Fields of August

By Conrad Beaubien

The fields are set like a game of checkers; the playing pieces, dry-stained roll-bales of hay. You’ve seen them I’m sure. Aligned in graceful poses in high afternoon; edges of each giant roll cut from the earth they sit on by sharpened purple shadows; the bales ready to race down a duneshape of land dyed in shades of the sun itself. Earlier, while waiting in my car for a passenger to join me, I watched nearby as a bird of brown and white markings whose body was balanced stilt-like on thin wire legs, a bird that I would describe to be in the lineage of a plover, picked about through a yellowed lawn belonging to a large garage with an attached low-slung house. No shade, no trees, yet the plover-like bird seemed content going about its business. I say plover-like, but I would more likely call it a sandpiper if at that same moment I was sitting among the dune grasses along the coast of Nova Scotia.

The bird trotted then stopped. It picked at the ground, raised its head then trotted for another few feet. Then in all its dusk brown and egg-white feathered elegance, it let out a call; Cheeepp…the call ranged from mid-tone to a soprano note. Cheeepp…it called again. It repeated its call until I could anticipate a deliberate rhythm, notes played by the natural world’s existential music ensemble. These are some of the things we do, at least some of us non-text, non-social media types do when waiting—listen, observe, compare; but then again the hay imagery is another thing. It’s a marker of time.

Hay from the salt marshes of Nova Scotia was originally cultivated by the French Acadians who in 1604 began settling in Acadie, now Nova Scotia. They prospered as farmers and fishers and as generations passed the premium hay, sought after for its sea minerals, eventually became in demand to feed the horses that pulled the transit trolleys of New York City of the day.

The Acadians made use of the marshes of Nova Scotia in the tradition they had brought from the rural areas of the Vendee region of western France. Previous generations had farmed and fished along the vast Brittany coastline and had developed a system to advantage the richness of the sea for their land crops.

Imagine vast tidal fields that resemble the fresh water wetlands in the County like those around Big Island or others situated below the elevated ridge that shoulders the Bloomfield preserve of muck grasses.

In marshlands along the Baie Française, known today as the Bay of Fundy, the tides have deposited a rich layer of alluvium that in some places is 40 metres deep. The Acadian adaptation was to prevent the tillable portion of the marshes along the bay and along rivers from being flooded with salt water, an undertaking which earned them the nickname défricheurs d’eau, or water clearers. The system comprised of levees and tide gates, was known as aboiteaux.

These levees, massive embankments ranging in width from two to seven metres at the base and topped by a 60-centimetre-wide path or a roadway, were usually 45 centimetres higher than the highwater line. The walls were built of sod, and the space between the walls, like the body of the levee itself, was filled with clay. Into the base of each dyke they built “aboiteaux”—wooden sluices fitted with swinging doors that allowed excess fresh water to drain from the newly claimed land, but shut to prevent re-entry of salt water at high tide. After rainwater had diluted the salt content for a few years, the new fields were ready to sustain crops and livestock.

This system of levees and tide gates helped create a sense of belonging for the Acadian people. Every owner of marshland was expected to help build and maintain the structures, either by working on them directly or contributing money or materials. As the levees protected vast tracts of land, people felt bound to preserve them for the benefit of all. Today, modern aboiteaux based on the same engineering principles are employed to maintain drainage of dyke lands.

There are comparisons and differences with the fate of the Acadians in Eastern Canada and the Loyalist immigration to our region. Whereas the Loyalists fled their homes in the New England US states out of loyalty to a King in England and were offered refuge, the Acadians were brutally deported from their homes in Acadie by the British for choosing to remain a neutral people in the wars between Britain and France. The Acadians were also considered a threat to the British because of the former’s close affinity to and friendship with the Mi’kmaq First Nations of the region. The Acadians are considered in history to be of the first ‘boat people’ forced to be separated from family and shipped off to any place that would offered them shelter along the coastlines of North America.

Not sure why the image of ripe, sun-soaked hay in a field at this time of year would carry me off to fields afar. Maybe one day it will come to me as to why.