"Isabel" and Me!

~PREFACE ~

Halfway between Hants Border and Lower Avonport on the Avon River in Nova Scotia, Canada, can be found a very unique beach. It is unusual because it does not consist of sand like most beaches we usually think of do.  Blue Beach, gets its name from the approximately three hundred sixty million year old blue shale that crumbles from the forty to sixty foot banks of the Horton Bluff Geological Formation exposed by the continual shoreline erosion and widening of the river.  The HB Formation consists of three different members marked with different types of sedimentary rocks.  The oldest rocks of the HB Formation are conglomerantes, while others include sandstones, siltstones, mudstones, shales, dolostone and limestone.

At one place on the bank two diagonal layers of sandstone rock run from the beach to the top of the bank sandwiched in sharpcontrast by the soft blue shale. In the intervening fifty years since I visited this beach as a boy, coastal erosion has exposed this and other geological formations previously hidden for millions of years.  The area had obviously been flat at one time and had been pushed upward by a tremendous force millions of years ago. There is much evidence in the highly disturbed area of faulting and folding.  Two major faults are mapped in the area and the bedrock dips in a wide range, suggesting a great amount of earlier tectonic activity such as earthquakes and subsidence.

This area is at the Northern end of the ancient Appalachian Mountain Range which was worn down by glaciers during the last ice age. A sign posted on a tree at the entrance to the beach proclaims Blue Beach to be a protected area under the Nova Scotia Protected Places Act.

The road to the beach runs between two farm fields from where it begins at the Bluff Road. It then passes through a trestle under the railroad tracks and proceeds through a wooded area beside a gully until it drops steeply to a long finger of shale continually piled up by the force of the tides. The brook that runs through the gully spills into a creek which runs between the riverbank to the right and the shale beach on the left for several hundred yards.

When I was a very young boy, my family would sometimes drive the two miles from our home at the beginning of the Horton Bluff Road to swim and picnic at this blue shale beach. At times the shale would become so hot from the sun it would burn our bare feet. Sometimes, especially on weekends, the beach would be crowded with people who came from as far away as Hantsport and Avonport and beyond, to swim, sunbath and picnic. 

The water in the creek was always much warmer than the water in the river. We swam in both at full tide and did not give much thought at the time to the fact that the gully was used as a local dump site.  I guess we believed the action of the tides protected us from the contamination of the dump site as it flowed into the creek.  Since the establishment of a Municipal Dump about twenty miles away, this area has been returned to a more pristine condition.

My mother would always prepare a large pot of hodge-podge to feed her hungry brood on these occasions. It was a meal made with every kind of fresh vegetable that grew in our garden. My mouth waters at the memory of those meals on the beach shared with my family after a brisk swim in the chilly waters of the Avon River. So much of my life on the banks of the Avon and in its vicinity is a hodge-podge of memories simmering in my mind for years like the ingredients in my mother’s large cooking pot. In the following pages I have attempted to present this hodge-podge of the events of my life from my earliest memories until the present. If one person is entertained by my effort, I will be satisfied. If one child is spared the pain of one unnecessary or foolish accident by the sharing of mine, then I will consider my life to have had a purpose. If my stories cause even one parent to watch their child more carefully, then I will consider this book a success.  

DWC

The following article first appeared in the Chronicle-Herald on Sunday, June 22, 2003 and is reprinted here in its entirety with permission of the Chronicle-Herald Newspaper, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Footprints in the sand

What are dirty old rocks to most of us are clear signposts to the past for a few.  And no more so than near the town of Hantsport, where scientists from around the world are carefully eyeing 350 million year old fossilized remains of the world’s first land dwelling animal’s. 

If fossils could talk, those found on Blue Beach would surely have hundreds of centuries of juicy yarns to unload.  Indeed, fossils do figuratively have their own unique way of communicating.

And those messages are now being painstakingly deciphered by sharp eyed scientists.  “This is an extremely important fossil locality because it’s right at the beginning of the period of truly terrestrial vertebrates,” says McGill University professor Robert Carrol.

Studying what’s called the Horton Bluff Formation site since 1965, Prof. Carroll helpfully puts in context the importance of the information being gleaned from the formations discovered in the mid -1840s.

“The movement of the ances