Time and time again

In these days of early summer, days of extended light, evenings of lingering moons, I consider the idea of 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 got out of the truck and chased through the ‘hole in the sky’, a passageway through tall rows of poplar trees, willows and shadow, a corridor that transitions a walker from being a forest traveller to beachcomber on a wind-cast freshwater coastline. Leaning into the stiff breeze, our footprints trace lines in the sand against a backdrop of leaden sky that holds nearby Nicholson Island to a heavy sea.

The gulls swing over breaking waves and dip into the shallows; the fury of the elements awakens us to our surrounds; the calamity nurtures inward calm. Captured in the cry of the gulls, and the clatter of the lake, time vanishes.

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. Then in the early decades of the 1800s and the start of the industrial revolution, the steam engine took over from the horse. From its beginning invention in Manchester, England, the ‘iron horse’ shifted our perceptions of time and space. Trains ran on time and thousands of mechanized inventions followed that would make use of time more ‘effectively’.

Rapidity was the drug of the 19th century. Meanwhile the invention of hydro power—electricity— was ‘the genie out of the bottle’ that would regulate our lives more than ever. The work of the artisan and handcrafted ware surrendered to the time clocks of factories that calculated minutes spent on automated assembly lines rolling nonstop. Soulless spaces lit by artificial light allowed the work day to add a night shift. Factory houses were built in the shadows of the work place to accommodate workers as a way to further manage the minutes spent on travel. The company store was invented to further contain the worker.

Populations shifted from rural to cities to fill those factory jobs; centres developed with electric streetcars shunting people on set schedules. In addition to the tradition of the church bells that marked off the weeks, clocks in town hall towers were electrified to advocate punctuality all the while the rhythms of society and migrations of populations were irreversibly caught up in…time.

The combustion engine came along and the idea of allowing one day a week as a moment of pause was discarded. As cities spread we set aside publicly owned hinterlands, ‘parks’, partly for preservation, mostly as a nostalgia for a way of life once governed by nature and the seasons.

While in parts of the globe there are societies that continue to be influenced by natural rhythms of sun and moon, the Western world is often a 24/7 frenzy of 10-second sound bites where there seems ‘to never be enough time’. We buy it in ‘minutes packages’ and ‘bundles’ and want ‘high speed’ delivery. Since WWII, the corporate state has slowly ambushed the management of time in every facet.

A sandpiper dances in and out of the rhyme of each wash of descending breakers as further down the beach Luc and I engage in a contest of ten and twenty stones that we hurl into the foam as timelessness reigns.

After a kilometre stretch of sand is plotted we begin our return. In that same moment the sun cuts through heavy clouds and drifts along the horizon. The reach of sand and lake before is as otherworldly as only a beach at sunset can be. Nothing else but being here in this moment matters.

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 on a mercury sea, the valleys that separate wave after wave are stained with hues of lavender and sumac that fray with every crest of lake. Pebbles shift in rhythm, rolling glass beads in the last of day. Then, carrying through the wind, stirred with the earthy scent of lake and the sweetness of fresh cut hay, drifts the sound of the lone piper, the lament of bagpipes from faraway. Amazing Grace drifts to my ears as I turn back to watch my son study washed up treasures. I am a harvester of time in capsules.

And so tonight, I sit on the front porch under the starlight and consider time and its meaning. I sort through the memory box of the soul and ponder the various tiny beach finds of the day that I know time can never erase. It turns out that the best of the beach treasures is the sharing of time itself between father and son.