Category: Minas Basin

 

 

 

 

 

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Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. —Wallace Stegner

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I think one of the reasons I like to travel is because I’ve lived almost my entire life in one small part of the country: the Maine coast. Like the seamen who used to live here, I want to see the world but then return home—a kind of going out and coming back mirrored in the rising and falling of the tides I’ve grown up with. The ebb and flow of the ocean has embedded itself in my imagination, shaping the way I understand my life.

For example, when I was growing up in Yarmouth, Maine, I used to play—despite my mother’s warnings and wallops with her hairbrush—in what was called “The Black Ash,” acres of black soot and gravel created some twenty years earlier when the town’s paper company, at the turn of the twentieth century one of the largest in the world, burned to the ground, leaving a cavernous wasteland of toxic ash. In college, when I had dreams of becoming the next Ernest Hemingway, I used the Black Ash in my creative writing class as a symbol of how a once prosperous town had died. Today, however, the land is grass-covered and home to a post office, a number of businesses, doctors’ offices, and a large assisted-living facility. Ebb and flow.

What I don’t think I’ve ever realized before now is that for most of my life, I’ve tended to think of ebb as something negative or low, and flow as positive or high: low as in mud flats, empty, weak, enervated, poor; high as in more spiritual, more beautiful, full, at your peak, prosperous.

The thing is, I have great memories of the Black Ash. There were ash-gray canyons peopled with—depending on what movie I’d last seen at Carlton’s movie theater—Indians, space aliens, or Nazis. I’m sure the reason my mother didn’t want me playing there was because the landscape was punctuated with dangerously deep brick wells, but as far as I was concerned, the wells led down to a land of dinosaurs and curvaceous women in leopard-skin bikinis. In the 1950s, when I played in the Black Ash, the town was small and the people friendly. It was a great place to grow up.

When I moved back to Yarmouth as an adult, I took my two step-sons to the Black Ash a year or so before the town began to clean it up and got a chance to relive my childhood.

But, to be honest, one of the reasons I’ve since moved away again is because I never felt I belonged in the designer coffee shops, chiropractors’ and psychiatrists’ offices located where the Black Ash used to be.

Is high tide better than low tide? If you’re a swimmer, perhaps, but not for if you dig clams for a living. And while I may feel that the current political situation shows this country to be at its lowest ebb, I have conservative friends who feel we are at our highest point in history.

Ebb and flow, then, are relative, not only to each person, but, I find, to all of life. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Max Planck’s work in quantum physics has shown how everything is dependent upon everything else. You can’t have an “in” without an “out,” you can’t have an “up” without a “down,” and you can’t have an “ebb” without a “flow.” Everything is relative; everything is connected.  Something the Buddhists have been telling us all along.

My daughter’s death was certainly the lowest point in my life, a time when I felt all my hope, contentment, and well-being had ebbed away. And yet, it is only in the years following her death, that I have felt joy, felt overflowing with happiness. Before Laurie’s death, my emotional life was limited by my New England upbringing compounded by being raised in an alcoholic family. Laurie’s death broke me open. Only by going to the depths was I able to realize the heights, feel the joy of music, grandchildren, and, most important, the physical, emotional, and spiritual love I share with my wife.

A couple of years ago, Mary Lee and I drove through Nova Scotia and spent several hours walking Minas Basin, the site of the world’s highest tidal ranges, where twice a day, the Bay of Fundy ebbs and flows through the Minas Channel between Cape Split and Cape Sharp, completely emptying and filling the Basin. At high tide, the ocean seems vast, while at low tide we walked through a landscape of red sandstone and volcanic rocks, cliffs, and sea stacks. Now you can see ocean vistas like Minas Basin at high tide up and down the Northeastern coast, and you can see sandstone and volcanic rock all over this planet. It’s the relationship between the two landscapes —the tidal range of what can be as much as 50 feet—that makes them both unique and one and the same. Much the same way Laurie’s death has emptied me with grief and let joy into my life.

As I travel further along this pilgrimage through life, I’m more aware of how its ebbs and flows run like water-colors, painting a single picture, one I can only see by looking back, but which gives me hope for what lies ahead.

And I find myself more and more intrigued by the question: Who is the artist painting this picture?

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For more on Nova Scotia, you might be interested in my blogs: https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2017/10/16/here-comes-the-judge/ https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2017/10/02/rooting-around/)