The Strangest Thing: Hopewell Rocks

Because we haven’t learn how to live every moment of our life as a new and unique (we don’t even remember that it is new and unique), in order to feel more alive we may need a change of decoration, company, or mindset. Depending on the strengths of our habits this change can be large or small, but it must be intense enough to let us open for the impressions. Traveling is a good way to help that opening to happen. If you need a destination, I may advise one.

Hopewell Rocks in the Bay of Fundy, Canada is a place where at a low tide you can walk along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and admire 12-22 meters high rocks of the strangest shape. They have earned various nicknames, such as Dinosaur Rock, Mother in Law, E.T., Lovers’ Arch, The Turtle, The Bear, Diamond Rock, Apple or Castle. The unique spectacle in which the gravitational attraction of the Sun and the Moon plays an important role takes place every day. The bay has a huge size and depth, unique funnel shape, and the water waves here (about 12-hour cycle) are almost perfectly synchronized with the natural phenomenon of the tides in this part of the Atlantic Ocean (12 hours and 26 minutes).
An extraordinary ecosystem, rich in food for the sea inhabitants and created by unusual tidal energy, has a dramatic setting: high cliffs, fanciful rock sculptures, piles of various materials deposited by water. Volcanic rocks washed away by ocean waters and red sandstone give the area a truly unearthly look, and the fossils that can be seen here are 300 million years old.

You can really feel like on a different planet here, and the experience of strangeness, astonishment and beauty is intensified by the awareness that soon the place where you stand will be completely flooded with sea water - up to a height of 16 meters. Every tide and outflow lasts an average of 6 hours, which allows one to view both high and low water at any time of the year. You can plan your visit and your walk on the bottom of the ocean with great accuracy thanks to the info at www.thehopewellrocks.ca

New Brunswick, the Canadian province where Hopewell Rocks are located, borders Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and the state of Maine. Traveling by car from the Boston area will take a few hours, but it might be worth it. Dense forests surrounding the highway, dark hills crisscrossed with rivers and lakes, and loud silence are a good preparation for unusual landscape.

Visiting places like Hopewell Rocks helps to acknowledge the beauty of a strangest worlds, and to tune into the rhythm of nature and of our own being. Here, I am reminded again that everything has its rhythm and frequency, and that every coming tide goes out.

"You're the child of this Earth, and you share its resilient spirit, its insistence on life, and its inevitable rhythm. The sea that rushes out will come in. And so will you." (Margaret B. Moss)
 
Lidia Russell