WORDS & PICTURES: Melissa Goertzen
Connect with Melissa on Instagram | MelissaGoertzen.com
Since the start of the pandemic, travel has been touch and go due to government restrictions. To satisfy the travel bug, I decided to become a local tourist and explore my own province. Known as Canada’s ocean playground, Nova Scotia is a peninsula on the Atlantic Ocean. With over 13,000 kilometers of coastline, visitors are drawn to the province for an authentic maritime experience, including whale watching tours, outstanding seafood restaurants, and coastal hiking trails.
The Bay of Fundy quickly became my favorite get-away spot. Located between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, it has the highest tides in the world. The vertical difference between high and low tide is equivalent to the height of a five-storey building. Experts discovered that the Bay is the perfect size to match the natural gravitational pull cycle of the moon, and this causes the extreme tides. Each tide cycle is twelve hours long, and carries 110 billion tons of water in and out of the Bay of Fundy.
Since the timing of the tides change every day, activities align with tide tables instead of 9 – 5 schedules. At low tide, fishing boats rest on the ocean floor. While locals wait to sail out of the harbour, many build fires on the beaches and cook seafood in steel pots. Children splash in tide pools and hikers set high tide alarms on cell phones before setting out across the ocean floor. As the water rises, cookware and hiking poles are packed into car trunks and fishermen carry supplies to boats in preparation for the next fishing shift.
Evidence of the forces of nature transcend daily routines; they are carved into the landscape. Hundreds of years of tides have eroded the cliffs and left Flower Pot Rocks standing off shore. Trees grow at the top of the stacks, resembling plants in clay pots. Every time I hike on the ocean floor and look at the Flower Pots, I am reminded of the erosion and evolution that takes place due to the constant rhythm of nature. And I am reminded that I fit into this process as well. The world is moving around me, and I am being transformed by it all.
Discover Canada with us | Vancouver, Canada: A Tapestry of Modern Culture
Although I look forward to venturing outside of Nova Scotia, for now I lay in bed at night and imagine fishing boats on the water navigating past islands of trees that seem to float on the waves. And as I dream about the cliffs at the Bay of Fundy and the tides that roll in and out, I’m happy to call this place home.
