The miracle of the Bay of Fundy and how it inspires art
It sounds like a tea kettle nearing the boil, the first cresting wave of the tidal bore, hissing around a bend of the Salmon River, at the western edge of Truro, N.S., and at other river-to-ocean merge points along the Bay of Fundy. Twice a day, the bay’s rising tides, measured at 17 metres at Burntcoat Head, are the highest in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Worldwide, the average tidal range is only one metre.
An inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, the bay extends 151 kilometres inland and covers 9,300 square kilometres. Situated between the provinces of New Brunswick to the north and west, and Nova Scotia to the south and east, the bay’s southernmost point is the Gulf of Maine.
In summer and autumn, tens of thousands of sea and shore birds rise and dip above the famous Toblerone-coloured waters, most common in the narrower, upper sections of the bay. Fish, crustaceans, and mollusks proliferate in the ruddy-hued intertidal zones. Bracketing these, bedrock cliffs, also red, the sandstone rich in iron-oxide, soar between 60 and 200 metres. Whales, seals, and many land-based mammals, small and large, all live here.
So do the wandering spirits of two-legged mammals, many of them artists or writers, drawn to the bay’s vivid, ever-changing beauty.
“I grew up along the Bay of Fundy in Yarmouth,” says poet, journalist, and naturalist, Harry Thurston, who makes his home with his family by the marshy, flora- and fauna-rich lands of Tidnish Bridge, N.S. “My most vivid memory of childhood is the fog, which is the breath of the bay. It’s a remarkable product of the eco-system … tidal upwelling makes contact with the warm air. The fog was there in the morning, and out in the evening, too. It’s been a part of the rhythm of my life from the beginning.”
Thurston, who studied biology at Acadia University in nearby Wolfville, once considered the bay primarily as a supreme source of tidal power. “In the late ’70s, we were going to dam either end of the bay and export power to the U.S.,” he says. An emerging poet at the time, Thurston quickly developed a more holistic view of one of the world’s most dramatic natural wonders.
“The real power of the bay was not its potential to transform kinetic energy to power,” he says, “but its extraordinary bio-productivity, its ability to create life.” The author of Tidal Life: A Natural History of the Bay of Fundy, published in 1990, says now, “I see my role as an artist to protect, understand, and cherish the bay, and the natural world. I have done this in many different books.”
In addition to a lifetime of freelance journalism, Thurston’s award-winning non-fiction works range from memoir to natural and regional histories. He has written about hummingbirds, dinosaurs, shorebirds, Atlantic salmon, salt marshes, and lighthouses, plus produced 15 books of poetry and four plays. At 75, and as always, both his work and heart stay close to the bay.
“I’ve never not known wonder about the world,” says Thurston. “This has only been strengthened by my training and work as a writer.”
Thurston senses that the wonder he feels about the bay has become widespread. “These days, there seems to be more interest in eco-tourism than in tidal powers … The bay is such a rare eco-system, so very special. It’s worth preserving, rather than exploiting it for electrical generation. It’s already doing its job.”
Artist Susan Sweet might have been 26 years old and in art college before she realized that a person could paint something other than horses, which she also owned and showed competitively. But she always knew she wanted to draw, and she was always pulled to rural and Maritime landscapes.
“I was born in Windsor and raised on a small farm in Martock,” says Sweet, now 65, and living in Selma, in Hants County, N.S., a rural community she calls “very creative.”
While some painters work en plein air, Sweet prefers to take photos of her subjects of interest and then return to her home studio. “I can take up to 500 photos a day,” she says.
The brilliant-hued Bay of Fundy is a regular feature of her works, most often done in acrylic.
“It’s the drama of the tide and how the colours change every time you look at the water,” she notes. “How the land hits the water, and the water hits the land; how the water carves the cliffs and shoreline. There’s an energy, too. You can feel it, feel the power and height of the tides as they come in.”
Sweet also specializes in livestock, landscapes, pet portraits, and ornaments. Her colour choices are bold, the backgrounds often contrasting, exciting in their light-shot intensities. Subjects include goats, seabirds, donkeys, among others, along with horses and cows. “My dad was a dairy farmer, then we had pigs, and so on,” says Sweet. The family would get out of farming, but she retained her love of animals and for painting them.
“There are farms all along the bay, on either side,” she laughs. “I married the cows to the bay.” Her work includes beef breeds such as Limousin, Charolais, Highland, and Angus, and dairy breeds including Jersey and Holstein. She says “I love scruffy cattle, their winter coats and hairy ears.” She paints her cows as singles, duos, and in groups. Individual personalities among these are evident, from the alert heads and ears, to the benignity in the deep amber eyes.
Sweet’s first images of the Fundy started with “baby landscapes,” or miniatures, which she continues to produce. She now does larger landscapes, too, some of these a square metre. Her artist’s brain sees many colours.
“I see oranges and reds; they don’t look brown to me,” she says of the bay’s famous mudflats. “It’s like Prince Edward Island. And the water, I like the way it hits the cliffs. It’s always bright, even if it’s overcast. I see the purples.”
Sweet has a list of places along the bay that she wants to visit, collecting images to paint. “I’ll never stop painting. Every time I walk, I see something different. It keeps me keen.”
Lately there have been rumbles from the north of Canada in Leaf Bay, in the Nunavik region of Quebec, where people also claim to have the highest tides in the world.
Harry Thurston remains sanguine.
“There have been many claims to Fundy’s crown,” he says. “I’m not sure who the ultimate authority would be, which measurements would prevail. But the tidally driven ecosystem of the Bay of Fundy remains an ecological wonder with its kinetic energy finding its ultimate expression in a proliferation of life.”