Time and Tide in Acadia by Christopher Camuto

Author:Christopher Camuto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Peripherally the ocean

marks itself

against the gauging land

—A. R. AMMONS,

“EXPRESSIONS OF SEA LEVEL”

PARALLAX—

Expressions of Sea Level

In a kayak, you can feel two kinds of vertigo at sea level.

There is the mesmerizing stillness of placid water at dawn and dusk—a pink or blue hour laced with loons calling and ducks hustling overhead, the chug of lobster boats trailing fat wakes that, overwhelmed by distance, never reach you. These are moments when time rarifies into a kind of visual music and you feel a frank sympathy with everything you observe. You sit in the water with no more self-consciousness than an eider. In this still hour, the totemic face of a harbor seal staring at you from twenty feet away is not the object of your contemplation but a subject keenly contemplating you.

You can become dizzy with this glassy stillness when the waters of Frenchman Bay or Pretty Marsh Harbor or Mount Desert Narrows, which separates Mount Desert Island from the mainland, seem as depthless as the water in a painting. You may, at times, glassing scoters at a distance or staring into the near water watching great urns of knotweed standing at high tide, forget you are in a kayak and, turning, suddenly feel the craft squirrel around under you. And sometimes, when a cove is perfectly still, bathed in the pure, transient light of morning or evening, you can feel your boat, agitated only by your breathing, lose its purchase on the water. You can capsize in this stillness.

Or you might be lost in watching black guillemots bring food to their nests in the crannies of cliffs on Burnt Porcupine Island. They fly into and out of the shadows like bees working a hive. There’s nothing to see, really, but you can’t stop watching them through binoculars. Just the fact of small alcids tending their young on weathered exposures is enough to take you out of yourself. If you understand the poignancy of seabirds nesting on shelves of bare rock, you will watch them until you forget, paddle draped across your lap, that you are floating in Frenchman Bay.

And then there are moments of vertigo in rough water when you feel not so much the depth but the breadth of the ocean grab the chine of your hull, when you feel, even in inland waters, the authority of tide and wind, the weight of millions of gallons of water flowing with a purpose that can be unsettling and the uncanny force of a long fetch of wind that can be unforgiving.

When salt water moves out to sea—especially when it snakes deeply between steep-sided islands with a pronounced height of tide—the proximity of land means nothing. You concentrate on the water immediately around you, paddling squarely into the waves coming at you and riding the swells rolling under you. You keep your shoulders square to the horizon and your hips synched to the way your kayak is trying to track through the water, give in to the tumult around you while holding a firm line.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.