Nova Scotia (2 page)

   
The wind was out of the north on this day and it was warm and
sunny. The sky was a robin’s egg blue. It was a rare day. I parked
my car on sand and began the long hike out over the stones and
boulders that would be the sea floor in a matter of hours. Lower
East Chezzetcook is a kind of rock star of coastal erosion. Those
in the field are aware of how quickly the sea is sweeping the land
away here. It reminds us all of just how much this coast is
“drowning.”

   
For me, this is one of those sacred places. Sacred because of
what it feels like to be out here, far removed from civilization,
on such a stunning day. Sacred because the elements of sea, sun,
rock and sand conspire to create such raw beauty. And sacred
because it underscores how powerful the sea still remains in all
its many vocations of destruction and creation.

   
The stones beneath my feet require my personal attention.
They are round and smooth and some are slippery with sea
vegetation. I perform the familiar dance of many a coastal hike and
recall the time I hiked here over a decade ago. On that day I
carried a camera with film. Now I carry a digital camera. And a
cell phone. Despite how remote this place feels, I discover the
cell phone still has a signal. I turn it off, fearing the
technology might somehow ruin the moment.

   
I find my way to the spit of sand that faces across the
inlet, take my shoes off and absorb the sun and breathe the sea
air. I think of lost continents and lost history as I listen to the
clanging of the channel buoy and watch the swirling gulls. Although
a month of raw damp weather will follow, right now, this feels like
summer. I walk further on towards my destination on sand and turn
around to study how my human footprint commingles with the
footprints of gulls. It makes me think of sheet music on a page.
There are bleached boards scattered here and small shells and sea
oats. Fragments of debris – a lobster trap plastic tag numbered
138, bits of refuse and Styrofoam. I have a flashback to another
day when I walked the beach at Lawrencetown, collecting debris that
I knew had once been the cabin wall of Swiss Air Flight 111 that
had crashed into the waters near Peggy’s Cove.

   
All along this coastline, things wash ashore. I think of
gains and losses in my own life, in all the lives around
me.

   
My shoes back on my feet, I hike north towards where the
fishing village once stood. Storms and tides have dismantled what
looks to be a duck blind where blue and red empty shotgun shells
litter the ground. Nearby, in what used to be the small protected
harbour, two ducks are enjoying their afternoon in safety. There
are some sea grasses growing here and glasswort and orach and sea
rocket and a low thorny bush that must be some wild version of
currant. And wild strawberries, already in flower. How these plants
survive the ravages of winter sea storms and inlet shelf ice that
would sweep over this finger of land is beyond me. But clearly they
will hang on until the land is fully swept away.

   
As will the orange lichen, as bright and cheerful as they
were in 1996. Author Bill Bryson notes, “It may take a lichen more
than half a century to attain the size of a shirt button.” These
lichen are the dimensions of an outstretched hand or larger. Bryson
also observes that they are “just about the hardiest visible living
organisms on earth.” I am in the presence of
heroes.

   
And then I arrive at the place where a thriving fishing
village once stood thirty years ago. Eleven years ago, a few
buildings still remained. Now it is all gone. All except for a
single rust-scarred and corroded corpse of a cookstove, the large
bleached beams of what was once a wharf scattered like pick-up
sticks on the higher sand ridge and a scattering of rusty nails and
hinges.

   
In the last decade, the sea has all but erased the history of
this place. And the odd thing is that, right now, right here, it is
all so recklessly beautiful on a day like this that it feels as it
should be. A butterfly sails by and there is a small battalion of
white moths.  I get low to the ground and study how those
thorny vines, those wild currants, have rooted themselves into only
the most protected pockets of land that remain. Humans have
abandoned this place for the most part, but life goes
on.

   
There are no fishing boats in the inlet or at sea within my
vision. Some still fish the inshore but as they say, “It’s not like
it used to be.” The herring schools are chased with sonar and then
scooped by nets and machines and hauled ashore where they are
vacuumed into waiting trucks. And soon they will be gone like all
the rest.

   
Sitting to ponder the scene before me again, to revel and
meditate and brood, I am reminded that on a day like this where I
have fled from all my worldly duties and responsibilities, the
world continues on without me. This is both worrisome and
comforting.

   
On the trek back across a thousand acres of rocks, I pick up
one small smooth stone the shape of a kidney (not a heart) and
carry it with me. I think of the “recent” history of this province
again, those few 400 years wherein European settlers and
descendants made their mark on this place. Another blink of an eye
in terms of the history of the earth. And as I wobble on my journey
across this sea floor on my way back to solid land, I once again
think of what a privilege it is to live here on this coast where
the sea meets the land and showers us with its treasures even as it
threatens to swallow us up.

Lesley Choyce

Lawrencetown Beach

June 18, 2007

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

In the winter, the “beach” at
Lawrencetown Beach disappears. Formidable storms assault this
northern coast, pounding the land with waves that gouge and suck at
the sand until it is pulled out to the deep. In the summer, it’s a
different story. The sea kindly returns the sand to the shoreline
and on a crisp, clear August morning at seven o’clock you can find
me alone on this beach, walking the edge of the North Atlantic, a
sea that is as placid as a mountain lake, with water as transparent
as a pane of glass. To anybody watching, it might appear that I’m
searching for something, but the truth is I’ve already found what I
was looking for. It’s been more than thirty-five years since I made
my personal discovery of Nova Scotia, and having moved here and
staked my claim on a five-acre homestead at Lawrencetown Beach, I
can say in all honesty that I have also found myself.

