North Cape
North Cape ...
... stacks, leaning like abandoned factory chimneys in a red brick factory land, standing stark where the St. Lawrence River meets the Northumberland Strait ... and the stone mason currents curving and carving their way through rock and cliff, slicing through the sea end of free fall and scree, undercutting, pathfinders for the wind and ice that will make the cliffs fall ... first, the thin edge of the wave driven between layers of sediment, then the sparkle of frost and ice, then a hole, a blow hole, a cave, a key hole, and suddenly, one day, the roof falls down and the scouring sea rushes in ... and we are looking at these chimney stacks, wild stacks, with lives of their own, the Old Squaw with its bird’s nest hat, the Killer Whales stranded as they flee an enraged sea god, a maiden running from an angry father and caught here by his rising tide of wrath ... a young man escaping from an old man’s fury ... what tales they tell, rocked in their cradles by the sea’s firm hand, soft on a summer’s day, furious in a winter storm with the gnashing sea seething at the headland ... and the sea itself, rocking in its rocking chair, rising and falling tilting the land, reducing the cliffs to rocks and the rocks to rubble and here, at North Cape, at the Island’s End, the sea wind whipping the waves, driving the bladderwrack and kelp to the safety of the shore ... and what hand will rock the cradle of the sea ...
On a fine day ... the sea’s fury lies buried in sunshine ... there are seals on the islands, sunning themselves on a warmth of rock, fabulous underwater kings, risen from the depths, monarchs tumbled from their sea-swell chariots to bask here in their solitude, with none to dispute their rights ... and the sea birds gathering, black-backed gulls fiercely fighting for their places in this sandy paradise ... this rock strewn sand bank island, lying here at the finger tip of another red rock island ... warming beneath this summer’s sun ... with a falling tide and the land stretching its long arm out towards the horizon ... to that long, thin ribbon of rock and sand and stone ... gathered where the waters meet, river and sea, to mark the island’s end, the world’s end, the fabled point where land falls away and the sea is everything, ubiquitous, omniscient, uncaring in its loneliness and splendour ... ah! to be caught there, to be set adrift there, to be free, in the embrace of the all-embracing sea ...
