3 September finds us on Martinique Beach, at the mouth of Pepetswick Inlet, to see if the waves are beginning to grow larger ahead of Hurricane Earl which is forecast to reach the coast of Nova Scotia before noon tomorrow.
The beach is long and curved, it’s barrier dune backed by a large salt marsh, and there are several vehicles parked along the beach access road. Two groups of people are wading in the surf and a flock of Gulls rest on the long rock that juts into the crashing sea. The waves indeed are large, rising near shore from a ruffled gray sea under an inscrutable grey sky. The wind isn’t strong yet, and although the sky is brooding, it doesn’t appear threatening – there are just these waves rising out of it as if propagated by a force yet unseen.
Waves are coming fast in threes and fours. Some rise high enough for light to shine green through them like glass and some crest together from two different directions, meeting in a heart-shape before curling and breaking into white chaos. The front edge of one wave appears to change direction, streaking with a mad hiss like a car just shooting past at the edge of the surf. Most waves break further out, and follow each other in a procession of watery mountain ranges, snow-capped along the ridge. The curve of the wet beach reflects the faint rose of the hazy evening sky and high above a field of broken mackerel clouds, thinly spread across the pink-touched baby blue.
NOTE: Prudence dictated that we retreat about 20 km inland from the coast while the storm passed, but on the bright sunny day after the hurricane we returned to Martinique Beach to waves that appeared no higher, but sea and surf much more agitated. Waves followed each other thick and fast, their crests brushed forward by the wind. They broke early, crashing into a field of white water from their breaking to the beach. The gale force wind kept so much sea spray in the air that it was blazing white and painful to the eye to glance west along the beach toward the sun. Sand was also in the air, gritting in our teeth. It was as hard to stand against the wind as it must have been to stand against the surf for those adventurous folk who were trying it.
The hurricane felled many Spruce trees. They lay like jackstraws in the patch of woods at the base of the beach, and it was interesting to see their closely-coned, heavily lichened tops at close range where they’d fallen by the road. On the back side of the dune, the tops of every plant except dune grass, Bayberry, and Beach Pea was killed by unaccustomed exposure to salt – I imagine the very rain must have been half sea water right at the coast. On our way north we noticed Alders and Apple trees, Cherries and Maples all browned and blasted as if their leaves had been turned to darkly-dyed leather and twisted away from the sea. Even far inland many Maples still have their leaves turned upwards, undersides to the south.
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2 September finds us in the village of Prospect Bay, having been graciously allowed to camp beside Our Lady of Mount Carmel church. My artist’s eye is totally delighted by the striking contrast of blue water, yellow rockweed, and white granite.
We step onto the alga-stained pavement of granite bedrock among swirling mops of rockweeds – rich tawny, float-bladdered Fucus, and more elongate, thin golden Ascophylum exposed by the low tide – and in the pools, brighter yellow Ascophylum of a finer texture. Looking closely at the edges of the saltmarsh turfs, we find their grasses growing up through mats of fine, mossy Ascophylum, rubbery textured and upright, rather than sprawling like its larger relatives, and amazingly in miniature – a salt water “moss”!
There is a sprinkling of white barnacles on the flanks of the tide-stained boulders, and here and there on the flat pavement, and in the pools, Periwinkle snails creep and graze.
We had walked down behind the church past a patch of Pink Jewelweed to a low granite ledge with a single Barberry bush on it and delicious ripe Blackberries along the sides, then on down a slope of white Aster and yellow Goldenrod, into the rough grass and carex of a tidal meadow flanked by low brush-covered white granite knolls. I found a grass with dangly white flowers to photograph, and also Sea Lavender in bloom.
Fred wrote about the vegetation on the knolls: “Most of the cover is Myrica, but without longer to stay here it’s hard to tell the Bayberry fom the Sweetgale, and there’s a huge variety of shrubs, as well as the salt-whipped Osmunda (which one sees all along the shore here) mixed in. These include Aroinia and Rubus canadensis (Canada Blackberry) in sparse fruit, mats of \
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1 September finds us on the road to the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove, undulating through a magical landscape of dish-shaped bogs, stunted spruces, and granite boulders, reminding me of taiga. Heaths of all colours and textures carpet the spaces between rocks, and the trees either hug the ground or flag sparse, weather tortured branches with tenacious knots of foliage. It’s another hot day. Even at the coast, facing the open Atlantic our thermometer reads 29C. The horizon is a blur of haze and the sea is fairly calm, slight swells breaking in bright plumes on the rocky coast far below us. The coastline toward the lighthouse is dotted whitely with huge jumbled boulders like houses on a Spanish sea coast.
The lighthouse itself is seated firmly on massive glacier-shaped mounds of granite that slope roundly into the sea. When we first arrived we drove to the end of the road and found there a grey building near the lighthouse surrounded by parking lots filled with cars, and a waiting tour bus resplendent with stars and stripes.
