Down Memory Lane #2

On Sunday, we went to Hampton Beach with Siqsiq to cool off in the Bay of Fundy. This was followed by a downtown walk at Fort Anne in Annapolis Royal.

On our return, travelling along Highway #201 on a whim, we decided to take the Spurr Road in Round Hill up South Mountain to the West Dalhousie Road.

In 1980, we arrived from Alberta, for me to teach at the Survey School. With two young boys, we rented the Buckler house in West Dalhousie from Bill O’Neill. Each day, I would drive back and forth on Morse Road to Lawrencetown.

This was a new federally funded program at the school to teach Scientific Computer Programming. Each session was forty-eight weeks in length — three sixteen-week semesters, with the final semester dedicated to a co-operative project with industry or government.

Given the success of the intensive program, we went forward to develop new programs in Business Computer Programming, Computer Graphics, Geographic Information Systems. They complemented the Remote Sensing program. The other departments were Surveying and Cartography/Planning.

The success of these new technology programs led to the renaming of the Nova Scotia Land Survey Institute (NSLSI) to the College of Geographic Sciences (COGS).

After one year of living in West Dalhousie, we moved down to the Valley and bought a house in Clarence, at the foot of North Mountain.

Eight years of intensive technology teaching, on one-year contracts, took its toll. In 1988, we left for Indonesia as part of Dalhousie University, Environmental Management and Development Indonesia (EMDI) headed up by Arthur Hansen. We did not return to live in Nova Scotia until 2000, to set up the Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG).In between, we lived in California, Ontario and British Columbia.

On Sunday, after reaching West Dalhousie, Heather remembered that she used to visit friends, John and Inga’s family on the Thorne Road. From the road atlas, we located the road, found the old house, continued past Paradise Lake, until we joined the Morse Road.

I would not recommend the road, except in a four-wheel-drive truck. Over the last forty years, the road has not been maintained. We were lucky to make it through in our Honda CRV. The other major change has been the loss of forest cover. There has been significant cutting. It was with great relief that we hit the paved surface of the Morse Road.

 

The afternoon adventure served, once again, to remind us of the two cultures captured by Buckler in ‘The Mountain and the Valley’. Indeed, it may be more extreme now than when he was writing in the post-Second World War era.

Postscript

Check out my blog on July 1st, 2019 for Down Memory Lane. They complement each other. Different time, different route.

Acknowledgements

Heather and I were struck by the adventuresome nature of our time in West Dalhousie in 1980. Likewise, the creativity of the new programs at NSLSI.
Edward shared that experience. He was a Remote Sensing instructor at the time.

References

Ernest Buckler, 1952. The Mountain and the Valley, McClelland and Stewart.