Seaforth Nova Scotia : Surf, Hope for Wildlife, Skunk, and my pen

"our" beach in Seaforth NS

I wrote the first drafts of today's SVE posts out in Seaforth Nova Scotia, my family's home.


(We live in the old parish rectory, next to the church, right across from the community hall cum old school house , on land that was once the oldest farm in the settlement: basically in the centre of the tiny village.)

Growing up, the place was totally obscure, even to Nova Scotians.

But one day in the late 1906, some guys in a beat-up VW with Colorado plates came up to me and my brother Bruce and asked the way to the surf.

Surfing Seaforth

Surf ?

We tried to point the way - back  past Colorado - towards California and Hawaii.

But no, the boys pointed to the big waves in front of our house - how to get down to them.

Our omnipresent big waves - a perennial aspect of our Seaforth we could never stop hearing and seeing - turned out to be what others called "surf".

So for the last 40 years we are a place of pilgrimage for surfers from all over. And an nearby newspeg for lazy reporters seeking an easy sidebar on an upcoming hurricane threat : 'but won't the waves be totally, totally awesome ?!'

Then , more recently, Hope Swinimer came to our village and opened a volunteer-run place to save the lives of injured wildlife.

Cue even more reporters to report on cute (wild) animal alerts.

2000 people came out to Seaforth , to enjoy the Hope for Wildlife open house last week. (Star-of-the-show was a 3 legged skunk called Maxwell.)

We never had skunks in Seaforth till recently: credit global warming...

We got lots of surfers at "our" beach, right in front of the bench where I wrote this paragraph yesterday - thanks to a cover story in the day's local newspaper.

As for skunks -well a family of them lives in my field about 20 metres away from where I write.....

GCN's 'Back Story' : growing up a "LITTORAL" commensalist, becoming a global commensalist ...

  My own personal 'back story' actually.
  I was three and a half in 1955 when I first saw Chezzetcook Inlet - we were moving into our new home in Seaforth, Nova Scotia, along that half drowned river valley cum estuary.
   But it wasn't my first experience of living along a water's edge: far from it.

   My parents grew up along the edge of St Clair River, part of the Great Lakes system, in Windsor Ontario - a few minutes walk to the river's edge. It seemed an hourly occurrence to see large steamships sail past the end of their street.
  I was conceived there but was actually born born in Victoria, BC. Lived there twice, actually - both times close to the water's edge.
   I later lived in Milton and Southsea, water's edge sections of Portsmouth - itself basically an island of the ocean, so very very close indeed to the mainland of Britain that most aren't aware of it's island status.
   I lived for a time in Vancouver, but in the UBC Endowment grounds - at the very tip of Vancouver - the ocean minutes walking away, even for a small kid.
  I later lived for a time in Putney and Ealing - river's edge suburbs of London England.
   I live twice in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, the last time for 20 years  and now for 30 years in Halifax --- very close to the water's edge.
   However, like all my other homes bar one, still one not quite within sight of it.
 You see, despite all those years living near the water's edge, I never actually lived within direct sight and smell and feel of it - except in Seaforth.
   That it is why Seaforth was so important to my mental formation - that and the age I was when I lived there.
   I lived there full time for only brief periods - in 1955-1956 and between 1961 and1965.
   But both periods were critical. In the first I was just old enough to retain those all important firm first memories.
  In the second period, I was in my critical 10-14 period of maturation.
  In addition, I should say I was in Seaforth all summer between the ages of 14 and 18 and for much of the summer (and bouts of winter,fall and spring) ever since.
   Our family still owns land there - my parents moved back gradually to full time residency, after moving to Dartmouth full time for just 5 years.
   The next land fall our Seaforth house looks out seaward to, is I believe, Bordeaux in southern France. The open ocean is but 200 metres away---- and incidentally it is relatively rare in Nova Scotia to see the open ocean from a house- our province is a coast of deep bays.
   Ocean wind and rain storms lash our 150 year old house, built literally like a sailing ship, until it creaks alarmingly like an old sailing ship 'working' in high seas.
  But our part of Seaforth is only a tiny part of a much larger system : starting in the interior watershed for Chezzetcook River and Lake, it becomes a tidal flats cum narrow drowned river valley estuary, before emptying into the ocean between two guard barriers of resistance rock.
   The original soil is terrible, but Chezzetcook is blessed by being the centre of a vast field of red clay drumlins that form its arable hills, its capes and its inlet islands.
  Between drumlins and the rich marine life produced in such a littoral zone, the earliest settlers - first Micmac aboriginals and then their relatives among the earliest Acadians, eked out an adequate life here.
   In 1962, aged ten, I heard and read the uproar about Rachel Carson's article and then book "SILENT SPRING". It impressed my young mind muchly. ( I had just started reading adult books and magazines and listening to adult radio.)
  But may I confess ? I never could get far in her book - then and now - past the first chapter or two.
   No mind - our family, like millions of others, was pre-sold to believe her based on our enjoyment of her earlier- better - book : "THE SEA AROUND US".
   Our bible, every time we went to a beach or a rock pool.
   Soooooooooo - given my 'back story' ---- how could I not help but to grow up a littoral commensalist .
  And it was that  plus the fact I knew as a young kid that my morning glass of milk was likely laced with Strontium 90 fallout from an nuclear explosion half a world away ,made me a confirmed global commensalist from an early age....

 --- Michael Marshall

Two thirds of humanity are "Littorally" commensalists - and don't even know it !

   Two thirds of humanity lives along the edges of waterways - oceans, rivers, lakes : living in the Littoral Zone, as biologists and ecologists like to call it.
   Seaforth, along the Chezzetcook Lake/River/Inlet system is an example of but one such community drawn to the littoral.

   That place of half water/half land --- that highly biologically productive co-mingling of bodily fluids, that highly productive miscegenation of land and water - that bastard,mongrel, metis, half breed of  terra firma and H2O.
   It is that very high productivity that led humanity to the water's edge and kept it there - even in the days of Galton and Darwin when Social Darwinism proclaimed the degenerate dangers of mixing and half-breededness.
   But few within humanity are well taught in the public school system of the importance of water's-edge-living in the history of mankind and that is to be pitied.
   Because land and water mixing and sharing of each other - fresh and salt water mixing and sharing of each other ---- they are a textbook case of global commensality : littorally ....