   
When I immigrated to Nova Scotia, it was clear in my mind
that a geographical move would enhance my life. My goal was to
become a Nova Scotian and it was secondary that I need also become
a Canadian. I didn’t mind all tghat much really, given the fact
that my allegiance to this coastal province was so strong that I
was ready to swear allegiance to any flag or queen necessary. Hugh
MacLennan once mentioned to me that as recently as the 1950s,
passengers disembarking from ships in Halifax Harbour were asked by
the customs men if they were foreign, Canadian or Nova Scotian.
Hugh had always answered the latter and I can understand why. Every
state or province undoubtedly nurtures loyalty to its soil, but a
land nearly surrounded by water and steeped in a history of the sea
suggests kinship between the salt in the blood and the salt in the
air.

   
Because I live a rural life, I like to think that I am more
closely linked with the past than those who live in cities. I’m not
a historian but I live inside the history that is this place. My
200-year-old farmhouse is a window into the past. One day when I
was cutting through a wall to put in a new door, I uncovered an
alarming fact. I discovered that my house was built those two
centuries ago with wood that had already been used before. Whoever
had fashioned this home, above this once lonely stretch of salt
marsh, sand dune and sea, had been a scavenger like me. Some closer
investigation reveals that it was not a mere barn that had been tor
n down to provide the sills and beams, but the lumber recycled here
was the wood of a sailing ship, ravaged by a storm and left
stranded on the beach. My house was once a ship. And with the
original captain long dead, I’mr the only one here to sail her on
into the twenty-first century, complete with the aid of satellite
dish, online information networks, fax, modems and
call-waiting.

   
Historians often speak with some despair of this province as
a place that has been out of step with major industrialized
development and the inherent blessings that come along with that.
There is for me, however, great comfort in this thought that the
world has passed us by. Now I can live here with fewer frills,
fewer distractions, a limited amount of noise and observe the
madness from a distance.

   
But this is also a province of people who still long for the
good old days, the Golden Age of Sail, that sort of thing. Not far
from where seventy-foot schooners once sailed their way along this
coast on serious business, I now scoot along with the wind in a
mere plaything of a sailing ship, less than five metres long with a
hull of fibreglass and a Dacron sail. I’m a novice in the hands of
the wind and grow to respect its many moods as I tack east and
west, learning that the quickest route from point A to point B is
not necessarily a straight line. *

   
In my immediate neighbourhood, whole headlands have been and
gone in a matter of decades. Human history has made only a little
dent in this community on the Eastern Shore, a mere thirty-two
kilometres from the city of Halifax. But the sea has carved and
scraped the coast with such serious intent that cartographers might
just as well start all over with their work of aerial mapping every
five years. The sea has created the history of this place more than
colonial politics, more than Confederation and even more than all
the demands of the twenty-first century. To live by this powerful
North Atlantic is to be intimate with the dreams and fears of
seafaring men who sailed this coast and also to laugh with the
gulls or shudder with the pounding waves at the many facets of the
ocean.

   
Wind and water and wave. Three of the great personal and
literary influences in my life. I share a passion for the sea with
the fishermen and sailors of the previous centuries, but I doubt
that I have suffered the hards hips that they have. I started
surfing when I was thirteen, further south on a warmer shore. Now I
surf a cold but immaculate wave, summer or winter, a stone’s throw
from my doorstep. The waves form as the wind pushes against the
water some 160  kilometres off shore. The storm subsides, but
the waves drive on through deep waters until they reach a stony
reef along the rib of land that is Lawrencetown Beach. If I’ve
walked the morning shoreline and observed that the waves are
plentiful, then I give up my meditative trek along the sand and put
on my wetsuit, grab my board and paddle out to meet them. As they
rear and sometimes rage in their final challenge of the coastline,
I paddle hard and tag along to tap their strength and energy. If
you don’t mind cold water, Nova Scotia is a surfing paradise. The
waves make their long pilgrimage here and rise up from the depths
as they hit the shallows along the shore. In their end is my
beginning, because I begin as many days as possible out on the
beach or out on the waves and I feed off their positive energy
until I am fully recharged for another day of
work.

   
Lawrencetown itself, for all of its obscurity, is a place of
historic beginnings, and my link to the past here is my
relationship to the elements that shape this place. As for all of
Nova Scotia, the sea has demanded pre-eminence in the history
books, even in the story of this town.

   
The first peoples of this province, the Mi’kmaq,
came to my beach in the summers for fish and mussels, and the
salt-water lake beyond my garden was known as
Negsogwakade
or the “place of the eel traps.” This was a fertile,
generous destination to spend the warm summer months feeding on
eels, gaspereaux, smelt, salmon, clams, quahogs and waterfowl. But
each year, the Mi’kmaq sensibly retreated away from the coast,
further into the spruce forests to avoid the hostility of winter
storms.

   
Early attempts by Europeans to settle Lawrencetown ended in
failure. The first white people to try and make a go of it were the
French. They were not as intrusive as the English who were to
follow and did not mind that this area had no great harbour for big
ships. English surveyor-general Charles Morris, in his official
report of 1752, missed the advantages of this area altogether,
reporting that “the harbour to the [French] settlementf is but
indifferent, it being a salt water river or creek, with a shoal at
its entrance.” The Acadian settlers, however, had already been
finding sustenance from the fish and shellfish and most likely
built an aboiteau, a style of dyke, so as to control the tidal flow
on the marsh and allow for plentiful salt hay. a

   
In search of the remains of anything Acadian, my daughters
and I have often set sail in my second-hand Laser across the wide,
shallow base of Lawrencetown Lake, which drains into the sea. The
forest has long since swallowed up anything remotely resembling a
community. There are no signs of the Acadians.