The Legend of Creaky Bog

Today is another stunning day, quite nippy, but extraordinarily clear and sunny. Today is going to be a beach day, but we we've talked about visiting the Shorepine Bog, just off the road into Wick Beach, so we deke off there, park, and head out on the boardwalk.

For the next twenty minutes, we wander along a boardwalk that snakes through a wonderland of stunted trees and a layer-upon-layer carpet up to 2 metres in depth, of Sphagnum Moss. The moss makes the water extremely acidic and thus limits what else grows in the area.

The air is so still, with no birds that we see or hear, just the low churn of the surf, away in the distance and the occasional creak of the boardwalk. It's slightly surreal, as you seem to be gliding along just above the surface of the bog. In fact, the boards are still rimed with frost in the shadows and it's a bit tricky, so we shuffle along those sections as if we're practicing the Moonwalk.



Parks Canada has a great web page for all of the flora and fauna found in the bog, which may be found here.

When we get to Wick Beach, the tide is higher than we've seen here before, and there's still just over an hour til high tide!

The water was calling to Marcelle, so off came the shoes and the pants were rolled up and off she went down the beach in the shallows. This routine astounds me, as thirty-seconds in the bloody water is more than enough for me. It's frickin' freezin' ! Nevertheless, my darling woman is out there year-round.

While Marcelle promenades down the beach, I follow along looking for things to photograph and just letting the incredible ambience of weather, water and waves saturate into my soul. Just being in this marvelous place is therapy.

Poking around on the back of the beach is always fruitful, and as I walk, I drop into a state in which I kind of just put my mind in neutral and let the peripheral vision go to work. What I wait for is some visual trigger that catches in the old filters and wakes me up enough to apply a bit more scrutiny to the situation. If it warrants further investigation, then I'll stop and work it for a bit, or just lumber on until something better pops up.

These tiny mushrooms caught my eye, or rather their shadows caught my eye, and then when I removed a piece of grass just to the right, it left an indentation like a running figure. A tiny drama, right there for the keen-sighted to find.

Interestingly, when I'm out with people, they often will observe, or even question how can I really see something when I'm spending all my time with the camera in front of my face? Later though, when we look at the images I've captured of the experience, inevitably I hear "Oh, I didn't see that!" ... I did.

Under a log, in its shade, I spotted a dark ovoid object which, in the contrasty light, looked like a huge black egg. Upon closer examination I saw it was a rock (as one might expect), but with a sheen of condensation on it as it sat in the still-cold lee of the log's shadow.

Before we left, just as the tide was due to start receding, I put my Voigtländer 12mm lens on for a wide angle shot, lying on my stomach right at the tide mark. I waited and waited for a wave to come right up to me, and finally just snapped this shot out of frustration.

Naturally, as soon as I got up and walked back to where we were sitting, a great wave followed me up the beach like a faithful dog. Drat!