Location Taken: Sudbury, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010
Sheesh. I hadn’t realized it when I took the photo, but can these stones get ANY more Canadian?!
There’s a beaver, a moose, an orca, a deer or elk, a bear claw print, an inukshuk… Shall I continue?
Amazing how all those things spell out “Canada”, isn’t it?
Aside from the inukshuk, which is a cultural thing from the arctic peoples of Canada, the rest are all animals. And, well, animals wouldn’t know what a Canada was if it bit them on the butt.
Still. Moose? Canadian. Orca? Canadian, or perhaps Pacific Northwest USA. Beaver? The freaking national animal of Canada.
I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense for me to find this sort of assortment in a Canadian geology museum’s gift shop.
And Canadian culture is very closely tied with its natural wonders – which includes a lot of wild animals. And it’s a lot easier to put a simple image of a beaver on a small stone than to try to fit in, say, a legible picture of Lake Louise or a depiction of the marvelous tides of the Bay of Fundy. Not that I have a clue HOW to properly depict tides that vary more than 40 feet between high tide and low in one image. That would be one heck of a design challenge.
Which, well, is probably why the Canadian souvenir designers stick to simple things like moose. And beavers. And maple leaves. Which, interestingly enough, I’m not spotting in this pile.
Maybe it’s on one of the buried stones.
