Sometimes, when the tide is way out, Chris Martell stands by the water’s edge and marvels at his creation. He also feels a bit jealous, because he can never know what it feels like to see The Seahorse for the first time.

On a beach in the North End, he has spent the last 4.5 years constructing an elaborate camp out of found materials. Although Chris doesn’t want me to share the exact location of The Seahorse, he invites you to try to find it and have an experience there.

The Seahorse is an ongoing endeavour. Creator Chris Martell intends to dig out the backwash that has built up outside the second seating area so that tall people won't have to duck their heads to enter | Photo: David Minkow.

Chris, who turned 50 in May, began building the beach camp as a coping mechanism during a very dark time in his life. That in itself has been healing. But then he saw pretty early in its incarnation The Seahorse begin to transform into something larger, a place of whimsy, magic, and refuge for people who come there by happenstance or word of mouth.

I stumbled upon The Seahorse on a beach walk last winter, not long after moving to SSI. I was astounded and enchanted. Even before I read the laminated welcome sign introducing Chris and inviting people to share their experiences in a guestbook, I could tell it was a labour of love. Two sitting rooms, a fire pit, sturdy support posts, steps leading to a lookout, decorative beach detritus, and of course a large piece of driftwood resembling a seahorse. It was like a jigsaw puzzle put together from numerous sets of puzzles of all shapes and sizes. Yet words and even pictures don’t do it justice; it’s something you need to see for yourself and take the time to explore all its nooks and crannies.

Everyone is welcome at The Seahorse. There's usually a guestbook for visitors to sign | Photo: David Minkow.

When you go, make sure you’re aware of the tides. Because I knew how the beach in that area becomes impassable during high tide, I felt on that first visit a sense of porousness, that the camp was on the beach, but of the sea. When I recently met Chris, he cautioned that a tide of 11.3 feet is when the seawater begins lapping at the fire pit.

Two Saturday evenings ago, I wanted to show a friend the groovy beach camp (I didn’t know there was a name for it) that I visit about once a month. When we got there, a guy in a bike helmet was finishing a conversation with someone, in the way a host bids farewell to a departing guest. I was excited to finally meet Chris and thank him.

I told him I knew a little bit about him from a mutual friend, and Chris proceeded to tell us The Seahorse origin story, and some wild adventures he’s had there. It felt like coming across an interactive art installation in the middle of the playa at Burning Man and talking with an artist keen to give and receive. Chris wanted to know about my experiences there, and didn’t seem to mind telling a tale he’s told many times.

On May 15, 2020, he was having a really bad day. The combination of the first two disorienting months of COVID isolation, a spousal spat, and the death that morning of the singer of one of his favourite bands, Phil May of Petty Things, was too much for him to handle. Chris grabbed his guitar, backpack and some weed and headed down to the beach.

On a whim, he started stacking rocks along the crook of a long, thick log, which
he later dubbed The Spine. He kept collecting and stacking rocks for the next 7.5 hours. When he got home, he convinced his wife to come down to the beach to see his handiwork: a nine-foot-long slightly curved rock wall.

The rock wall Chris Martell built on one of the worst days of his life in May 2020,. He didn't know it at the time, but it was the genesis of The Seahorse, even though the wall was later knocked over by a huge storm | Photo: Chris Martell

Although proud of what he had built, the rock wall felt like a one-off to Chris, who had no plan to do anything more with it. A few weeks passed before he returned to the beach. By then, he was in even more of a funk. He wasn’t working, his marriage was unraveling, and he was reeling from the murder of George Floyd and other police-related deaths. He didn’t feel capable of coping with the "swirling cauldron” of it all.

Down at the beach, he was excited to discover some branches and other beach debris leaning across his rock wall. To Chris, who much later met the three local preteens who had laid the branches, it looked like “a little Flintstone house” and he started envisioning how it could become something more.

That July, he started coming down to the beach every day, staying for as long as 14 hours at a time. He would smoke pot, listen to music and think about pieces of wood he had found or wanted to find. He would wander hundreds of yards in each direction in search of building materials, picking the beach clean of logs, twigs, and pieces of bark.

“The activity of engaging not just my creative self but my physical self doing something daily was invaluable and it became essential that I continue to do this,” Chris recalls. "It helped save my marriage. I think it help save my life as well. It definitely saved my sanity.”

Although he’s not a builder by trade, Chris grew up building little camps way back in the woods behind his childhood home in Upper Sackville, outside of Halifax. He experienced neglect and abuse as a child, and has battled depression his whole life. He wasn’t surprised when a friend who works with at-risk youth told him it’s common for children in those situations to build forts as a way of creating a safe space.

