Where dividing lines end

There is a gentle push of air coming from off-land and escaping to the open water of South Bay. The chatter of waves smacking at the wooden edge of a wharf offers rhythm to the voice of the rain-swollen inlet. Resting in the young spring day, False Duck Island drifts on the distant horizon. The spring migration has mostly passed, but activity remains around the nearby buildings used by the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory. The lake overlaps a section of dirt road that got me here.

It’s a Sunday afternoon and easy to contrast the rise of new-season buzz of our urban settings with the quietude of getting lost in one of our island places of refuge. I’m perched on a decrepit plastic storage tub at the end of a wharf. Across the inlet of Long Point Harbour, high on a wooden drying rack for fishing nets, four gulls are similarly perched; four large gulls, a quieted harbour and me at land’s-end. Or so it seems according to the storied Point Traverse Lighthouse—a once functional beacon and warning to mariners of treacherous shoals that surround these shores. The iconic structure is one of few remaining of Prince Edward’s once 45 lighthouses.

I include myself in this shoreline menagerie because there is nothing of concern more than simply watching bird-like over the water. And the more you do it the horizon lines of consciousness blur into vanishing lines. There are no divisions. The mind forever analyzing, is quieted here at land’s-end. There is nothing for it to do: no recognitions, comparisons; no inner critic or judge: just every part at ease to accept that things are simply as perceived through all of the senses. They are what they are. And the lap of the waves erases everything else.

The state of no-mind is easy, a sonnet to onhigh: and we remember these places, these moments. The part of us that knows, reminds us by our reluctance to leave.

The breeze carries the sweetness of spring and earthy decay of forest and of coastline. I once filmed here, I believe it was aboard the Lilla, a steel-hulled Great Lakes fishing tug. She lay here, tied at rest, her equipment cleaned and readied for her usual 4 a.m. run out into deep water, her crew aboard for a catch of yellow perch; a most delectable freshwater fish and still a favourite of mine.

The fishing trawler image is a reminder that the harbour today is a ghost of what was. For almost a century the inlet thrived with the business of the Point Traverse fishing fleet; the shoreline crowded with small seasonal quarters for families, for crews that hailed from old Loyalist stock. Working hands, neighbours you counted on—for the lake still maintains its seafaring temperament, an unpredictable ruler of nature you never counted on for its whims. It dictated livelihoods. It governed lives. The South Bay cemetery tells of family names, those who knew the moods of big water.

Over by the boat launch a small, older model red car pulls up. A big man with a red jacket and brown tuque gets out. He opens the trunk of his car and grabs a worn green tackle box and two fishing rods which he carries with one hand. In the other hand is a white plastic chair. We exchange greetings on his way past like strangers on an elevator. His name is Jim. He settles at the end of the dock and, unspeaking, carries on with the tradition of ‘wetting the line’: a fluorescent red bobber here; a brighter spinner there. Jim turns to me: high water, so the Lilla would have docked here because over there the wharf is drowned. Over there on the lost side once lined with cabins for the inshore fleet; if only the lighthouse could speak.

We return to the quietude and I watch how Jim tosses the line then reels it in and how he wonders whether the high water might encourage the fish to come in past the low shoal.

Jim has awakened the interest of the gulls and with now opened wings they hover above his fishing grounds. I ready to leave on the only road in and out of this refuge.

Watch for the road sign next time you’re by this way; the sign that reads ‘end of divided lines’ and you’ll know you are near.

Conract lighthouses@ontariohistory.ca for historian Marc Seguin’s guided tours of the lighthouses.