Remnants of our lives

The silky Marysburgh breeze has slight effect on the rivalry as a swallow gives chase to a crow. You know the kind of kafuffle I refer to when a crow, a raven, sparrow hawk or any of the other larger kind has invaded a tiny bird’s nest? Best part is when big bird tries for the getaway. The little now-threatened and very pissed tiny bird gives chase to the invader. It dive-bombs the larger bird with a flying vengeance that, by comparison, makes the Billy Bishop airborne fight-it-out saga read like a bedtime story.

What I gather this morning is that crow has every feeling of regret as he labours his expansive wings towards escape. He can’t exit speedily enough to duck the pecking machine that is now the mosquito-bomber-like swallow. For crow, it’s like having a nose itch at a time you’re not able to scratch it. Crow makes for cover into the clump of silver birch trees huddled a piece away along the shoreline at Little Bluff beach. My guess is that swallows have long memories when it comes to crow business.

While the beach has called me with its welcoming offer of repose, this morning the beach is surely void of fellow dreamers and island walkers. The chill of spring makes the place yet part winter, but still invites the world to slow and more often arrests it.

To me, beaches stand for opposites: as in being both borderland and escape hatch; as in rolling with the breath of the seas yet holding to the calm of an unmoving horizon; or as in being timeless places while the ground underfoot moves with every moment. At the same time empty and full; high waters of spring; ice-out; shore currents, summer breezes, autumn winds, winter gales.

I walk in lake-air meditation, in a deafening raucous of beach life; in a mixed scent of land and sea—awakening earth and sturgeon. Past seasons have left their mark—cold embers of a beach fire; right-foot canvas running shoe; miniature worlds of castles and cities—built of lakesmoothed stone; the lake has stormed their walls.

The debris is a reminder of the world out there; I imagine that the washed-up plastic lighter once belonged to Jack Jefferson from Rochester. He tossed it on a fishing run. Or the spent shotgun cartridge shells of previous autumn hunts of the Lombard boys out at Main Duck island, or the cormorant cull over in Presq’ille; the slab of wooden dock from the old Ferguson place that broke free during ice-up winters ago and wandered the waters like a ghost ship before marooning here at my feet.

The ground beneath is a bed of story. I scoop a handful of beach matter into my palm and hold the ages: granite and marble and bone and shell and wood now milled into finest of grains, remnants of earth formations, strata of humankind and planet life. Over there a seabird carcass, here polished glass remnants in blues and browns and white and clear; seems like we find it hard to resist picking up keepsakes captured in a glance. On the veranda and by the garden of my house are stashes of beach gatherings and with them, walkingstick reminders of treks past.

But mostly today in the silky breeze I accept full repose; on a log I roll my sweater into a pillow. The Zen motion of the waves, the scent of sun on earth, I close my eyes to the call of the seabirds and memories of summers past. Magically manifested is my thesis on the subject of opposites: Beach transports me across the fine line between half awake and dead asleep.