My sister is upset. She owns property along the contentious Avon River in Mount Denson. Why is this river contentious? The nearby town of Windsor built a causeway across the water 50 years ago, causing this extraordinary tidal system to fill with silt. A river that once boasted the highest tides in the world and harboured an industry of proud boat builders, has become an ecological disaster.
This year, instead of repairing the situation, the government decided to widen the highway through Windsor by building a second causeway. At Hantsport, 14 km downstream, the Avon converges with a second river system, the Halfway River, where a dyke holding back ocean water burst a few years back. Again, the government addressed the situation by constructing an impenetrable rock wall to stop a body of rushing water that has no intention of being stopped. The silting has caused the river to disappear in many places. In other places, the water, having nowhere else to go, has pushed against its banks, eating away the land at a furious pace.
Janet showed us the riverbank where stately oaks hover above the eroded ground. Roots once buried deep into the earth are now stilts, pedestals made of gossamer. The trees’ demise is inevitable as water eats into the land and robs these giants of their stability. .
My sister and I talked about cycles of nature. Landscapes transformed as forest soil becomes water logged sand and then something else. Janet had been reading Silver Donald Cameron’s The Living Beach. In this book, Cameron describes a sandcastle festival on the Magdelan Islands. Artists and amateurs come here to craft elaborate sand structures on the public beach, cheered on by crowds numbering in the thousands. The castles are grand and beautiful, yet none will last longer than a few days as the surf rolls inexorably toward them.
Here are Silver Donald’s words: “There’s something very appealing about this–structures lovingly created in the full knowledge that they’re ephemeral, that they’ll be gone in a week, that no trace of them will endure after the first big storm … By the Earth’s calendar, all our works are sand castles–and so is the coast itself. There they stand, those glorious constructions bathed in pearly morning light, already starting to crumble. And built with joy in the knowledge that their destiny was to crumble. There’s a liberating acceptance in this gesture.”
Disappearing sandcastles are a metaphor for the shoreline itself. The shore supports an ecosystem that appears stable and complex, yet the entire system is in flux, and will change character in the space of a decade or a lifetime. Perhaps the change would be easier to accept, if human interference weren’t such a contributing factor.
Janet and I are walking along the salt marsh. At one point we pass a submerged dock, its twisted boards just visible through layers of sand and rock. The ground becomes sandy, then stony, dotted with a sharp, spiky grass. Through blades of grass, I notice a dark-coloured rubbery form, snap its picture. What is it? A lichen or an algae? Back home, I look it up on inaturalist. The identification is: green spongy cushion algae (codium setchellii). It’s also known as Dead Man’s Brains. It’s a close relative to the finger sponge algae (Dead Man’s Fingers) often found on our shores. It’s probably been there my whole lifetime, but I’m only getting around to noticing it now. It takes a river to wash away a forest to cause me to notice a tiny creature who may adapt to change more perfectly than all the giants surrounding it.