Artfully rearranged

Today was one of those days when all is not quite as it seems.

We are in Kouchibougiac National Park in New Brunswick: 92 square miles of forest and wetland, edged with barrier islands, shifting sand dunes, lagoons, and salt marsh. Right on the edge of the Northumberland Strait.

We walked the water’s edge along Kelly’s Beach and part way down the South Kouchibougiac Dune, before retracing our steps and finding the Salt Marsh Boardwalk. Some 10 miles or so, taken slowly, as we watched common terns fishing the lagoon, seals offshore, ring billed and bonaparte gulls, cormorants, white winged scoter, bank swallows, and juvenile bald eagles haunting the nesting grounds of the piping plover. In so many ways exactly what we had come for.

But as we walked I was struck by the artificiality of the Park. The bicycle trails are wide and top dressed, their edges trimmed and tidy, and they wind in slow curves through the forest. There is signage – and clear prohibitions against straying off the designated way. And then there is the Park’s emptiness. What you are walking through is the recreation of a virgin wilderness that it never was. There are no houses or cabins – just the Park buildings and the campgrounds. Yet most everywhere else we have been the past fortnight, as we travelled the North Shore and then the length of the Gaspé Peninsula, the land along the forest or shore edge is lived on, worked, busy with people.

Over a 1,000 people were removed, and not without difficulty, to create this Park – descendants of both Mi’kmaq and the Acadians. The anger and resentment involved in the creation of this Park is acknowledged (and Parks Canada subsequently changed its policy on forced removals) but the very silence of the Park speaks to it more eloquently.

Watching the eider raft savaged by black backed gulls as we did at Ragueneau eight days ago and experiencing nature artfully rearranged, with the inconvenient parts removed or smoothed over, are not quite the same thing.