A Walk on the Beach by Eden Monroe

 

To purchase Sudden Turn click here

The romantic suspense novel Sudden Turn is set in the fictitious city of Franklin, in the real life province of New Brunswick, Canada. I know everyone has their own little slice of heaven, and for me that’s New Brunswick (Nouveau Brunswick), my home province. So forgive me if I brag a little.

Not that size matters, but New Brunswick is 72,908 square kilometres of mostly trees, lakes, etc. There are also plenty of cities and towns, although more than half of us live in rural areas, me included. But nature can be pretty exciting.  Like watching a river run backwards. It’s a fact! It happens twice a day and you can almost set your watch by it. I’m talking about the mighty St. John River, often called The Rhine of North America. It does its slow dance through the province from north to south until it meets up with the Atlantic Ocean and then things get really interesting. Rising tides literally shove this 450-mile river in the opposite direction with force, creating powerful rapids. I’ve ridden those rapids in a jet boat at their peak. Epic!

And speaking about the tidal action of the world-renowned Bay of Fundy, how about this? You can walk barefoot on the ocean floor, wet sand oozing between your toes where just six hours earlier you would have been taking that same walk under as much as forty plus feet of salt water. That’s about the height of a four-storey building! The tides of course are the result of the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon on the earth, which itself is in perpetual motion. The highest tide on record in the Bay of Fundy is 53.6 feet! It’s pretty phenomenal because about 100 billion tonnes of seawater makes its way in and out of this funnel-shaped bay in a gentle sway during its twice a day tide cycle. That’s equivalent to the estimated flow of all of the freshwater rivers and streams on the planet!

There’s also the spectacular Old Sow Whirlpool in the western passage of Passamaquoddy Bay, an inlet of the Bay of Fundy. It’s the largest whirlpool in the western hemisphere, second only in the world to the massive Saltstraumen maelstrom in Norway.

New Brunswick has tidal bores too, again because of the giant Bay of Fundy tides. One of the best known is found in the city of Moncton where the incoming wave can reach up to a metre high and rushes up the Petitcodiac River at about thirteen kilometers per hour. Surfers love it. It’s a rare natural phenomenon because there are only sixty tidal bores in the entire world.

Again along our rugged coastline, the Hopewell Rocks are probably the biggest stone flowerpots in the world. Some of these amazing sea stacks are as tall as seventy feet at low tide when you can literally walk among them … or kayak in this most unusual flowerpot garden at high tide. The choice is yours. The difference is about forty to fifty feet of seawater.

Moving inland a bit, New Brunswick has it’s own gravity hill – Magnetic Hill in Moncton where vehicles coast uphill. It used to be said the land was somehow magnetized, hence it’s name, but it’s just an optical illusion. There are actually sixty gravity hills in the world, but perhaps Magnetic Hill is one of the best known. I’m guessing there might also be more of them. I recall riding a bicycle from Saint John to my parent’s home on Darlings Island one time and I came to a long stretch of highway that looked like a steep upgrade. I thought I was in for a lot of heavy pedalling on my old school bike with no speed gears, but to my surprise I actually coasted the whole way. It looked like I was going uphill, but I never once pedalled. I’m serious! The funny thing too is before that highway was twinned many years ago, there were a lot of fatal crashes along the stretch where traffic from the Fox Farm Road entered the highway. I wonder if perhaps cars may have appeared to be further away than they actually were when people pulled out and tried to merge with the existing traffic flow?

In Saint John, Canada’s oldest incorporated city, there is a green space like no other, well in this country anyway because it’s the largest urban park in Canada. Rockwood Park is 2,200 acres in size and was designed by Calvert Vaux, one of the designers of New York’s Central Park. Rockwood Park is home to an 18-hole 70 par public golf course, 10 freshwater lakes and 55 walking trails and footpaths, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump from downtown. I’ve spent many an hour in this pristine urban wilderness.

Are you into bridges? No? Well maybe you will be after this, given the romantic nature of covered bridges. Also called kissing bridges, you have time for quite a few in our Hartland Covered Bridge. Built in 1898 as an uncovered bridge, it got its roof in 1922 and is now the longest covered bridge in the world with a span of 1,280 feet. That’s just under a quarter of a mile long! In the early days you would be penalized with a substantial fine if you were caught travelling through it with your horse going faster than a walk. It was likely a resonance issue.

And of course prehistoric creatures also once called New Brunswick home and we have our own mastodon, discovered in 1936. There are said to be about sixty such specimens found across Canada, and the Hillsborough Mastodon is “considered to be one of the most remarkable.”

Speaking about fossils, we certainly have our share. The farm where I once lived had plenty because many stones found in that area have some kind of plant fossil embedded in them.

Among the countless fossils found in New Brunswick is the world’s oldest intact shark skeleton dating from approximately 409 million years ago. That makes it about twice as old as dinosaurs. This specimen was discovered in the Restigouche River basin. For the scholars among us, that’s Doliodus problematicus. Say that five times fast.

Now many of you at this point are probably shouting at your screen. Please! Eden! Tell us how New Brunswick got its name! Okay, it happened in 1784 in honour of the reigning British monarch, King George III who was also the Duke of Brunswick. So … New Brunswick. It’s not exactly original, but it stuck.

And New Brunswick is the only province in Canada that is constitutionally bilingual, with about a third of our population speaking French. I love the dual cultures.

If you’re taking notes here’s a couple of other interesting facts: The New Brunswick Museum is Canada’s oldest operating museum (that’s where we keep the mastodon and the shark), founded in 1842, and we’re home (in Rogersville) to two of Canada’s only three Trappist monasteries (one of monks and one of nuns). Also, just off our east coast lies the province of Prince Edward Island and linking the two provinces is the eight-mile long Confederation Bridge. It’s not only the longest bridge in Canada, but the longest bridge over ice-covered water in the world.

Oh and one more thing, if you’re into French fries, one third of the world’s frozen French fries are produced here. Just sayin’.

Thanks for letting me go on a bit about New Brunswick. Nothing but fun here in Canada’s picture province. Come on over!

 

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