SUMMER2016
MOUNTAINLIFEBLUEMOUNTAINS
67
words :: Leslie Anthony
So large it shows the curvature of the earth
,
Georgian Bay’s generations of residents and
cottagers and travelers consider it a Great Lake
unto itself. Indeed in representing the near-
north for some 12,000,000 people, Georgian
Bay offers no shortage of figurative and literal
touchstones. Inmy case, that remembrance will
always be the Bay’s lapping, along its eastern
shore, at the Canadian Shield—a Precambrian
formation figured on diagrams yanked down
on rollers at the front of every classroom in the
Great White North.
Some 8,000,000 km
2
of granite and gneiss
ringing Hudson Bay from the Northwest
Territories to Labrador, the Shield is bedrock
with a personality, blushing the same feldspar-
pink in real life as those oldmaps of Canada. If
you live or recreate along the eastern Bay, you
know the Shield as an eternally breaching pod
of rosé whales, marching scattershot toward
the thunder of breaking waves, eventually to
disappear at the very edge of the world. This
water-rock interface is also a livingmuseum of
NewWorld exploration, a 410-year diorama of
Brûlé, Champlain, Brébeuf, Nicolet, Vérendrye,
andMacKenzie, still the same land of canoes
and kayaks and sailboats and swimming figured
inmany a dreamy song. It’s also a landscape
so untamable that the rarest plants and snakes
and turtles and fishes and birds in all of Ontario
still find foothold here, a place of unbridled
wildness, preternatural beauty, and a thousand
splendid sunsets. With all this memory to
connect to as a former Torontonian, maybe it’s
no surprise that I keep a piece of Shield granite
from Georgian Bay inmyWest Coast living
room—where it’s in equally auspicious company.
The accumulation of rocks inmy life
often
feels like a geological process unto itself.
Loosed from the outside world by the hands
of encounter or discovery, they’re carried
downstream in the currents of human
experience to be deposited in some eddy or
other of my existence. When this process is fully
conscious, the rocks quickly find themselves
in the company of that piece of Shield. When
not-so-conscious, they often go on subsequent
journeys of their own. Sometimes they turn up
later in a pocket, other times in a drawer,
BIO
PHILIAC
BEDROCK:
MEMORIES
AREMADE
OFGEOLOGY
Canadian Shield formations on the shore of GeorgianBay. ADOBE STOCK