“That is something that I've always been doing, and so as the world seemed to be falling apart around me, all those things that I've been struggling with off and on throughout my life started coming back, but it took me several weeks before I realized one of the other things that came back was this sense of, ‘I'm just gonna stay here and build my little thing, I’m not hurting anybody.’”

He kept building and tinkering, tinkering and building. After a while, he realized the roof needed to be raised so that a tall woman in his old band wouldn’t have to stoop while inside (his new band is the Mar-Tels). So he dismantled what he had built and used a found piece of plywood as the base of the new, much-higher roof. Increasing the height of the camp “took on this whole other sensation” of spaciousness and possibility.

Early on, Chris had been hand-sawing away at a root washed up on the beach for several week until one day he turned it a certain way and saw it looked just like a seahorse. It became the perfect talisman for the camp because as a young man the Seahorse Tavern In Halifax had been his favourite haunt.

After a while, he took a job at the old Fernwood Cafe and when families would ask about cool things to see in the area he would show them photos of The Seahorse and tell them how to find it. He enjoyed seeing the children return with their mouths agape and everyone in the family filled with questions.

The word gradually spread about The Seahorse. People began placing shells, other beach treasures as well as painted rocks on the camp’s driftwood shelves, which Chris keeps clear of “kitschy, store-bought doodads.” He says a lot has been mourned and celebrated down there, including via a men’s group that he’s a part of.

Although Chris Martell has laid his hand on every log, stick and chunk of bark that has gone into the construction of The Seahorse, visitors have added beach treasures and painted rocks | Photo: David Minkow

He set out a guestbook inside The Seahorse because “I wanted to know what people thought about this place. I wanted to know how it made them feel.” He has brought home three journals filled with visitor entries, but unfortunately two others were stolen or damaged. “It gives me an incredible sense of peace and a humble sense of pride that practically everyone who has interacted [with The Seahorse] seems to have gotten it.”

Someone who didn’t get it—there’s always someone!—filed complaints in 2021 and 2022 with Islands Trust alleging the Seahorse was a “potentially illegal foreshore development.” Chris says the complaints were forwarded on to the CRD, and then the provincial government, which declared the concern a non-starter and closed the cases.

While that matter is seemingly settled, Chris has worried that people might think he is claiming a stake on the land, which is not at all his intention. He solicited the opinion of some Indigenous friends who told him they have no problem with what he’s done, in part because of the impermanence of The Seahorse—at any moment the ocean could wash it all away.

For Chris, The Seahorse is emblematic of the ebb and flow of life, where things constantly come and go. Porous by design, the camp is not there to stop the waves or keep giant logs from crashing ashore. Pretty much everything there came from the beach aside from nails and some tarps used in the roof’s construction. Eventually, Chris realized it will always be a work in progress.

“There were times when I thought the camp was done and then nature hurled another 40-foot pole through something that I thought wasn’t gonna break,” he recalls.

He gets excited after a big storm to see what nature has brought or wrought to his camp. A huge storm in the fall of 2021 knocked down the original wall as well as boulders he had added. This allowed a large buildup of backwash, so Chris decided to block off the mouth of the main room, creating more of a closed space.

A few years ago, an architectural engineer suggested building triangular “baskets” and filling them with stones to serve as anchors to the structure. Chris has already built seven baskets, and hopes to add two more (9 is his favourite number). He also intends to boost protection of the middle pole, lower the fire pit and remove a lot of the gravel that has been building up in the second seating area.

I got a sense of the ongoing maintenance when I went down after last weekend’s atmospheric river, and there was fresh seaweed everywhere, burying a second fire pit that someone else had built. But Chris didn’t seem fazed, even as he was amazed that the ocean had gotten into places he didn’t think was possible.

He now works at Greenwoods Eldercare Society, and he says providing care for people at the end of their lives emphasizes how short life is and how we waste so much time on frivolousness. “It feels like more than ever people need to put their phones down and get outside and do something, anything, and find a way to connect with their inner child.” Hesitant in the past to publicize The Seahorse beyond word of mouth, Chris says this is why he is finally ready to share his story with a wider audience.

As a journalist, there are some things I don’t report on because even though they would make for a great story, I worry that overexposure could ruin them. The Seahorse is an endeavour worthy of wider recognition with the potential. May everyone reading this treat this local treasure with the same care and respect that went into its creation.