The road is narrow with few pull-off spots, so to approach the barrens, which caught my interest more than the lighthouse or the sea, we parked at the Swiss-Air Disaster Memorial, and walked in on fenced paths to the large flat rock where the memorial stands, a round boulder cut in half and carved with an inscription, standing beside a similar shape, with three slots in its curved upper edge, through which I photograph the sea. People have left coins and small tokens in memory of those who lost their lives in the plane crash, and the brave fishing people who risked their lives to rescue them on the 2nd of September, 1998, twelve years ago tomorrow
Looking up slope from the memorial and the sea, I find my painting subject – rocks and trees in a dance with the sky.
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31 August finds us at White’s Lake, Nova Scotia, admiring a licheny old Apple tree that is being shaded out by Spruces. There is no way that I can get close enough for a plein air painting, as the view that I want is from right inside the tree, standing on one of the large rocks that line the side of the parking lot. The beach is busy with bathers, but I hardly glance at the lake, as I’m entranced with the lichen-encrusted world among the branches of this tree. It is crowded by Spruces, to the side and behind, and its leaves look tired and many have bites and brown spots, but it bravely bears a small crop of bright red fruit. These three apples are low enough for me to capture in my reference photos for a painting. Yes, this one will be painted entirely from photos because “onsite” would be standing on a rock and ducking up among the branches – technically too difficult for sitting to paint the view that I want – and no room for a standing easel.
The tree must be very old to have gotten this licheny. Tufts of pale green Usnea join the foliose species that cling as frilly pale gray and green mats to the Apple bark. Lichens may cover a tree but they don’t sap its strength. The closer you get to the coast, the younger the forest is that’s draped with lichens.
This brown water lake along Highway 333 south west of Halifax, is very close to the sea, but separated from the salt water. Fred has walked some of the shores, but hasn’t found any mollusc shells.
30 August finds me in an old residential area of downtown Halifax, waiting for Adam to come out of his meeting, and sitting in my low folding stool by the wall of a building, to paint one of the row of little “wartime” houses directly across Bayers St. from the church parking lot of St. Catherine of Siena.
A little girl chatters directly above me, on an apartment balcony, and several minutes later comes down the steps with her mother and father and they drive away in a minivan. I’m thankful to be in the shade, because it’s been a very hot day. The front of the house is in shadow but one of its windows reflects a sunlit sign on the storefront on my side of the street. The other front window of the house shows me the evening sun glowing through a curtained back window, and a bush in the front yard is just losing the sun from the tips of its branches. In the backyard, a big bush of blooming Japanese Knotweed peeks past the right hand side of the house.
I have only been painting for fifteen minutes or so, stroking the palings of the picket fence in pale blue-grey on my indian red underpainting, when the house door opens and a black man emerges with a watering can. He waters the flowers in the planter on the front railing – almost to prove that these perfect little plants on the perfect little porch of this perfect little house are not artificial. Or perhaps the house suddenly became self conscious, feeling itself being painted, and reached out to groom itself a bit.
Jim Strachan, the property manager of the church, comes over to tell us that we are welcome to park our trailer here overight, and we accept, as it will be more convenient to pick up our replacement battery, use the local laundromat, shop for groceries, etc. if we don’t have to leave for the night and then come back into the city in the morning. Jim tells us that the house I am painting used to belong to Betty Devanney, and that it is owned by someone else now and is being rented out.
As the light fades and I hurry to get as much painting done as I can before dark. The minivan returns to its parking spot and the mother and child go upstairs. The father and another man discuss the headlights of the minivan in some language that I don’t understand, perhaps Greek, only a few metres from me as if I were invisible.
The street lights have come on, and although there would have still been enough light from the evening sky for me to continue, the values are now all different, so I’ll have to finish from my photo.
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27 August finds me still amazed by the tide at the mouth of the Walton River at Walton, Nova Scotia. We decided to spend the night here, to try again to find clams during the morning low tide today, as Adam came back last night without any.
He had walked all the way out to open water without being sure of what to look for in terms of evidence of clams. It was a darkly cloudy afternoon, lightened a little toward evening, and then got dark so quickly just as the tide turned, that he would not have been able to find the shoes he’d left beneath the cliff if they hadn’t been white. Without shoes, his return would have been painfully slow, and it would have been a race between a search party and the tide, which comes right up on the cliff, leaving no place to walk when it’s high.
My artist’s eye is so excited by the sweeping bands of red and blue in this scene, that I’m grinning all the while I’m painting it. This is the other side of the river mouth from last evening’s view, and it’s interesting to hold them together as their moods are so different, but the patterns of channels in the tidal flats appear to correspond and you can tell it’s the same place!
In the foreground of my painting you can see the tracks of a crab in the wet red clay. Adam reported seeing many little hermit crabs in pools and channels yesterday. There is not much tide pool life to be seen on these vast flats of mud because the substrate is constantly shifting, but wherever there are rocks there are various forms of algae, encrusting them and clinging to them – and invertebrates sheltering in the algae. Of course there’s a diversity of animal forms moving about in the mud as well which we don’t see much evidence of – sea worms of different kinds, and Fred reports that he’s seen Corophium volutator, a little digging amphipod about 5 mm in length.
