RESURGO!!!

Last winter I drew a cartoon about the "Chocolate river", the Petitcodiac. I gotta admit the color of the river is mind-boggling on a cartoon.  We're used to see rivers brown because they are polluted but the Petitcodiac would be brown anyway because of the Tidal Bore, or Mascaret.

What is the Tidal Bore? Well, I caught a video of it about two weeks ago but it just won't upload from my phone (curse you, Samsung Galaxy!) but I found another video of it on Youtube...

The camera is looking downstream towards Dieppe. This wave comes all the way from the Bay of Fundy, many kilometers south all the way to downtown Moncton and beyond. In 1968, a causeway was built a kilometer or two upstream. It was an environmental disaster! Over the years, the river had shrunk to a muddy little brook in the middle of the marsh. The floodgates of the causeway were opened in 2010 and when I came back to Moncton just last fall (last time I had been there was 2007), I was surprised to see the river look like an actual river.

An inspiration to many an acadian artist, to me it represents what you risk losing if you take something natural but different and try to "fix" it to make it like the majority. Like when you try to "convert" a gay person into heterosexuality, or shame acadian kids into speaking regular french instead of chiac, or shame native people into adopting white culture. To me, the river's renaissance is also a good symbol for the town's motto: Resurgo, "I rise again", like the city bounced back after crashes in sailing, and later train industry in its history and how it will bounce back from another disaster.

Now here's another video of Moncton, that you probably seen all over the news.

As far as I'm concerned, the 30 hours where that mofo was playing cat and mouse with the police and keeping the whole city paralysed and afraid could be summed up by one cartoon:

Yup. Wish I could have been more brave, but that was pretty much the feeling I had...

During the crisis, I still went out in our shocked downtown to take a few pictures, like flags at half staf in front of City Hall and Assuption Place..

And the outpour of flowers, cards, teddy-bears, candles that piled up in front of the Codiac RCMP headquarters over the past few days...

That was last friday. This morning it looked like this...

Since I can never resist adding my two cents, here is what I made:

So take whatever time you need to cry and grief, Moncton, we're a city that knows how to Resurgo! 
And passed the time of Amazing Grace, we'll be back to singing Rue Dufferin!