Atlantis. This item is unavailable.Atlantis

"I was a child before the flood..."

With this arresting line, George Peabody begins the long poem that looks back at the life of a great river before it was damaged by a headpond. 

When the Wolastoq (St. John River) was dammed at Mactaquac, western New Brunswick lost the heart of its great natural abundance-the annual migration of Atlantic salmon and a large swath of the best agricultural land in the province.

Remembering well a way of life along the natural river, the author deftly puts the reader in the picture. He draws the thread of memory to the building of the dam. With precise images he recounts the consequences of such ecological thoughtlessness.

George Peabody has created a classic elegy for a circumstance of great loss. However, with the passage of time and end of the dam's working life in view,Atlantis also evokes the awareness that Wolastoq will outlast this unwise human interdiction.

George Peabody is a lifelong environmental and cultural preservation activist. He is Administrator of the Meduxnekeag River Association, a community based, non-profit, land trust organization in Woodstock, New Brunswick, dedicated to preserving the Appalachian Hardwood Forest and riparian environments of the river's watershed. He is the author of Schools Days: The One-Room Schools of Maritime Canada, Kings Landing: A Living History, and editor of East Coast Limericks, and Best Maritime Short Stories. He lives alongside the Wolastoq in Lower Woodstock near the site of the original Peabody farm and maintains a market garden at Kirkland. He is preparing a book on the natural and cultural history of the Meduxnekeag River watershed.