raptors have slowly been making a comeback on the island, and 35 chicks have been banded in an adopt-an-eagle program.
We stop in a meadow where a developer, George Diercks of Long Island, New York, had planned to build a resort. Instead, after a land-use hearing, he agreed to swap the dunes site for 500 acres of abandoned farmland nearby, where he plans to build a hotel and golf course. "This way everyone wins," Diercks later explained. "The dunes and Paleo-Indian artifacts on the site will be protected, and there will be an interpretation center for visitors."
On the way back to the parking lot we meet Lynn and Phil Brown, from Tunbridge, Vermont. "This is a jewel of a place," says Phil, a physician. "I can't remember ever seeing so many shorebirds. And there are miles and miles of beaches with no rubbish on them. There's an opportunity to avoid doing what other coastal areas have done. On P.E.I. the beaches are still accessible. In New Hampshire, where I spent summers as a boy, most of the coast is cut off from the public."
For four summers the Browns have traveled to P.E.I. by ferry. This year, however, they came over Northumberland Strait on the bridge. "It was weird," says Lynn, a teacher. "You no longer feel like you're crossing over to an island. Now it's like driving any highway -- you just zip along, and you're here. I hope it doesn't take the mystique away."
The Browns are coming back next summer to find out.

Revisit Green Gables.
Go on a searching expotition to AltaVista though you're not likely to find anything.
Go on a searching expotition to Lycos if you think it'll do any good.
Are you a Houyhnhnm or a Yahoo? Yahoo, of course. We're all Yahoos.
Go ahead and leave me. "Nobody minds, nobody cares." -- Eeyore, from The House at Pooh Corner