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March/April 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor's Notebook Feature: Ice storm Feature: Sandbanks Provincial Park Our home and native tongue Write to know À la carte

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Sandbanks Provincial Park resembles a tropical beach, 1,200 hectares of sand stretching nearly 20 kilometres along southwestern Prince Edward County, Ontario. I went there with a girlfriend to marvel at the place in 1940, before the park was established. The dunes were white bonfires in sunlight, Lake Ontario a wide expanse of blue where horizons melted into the sky. At that time I didn't know the danger of parking a car on wet sand too close to oncoming waves. That evening when the most beautiful girl in the world took all my attention, rising water forced us to flee: the girl home to nearby Picton, myself in search of a farmer with horses to haul my 1938 coupe to safety. He mentioned that such hauling was his most profitable business, and I felt pretty foolish.

That was the first of many visits to the Sandbanks. And over the years since, the geology of the place has seemed to me nearly as interesting as the park itself. The history of the dunes goes all the way back to glaciers that once covered Canada with ice a couple of kilometres deep. There are mysteries about the origins of these glaciers; their reappearance is a definite possibility. Twenty-five thousand years ago, the Wisconsin ice sheet, the last of the four glaciations in the last ice age, started to recede. Ten thousand years ago the melting monster stopped in its tracks for unknown reasons. Meltwater south and east of the glacier was dammed by ice, collecting in a huge expanse of water that geologists call Lake Iroquois.

After a lengthy period the glacier again started to retreat. The ice dam broke with a roar heard by no one; and house-sized chunks of ice with megatonnes of water tumbled toward the far-off sea. Prehistoric Lake Iroquois disappeared, leaving the puddle of Lake Ontario. Pushed by westerly winds, sand was caught in bays and inlets, and the world's largest freshwater baymouth sand barrier began its 10,000-year birth pangs.

Farther back from the beach, small forests of cedar rise among the dunes. Wildflowers spangle the forest floors in spring: trilliums, violets and hepaticas. In the middle of the last century, settlers grazed their cattle here and cut down some of the trees whose roots had helped to stabilize the sand dunes -- with disastrous results. The dunes began to move inland, a benign place of beauty transformed into a dangerous monster. Buildings and roads were enveloped and buried, valuable farmland lost. And westerly winds kept blowing. For more than 100 years farmers and various "experts" did their best to stop the sand invasion; and the provincial government also took a hand. Where trees were planted, the dunes are relatively stable. In other areas they are extremely unstable, shifting uneasily during heavy storms. There is a faint golden haze in the air when high winds blow in the winter.

Of course, the park has its legends. An Iroquois hunting party is ambushed by another group of Iroquois near the sandbanks. All but its leader, a young chieftain, are killed. This young man is held captive at the enemy village, where beautiful Kemana falls in love with him and vice-versa. The two escape together, are again captured, and then are rescued through the supernatural agency of a dwarf called Oui-a-ra-li-to, "the spirit of the sand dunes." Presumably the lovers lived happily ever after.

Another story is said to be history, but sounds like legend. When Britain and France were fighting over Canada's ownership in the Seven Years' War (1756- 1763), a French naval officer, one Captain de Levi, was entrusted with secret documents and a barrel of gold destined for the French Fort Frontenac (now Kingston) for safekeeping. The French ship was closely pursued by a British vessel and harried past its destination to the sandbanks of today's Prince Edward County. Levi set fire to his own ship to fool the English and buried the gold beneath a cottonwood tree at Outlet River. The captain escaped and drew a map locating the buried treasure. Years later, Levi's grandson went searching for the gold but, so the story goes, he fell in love with a woman and traded away the map to her fiancé in exchange for her. What a woman she must have been.

Although my first visit to Sandbanks in 1940 was far from idyllic, I will always remember it as a magic place. At night under moonlight, the dunes whispering, it seems as close to paradise as the human mind can imagine. For we make our own paradise, imagine it or build it. And sometimes find it waiting for us in nearby Prince Edward County, in the magic dunes.

David Barbour is a photographer based in Hull, Que. Al Purdy is a poet who lives in Sidney, B.C., in winter and Ameliasburgh, Ont., in summer.

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