The comfort of the sea

You have to look for the shapes that shouldn’t be there to see the things that aren’t there. At least, to see the things that aren’t there anymore.

The shoulder of a small hill, a squarish mound with a squarish hole in the middle, was a root cellar. Next to it, the larger flat square of plainly different vegetation marks what was the foundation of a house. Once your eyes are set right, it’s like neighbouring root cellars and house plots pop right out of the background.

Along the cliff edge, the shallow seabird-hunting pits stand out only when you already know what they are.

At Gusset’s Cove, there isn’t anything manmade that’s much taller than a fence post now — so you feel like you stand taller than the whole place. The largest thing still looms, though, just offshore: a standing sharp spike of rock, the top garish with bright-orange lichen, the base black where it gets rhythmically slapped by the waves.

I was there this past weekend before the snow, hiking the cliffs and watching out for ice, looking at the changes. At Adam’s Cove, a winter storm had pulled away half of the stone beach — one side is the same as always, albeit pushed tighter and higher up the cliff than usual, while at the other end, all the small rock has been sucked away from the boulders beneath. What used to be mounds of loose round sliding grey stones is a hopscotch across flat and angled rock, the perfect place to slip and wrench an ankle.

Then out onto the cliff edge, the rock all shale-like plates that break away in squares and other flat-edged pieces.

I was looking for a place I’d been before, a particular kind of notch in the rock right down to the sea. A natural split in the stone, running back 200 feet or so with a divot at the cliff, where a stream runs over the lowest point and falls 20 feet or so down to a narrow fan of beach. I’ve been there before, even shot video of the falling water inside.

I’ve found gaps like that in plenty of places — Sandy Cove, near Scott’s Beach in Nova Scotia, on St. Margaret’s Bay and in Owl’s Head, N.S. — and there’s nothing I like better than to find my way in and down to the very bottom of them, so that I can stand and look out at a working sea through a frame of stone.

It isn’t without risks, I know. The rocks in seaside crevices are often wet, regularly slimy, and this time of year, icy, too. So climbing down takes full attention — the kind of attention that brooks no distractions — especially since the chances of being found are pretty slim when you’re alone and you’ve deliberately crammed yourself into a crack in the rock.

But.

But in its own way, it’s focusing, like looking through a telescope at a very small piece of the far away, or having your attention pulled to a particular and unfolding fragment of an event in a movie,

The sky above you may be open, but it feels like you are standing in a funnel of sound — the waves beat, the brook water falls, and the droplets drip musical.

made more important simply by the means of its framing.

The sky above you may be open, but it feels like you are standing in a funnel of sound — the waves beat, the brook water falls, and the droplets drip musical.

And I am reminded of this: “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” (from E.E. Cummings’ “maggie and milly and molly and may”)

You have to look particularly hard to see the things that aren’t there anymore.