The Atlantic Coastal Plain
I've been thinking a lot about the Atlantic Coastal Plain lately.
I have seen the Atlantic Ocean a few times. I saw it in Nova Scotia and in Maine, and a long time ago I went swimming in Virginia. I remember the smell of big salt water and the sand on the dunes, loose under my feet. And I remember the restless tides, too. In, then out, and the long wet beach that was left behind. The ocean left strange crusts and films on the rocks, some whitish and maybe from the brine, others brown or green and alive, apparently. I saw creatures unfamiliar to me, ocean creatures, suspended in pools at low tide, or clinging to rocks. They were spiny, shelled, or soft, or all three. I was glad to not have to see the immensity and strangeness of the ocean all the time, I thought. It felt primordial I did not belong on its shores. I saw the ocean, sized it up, and rejected it for the freshwater world I had come from. So many things end up in the ocean, but I would not be one of them.
That's the Atlantic itself I am remembering. But what I've been thinking about lately is the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The flat lowland fringe abutting the coast. I have read in my books that it is a land of bog, swamp, sand, and pine savannah. I have never really set eyes on the Atlantic Coastal Plain itself, but from what I've read, apparently I have seen small glimmers of it here on Georgian Bay.
I have read that there are certain plants growing along the coast of Georgian Bay that are disjuncts here. That is, they originate from the Atlantic Coastal Plain, where they are widespread and abundant, yet they also occur in small pockets here on the coast of Georgian Bay. It is almost 700 kilometres between the Atlantic and Georgian Bay, and I read that there are none or only very few of these plants in that space between. Disjuncts.
This group of disjuncts include Virginia Meadow-beauty, Rhexia virginica, and Bog Yellow-eyed Grass, too. Xyris difformis. Rhexia, and Xyris—they are good words. There is also White-fringed Orchid, Branched Bartonia, and Virginia Chainfern. Yes, Virginia.
I read that these plants probably colonized the Georgian Bay area over eleven thousand years ago, when it drained out of an immense river that ran through the state of New York and into the Atlantic Ocean. That river was a direct conduit to the coastal plain, where these plants had found refuge during the icy Pleistocene. I read that they had colonized their way up this river to the Georgian Bay area, and their occurrence here speaks to that ancient journey.
After I had read about these plants I set out to see them. And I did see them. On wave-washed shorelines I saw the pink blooms of Virginia Meadow-beauty and the dainty flowers of Bog Yellow-eyed Grass. Virginia Chainfern, White-fringed Orchid, and Branched Bartonia I found all together, very near the coast, growing out of the wet moss in a small bog. And another disjunct, too, that I hadn't expected to find—Hidden-fruit Bladderwort.
I think about this a lot, and how it is a story of contradiction. There are opposing narratives in the story that make it hard to understand. At first you have to let yourself see these plants as intrepid colonizers who quickly moved north into the fresh new world emerging at the trailing edge of the melting glaciers. But despite this, you then have to reconcile how it is that they have gone no further. Why would they arrive on the shores of early Georgian Bay and then make no further gains for ten millennia? Was the entire continent not in their grasp? It's as though something about the world changed and this stopped them. And now they are marooned. The mystery is what stopped them. I think I know what it was. And I'm not going to tell you.
I look at Georgian Bay's Atlantic Coastal Plain flora and see the oldest and earliest elements of life on Georgian Bay manifest. I think about coastal lowlands and the ways Georgian Bay and the Atlantic are similar and different. I think of the way summer's heat gets held by the big water and emanated long into the fall, and how that holds off autumn frosts. I picture the ocean's tides, and the scouring of coastlines by strong waves and by plates of floating spring ice. I think about how strange it is that the stories of Georgian Bay and the Atlantic Coastal Plain intersect like this. I think about waves crashing on the distant shores of time.
