The ruins of an old wharf in Saint Thomas de Kent, NB. We’ve had a cottage in the area for almost 10 years and only just noticed these because we had never actually walked this beach.
We’d like to make a living from the sea. Not by fishing, of course. There are no fish left. We found that out when we decided that this year we would try every type of local fish, freshly caught and bought from those little markets you see along the coast. However, that project’s death knell was sounded by the door chime of the first market we tried. The only fish they had were some trout and salmon. From Halifax. No, we won’t be making a living fishing any time soon.
What we want to do is write about our explorations. We live 20 minutes from the coast, have a cottage within view of it. We’ve driven from Miscou to Florida, at one time or other. The Florida trip was a one-off deal and was made when Elaine and I were still just friends, but we know most of our Acadian Coast pretty damn well, at least that’s what we thought.
We've started stopping more often rather than just doing a lot of driving. It's amazing how much more we see when we just stop.
Time to start stopping
We’ve put a lot coastal miles on our various vehicles but we’ve just realized that we haven’t done much stopping. We joke that we almost never talk to anyone, but how do you talk to anyone when you’re cruising along at 80 to 100 KMH? So, now we’re stopping. No fisherman ever caught fish zooming out and then back from the fishing grounds and so we’ve make that every weekend we park the wheels and walk or just sit at mini-destinations, enjoying the air, taking pictures, or writing. We still haven’t talked to anyone, but that will come.
This weekend we dropped anchor (That’s the last fishing metaphor, I promise.) at Saint Thomas and we discovered the ruins of an old wharf. The wooden cribwork, looking like sets of rotten and broken teeth, is most easily seen at low tide, naturally, and makes for an interesting photograph or two.
Just an average wharf
We want to know more about it, though. Sure, we know no famous ship moored here. None of the survivors of the Titanic swam ashore and I doubt even one U-Boat snuck in under cover of dark to lay mines during WWII. I’m sure it was the average wharf where the local fishermen moored their boats at day’s end, unloaded their catch and went back out the next day. That’s the magic of it, though. People lived their lives around this wharf and much more so than of the wharves of today and that’s what gives these old centers their depth.
Driving up and down the coast you see only the “today” of whatever you come by and that is two dimensional, there is almost no context. There is only foreground, no background. Stopping to delve into the local history provides depth the way shadows make a drawing look “real”. Stories, happy and sad, are the details that bring a place to life.
We don’t know any of the stories, yet. We know only that there was once a wharf at Saint Thomas, that it was abandoned and replaced by a solid around the bend to the north of it. The ruins are the only hint of this chapter of the community’s history, but we intend to find out about it and paint a better picture of it.
