My trip to the ocean

 
I wasn’t really expecting an amazing home-cooked meal, a 40-minute hike over pure unfettered rock carrying (someone else’s) very expensive equipment, or to have my mind blown.  But all of that happened too.
My job at WWF is mostly to write: proposals, reports, cases for support.  I try to translate the amazing and important – and technical, and complicated, and sometimes tedious (think “multi-stakeholder meeting”)— work of our conservation experts into words that capture the imagination and intellect and ultimately, hopefully, hearts of our donors.  I depend a lot on the stories that folks like Bettina share with me, on their pictures and presentations, on the answers to questions I ask over the phone or by email or, sometimes if I’m lucky, over a beer somewhere.  Rarely do I get to see what they do and where they do it first-hand.
So maybe that’s part of it, why this short little trip was so special to me.  But there was something totally visceral about the experience too.  If you are one of those people who has a dream of someday living by the ocean, the picture that you have in your head of that perfect house-by-the-sea: that’s Bettina’s.  The water, the rocks, the sky—gray and broody the day we were there—it’s not quite right to call them “the view.”  They are somehow part of the architecture.
I wanted to get a shot of Bettina walking her dog, Digby, along the shore so we packed up the tripod and camera and followed her on their “usual path,” over a kilometer or so of rocks the size of small skulls.  I needed to watch my feet.  I needed to, but I couldn’t.  The spray against the jagged islands, the tall crooked trees, the possibility of a seal colony – I was awestruck.  I collected tiny, fractured sea urchin shells, hoping to hold on to something from the walk. They turned to dust in the pockets of my rain jacket.

(c) Jessie Sitnick/WWF-Canada
Later, Bettina’s partner—a marine biologist and expert in his own right—made us the best ragout I’ve ever had.  Then he told us about the walrus.  Two-hundred and fifty years ago this cove was full of them.  Gone now, along with most of the seals, and the sea birds…and the fish.  We sat sipping wine overlooking the ocean, which had gone momentarily calm.  It’s beautiful, he said, it’s beautiful, but it’s dead.
It’s hard to get context like that from a desk in uptown Toronto.  But when it comes to the trouble in our seas, I know—even here—we are far from immune.  It effects what we eat, what we breathe, it’s a strong pulse in our economy.  And those are all important reasons—more than enough reasons, really—to care about what happens in our oceans.  But the view from Bettina’s house, what you can see, what you can’t see…well that puts caring in a whole different light.  Next time you’re in Halifax, I suggest you go.  Ask for the ragout.