The tropics may come ashore here as well every few years with a blast of warm tropical wind strong enough to knock down power lines or reduce a barn to a pile of kindling but it is only a rowdy tourist with a temporary visa. For this sea, this Atlantic beyond our shores, is a northerly thing. We live in a cold place, shaped by the whims of the North Atlantic. Unaware visitors from America or Ontario are still paralyzed by the cold as they jump into those clear, enticing blue waters of Martinique Beach on a warm summer day. Even in summer the ocean water stings, electrifies, even burns, because it is so cold. The arctic ice remains there to the north, forever venting its cold. The cold water slowly drifts south on the Atlantic side of Nova Scotia and saves us from ever having to worry about air-conditioning in the summer.
The Grey Rocks of Fishermen’s Beach
“Farewell to Nova Scotia, you seabound coast, Let your mountains dark and dreary be.” So goes the vintage song that Helen Creighton saved for us as she travelled the province to collect traditional music of these shores. “Dark and dreary” are not usually two words found in any tourist brochure, but along with the appreciation of stunning clear days and bright sunshine, I’ve cultivated a love for the infinite shades of grey that haunt the sea and the sky of this coast.
It was on such a grey day in November 1995 that I was hiking a remote headland – or what was left of a headland – at the mouth of Chezzetcook Inlet, with a photographer friend, Len Clifford. We drove the twisting, turning road of the east side past Deep Cove, Gaetz Island, Roasts Hay Island, Red Island and across the bridge of Little River. I parked the car at the end of the road and we had about one and a half kilometres or so to walk out along a long, grim, stony spit known as Misener’s Island (although it wasn’t really an island, not yet, anyway). We had a northeast wind howling at our backs as we stayed on the landward side of Story Head, headed toward a place labelled on the topographic map as “Fishermen’s Beach.” The grey rocks bloomed with orange lichen, choppy waves rattled the stones of the shoreline and the inlet of Chezzetcook looked dark (yes, even dreary), deep asnd ominous.
We hiked out to the remains of what had once been a thriving fishing village thirty years ago. In three short decades so much had changed. The fish had diminished, the fishermen and -women had retreated inland to tether their lives more securely to mainland life. But something else was gone as well. The land. There wasn’t much left here but sea, stone and stubbles of drifted wood.
Once there had been a road out here. Once there had been solid soil, grass, dunes and stunted spruce trees, but the sea was moving landward, drowning the coast, shipping the soil away, leaving only this. If the tide was higher, we’d have to take a boat to get here. As it was, we could stay almost dry on our hike here to the haunting but beautiful remains of the fishing village where old houses, boat sheds and wharves still remained. u
The sea continues to carve away at Nova Scotia. In the most basic way, we remain shaped by the sea. The sculpting is not at some beginning or anywhere near some end point. But we are in the midst of it. It was going on elong before we arrived and will continue on long after we are gone. We are still just barely beginning to learn how to live with it, to use this momentum, to understand that the immense power of tide and wave and storm and erosion is both a curse and a blessing.
With a photographer’s eye, Len pointed out a great piece of sea-ravaged wood sculpted into something that looked like caribou antlers. Other driftwood, the remains of the roots of a tree, looked like bizarre alien creatures, yet others presented themselves like sculptured figurines. When we arrived at the fish shacks, our ears stinging with the cold, we noticed that several of the buildings were jammed into each other at odd angles. Higher tides had floated them off foundations and bumped them together as if they were cars with clumsy drivers. As the tide withdrew, they remained like this. Property lines once recorded in legal documents in Halifax would have little meaning now that the sea had called the mortgage on the soil.
Inside a boat shed, wavy lines of salt along the rough plank walls marked the intrusive tides of spring and fall. All the furniture inside one small saltbox house had been moved into the cramped quarters of the upstairs as if to imply that as the sea took over the real estate, all you had to do was move one flight up. Other buildings had given up all hope already and collapsed into the rubble of rock. One remaining house, with curled asphalt shingles of bright blue crowded over with brilliant yellow orange lichen, look oddly out of place, like some gaudy oriental pagoda.
Broken lobster traps littered the community of ghosts. Shards of yellow rope were everywhere. No other human soul walked the stones, but the inlet was alive with the cacophony of Canada geese and the sea oats hung with small grey and brown migrating birds. Len spotted one lone weasel who followed us from pillar to post as we surveyed this amazing ghost town. He watched our every move from beneath a dozen fish sheds, always wary but intensely curious. Did he remember raucous, happy summer parties here where bottles of beer were emptied and the air was alive with human noise, a time when scraps of food and living mice were plentiful? Or was he just a tourist like us, passing through?
As the wind increased from the north and began to blow an impertinent snow in our eyes, we retraced our steps back to shore as the tide began to spank against the higher stones. And I kept asking myself why this place, today so stark, so sea-weary and so “dark and dreary,” was also so amazingly beautiful. But it was, without a doubt, beautiful.
