Truro, Nova Scotia September 25, 1978

After my little rest stop in PEI, and having to come back through New Brunswick, I decided to make a circular detour to see two places on my ‘must see’ list.  The first was the city of Sussex, and the second was the Bay of Fundy.  

  

Sussex, the city – or likely small town then – where my maternal grandmother, Ida Maud Debou, was born, in 1881, and raised.  She died just seven years ago.  As I drove around the city I tried to envision it as it must have been then, dirt or cobble stone streets, horses, buggies, bicycles and the odd car.  How did she end up, coming as she did from a ‘well-to-do’ and educated family, having been one of the first women in Canada to attend university (in Moncton, Fredericton, St. John – or further afield?), marrying a man who after siring five children, proved unable to support her?  (She said one time she married him because he was ‘a good dancer’ – evidently that wasn’t enough.)  How did she end up moving to Airdrie Alberta, and then to Vancouver BC?  What forces of circumstance, what decisions, what acquiescences to another’s (her dancing partner’s) decisions?   I knew her as a formidable presence, a woman of great intelligence and strong opinions, a woman who, having shown her husband the door, was left with five small children during the Great Depression, and went to work as a school teacher in order to provide for them all.  But back then, in Sussex perhaps, she was young and impressionable and fell in love with a ‘good dancer’.  She was, in short, ‘swept away’.

 

Note: Here’s a link to Ida Maud Debou’s genealogy courtesy of the Atlantic Canada Genealogy Project: https://www.chignecto.org/getperson.php?personID=I6901&tree=Main

And here’s the link to her dancer husband’s (John Russell Weldon) genealogy:  https://www.chignecto.org/getperson.php?personID=I6900&tree=Main

You will find my name if you click on Ida and John’s child #3,  Dorothy Hazel Weldon.  I am J.A.L. Drexel.  They don’t have my birthdate, but they do have my husband's and children’s names.

 

The Bay of Fundy, as every Canadian knows, boasts the ‘highest tides in the world’.  And on September 24, 1978, the best time to be there to see it was at 5:30 pm.  Fundy National Park is directly south of Sussex, so was a convenient spot to go, and stay. We got there in plenty of time to set up camp and take a leisurely walk down to the shoreline where we sat for several hours, just watching the show.  There was something about witnessing the tremendous rush of water that affected me on a deep, visceral level.  I was alternately awed, excited and frightened by the energy and power of that great mass of rushing water. Water, that wonderful life-giving, life-sustaining element, that friendly substance we can drink, wash with, and make endless things with, and yet it has the power, through flood or rushing tides like this, to sweep us and everything we have done and built away, to destroy it all.    

 

It was with these thoughts in mind – of people and things being carried along, or swept away, by force of circumstance or nature – that I headed, the next day, to Truro, where some friends of my mother’s were visiting their daughter and her husband. Their daughter, who I knew, but not well, as she was a few years older than me, had a Doctorate of Biology, specializing in genetics, and had worked with the famous David Suzuki.  Her husband had also had a Doctorate of Biology, specializing in Marine Mammalogy.  They had both been living and working – mostly doing research – in Vancouver when he, apparently, decided his work, indeed their work, and their urban lifestyle, was neither satisfying or meaningful.  And so they, with two very small children, had moved to a remote farm near Truro.  I couldn’t help but wonder whether ‘the wife’s’ wishes, her needs and wants, were equally considered in ‘their’ decision.     

 

As it happened, I met first with her parents, who made no secret of their concern, and dismay.  They kept repeating versions of  “How can she just throw it all away?” They clearly felt that her husband had influenced her, and pulled her away from what could have been a stellar career as a Suzuki side-kick.  They saw absolutely no redeeming qualities, and no opportunities for a meaningful life for their daughter in this ‘back-to-the-land’ life in a rough cabin with no electricity and no running water.  “What about the kids?  What will become of them?”  Over an uncomfortable dinner they extended their expressions of concern to me: “Where are you going?  What about your job, your ‘career’?  You have so much promise, could do such great things.  You should go back…” .   

 

The next day I went out to the rustic cabin in Truro.  I found the family happily engaged in homesteading activities.  Their parents, so intelligent and able, were teaching them not only how to do things, but the biology, physics, and mathematics that underlies all of our inventions and applications.  They seemed happy.  They said they were happy.  Happy to be ‘out of the rat race’, happy to be closer to the land, happy to be able to really be with their kids.  

 

Note:  I did not take a photo when I was visiting my friends, but as I recall their cabin 

looked much like this, except the area immediately around it was more open.  

 

And so I find myself challenged to consider who I am, and what I am doing. Right now I am following paths diverse and ephemeral, off the beaten track, intense, coloured, sometimes unreal.  My friend’s parents think I am searching, pointlessly – and at considerable cost to my own well-being – for the proverbial ‘pot of gold’.  But I know that the ‘pot of gold’ is all around me.  All I have to do is free myself from others’ – and my own – expectations, to experience and enjoy it.  

 

Our lives are the paths we take.  For most of us the path is narrow, the edges very definite. We are warned from early on “don't go out there, you'll get hurt, you'll hurt others, you'll hurt me.”  Hands and hearts reach out to pull us, to pull anyone who strays too close to the edge, back to the safety of the known path.  We become afraid not only to venture off the path, to explore new and unknown territory, not just for ourselves, but for others.  We become afraid of their wanderings and what they might find. 

 

But somehow I fell off course.  And I fell off course not because someone or something pulled or shoved me off, but because I wanted to fall off; I made a conscious decision to fall off course.  I wanted to experience the weightlessness and timelessness of being with no goal, no plan, no notion of what even the next minute might bring.  To open the doors and windows of my mind, stop the ceaseless circuits and progressions, and to think and sense and be more fully in whatever reality I find myself in.  I want my being to feel full and heavy, like a rich glob of whipped cream, fully rolled around in my mouth, tasted, felt, enjoyed. I want to explore everything, take all the side-roads, all the detours.

 

A few days ago I had a dream that I was running on an oval track.  People – some friends but mostly people I didn’t know – were racing by me.  There were crowds in the stands, cheering us on, like horses or dogs.  (Perhaps they were betting on winners?)  I kept slowing down, until finally I stopped running and started walking into the center of the oval.  There were others doing the same thing, but I didn’t know them. My friends were all waving and shouting at me, “where are you going? Hurry up or you’ll be left behind!”  But these other people, floating almost dream-like figures were whispering a different message, saying “it’s okay.  You're coming home.”  The dream ended there, or didn’t, but I don’t remember any more.  It doesn’t matter.

 

The prism in my car is making rainbows all around me, reminding me that I am on the right path. I am sure of my course.  

 

Note: This is a stock photo of a rainbow, just for colour.