JOHN DeMONT: How disasters teach us to how to master loss

I do not know Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry well enough to say if the spire of St. James United Church in Great Village, Nova Scotia is found anywhere in her work.

However, I do know that the homeland of the woman critics consider one of the most important American poets of the 20th century was very important.

We also understand that the few years the Worcester, Mass. native, Bishop spent there with her grandparents and widowed mother in “an unfathomable house” were some of her most memorable.

So it stands to reason that the church opposite her childhood home, and the steeple that had guided sailors back to port for more than a century, lingered somewhere in Bishop’s imagination.

And to wonder if, if the church spire Fiona had damaged had recently been torn down, would Bishop have been there, if she would have written, as she did in her poem One Art: ‘The art of losing is not difficult to master; so many things seem filled with intent to be lost that their loss is not a catastrophe.”

The pain of loss was felt across Atlantic Canada after Post-Tropical Storm Fiona. In rural communities, residents mourn washed into the sea, but also in the devastated towns and villages, amidst the crumbling and wrecked homes, in places where livelihoods were lost and centuries of history were wiped out in a few horrifying hours.

Beloved animals died in Fiona. Barns, farmland, fish huts and other things that meant a lot to people disappeared.

Lost Landmarks

There is some comfort in knowing that some of what was lost in Fiona’s wake, the roads, bridges, shipyards, power poles and other infrastructure of our East Coast life, can be rebuilt.

However, it is sad to know that some of the signposts that have always shown us the way forward in the land we call home are gone forever.

Our shared sense of loss is immense for a red oak tree that stood for three centuries in the vast empty cornfield near Shubenacadie and most saw out the car window as they drove the 102 along the road to somewhere.

I wrote a column a few years ago about the tree as it resonated with people far and wide who saw poetry in its massive canopy and symbolism in the way it stood resolute and grand.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh. Damn Fiona.
Our favorite tree in the province is gone. It has been estimated to be 300 years old. #fiona #Storm #halifax noise #Tree pic.twitter.com/Nn3pn8xrK3

— len wagg (@Len_Wagg_photo) September 24, 2022

For some it was a ‘touchstone’, for others a ‘holy cause’.

For Mike Sangster, who always pointed the tree out to his daughters while driving them back and forth between Halifax and Sackville, NB, where they attended college, “It was just a tree, but it meant a lot.”

After all, every loss is something deeply personal. When her daughter walked into the bedroom at 3:30 a.m. the morning after Fiona punched her and said, “The big tree fell,” Lisa Profitt headed into her backyard in Halifax.

Using a flashlight, she traced the length of the 75-foot-tall spruce tree she planted there 28 years ago, which offered her four children and first grandchild shelter from the summer heat.

She stopped at its splintered base, got back into bed and cried until dawn.

That’s how the natural world works, of course: things die, disappear and come back to life seemingly out of nowhere.

That knowledge does little to lessen the sense of loss of someone like Fiona.

This comparison of satellite imagery of Prince Edward Island and the Northumberland Strait, taken on August 21 and September 25, 2022, shows the extent to which the storm’s extreme wind and wave action has churned up the seabed and eroded the shoreline. pic.twitter.com/hHGVjNqjJb

— Canadian Space Agency (@csa_asc) September 27, 2022

dunes destroyed

As a child, Beth Johnson was warned by her parents not to step on the dunes at Cavendish Beach on Prince Edward Island because it would disturb the endangered plover nests and marram grass root system.

The communications pro, who lives in Charlottetown, said “every islander has an adoration” for the island’s North Shore Dunes, which “have been muses for generations of artists, a hideaway for romantic moments and a gateway to those breathtaking ocean views you have.” crowned one.”

Fiona, however, reduced the dunes to pitiful hills.

“Seeing her so badly damaged feels like the morning after in a disaster movie, where a sunrise reveals a reverberant, barren landscape,” she told me.

In the rest of Prince Edward Island, hearts are heavy for a different reason. Teacup Rock was part of the sandstone cliffs on the north coast of the island. Over the years, however, the Atlantic waters had eroded the formation at Thunder Cove Beach until it was self-standing, the sides narrowing precariously at the base until they resembled a teacup.

“Like losing an old friend”

“It’s a natural wonder,” said graphic designer Larry Burke, who has owned a property in nearby Darnley since 2010, “and like a sandcastle, we knew it would eventually be washed away by a big storm.”

Fiona was the one. The morning after it thundered through the region, friends in nearby Malpeque wrote to him that the iconic rock had collapsed.

“I think it’s like losing an old friend,” he told me days later.

He and his wife have many pictures and memories of all the walks to the rock that usually marked the turning point of a walk on the beach.

They plan to return in the coming days to photograph the remains.

There’s something else they’ll want to see: a sandstone cliff block that’s eroding in a way that gives hope that another teacup rock might one day form, although that likely won’t be in their lifetime.

I assume that’s what Bishop meant when she wrote about the need to cope with loss, which in other words means it’s important to never give up hope no matter what.