Very few people understood the eastern forests better, or at least could explain them more coherently, than Henry David Thoreau. This is what he said:
“If a man walks in the woods for the love of them for half each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed as an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
Hermann Hesse also got it right: “Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever learns to speak to them can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
I love reflections of the autumn leaves in lakes or streams. I can never get enough of them.
The autumn colours were clearly the best that we had seen yet on this trip. They were sensational. As we strolled along the Mersey River the colours reflected brilliantly in the water of the river.
The water in many places seemed brown. This was not from dirt or pollution. It is stained brown as it seeps through the surrounding bogs and gets coloured brown. The locals call it Mersey tea.
Tannins stain the water brown saponins are a kind of natural soap. When they fall over rapids they form stable foam.
The river contains a lot of slate which is a smooth gray metamorphic rock that forms natural dams over the river. Over time the slate has been polished smooth. The slate was formed about 500 million years ago when silt was deposited in fine layers on what was then the continental shelf of northern Africa! Think about that. The slate moved with the continent from Africa to North America.
380 million years ago the continents of Africa and North America moved together closing the Atlantic Ocean in the process. This collision of continents baked and bent the layers of silt and shale into the metamorphic rock that we call shale.
Later the continents shifted again and the continents separated once more leaving some African slate as part of what we now call Nova Scotia.
Autumn in Nova Scotia is grand. Life in Nova Scotia is grand.