No mistake here

Last week, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, confirmed what many Newfoundlanders and Labradorians already knew: Mistaken Point is a treasure.

More precisely, it’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, picked for that designation as a result of its extremely large number of Ediacaran fossils. The fossils, 560 million to 579 million years old, show the first signs of locomotion in multi-celled organisms. For the first time, something was moving. The site is moving, too, but in a variety of ways that stretch far beyond the fossils. The ecological reserve that protects the fossils houses a journey in itself: 130 kilometres from St. John’s, you get to the site by passing through the starkly beautiful southern Avalon barrens, a land where most plant life is barely ankle-deep, except for low and tangled windhedged spruce. In some places, the ground is only interlocked grey stone, nature’s pavingstone, dressed in multi-coloured lichen of orange and grey and startling green.

Then, it’s the town of Portugal Cove South and out on the dirt road towards Cape Race — passing The Druke and its grey beach — the road rising and falling with the terrain, no matter how steep, instead of cutting through it.

Then, it’s the guided hike out to the fossils themselves, something like 3 1/2 to four hours all in, a hike through barrens grass and low sedge, the ocean always close and moving, the smell of hot bog plants in high summer, the sharp smell of peat and ground juniper.

Rude blue flag irises wave in the wind, and you can see out over the headland, hard ground made soft by its summer blanket of vegetation.

Then, all at once, the path opens up to the grey wet plates of wedged stone of the Mistaken Point site, a long ramp surfaced with fossils so peculiar they look more like science fiction than science fact, a plateau of life that stopped squirming in an instant hundreds millions of years ago, and have stayed there ever since.

It’s easy to understand the excitement the fossils hold for science and scientists, the importance they have in understanding the fossil record.

For everyone else, the fossils should perhaps be a slightly more solemn experience.

It helps to sit for a moment and consider how we, with all our technological advancement, self-importance and impact on the world, are a mere blip in the long and winding timeline of life on Earth.

Primed by driving and walking through a near riot of the variety of life, the finality of its sudden end, preserved right there in front of you, is sobering and wonderful at the same time.

The fossils, so tremendously significant for explaining where life came from, have a singular power to remind us how insignificant we all are.

Go — it’s more than worth the trip.