The Spiritual Link to the Sea
We cannot hold back the sea on this drowned coast, although we’ve tried. We’ve experimented with tapping the energies of tidal forces and wind power, but not since the days of sailing ships have we been truly comfortable with harmonizing our needs with what the sea could provide. The sea has at once diminished our land and enhanced it in a multitude of ways. It has given life and taken life. It will take little notice of the politics of Quebec or a Maritime Union or who has won the latest provincial or federal elections.
The wood of the shacks of the East Chezzetcook village would eventually rot or float away. What’s left of that bit of land will be a rocky shoal, a good shallow place for undersea plant life and, if we’re lucky, fish. Lawrencetown Lake, where I first learned to sail my little Laser, will have successfully been reunited with its parent, the sea. The waves will have swept away the living-room furniture of my neighbours who built their homdes in the lowlands, entrusted to the care of the barrier rocks above the beach that try their best, but fail, to hold back the sea.
If the current trends of rising sea levels from global climate change continue to enhance the natural advance of the ocean, all of the above may happen much sooner than expected. We aren’t talking about a thousand years here, not necessarily even centuries. A generation, perhaps, and the sea will lap at the foot of my driveway. Water Street in Halifax at that time will be exactly that. The sea will prove to be the most successful privateer ever to make port at that historic city.
I’m hoping that we learn well the lessons of the past. We cannot undo the mistakes we’ve made but we may yet learn to avoid repeating them. The sea, even as it has intruded into our lives, may be gracious enough to bring back the fish, the forest may be benevolent enough, given time, to undo the pillage of clear-cutting. May we gently tap the tides and the winds and leave the coal in the ground to compress further into diamonds and spare the lives of miners.
Today, Nova Scotia remains a unique and singular place. As the sea has shaped the land and its history, so too has it shaped a spirit that is intrinsic to our individuality and our culture. This spirit, so obvious in our literature, our art, our music and the tales that are told in the kitchens and backyards around the province, is our greatest strength and certainly worth preserving. Let the wharves wash off to sea. We can always build new ones. But we cannot afford to let drift the spiritual link to the sea that sustains who we are.
Chapter 46
Chapter 46
Air Tragedy at Sea
That night, rescue vessels and aircraft, aided by local fishermen in their boats, mounted a rescue operation of heroic proportions but it soon evolved into an attempt to recover the debris floating in the sea. The world’s attention was directed to small villages around St. Margaret’s Bay, where Nova Scotians hosted families of the victims and offered food, shelter and support. The Canadian Coast Guard, Navy and RCMP worked tirelessly for months as the recovery operation continued. Navy divers searched in dark and deadly conditions undersea among the razor-sharp metal wreckage of the aircraft to retrieve the cockpit voice and data recorders and human remains for identification. The overall operation continued until December of 1999 when ninety-eight percent of the aircraft had been retrieved and all who had been on board were identified by forensic efforts.
An investigation determined that the cause of the accident was faulty wiring in the entertainment system and the flammable coating of the wires themselves. In the days that followed the crash, debris washed up on the shores of the bay and westerly winds pushed a considerable amount of it along the coasts of the province. My own morning walk along Lawrencetown Beach several days after the crash led me to dozens of pieces of what was once the inside cabin wall of Swissair 111. It reminded me of the marine disasters of ships down through the centuries along this coast and how unforgiving the sea can be when our technology fails us at sea or in the air.
Tar Ponds, Pipelines and Green Power
If it’s any consolation to Cape Breton, some environment watchers in Canada say that the lingering mess known as the Sydney Tar Ponds is not the worst contaminated site in Canada, that in fact such honour goes to Hamilton Harbour in Ontario. Nonetheless, as of 2007, the Tar Ponds remain an environmental nightmare comprising thirty-one hectares of a coastal estuary containing 700,000 metric tonnes of sludge laced with heavy metals, dioxin, other coal-based contaminants and at least 3.8 tonnes of PCBs.
There is a long legacy of failed federal and provincial attempts to solve the problem. 1995 saw the abandonment of an incinerator project and in 1996 the Nova Scotia government brain-stormed a scheme to bury the place under tonnes of slag, a proposal which did not go over well with the citizens of Sydney. In 1999, the newly formed Joint Action Group began work to come up with a community-supported solution to the problem, but it wasn’t until 2007 that a $400 million program was announced to incinerate the PCBs, solidify the rest of the gunk with a massive quantity of Portland cement and then tidy things up with a plastic cover and then soil and grass. It’s safe to say that controversy still surrounds the clean-up, which has been at least twenty-two years in the works and has generated 620 technical reports and 950 public meetings.
While Sydney is still hoping to recover from the persistent pollution of hundred-year-old coal and oil technology, the province continues to encourage oil and gas exploration off our shores, providing incentives for new exploration and strategies to tap some of that wealth in the form of oil royalties for provincial needs – even as Ottawa attempts to siphon off more than its fair share of the wealth.
A flurry of activity in 1999 included natural gas companies committing $60 million to explore nineteen offshore locations. North America’s largest natural gas plant was opened in Goldboro on the Eastern Shore and, by December of that year, natural gas was flowing out of the province to distant markets through the Maritimes and Northeast Pipeline. Eventually, some of that gas would find its way to the Nova Scotia Power plant in Dartmouth, providing a significantly cleaner means of producing electricity. While the provincial government once had a fairly direct involvement in developing offshore oil and gas, in 2001, it got out of the business by selling Nova Scotia Resources Limited, a final gesture towards privatization in that arena.
