Somewhere down the
NEW BRUNSWICK TOURISM / NIGEL FEARON
Chocolate River
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For decades, New Brunswick’s Petitcodiac River didn’t get the respect it deserved. That’s changing and it’s about time
t was half past 4 o’clock in the afternoon and the biting flies were out for a snack at the headwaters of the Petitcodiac River. Downstream, where the river crashes into the highest tides in the world, it turns into something resembling 25 square kilometers of chocolate milk shake. But up here—long before it meanders past southeastern New Brunswick’s alluvial plains, towns and farms—it was as smooth and clear as glass. And buggy. “They’ve been getting worse recently,” said my guide (whom I’ll call Jim), snatching mosquitos out of the air by the handful. “For generations, the gypsum caves along the river made perfect homes for little brown bats. You know one of those critters can eat 1,000 insects in an hour? Anyway, they’re gone now, thanks to white nose fungus or, maybe, climate change.” Jim is a wildlife specialist who works for one of the local First Nations. Their ancestors inhabited these shores for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. He’s
BY ALEC BRUCE
a Scots-Irish gent, 40, fit, and full of topical knowledge. “We used to have a lot of fish in the river, too,” he said. “Everything you can imagine: salmon, gaspereau, brook trout, bass, perch, sturgeon.” The problem, he said, is man. The problem, he said, is always man. “The good news is man can always make things better.” He looked up from his clipboard. “We’re making things better right now, right here.” I hadn’t been back on the river in years. Travel, work, a move to Halifax—life—had reordered my priorities. But I’d recently snatched an opportunity to return, to see how my beloved “Chocolate River” had come along since I’d been gone, since the city of Moncton and the provincial government finally reversed years of neglect and began to restore its riparian health for eco-tourists and river rats like me. And so here I was, talking about the future—while also getting eaten alive. In the old days, I wouldn’t have needed a guide for an adventure like this. For more
than two decades, I was fond of gambolling along the Petitcodiac’s banks alone and in all conditions. Whenever I wanted a break from writing my daily column for the Moncton Times & Transcript, I scooted down to Bore Park to watch the sandpipers pluck shrimp from the mud flats that stretched for miles. The river’s sameness—particularly where it bends to the south and widens on its last leg to the Bay of Fundy—was a steady comfort to me. On the other hand, she wasn’t the prettiest watercourse I’d ever seen. New Brunswick’s Saint John River was larger and, in many places, lovelier. The Fraser, Thompson and Kootenay out west were far more conspicuous. Even the humble Saint Mary’s in Guysborough County, NS—where American slugger Babe Ruth once happily dropped a line, or several, for mighty Atlantic salmon—had more star power. The Petitcodiac, by contrast, was a 79-kilometre-long brown ribbon that looked a lot like the muddy Mississippi, only NEW BRUNSWICK
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