A shower of stars
“I’ve lived in the same area most of my life …”
“What would I know?” They’re out by the fire pit on the knuckle, all that remains of an old breakwater on the edge of Haha Bay, and I’m not making this up.
They’re from away, New Brunswick and further, and they’ve made their way to the tip of the Northern Peninsula, the temperature dropping a degree with every 50 kilometres northwards.
It’s a cold, clear night, and they must like having the fire; me, I’m curled in a ball in a wooden deck chair out of sight in the night, all extremities tucked in except when I need to reach for my drink.
A turning pickup truck’s headlights sweep the front of a green shed, lighting it up against the dark for a moment like stage lights coming on.
I hate my immediate cabin neighbour, the only one in our line of cabins to leave his outside light on.
Then he turns the porch light off, so I love him now, as his car’s lights flash along with the small beep of the horn, locking the doors. And who’s stealing anything from cars in Raleigh, anyway?
But with the glow of his porch light gone, the night sky does what it does so well in sudden darkness, jumping straight down at you as if it has, in a second, come a thousand times closer that it was.
And the Perseid meteor shower ripped by, the wreckage trail of Comet Swift-tuttle blazing into the atmosphere and burning up in fits and starts.
At one point, a huge magic marker of yellow-white light strobes across the sky, bright enough to leave an after-image in my eyes.
At the firepit, the conversation doesn’t even slow. I don’t know how they could miss it: I can’t escape the green afterimage for minutes.
It’s strange what people don’t notice, like the fact that the New Brunswick couple’s SUV had a young, still-spotted dead robin caught in its grill, one aerodynamic wing regularly flapping in the light wind, like it was waving.
There’s distant large surf on the other side of Burnt Cape, big enough that you can hear them over the close flat lop of the harbour waves, harbour waves that are little more than ripples, flopping tiredly on the shore.
“We’re going up,” they say at the firepit.
“All right I’m going up good night see you tomorrow — oh you’re coming…”
Completely out of sight behind
“A turning pickup truck’s headlights sweep the front of a green shed, lighting it up against the dark for a moment like stage lights coming on.”
the cape, a lighthouse makes its presence known with the regular pulse of its light in the wisp of fog atop the hill.
Fire crackled, sparks blowing out across the water.
Planes flashing to Europe, travelling left to right, their tight line of strobe lights looking far too close together to be safe.
The next morning, Pistolet Bay is flat as glass, almost waveless, the tide inching in, lifting empty crab carapaces and floating them away like hopeful open coracles, each one destined to be overtopped and sunk before they ever reach their brave new world.
There’s a stray moose on Burnt Cape, young and brown and obvious against the unremitting grey small stones of the limestone barrens, where small plants fight their way up through an armourplate of stones. The plants are delicate and unbelievably hardy at the same time; the wind here is relentless, the plants more plentiful in any fold in the ground and behind any boulder that provides the least bit of cover.
It is so beautiful, so empty, that it stops your breath.
There are places in this province that you owe it to yourself to see, things that, if you saw them while on a road trip somewhere else, would be unmatched natural wonders. And so often, you’re in them essentially alone.