Although we are “blessed” with some abundance of offshore hydrocarbons, retrieving those resources is both expensive, dangerous, and the resulting fuels will do little to slow the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Sadly, relatively little has been accomplished here to further develop tidal power by tapping the monumental potential of the Bay of Fundy. On the other hand, wind energy in Nova Scotia has come of age. While early wind pioneers like Neal Livingston in Cape Breton seem to be routinely snubbed by Nova Scotia Power, other community-based wind companies like the Colchester-Cumberland Wind Field Inc. are developing environmentally-friendly wind generation stations to sell clean, green wind power to the utility and feed electricity directly into the provincial power grid. There is agreement from all concerned that the potential for coastal wind energy in Nova Scotia is enormous.
Two Juans and the Losers
Near midnight on September 29, 2003, Hurricane Juan hit the shores of Nova Scotia near Halifax and travelled northward, leaving devastation in its path. It was the most massive storm to come ashore near Halifax since August of 1893 when an “August gale” blasted the province with winds over 180 kilometres an hour. Juan was a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of at least 158 kilometres an hour and gusts up to 176. Wave height in some places was recorded at 19.9 metres and storm surges of 1.5 metres led to considerable shoreline damage. The Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth had to be evacuated due to fears the windows would blow in from the power of the wind.
The morning after Juan, I surveyed the damage at the Fisherman’s Reserve nearby at Three Fathom Harbour, where buildings had been lifted from their foundations and relocated to neighbouring properties. Boats and a few buildings had been swept away, and for those fisherman who had stayed near their wharves through the night, it was a living hell.
Juan caused the death of eight people and left a swath of massive forest damage. From the air, it looked like some giant lawn mower had cut a path through the coastal and interior forests. The damage would take decades to repair and, in some rural areas, it was used as an excuse to increase the devastation of clear-cutting that continues in Nova Scotia.
Many Nova Scotians faced costly home repairs (overall property damage was more than $100 million) and hundreds of thousands of Maritimers were without power, some for up to two weeks. While many believed that Juan’s wrath was just the luck of the draw, when it comes to tropical storms, others are concerned that this may be part of a new storm pattern emerging as the result of global climate change.
As if to add insult to injury, Mother Nature conjured up another clobbering storm that winter dubbed “White Juan,” which arrived on February 19, 2004, as the result of an offshore low pressure system. White Juan dumped a mass of snow on the entire region, measured at 95 centimetres at Shearwater Air Base. Nova Scotia was declared to be in a state of emergency and everything closed down. High winds up to 120 kilometres an hour created zero visibility in many places as everyone hunkered down (some without power) and prepared to shovel out the next day.
Yet Another Kettle of Fish
In April of 2005, Fisheries and Oceans Canada issued a release that stated, “The ocean industries sector has roughly doubled its contribution to the Nova Scotia economy since 1996.” The federal minister, Geoff Regan, offered the observation that “Nova Scotians attach immense historic and cultural value to the surrounding ocean.” A little further along in the release, one would quickly realize that he wasn’t just talking about fish. The $2.62 billion contribution to the Nova Scotia economy included both fish and oil as well as a smattering of shipbuilding and to
urism. But oil was the winner here and fishing came in second. Oil and fish have proven to be a dangerous mix throughout the world for environmental reasons and it looks like the economic scale has already tipped in favour of oil, which may not bode well for the future of the fishery.
My fishermen neighbours down the road from me in Three Fathom Harbour still go out to haul lobster traps in season and fish for herring after that but during most of the year their boats remain tied to the dock. They say the quotas for the small inshore fisherman are set too low to make it worthwhile to go to sea for hake or haddock or some of the other remaining fish that swim off our shores. It’s still a sad state of affairs for most independent fishermen who would like to preserve the traditional means of making a living from the sea.
So where is all that fish revenue coming from? Primarily the big companies. And while the inshore fishermen remain the losers in the game of fish, the rest of us continue to ponder if the industry in general is being allowed to fish too much or too little. From an economic standpoint the answer is too little, but from a sustainable environmental point of view, it’s probably still way too much.
In 1996, Nova Scotian companies harvested 279,331 metric tonnes of fish. In 2004 it had risen to 332,255 but by 2005 it had shrunk back to 268,000. In 2004, that included about 16,000 tonnes of haddock, nearly the same amount of hake, but a whopping 75,000 tonnes of the much smaller herring. Lobster rivalled herring with about the same numbers. But what do those numbers really add up to?
Sometimes a visual image tells more than statistics and I have two contrasting images in my head. The lobster fisherman catches lobster much the same way he did fifty or more years ago except that he is aided by a mechanical winch. The trap goes over the side with bait and some time the next day that trap is hauled aboard, the lobster removed, the trap is rebaited and dropped to the sea floor again. It’s a labour-intensive task but it seems to me to be an honest encounter of man and shellfish.
Nova Scotia Page 36