| Whimsical Nature endowed the Moncton
region in Southeastern New Brunswick with an enviable bonanza of oddities. On
the seashore at Hopewell Cape, strange reddish rock formations rise like giant
Polynesian heads eighty feet in the air-monuments sculpted by tides and winds
and frost over countless centuries to fill the aboriginal Indians with awe and
inspire their legends. The high domes of some statues are thatched with balsam
fir and dwarf black spruce, which always prompts children to ask how the trees
got up there. At Demoiselle Creek a few miles from Hillsborough is a subterranean lake of undetermined size, low-roofed by dripping stone icicles. The white gypsum floor of the lake emerges startlingly visible through the clear water. To step into the cavern entrance on a hot summer day is like unexpectedly walking into a cold storage plant. When you first glimpse the Peticodiac River at Moncton you may wonder why it is called a river as there is only a little trickling brook to be seen while the billowy, chocolate- blancmange banks are bare of water. And then, suddenly, the missing water comes into view-a veritable tidal wave as high as five feet, fanning up the empty river bed at eight miles an hour, like surf cresting up an endless beach. What causes this? The rapidly swelling Fundy tide is dammed temporarily by shoals at the river's mouth. When at last it overcomes these obstacles, the triumphant tide drives inland with inexorable momentum, sweeping everything before it. More than one oil prospector, intently examining the shale in the exposed river bed, has been trapped by the incoming tidal bore, picked up bodily, tossed head over feet a few times and then flung up on the muddy embankment like a devoured morsel. But if I had to pick a favorite natural phenomenon it would be the Magnetic Hill. This is perhaps understandable under the circumstances, which date back to a June day in 1933 ... and how three young newspapermen recognized a story but failed to recognize a fortune. Often the night staff of The Telegraph-Journal in Saint John had heard pressroom superintendent, Alex Ellison tell a curious anecdote. It was about a clergyman early in this century, who was bringing children home from a picnic. He stopped his touring car at the foot of a hill during a rainstorm to put up the side flaps. To the good man's amazement, his car started to coast up the hill by itself-"the most astonishing thing I ever experienced," the cleric related. He had to spring after it and jump in. The unbelievable episode seemed so well vouched for that three of us decided one night to try to locate the hill. We knew, of course, this was a fool's errand. Only a fool would think otherwise. It was an ambitious project in those days even to think of driving one hundred miles to Moncton over rutty dirt roads in a tiny open 1931 Ford Roadster ... John Bruce, a former engineer, had brought his surveying instruments just in case .... Now began the frustrating process of trying one hill after another, on every country road within a radius of ten miles of Moncton. We attracted quite a lot of attention. Every time John Bruce halted the car at the base of a grade and put it into neutral, nothing happened. But we could see lace curtains being pulled back in farmhouse windows, and occasionally we'd glimpse a nose or a pair of raised eyebrows. It must have looked like the end of quite a party, or the start of one. Once a passing farmer herding some cows called out: "Need any help?" "No," was the reply. "We're just waiting to see if the car will coast up the hill!" The farmer kept looking back over his shoulder all the way to the next field. Three weary modern explorers were ready to give up around 11 A. m. We were down to our last hill-a former Indian trail that became a wagon road, on a two hundred yard gradual rise leading up toward Lutes Mountain. Then it happened. The car, in neutral, began coasting "uphill"-slowly at first, then faster. Elated, we all jumped out and almost let the roadster get away on us. Any thought of magnetism immediately evaporated when John Bruce noticed the water in the ditch was running "uphill" too. It was not difficult, from this premise, to realize that the whole down-sloping countryside was tilted-that the seeming phenomenon was due simply to the fact that what appeared to be an upgrade for two hundred yards was really a downgrade .... Magnetic Hill has become a New Brunswick institution.... One Torontonian comes back every year and claims the electric currents help his arthritis. A Californian insists he can sense the magnetism in his bones and has to use conscious force to focus his eyes. He knowingly asks: "Where do you keep the magnets?" Another American contends he can feel the nails being drawn out of his shoe-so Magnetic Hill is unquestionably sitting atop great unexploited iron ore deposits. Still another declares that as he walks up the hill he can feel his eyeballs being pulled. If he does, somebody walking right behind him must be pulling them, because there is no magnetism in the hill.... |