Blueberries for all!

Aug 25 was sparkling weather all day. We saw our first other sailboat (actually, first any boat in two weeks), an Austrian couple who had spent the summer cruising the Labrador coast and were heading back to Newfoundland on a parallel track, planning to leave their boat in Lewiston, NFLD. What a deal — cruise in some new place, leave your boat in a boatyard wherever you end up, come back the next summer and continue. They and Finley chatted by radio. We almost spent the night in the same harbor but they decided it was too small for two boats and continued on. We’ll probably see them tonight in Makkovik, since he said they were out of beer. Austrians out of beer!

Our anchorage was in a small protected cove on a small island. No more polar bears to worry about! A well-kept fishing cabin stood solidly on the shore. There were piles of whelk shells (big — 2″ long) behind it, presumably the product of several feasts. We had a feast of our own the next morning: blueberry pancakes. The island was loaded, and no berry branch was more than 1″ above the ground, spread out flat against the rock.  Talk about hunkering down.

The island was granitic, with great vertical slots like saw cuts running in every direction. The exposed rounded upper surfaces had a coating of blueberries, crowberries, mosses and lichens. At the bottom of each “saw cut” was an entirely different ecosystem: a blanket of foot-tall flowers, twisted alders several feet high, ferns galore. It was like dropping from above the treelike directly into a tropical jungle, except the distance was twenty feet. I suppose it’s no more dramatic, ecologically, than the transition from dry meadow to swamp. Here the change is due to protection from cold and drying winds rather than soil moisture. And the plant communities are old and undisturbed, due to differences of conditions rather than history. So much of New England is a direct result of disturbance — clearing, mowing, logging, tilling, grazing — which effects the plant community for dozens of years afterward.

Another treat: the bay was loaded comb jellies drifting gently past the boat with the tidal current. I’d seen them before: an egg-shaped body with two very long streamers, so beautiful in their element. We could see them fluoresce. I took a water sample with my plankton net but the result was disappointing, modest quantities of needle-shaped phytoplankton. Do the jellies eat much smaller stuff?

This coast is all about rock, so we wish we were geologists at this moment. So much variety, all of it visible, like the American West but two billion years older, as I’ve said. What we see seems hard to interpret without much more knowledge. The language of rocks is complex. Appearances are insufficient. For example, the same mineral combination (quartz, feldspar, mica) has two forms: granite, if formed by intrusion; and rhyolite if formed by extrusion (volcanoes). Then it metamorphoses (remelts), presumably changing crystal structure in some way. Somehow geologists know that the rock around Makkovik is metamorphosed rhyolite, whereas the Torngat Mountains are metamorphosed granite. In the process it gets banded and twisted and acquires jet-black intrusions, typically gabbro or diabase, which are the same minerals as basalt but they’re formed by intrusion and basalt by extrusion. Got that? Then somehow this metamorphosed form stays around for over a billion years without being eroded away or re-subducted and now appears on the surface as if it’s always been that way. The entire glacial period is just the blink of an eye for these rocks.  What’s more, the whole lot of them is silicates, but each with slightly different amounts of various other elements, all formed at enormous temperature and pressure, and coming out looking very different. What a stew pot. And what a time scale.

Speaking of eye-blinks, we’re used to ocean level being a strong determinant of shoreline appearance — beaches, cliffs, etc. — and being fixed in time. Here that fragile illusion is summarily shattered. It’s all rock, shaped the Ice Sheet and glaciers, mostly indifferent to the effects of mere waves the way sand. The water level could go up or down 60′ and the coastline would look about the same. The islands would just be in different places. Which is exactly what has happened since the last ice age.

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