NATURE NOTES FROM ACADIA

THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA

In the region of the "Ovens," on the side of one of the high rocky cliffs which sends its roots down into the sea, is a strikingly well-proportioned face in the stone. Its rugged masculine features, looking out across Frenchman's Bay to the mainland, have been carved by nature's forces, especially by the action of the waves which, at high tide, break only a few feet below the powerful chin of this heretofore nameless sage. I have called him "The Old Man of the Sea," for how many times he must have witnessed this regular rise and fall of the Atlantic waters! At low tide a belt of chalky-white barnacles girdles the cliff half way between its base and the Old Man's chin - a multitude entirely dependent upon the life-sustaining sea.

I like to think of the Old Man as a character of great antiquity - one who had seen this drowned coast hundreds and thousands of years ago when the giant Sea Mink, the Great Auk, the Labrador Duck, and many other animals now extinct, found a home here.

Although seemingly impregnable, the cliff wherein the Old Man is fashioned will some day fall before the repeated onslaughts of the ocean, and he, like the panorama of life which for ages has paraded before him, will disappear entirely from the earth.

In the words of Tennyson:

"From scarped cliff and quarried stone,
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.'"

- Arthur Stupka