Beach Reading
Page 24
The job came to an end. I finished the report and sent it to Project Ecology where it was promptly filed. I saved a copy and re-read it recently, just before I wrote the book you are reading now.
I went back to university that fall, took it more seriously, and graduated in three years. Somewhere in there I fell in love again, bruised my heart again, and it healed again, though more slowly this time.
I finished my studies and started my working life. When people ask me what I do, I always say, “The government pays me to lie around on beaches.” It’s not as easy as I make it sound, but try telling people that when you work for the government. My job description is Marine Biologist for Eastern Regions, and the geographical area which is my bailiwick is roughly the Gulf of St Lawrence. It’s not all sand and surf. There are rock beaches on the Great Northern Peninsula and outside of Stephenville that roll great granite bowling balls under your feet, and ledges of Appalachian rock by Forillon, as well as Precambrian shelves along the Lower North Shore and up the Labrador Coast. I love them all. My Littoral Environments On Canada’s East Coast is, I think, a respected work, albeit in a narrow field.
Of the people I worked with, some were good and some were bad, although it is probably truer to say that they were all just people, each with both good and bad in them. But of everybody I have come into contact with in the course of what is now a quite long life, nobody has ever seemed quite as vivid as who I met that summer.
Claire married. Actually she married a lot. I recently heard she is on her fifth. And apparently she’s still smoking.
Smooth Lennie disappeared for good, no one knew where, and Robert Logan Head never got into power again. He also never shook off his new nickname. When he died, years later, a writer at The Guardian started his obituary with “The Island mourns the passing of Robert ‘Dick’ Head,” and narrowly avoided being fired for the mistake.
Bailey, back in the States, was arrested for possession of marijuana. I believe that the drugs were planted, because at the time of his arrest he was helping organize an independent candidate who was starting to do quite well, and he never smoked pot when he was in campaign mode. He got seven years, but never served them. Two weeks into his sentence he hanged himself in his cell.
Wallace lived in the MacAkern home until his death. His last words were “Tell them that I…Ah, fuck it…See ya!” He was buried out on the point, as softening shades of evening fell, but no pipers were hired to perform that piece, which I think is a pity.
Brucie doesn’t stammer anymore, and I visit him whenever I’m in the area. Usually during the course of the evenings we spend with each other we sing the one song we know together.
Robbie and Melissa continued to live with each other and eventually married. More surprisingly, so did Rattray and Toe, apparently happily, so how can you not believe in some sort of benevolent God?
I myself became religious, though not, I think, in any flashy way. I don’t even go to church, because Jesus said not to. My scientific friends wonder about this spiritual side of me, but the older we get, the less we argue about it. My position is that God is the sum total of all good things, and if that’s true (so go my prayers) those who don’t have the knowledge of what Good is, let them be informed (that is, bless them). And those who do have that knowledge, bless them for having it. So, God bless everybody.
I went back to Barrisway last summer for the first time in years. The beach where I had set up my camp has disappeared, washed away in the tidal surge of two winters ago, which picked up all the sand, sucked it out, and in the next tide, moved it around the point where a new sandbar has appeared, a spit the shape of a billhook.
MacAkerns’ house, now the Interpretation Centre, is being slowly buried by the dune behind it, Things of God once again winning against the Things of Man. Picking of mushrooms or berries is not allowed anymore in the park, but some vegetable stands around the Island still work on the honour system.
I once knew a beach, shaped by the waves in front of the dunes that were shaped in turn by the wind. The marram grass held the sand with its roots, and in the swale behind, beach-pea grew over a jumble of driftwood. Behind that grew wild carrot and thyme and still further back, out from the floor of the spruce forest, briefly and magically the chanterelles sprang up, but if you weren’t fast, you’d miss them. There was always something growing, though, each in its season, growing then dying to make room for new growth. The moon and the tides, the shape of the shore, the cry of the seabirds rising and falling. The bite of cold ocean, the taste of salt air, the tightness of sunburn, the lap of the waves, at times the memories almost overwhelm me.