September 7, 2016

“Ah, how well I remember those wide red flats, above tide-mark

Pale with scurf of the salt, seamed and baked in the sun!

Well I remember the piles of blocks and ropes, and the net-reels

Wound with the beaded nets, dripping and dark from the sea!”

-        ---  Charles G. D. Roberts, Tantramar Revisited

Xxx

I walked to the beach.

Willow’s Beach is twenty minutes away from my house on foot, and when I left the house this afternoon there was a definite sense of change, of turning over, that I felt as I headed north-east for the rocky coast. Maybe it was the rain seeping into the pavement, maybe the weak chill clinging to the air. In any case, as I walked I felt the doomed summer taking her last sunlit breaths of the season.

I walked to the beach because it’s the wilderness I know. I come here when I want to stop thinking and feel a bit primal for a while. Sure, with my feet in the sand, I can still hear cars pull into the parking lot behind me, or listen to them snake their way around the road just beyond the sparse forest to my left. But if I choose the right time, say, in the evening following a rainfall, I am usually lucky, and the beach is mostly deserted.

As it is, I am in luck.

My favorite place is in a small inlet, set in a rock wall descending steeply to cold salt water a couple feet below me. From here, the roads and parking lots and beach volley ball players disappear from view. There is nothing but steel-blue water meeting a pale sky streaked rose with the sinking sun. With my sand-specked toes digging into the rock face and the sound of gentle waves to muffle distant disturbances, I can imagine I am alone and apart for a while.

Well, not completely alone. Like Miranda of the Ancient Wood, I see there is no true loneliness in the wild. Nagging gulls and snobbish geese float in mottled grey and white pools over the water’s surface, and twice I spy the curious doe-eyes of a harbor seal peep out at me, before she drifts dreamily down to her sunken rock castles.

I want my project to be about this place. I haven’t the faintest clue how to make that happen; can a place within walking distance of a Tim Horton’s even be considered wilderness? I don’t know. But this place was wild once. And the gulls and geese and seals and rocks and tides – they’re wild still. So I’m going to give it a go.

To find a text that pertains to Willow’s beach would be phenomenal, but unlikely. So my goal is to find a work that deals with the Pacific Coast in some way, and see if and how that influences my perception of my beloved beach.

It is very cold now. My bare toes purple against the rocks, and I can see the lighthouses winking at me through the steady approaching dark.

So, my questions before I go:

Where is the line that divides wilderness from the rest of the world? How is it defined?

Wilderness is often viewed as something “other”, an alien entity. Can humans ever be truly part of wilderness, or can we only ever be its observer?

What divides us from wilderness? And is our perception of separation from the wild justified?

And more specifically, and what I think I will explore for this project: is Willow’s Beach still a wild place? If not, when did it stop being one?