Youtube video (Blog 14) 5 min.
Jeb Elison did not tarry long in Fredericton. Curiosity drove him first downriver to the large New Brunswick city and port of St. John, and then he backtracked along the shores of peaceful Passamaquoddy Bay to Black's Harbor and St. Andrews in the west.
St. John, like Fredericton, had been another Loyalist town. British troops were dispatched through the port during the short War of 1812. Today, American tourists fling dollars at these traitorous folks who once pledged allegiance only to the father/mother country, Great Britain.
Passamaquoddy divides New Brunswick from Maine and in the second decade of the 21st century remains a sore point in a dispute over its potential use as a route for liquefied natural gas (also called LNG) tankers destined for possible new processing facilities on US shores.
Canada has all but declared the smaller bay here off-limits to US- bound ships of such magnitude. This was quite the conundrum— Brunswickians against ships.
"Jeb walked a stony shoreline and mused as autumn fused with a fuzzy late October light offshore. There appeared a single soul in a folding chair just out of reach of the lapping waters. Small talk evolved into the man's vigorous, animated exposition of the folly of governments foisting their will on the common people like him, who, he declared, are ""privileged"" to live and own land within natural boundaries untainted by political whim and fraud.
The sitter pronounced the oil and gas companies to be co-conspirators in cahoots with federal plotters. The sea would soon be sucked up in giant pipes and turned oily by energy companies homed thousands of miles west, operating mostly out of Calgary, Alberta.
Jeb listened politely and nodded politely. Jeb hiked and looked out across the windswept grasslands and red spruce and shrub barrens that comprise Fundy National Park, a shrine to minimalist natural vegetation and maximal ocean tidal thrills. Under the lunar government here, water and world-class tides establish the rhythms that decide life and death. Rocks and sand shift together under the enormous weight of boisterous winds and waves. Jeb had expected colder winds, even flurries, skittering across the Bay of Fundy, or rain squalls back-peddling inland off the Atlantic Ocean to the Northeast. However, the relatively warm Gulf Current drifts alongside this land.
So, with kind winds Jeb lingered in the New Brunswick bush along the eastern shore of Fundy. The paths through the tundra-like landscape were lonely but full of color, a seduction to Jeb.
