I often read that food is love, but it’s also memory. Such is the case with the burger shack of Murray Beach, New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritimes.
Campbellton was a waypoint, a dot on the map between days 2 and 3 of driving north from Boston to the Gaspé Peninsula. We arrived late and rushed to grab food in the bar attached to our HoJo, attached to an aging mall, attached to the bridge to Quebec.
We didn’t know what we were going to get ourselves into. We had just spent a week camping and hiking and were about to enter our first “real” city in days. All we knew about Moncton was that it held about 70,000 people and that it had bars in it that would be open and serving beer.
We didn’t know if he was going to kill us or invite us into his home. We had been shooting photos in a nearby parking lot and he must have seen us from his window.