My private refuge

It’s a very hot day. I’m hot–but not in the way one would like to be hot.
I think it is the hottest day yet this year. This kind of day zaps any evidence of ambition that may have been dwelling in my cells and grinds said enthusiasm to dust.
There are many chores barking orders at me. “Pick me, pick me,” they shout, almost too loud to ignore. Almost.
I’ve taken refuge at the ocean, just an easy stroll from Cape Blomidon, around the corner in a cove–a secret I like to think, only known by three or four people that I ever encounter here who come to wander in the cold, salty water.
It is a 10-minute drive from my house.
The bugs haven’t found me. Yet. Perhaps it’s too hot for them, too. Maybe they’ve taken an extended holiday. A few buzzing bugs have dropped by to annoy and disrupt my concentration, probably alerting their biting cousins as to my position.
“There’s a juicy one over here,” they may be shouting, for all I know.
The tide is in, at full high tide about 18 minutes ago. The tide, like life, is relentless. It doesn’t pause when it comes to its highest point. It doesn’t exhale and look back out to sea to chuff itself up, stretching its feet out to relax for a job well-done.
It merely turns and heads back, using every second of the six hours and 13 minutes from highest tide to lowest point.
The mark on the sand is immediate. In the three minutes since I last looked, the tide has moved out by three or four inches, which seems surprising, startling even.
There’s nothing subtle about Fundy’s water; it comes in and withdraws with equal determination–even when I pretend it languishes. It doesn’t.
I have found shade beneath a forgotten apple tree whose roots cling to the eroding cliff. The ocean will claim the tree, but for now it produces apples, small and round red/green beauties, wormy no doubt, needing some chemical intervention to be called perfect.
Someone is fishing a long way out, and I hear the boat’s motor growling and nets being hauled on. Is that really fishing, I wonder, or just gathering? I imagine whales and dolphins swimming beneath the boat, but I am at the shallow end of Fundy–the bay that boasts the highest tides in the world, as if anyone really cares.
It’s not Rainy Lake. It is a long, long way from Rainy Lake, both geographically and compositionally, but the sound of the waves can be disguised. I can close my eyes and pretend. I can pretend my toes are in the cool dark of Rainy Lake; the water’s chill not shocking but refreshing, invigorating.
I lie back on my towel and close my eyes and I pretend I am home as I drift off to sleep, cool and dreamy, reciting in my head “The Ice Cart” by Wilfred Gibson, like I did when I was 12 at the Festival, my knees knocking together while I stood on the auditorium stage at the arena.
“Perched on my city office-stool, I watched with envy while a cool and lucky carter handled ice. . . . And I was wandering in a trice, Far from the grey and grimy heat Of that intolerable street. . . .”
I still can remember it, not the whole poem but some of it–enough to make me smile and remember.
wendistewart@live.ca