MOM WOULD NEVER LET ME walk out this far.
That’s the thought that comes into my head as I make my way carefully down New Brunswick’s Alma Beach toward the still-retreating waves of the Bay of Fundy, boots crunching on barnacle-crusted rocks. It’s early February, only just past noon, but a scrim of high cloud has diffused the weak sunshine into a peachy twilight glow. Down at the waterline, more than a kilometre from the road, the only sounds are the wind in my ears and the cries of the great black-backed gulls that have congregated on the shoals revealed by the ebb tide. Behind the beach, a snow-dusted slope with a dense cluster of colourful houses rises above a small harbour at the mouth of the Upper Salmon River, where a couple of lobster boats are temporarily marooned on the red mud.
This is Alma, permanent population 250, gateway to Fundy National Park. In the summer, the village is packed with tourists munching on lobster rolls from Fundy Take-Out and exploring the intertidal zone. I’ve never seen the place so utterly deserted; but then, in the four years I lived in New Brunswick, it never occurred to me to visit the Fundy region in the winter.
It’s my first time back in the province in a decade, and in a strange way, it feels like a homecoming. It’s not just the film strip of memories that unspools as I rediscover the park I’ve loved since I first visited on a summer road trip in 1998. I’m also 14 weeks pregnant with my first child, and as I remember my mother calling me back toward the safety of the harbour breakwater, I imagine someday feeling the same mixture of pride and barely suppressed panic as I watch my kid flying down this beach at low tide.
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