Drawn Back to Burke's Beach
Wednesday evening was my
friend Steve’s retirement dinner so I drove down to Deep in the morning in time
to go out for coffee with Rick and co.. In the afternoon I did a few local chores before being drawn back out to
Burke’s beach. There I walked out to the point and, as is my habit, further
along the shore, as deep into the following bay as the sun allows; I turn
around when the bluff approaches close enough to the beach so as to put it into
shadow. Back at the point I swam out to the raft and lay in the warm sun, the
wood rough against my back, and tried to analyze what it is exactly about this
place that I like so much. It was, as usual, almost deserted, just one young
family playing further up the beach, but still, even without the comfort of
familiar people, I felt totally suffused with peace by the place itself. I like
the openness, the way you can see for miles, the plethora of so many elemental
features; sun, air, water, sand, and forest, I like the fact that it all seems
so clean, natural and pristine, it’s as if mother nature herself has afforded
me the privilege to visit her favourite refuge. It was almost completely calm
and the surface of the water was a solid dark green colour, a reflection of the
hills, and that seemed important somehow, though why exactly escaped me. (I also
like it when it’s windy there with dark grey cloud fronts bearing down turning
the colour of the water into a fierce navy colour flecked with whitecaps and the wind whipping the
surface of the sand so it bites your ankles and erases any footprints.) A
family of ducks swam right past the raft, and, as usual, one lone kayaker was
paddling off in the distance the flashing of his white paddle blades a silent
heartbeat. It is, to me, the most beautiful place in the world. When I am
travelling and meet foreigners, frequently Germans, who ask where in Canada I
am from and what it’s like there, and often comment in the same breath that the
Rockies are spectacular, I tell them that I live close to Algonquin Park, because
that’s somewhere that they might have heard of, and try to explain that though
the scenery is not as dramatic as out west it has its own lovely gentle wildness
that grows on you. In one of my favourite coming of age books there is a scene
where the young heroine walks with her boyfriend, who had just that day come
out from a nine month stint in jail, along a breakwater. They stop, sit,
and don’t even talk, just look out at the sea and drink in the view content
merely with the exquisiteness of being alone together for the first time in so
long. She says afterwards she can’t explain it, that she just became ‘undone,
in the Victorian sense of the word’, and that word, undone, is the best I can
do to describe what it’s like for me there. To have so much space, the heady
scent of freshwater saturating the air, the gentle silence all around broken
by nothing but the occasional sound of lapping waves - I am at a loss to explain the bliss it brings. And I’m always only visiting;
I can’t stay there forever, which makes it special too. It wasn’t even a
perfect day, a thin layer of high clouds were slowing drifting in from the
west, and yet as I lay on the raft with the dark green water spreading out all
around the peace and contentment that filled me seemed positively spiritual,
and, unfortunately, totally indescribable or explicable… Even when I was there,
and thinking about it, I couldn’t find words or logic to express, even in a
vague and ambiguous manner, the total serenity of the whole experience, so
there is no way I can do so here, trying to write about it, a whole day and a
hundred km removed from it all.
