On Tuesday I also met a man who had moved to Sackville 40 years ago to work for Wildlife Services. He stopped and talked to me for a while about the land in the paintings I had made. We talked about the change in land use over the last hundred years away from agriculture and about the history of the different settler groups in the area. He told me that once you get out on the marshes there are big skies – you can see 360 degrees.
This morning I went walking on les aboiteaux (a system of dikes and sluices) originally built by the Acadians before the Grand Dérangement. Its is amazing to feel the history of that labour under your feet as you trudge along among the nettles and burs and the long grasses. Aside from a few shell casings and some rusty barbed wire it is true you can imagine you are in another time and place (just don’t look in the direction of the highway).
The Tantramar River itself is mysterious to me as its current red mudflats were once a river so deep that Sackville was an important shipbuilding centre. The absence of that water is disconcerting and I feel that I need to understand its dissapearence better. Similarly I am curious that the Acadian culture is so strong in the surrounding towns in this area but in Sackville it seems absent.
