- Dec 12, 2013
My wife and I spent about three weeks in Alberta late this summer visiting family and renewing old friendships. It was a lovely trip but in neither of us did it inspire a desire to be anywhere else but where we are. We were happy to get home and go about the fall tasks of bringing in the garden and filling the woodshed.
Those turn-of-the-seasons routines always remind me of the grandparents I once visited here. Never in my early life did I imagine that I would live on the same land and in the same house. As a matter of fact, as a young man I would have been horrified at the prospect - but here I am and my roots are deep.
This place is at the geographic centre of the province of New Brunswick. It isn’t at the centre of anything else and it isn’t on the way to anywhere unless you are headed for the woods.
My maternal great grandfather settled here in the mid 1800s. I don't know why. It was granted land – “one hundred acres more or less” as the old deeds read - and that, I suppose, was the main reason for coming.
He couldn’t have been looking for prime farmland. The land is mostly clay and rock. There are places where you come to the underlying ledge when you scuff your feet. The shallow topsoil is full of broken shale and here and there throughout the fields there are the exposed tops of granite boulders, rolled here in another age by glaciers and far to large to have been dug out and rolled on to the rock piles when the land was cleared.
It is one of those many places that remind me what a thin skin we live on. We tread carelessly over the soil that is clinging precariously to inhospitable rock. Loosen it and it washes away. I have hiked along trails where the few booted feet that pass are enough to wear away the moss and roots that hold the soil. And I look through the earth's broken skin to the exposed rock and think, from here on down there is nowhere anything can live!
Imagine the sphere of the earth. Most of the surface of the sphere is covered with water, sand, ice or barren rock. The rest is covered with enough soil to give us some comfort and sustenance and a place to live between the rock below and the infinity of uninhabitable space over our heads. One should be grateful for any part of such a precious place - and I am.
I had a friend and colleague who, in the nineteen forties, held a position that gave him the opportunity to travel extensively. On one heady trip he visited London, Paris, Rome and Athens. In London, during his first stop, he encountered an unsettling condescension toward “the colonies” from which he had journeyed. But as he continued his tour he found the same condescending attitudes in each city toward the one he had just left. “By the end of that trip”, he told me, “I had come to the conclusion that no place on earth is any closer to the centre of the world than anywhere else”.
That observation is quite literally true. Again, imagine the sphere of the earth. Changes in altitude on the surface are insignificant given the magnitude of the distance from the centre. From out in space the earth is a perfect sphere.
For one year, I held a position that gave me the opportunity to travel, although not nearly as extensively as my friend. The one trip I took outside the Maritimes was to Bermuda. That tiny island nation’s crest shows a ship foundering on a reef. When I asked about it I learned that the first six inhabitants of the island swam to shore in 1609 after their vessel was wrecked. Beneath the crest is the evocative motto Quo Fata Ferunt meaning Where the Fates Lead.
There are a whole constellation of reasons and circumstances that bring us to one place or another. Rarely is it simply a matter of choosing where we want to go and sometimes circumstances leave us “shipwrecked” on an unexpected shoreline. It seems to me to be undeniable that our lives unfold more by chance than by choice. But that is not to say that I am fatalistic. Providence does not exclude random occurrence; rather it begins with each new circumstance and what we make of it.
I came here because this place was affordable at a time when I was longing for a place of my own and because the opportunity to buy it came along as I was considering a move. And I am still here because, so far as I can tell, it is as close to the centre of the earth as anywhere else.