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martha

[events] Bear River Encounter
It's April 30th. This means that I'm engaged in the annual review of the minutae of my life known as 'filing my income tax'. In some ways, this task is an examination of those aspects of my life which do not occupy a large portion of my consciousness: how much interest did my checking account earn? How much did I spend on medicine this year? And the search for receipts always seems to raise more questions than they answer. "Where did I go on Westjet in October 2004?"

Preparing the filings is interrupted long searches for papers by myself or Hannah - which is what's happening right now. While she sifts through piles of newsclippings, receipts, and other ephemera, I will make this posting.

In September of 2000, I attended a national environmental conference hosted by the Nova Scotia Environmental Network. The local Canadian Forces Base at Cornwallis had recently been closed down and to help rebuild the local economy, it was converted into a 'conference centre' without the benefit of any renovations whatsoever. Not even taking down the chain-link fence and razor-wire that surrounded the compound.

Here's something I wrote at the time:

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Yesterday was a free day for those delegates who arrived in Cornwallis early. Chris Baker and I were scheming out how we might get off the base for the day to a larger town, or perhaps to Bear River to see their sewage treatment plant. Walking towards our barracks, we saw Doug Badger sitting in a parked car.

“Where are you going?” I demanded.

“Oh, we’re going around,” he replied. Doug’s relatively small stature, jolly disposition, and rounded features makes it hard to believe that he is 45 years old with three grandchildren. The ‘we’ he spoke of included Cass, the AGA Logistics officer who was in one of the Cornwallis buildings practising his craft. Cass has been a CEN Youth representative for a few years now and is one of the most proficient people to emerge from this group. Cass returned to say that he actually needed the car for conference work and couldn’t tour about with it, but after a quick phone call, I became authorized to drive the rented Windstar van. This enabled a prairie crew consisting of Chris, Martha, Doug, myself, and Glen Gustafson from the Saskatchewan Environmental Society to go on a small tour of the Digby Neck region of Nova Scotia.

Bear River is a tiny community inland and straddling the Bear River. It prospered as a ship building community after a river supply shipman drifted upstream and landed there in 1613. The remaining shipbuilding infrastructure has left Bear River as a ‘town on stilts’ and a picturesque draw for tourists. Irene N. who lived in Bear River ‘a few summers’ reported that the town was a haven for ‘radicals, draft-dodgers, and drug dealers’. This demographic might be the cultural source of the rather flamboyant colours that tint the New England style buildings on either end, and in two cases along-side, the Bear River bridge.

Our interest in Bear River stemmed from its being the only community in Canada I am aware of using the ‘living machine’ technology for sewage treatment. 75 homes in Bear River have their sewage piped to a greenhouse by the river’s edge where it fills a series of vessels each supporting different plant communities.

Each community takes turns biodegrading and consuming nutrients in the sludge before it is piped to the next vessel where different plants consume different nutrients. The Bear River operation is smaller than other systems I’ve heard of in Colorado and Europe where as many as seven vessels treat sewage to clear water and supporting productive operations such as fish farms.

Main Street Bear River appears to be three shops and two restaurants along side the Bear River Bridge. Looking down into the water, our prairie crew wondered about the debris, sheen, and brown foam that seemed to be drifting upstream beneath us.

“You all Yanks?” a weathered voice asked aloud. An old man in a maroon sweatshirt, grey sweat pants, joggers, and a baseball cap with a capital D embroidered on the crest was standing near us on the bridge’s high sidewalk. His eyes were shrouded by long, grey eyebrows hanging like lichens over his lids.

“We’re from Alberta,” Martha answered on our behalf. “Glen here is from Saskatchewan. Why did you ask if we were Americans?”





“It’s mostly Americans that come around these parts,” D answered. Martha asked how long he had lived in Bear River. He pointed to a ridge upstream. “I live in a house over there. I live in the bedroom I was born in 84 years ago.” That fact in and of it self was amazing to me. D proceeded to describe several highlights of his life and repeating a refrain that he was ‘one of ten children, with six children and twenty five grand children, and twenty five great-grand children.’ He said it often enough that we could repeat it in the van later. He’d trained in the RAF but never saw combat. He worked many years in a powerhouse that he implied was a tidal-hydro plant, but you’d think that we would have heard of such a thing before now if it existed in Nova Scotia. He spent some time, he said, in Hollywood, working for $25 a day on a movie that wound up not being made when a colleague of his tried to hold out for $125.

Martha stood closer to D than I did.

“How did you lose your eye?” she asked him. Focusing past the curtains of eyebrows, I could see D’s right eye socket was sunken.

“Got a piece of metal in it,” he said, by way of explanation, then he held out his right hand, his gnarled fingers spread out like a gardening implement. The upper side of his hand where his thumb should have been was as flat and straight as the bottom side. “Got my thumb caught in the drive train of a tractor. Just pulled it off. Pulled out the cords.” He winced painfully and gripped his hand as if trying to stem gouts of spurting imaginary blood. The image of red cords hanging from a detached thumb made me shudder. Later in the van, Glen wondered if D’s stories were true.

“The ones about his eye and thumb were probably true,” I said.