This Be the Place: A Careening Wharf (for a Time)

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

The wind is blowing through the house, this small house that is not blue and has no porch. I’ve just arrived, even though the snowstorm is an example of why no one arrives at this time of year. Tomorrow the neighbor, an uncle of the woman whose house I’ve borrowed, will say: “That was the biggest weather event in 20 years.” I know what the neighbor will say because it’s already tomorrow, after the storm.

In fact, it’s been four years since I lived for four months on the island of Una-ma’ki-Cape Breton, which is connected to the rest of Nova Scotia by a causeway made of ten million tons of rock. I was there from January to May 2021. But the past tense (“I was”) feels less accurate than the present tense (“The wind is”) with which I began. That’s how present the eastern edge of the continent from Main-à-Dieu to Louisbourg feels to me.

And so: I walk along the harbor and the waves charge the shore only so far, recede, charge again. I imagine I can feel or sense the pushing forward of the water and that there is threat in it each time. The ocean seems to want nothing more than to get out, to push past an invisible line marking the limit of its advance on shore. An imprisoned tiger’s single-mindedness is forced on it by the four walls of the cage—just watch a tiger at the zoo, if you can bear it—and the ocean’s by its tidal rhythms. When I’ve been beside an ocean in the past, I have not had that sensation.

I had not intended, in the first place, to live on the island entirely without my family or any visitors for half a winter and into spring. However, the year before I arrived, the border between the two countries closed for the first time in history due to the pandemic. As a dual citizen, I was able to cross freely, but no one else in my family was allowed except my sister, who stayed home. If our Montrealer dad had been alive, he would have been able to cross, too. Naturally, everyone thought the border would reopen by the following winter. It did not.

Every few days, in snow and wind, mud and fog, or bright sun, I walked the two-mile Lighthouse Trail in Louisbourg. The lighthouse was built in 1734, the first in Canada and the second in North America. Just below it, the beach slopes down into a kind of bowl; I might have thought of it as a sloping harbor. But a sign on top of a wooden post jutting up from the sand informs you that it’s a “careening wharf.” It sounded like a strange thing, a careening wharf, as if the harbor were inherently unstable. Even when I speculated that the sand there must be subject to dramatic shifts, the verb, “careening,” seemed out of scale—appropriate for a ship, train, or car, but not for a swath of sand.

The next day I couldn’t remember what it was called. “Tilted wharf” was all I could think of, and I knew that was wrong, so I went back to look again. That’s when I learned, by reading the rest of the sign, that a careening wharf is a slope of shore with just the right shallowness for a boat to be laid on its side so that the underside can be cleaned or repaired.

The trail starts just north of the careening wharf and goes up into the forest above the vast rocks and cliffs. Every so often, you can step off the trail and walk on a wooden plank to a small, square platform in the trees and look down at the ocean. I’m pretty sure that for most of my life, I have not followed the walkways that lead to waist-high podiums with information on them. When I started out from the careening wharf, though, I was interested in following each of the smaller offshoots of the main trail. I wanted to see the unexpected information on the podiums, otherwise known as interpretive panels. One said:

Geology            Geologie

One said: “Wolf’s Cove” in English only. Another said:

Acadian Forest             Forêt Acadienne

and so on. The content is usually in two languages at most: English and French, not Mi’kmaq. I see that it would be a kind of fiction to translate “Acadian Forest” into a language used by people who were there long before the place was renamed in either French or English. Still, I wonder if the question arose when Parks Canada was designing the signs.

At the ends of the wooden planks leading to platforms and podiums, there are often photographs of what’s being explained, even when the platform is surrounded by the very things pictured. One sentence seemed especially beautiful to me, and very much not in need of the accompanying photograph. The platform was on the edge of a cliff in the middle of thick trees. The placard said:

Trees grow to the edge of the cliff.     Des arbres s’accrochent aux faulaises. 

The photograph showed the rock cliff with an evergreen on top of it right where we were, myself and the sign and that very evergreen. I said both sentences over and over for the rest of the hike: Trees grow to the edge of the cliff. Des arbres s’accrochent aux faulaises.

The whole time I was there, I was crossing another border: writing fiction for the first time instead of poetry. And so, I was most often inside the house. In the house, which faces west, my back was always to the ocean, except when I stood at the sink washing dishes. Then I could see the water and the eroding cliffs between the house and the water. The trees there do not grow to the edge of the cliff. There isn’t enough earth for their roots.

***

Hurricane Fiona hit the year after I left. When it reached the shoreline where I had walked every few days, Fiona was actually an extratropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds. The road to the lighthouse was not accessible in its wake, and the trail stayed closed for two years. I have not been able to determine, from this side of the border, whether the shoreline has changed so much that the careening wharf itself is gone. You’d think that something called “careening” would be able to roll with whatever comes along, such as a hurricane or extratropical cyclone. Maybe. “We can’t make sense of the landscape right around us,” my friend wrote to me after Fiona, “so many trees are down, you wouldn’t recognize it.” Nineteen years ago, I read in another friend’s book, “A story has to leave out nearly everything or nobody can follow it.” That’s different from what I thought she wrote—“A story has to leave out nearly everything or else it won’t exist”—which is how I hear it in my head now.