Time

In these moments of early summer, of extended passages of daylight and solstice moon, I consider time and its meaning. One recent evening, in the face of ‘heavy weather’, I drove to the bottom of Cold Creek Road in the company of my son Luc Henri.

We jumped out of the truck and chased through the ‘doorway to heaven’, a corridor formed of rows of tall poplar and willows that transports a traveller from treed shelter to wind-cast beach. Leaning into the stiff breeze we traced lines in the sand against a backdrop of leaden sky that held nearby Nicholson Island to a heavy sea.

Gulls suspend over breaking tides, dipping into the shallows now and then; the fury of the elements awakened us to our surrounds; the calamity nurtured inward calm. Captured in the cry of the birds and the clatter of the lake, time vanished in the wind.

Time; it’s in our daily speak. We spend it, save it, waste it, find it…lose it. Back in time, (see what I mean), the horse closed gaps between places, shortening the hours it took to travel distances. In the early decades of the 1800s and the start of the Industrial Revolution, the steam engine took over. From its beginning in Manchester, England, the ‘iron horse’ shifted our perceptions of time and space. Trains ran ‘on the clock’ and thousands of mechanized inventions followed that would ‘manage time’ more efficiently.

Then came the invention of hydro power—electricity—‘the genie out of the bottle’ that regulated lives more than ever. The hands of ‘craftsmen’ surrendered to the time clock that calculated minutes spent on automated assembly lines rolling non-stop in soulless spaces lit by artificial light. Populations began to shift from rural areas to fill those factory jobs while houses were built in the shadows of the workplace to further control the minutes.

Rapidity became the drug of the era as cities grew with electric streetcars shunting people on set schedules. Clocks in town hall towers were electrified to advocate punctuality; meanwhile the rhythms of society and migrations of populations were irreversibly caught up in…time.

After the combustion engine came along, the idea of allowing one day a week as a moment of pause was eventually discarded. Cities expanded and life hurried; publicly owned hinterlands, ‘parks’, were set aside, partly for preservation, mostly as a nostalgia for a way of life governed by nature and the seasons.

While in sectors of the globe there are societies that remain influenced by patterns of sun and moon, the western world today is often a 24/7 frenzy where there seems to ‘never be enough time’. We buy it in ‘packages’ and ‘bundles’ with ‘high speed’ delivery. Social patterns not withstanding, ‘quiet time’ remains for the taking.

The push of the wind has eased as Luc gives chase to the gulls; his six-year-old legs carry him like a sandpiper as he weaves in and out of the rhyme of each wash of collapsing breaker. Ten upon 20 stones are hurled into the foam as timelessness reigns.

After a kilometre stretch of sand is plotted we begin our return when the sun cuts through heavy clouds and drifts above the horizon. The reach of land and lake becomes as otherworldly as only a beach at sunset can be. Being here is the only thing that matters.

Luc lags far behind; his soggy running shoes in the waves at one moment, defending the shoreline with his willow branch sword at the next. By now the fire of the setting sun pierces the veil of trees that describe the headlands of North Beach. Amber light spills like syrup onto a mercury sea, the valleys that carry wave after wave, stained with hues of lavender and rust, fray with each crest of lake.

Pebbles shift in the rhythm of the sands; rolling glass beads in the last of day. Then, stirring with the wind and the earthy scent of lake and fresh cut hay comes the sound of a lone piper; the lament of bagpipes from a faraway shore. The refrain wanders to my soul as I look back to watch my son ambling toward me with an armload of washed-up treasures. These are moments when we are as harvesters in fields of memories that time can never erase.