Adam has just returned with a nice bag of about 50 clams, but very few of them are the “regulation” size of two and a half inches (63.5 mm). We are told by the local people that when the commercial harvesters were allowed to buy licenses for Soft Shelled Clams (Mya arenaria) and the size limit established, large clams (which would be upwards of 10 years of age) became very scarce.
Large birds which would be an easy target for pot-shots are fearless here, as if several generations removed from threat of guns. An adult Bald Eagle flew unconcerned over Fred, closer than he’s been to a Bald Eagle since we were on Haida Gwaii, and a Great Blue Heron flew close overhead as well.
26 August finds us in Walton, Nova Scotia, at the mouth of the Walton River, on the Minas Basin, the place of the world’s highest recorded tides.
The tide is going out now and will soon be at its lowest, and it’s threatening rain. I’ve set Fred up to skin the Gannets that he found at Cap Lumiere for the New Brunswick Museum, and Adam has gone to explore the tide flats for clams.
At low tide the sea goes out for more than a kilometre here, leaving a vast and fascinating landscape of channels in shining clay, and wandering bars of mixed clay, sand, and gravel – all the way out to a thin line of open water at the horizon.
I am sitting on a flat rock at the edge of a shale bluff, and directly across the river, at the top of a sloping gravel shore and against the forest, a family is camping with a cluster of bright nylon tents. This afternoon they were fishing from the tip of the headland and exploring the receding tide line.
We are parked on the town side of the river, by a pair of large concrete silos in which we are told barite ore is only occasionally stored now, since the most productive barite mine in Canada was shut down about 25 years ago because they couldn’t keep salt water from flooding it. The old wharf juts in from the right of my painting, and beyond it is the breakwater.
25 August finds me on the Richibucto Dune, northwest of Cap Lumiere, sitting at the edge of the dune grass on a knee-high bluff that crests the soft dry sand of the beach, gazing across at ‘another world’ All along the beach this afternoon, ever since the krumholtz forest dwindled to a few outlying birches, the dune, crested with waving beach grass has been our horizon.
I was trying to decide on which view of the beach I should paint, when Adam came down from the crest of the dune with news of a wide panorama of different habitats visible from up there – beyond our horizon. It was a surprise to the eyes after days of revelling in beach and sea, to suddenly see beyond our horizon….. salt marsh! The very marsh that I thought was unattainable in the short time we have for hiking before breaking camp this afternoon, is suddenly revealed to us – a vast flat variegated salt marsh vista, blending gradually from bogs in the south and east to the channels of the estuary in the north.
The scene I am painting is only a very small section of the salt marsh panorama – the part that shows the most striking silhouette of bog forest. As I paint the narrow strips of vari-coloured vegetation, I remember exploring this marsh during field work for Canadian Nature Notebook. I wish I could be out in it now, re-introducing myself to the plants of the salt marsh – all specially adapted to changing salinity, as fresh water flows through on its way to the sea, the returning tide covers it with salt water, and every thing is rinsed whenever it rains.
24 August finds me sketching one of three Gannets that Fred found dead on the beach north west of where we are camped. I have photographed it for an oil painting, but the evening light will not last long enough to even get the painting started, so I will replace this sketch with the painting when it is complete (completed on 29 August and replacing the sketch, which remains in my journal).
The death of three Gannets, spaced out along 3.5 kilometres of sandy beach is a mystery to us. Their feathers are a gleaming white, highly reflective as if they were clothed with light. The stripes on their black feet are pale blue, as are their beaks, and the longer feathers on their heads are golden-yellow. The eyes are positioned so that they can see directly below them – the better to see fish while flying.
Gannets dive from 30 metres above the water, reaching speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour, penetrating the ocean to greater depths than other diving birds can reach. They don’t have external nostrils, and they also have special air sacs under their skin to cushion the impact.
Fred saw one adult Gannet diving for fish as he walked, finding its dead relatives on the beach.
23 August finds us at Cap Lumiere, New Brunswick. Our trailer is parked at the end of the road, but a grassy track continues along a ridge of old dunes parallel to the beach, at least a kilometre along the sandy spit, toward the mouth of the salt marsh which is three kilometres further on.
We camped were here in 1976 and ’77, and are pleased to find it much the same as it was then. I haven’t been out to the salt marsh yet, but I’ve gone into the wind-sculpted “krumholtz” forest that shows darkly on the left of my view this evening, and glimpsed the bog behind it. All four habitats, beach, salt marsh, forest, and bog, grade into one another in classic simplicity, and I described and drew the beautiful pattern of it in my first book Canadian Nature Notebook (Wild Habitats in the US) published in 1979.
The salty air is soft and sweet, smelling like home to me and I hear the rhythmic ‘breathing’ of the sea along the beach. Frank Ross painted a stormy watercolour right here thrity three years ago, and I see the same clouds pressing against the krumholtz, but this evening there’s a ribbon of pink below them and blue sky above with splendid mackerel clouds, and as I sit by the crest of the grassy dunes to paint, the colours all become more rich and vivid, like the crescendo of a symphony.
