Eden Bay : Martin Falls (1)
The other "borough" of Eden Bay were P. R. went to preach & teach the Beauty of Writing after Kathy Vale was Martin Falls. (Martin Dumarais and his brother Jacques were the place's first settlers, and as such got to name a lot of its features ; you'll see). With Sooky County and Hummingcrest (that she only visited very briefly and has no pictures of, having forgotten her camera), it is the most agricultural part of the amalgamated Eden Bay city. It is in fact quite a sleepy little town, which only awakens in summer because it's the most touristic part of the region -- apart from agriculture, almost everything is geared to tourism. But it's not the noisy, frantic kind of tourism ; people come to Martin Falls from all over the region to spend their summer in peace. No music festivals, no summer theatre, no races, no nothing. You come, you boat, you swim, you walk around, you eat (well, as in the whole region), you get a tan, period. Even for Country Girl Extraordinaire P. R., it was a bit much -- or more accurately a bit not enough ( so she escaped once or twice again to Zinfandel. More of that later.)
The few things Martin Falls can be proud of are of the eggheady kind, in fact : the Bio Research Institute, which work la mano in la mano with the local outreach of the regional university, mostly dedicated to the sciences -- fortunately, P. R. is writing science fiction, and so she paradoxically received at once a slightly better welcome here than in more literary stuck-up Kathy Vale.
The local buildings of the Regional University :
It's close to the small canalized part of the Martin River -- the Zabnises' canal program didn't play as well here as in Kathy Vale ; the residents obdurately want their river and streams untamed.
Also, the claim to fame, for Martin Falls, is that it is the place where the two main railroads intersect. Hard to contain one's excitement...
But there is at least one spooky story still running around the town, of the farmer on whose (mostly boggy) lands the interchange was built, who cursed the whole Zabnis lineage and disappeared. His angry ghost is said to reside in a giant oak that was blasted by lightning on a Dark and Stormy Night, way back then.
The main attraction, of course is Martin's Lake (yawn...) , fed by the Sainte-Eulalie (Ah !) river and its small bifurcated tributary, le Ru-à-Jacques (of course...)
The place is mainly dedicated to agriculture, as I said That's where almost all the region's produce comes to be shipped outside, to ZInfandel and to Eden Bay proper.
Also people like to garden. A lot.
This is the street where P. R. lived during her stay in Martin Falls, on the second storey of the little castle-looking hotel (it IS named Castlebrook Hotel !), left bottom corner. Peace. Quiet. Ommmmm. At least she could sleep soundly.
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