“When I was Down Beside the Sea..”

“When I was down beside the sea

A wooden spade they gave to me

To dig the sandy shore.

My holes were empty like a cup

In every hole the sea came up

             Till it could come no more.”               

 Robert Louis Stevenson

I love Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “ A Child’s Garden of Verses” for so many of them catch the essence of a childhood experience.  Digging holes by the sea was something I did as a child, my children did, and now, my grandchildren.  If you live anywhere near water, I bet it was the same for you.  It is elemental. 

What a delight then, to be able to wheel and crutch my way down to the beach, with my whole clan and this time, and to be the one in the chair, digging with her foot and overseeing production as the matriarchs of my life had done before.

We were on the Green Gables shore of Prince Edward Island, one of the maritime islands off of Eastern Canada.  It’s a great destination for New Englanders, not all that far, yet another country and on PEI, another time actually.  Potato farms cover the rolling landscape as they have for over two hundred years.  Tidy Canadians seem to have impeccable, yet wild flower filled landscapes.  Dairy cows graze in lush fields, not on feed lots and the essence of Ann of Green Gables is celebrated everywhere, but not in the overly tacky way that our dear country is so fond of.

My daughters had grown up watching Ann of Green Gables and Ann of Avonlea over and over again.  Knowing that it had been filmed in the 80’s I imagined the scenery, which is gorgeous, wouldn’t have changed much and it hadn’t.  Sweeping views of the ocean and the red cliffs, and in August the world was full of Queen Anne’s lace, Fireweed, Joe Pye weed and so many others. By the shore the flora and fauna is similar to Cape Cod; bayberry, seaside golden rod, beach pea, vetch.

However, they have soil, really good soil, rather than sand and rock that a peninsula made from the leavings of a glacier has.  Their characteristic red soil is from sedimentary rock rich in iron that oxidizes in the air.  As it turns out, this soil is every potato farmers dream and so for the last 300 years Prince Edward Island has been doing just that.  Today they are the largest potato-growing province in Canada with 88,000 acres of potatoes! That’s a lot of spuds!  They must plant two crops for we passed many fields where the plants were in bloom.

Back to the seaside hole digging- the amazing thing here is that dig as we did, down to the longest arm reach, our holes that were empty, stayed empty!  On the Cape you hit water right away. Perhaps we were too far back, maybe 20 yards from the water.  It was beautiful soft, rock-free sand, great for castles, but our moat stayed dry.  It might be that we were just digging in an area that had seen a lot of sand deposition over the winter.  Other days on other beaches, the water behaved as RLS claimed it would. 

On the south side of the island, the Northumberland Strait provides Canadians with their warmest water, as warm as Virginia Beach actually, for it is so shallow.  And there the sand is rust red. Access to this beach was too steep for my crutches but I had fun watching from the cliff top and my daughters came and entertained me with yoga postures.  Bless youth and their entertaining ways; from my toddler grandchildren to my sprightly young adults the week we spent there was pure delight. 

Bringing to mind, as the beautiful world often does, the other RLS poem,

“The world is so full of a number of things

I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.”  Amen