Visitors

Remarkable journey ended here in Miramichi
by Rick MacLean
It’s funny how things seem connected.
Recently I decided to run in the five-kilometre race in Newcastle, a monthly affair held without fail since January of 1989.
At one time I never missed a race, making 75 in a row when I was fast. But eventually the kids started keeping me busy and I was no longer fast. I stopped going.
Then my friend, David Morris, died in an accident three days before the August race. We’d run the 5k for years and it seemed like a fitting tribute. Others came out for the same reason.
David and I used to collect sayings as part of our years of running together:
“Shared pain is less pain” was a favourite. Workouts were easier if someone was doing it with you.
“Quantity has a quality all its own” meant sometimes just doing lots of running could make you a better racer, even if you weren’t running fast in those workouts.
Then there was the one I said to him one day about six years ago. He’d been invited to fly to Holland to go diving in the North Sea. There was a wreck a friend planned to explore and he wanted David to go along.
David was hesitant. The Opera House kept him busy. He didn’t know if he could afford to take the time. What did I think?
“In a few years you won’t have to think about it,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll be too old to go diving in the North Sea. You’ll have to say no.”
Good point, acknowledged David, who ended up not going because his friend’s plans fell apart. A year later David was diagnosed with cancer.
A pair of Nova Scotia runners I met at the August 5k reminded me, if you’re debating doing something, remember some day soon you may not have a choice.
Norris Whiston, 58, of Earltown, and his friend Jim Harpell, 63, of nearby Shortt’s Lake drove to Miramichi just to run the race. It was the end of a remarkable journey.
Miramichi was the last stop on a trip that took them across Canada. Between July 6 and the Aug. 21 race in Miramichi, the friends crossed the country in a bid to run a race in every province.
Harpell’s journey ended – in success – in Miramichi. Whiston’s trek was scheduled to end the next week in Truro, near where he lived, with a 10k race there.
It was just something he wanted to do and he thought he’d better get at it, Harpell said after finishing the Miramichi race in a very respectable time of 25 minutes and 45 seconds.
He was twice retired, once as the principal at the school where his friend worked, and more recently as the owner of a very successful restaurant in Nova Scotia.
“I was in the fortunate position of having to interview people who wanted to buy the restaurant,” he laughed. “It was a going concern.”
He took up cooking at age 12. There was a girl involved. Franny’s father worked in the cookhouse of the lumber camp near his childhood home. Harpell started dropping by to visit Franny and eat a piece of pie.
“After about the third visit her father said enough of that,” Harpell recalled. “He said if I was going to hang around, I had to earn my keep. He pulled up a chair, a bowl and some butter and told me to start mixing.”
He didn’t end up with Franny, but Harpell did learn to cook, which helped earn his way through school so he could become a teacher.
He and Whiston set out on their summer of racing July 6 with a 5k race in Stittsville in Ontario. Then they headed – by train – to races in Saskatoon, Edmonton, Prince George and finally Gimli, four races in 25 days in four provinces.
Harpell ran in Digby in early August to get his Nova Scotia race, then dashed to Port-aux-Basques in Newfoundland, Montreal and P.E.I. before wrapping up in Miramichi.
He laughed as he said with his summer of racing over, he was heading home to start a new business, catering to people in their homes. Cuisine with an international bent.
Seems he always wanted to do that too and now seemed like a good time to try it.