Attack of the Medusa

Balancing Rock, Long Island. The rest of the photos are under the blog title as usual.

Long Island is a long narrow foot that pokes its toe gingerly into the cold waters of the Atlantic, its instep elegantly curved towards the mainland. It is the end of the North Mountain ridge and the centre of the island is dense with fir trees, with some hardwood sprinkled among them. They crowd to the island’s edge and peer over into bouldered coves, watching seals bask at low tide. In winter, storms tear trees up and hurl them into the ocean. There, the currents strip them slowly. Firstly, the needles and leaves, then the branches, roots and finally the bark. When it can do no more with them, the ocean flings them back onto the rocks at Bear Cove. The spring sun dries and fades them to a smooth, buttermilk sheen. They lie there until summer, when groups of people arrive at sunset, carrying beer coolers and hot dogs and warm fleeces for nightfall. The men pile two or three trees onto a roaring fire, working in groups to lever them on, while the women sit on the rocks, sipping beer and passing comments on the work. They hike in from the road, a mile or so that’s easy in the slanted evening light, trickier by starlight or in fog, or after a few too many beers. Sometimes they bring the whale babes with them. That includes me, apparently.

Whale babe…………….

Chief bottle washer I am. At the sharp end of wwoofing. Nasty little man with his nasty little business and two other summer staff he treats like muck, leaving nothing for me to do but cook for them all. I roll up my sleeves and get stuck in. I last a week before his manipulative little ways get to me so deeply I go through him for a short cut, roaring at him until I have gotten it all out of my system, much to the delight of the rest of the island. But I only promised him a week, so I kept my side of the bargain. And I did get to see a whale. For about a minute.

‘Nuff said about him. We’ll save it for the formal complaint to the agency.

So yeah, whale babe…

Fog babe more like.

Sitting in the ferocious sunshine, you suddenly get a feeling that something’s looking at you and turn round. There it is, slipped quietly in from the ocean, a deep, deep fog that cuts the island off from the mainland and from the sea. The hourly ferry honks mournfully, reminding everyone it is passing across the short mile of water that separates these villages from Tim Horton’s’, from IMAX, from Subway, from the grocery store, from the highway, from everything. Soon it creeps over you, wrapping you up in its coolness and dampness. It can last an hour, a day, a week. Everything takes on a new shape, fusses around its edges. Birds get bigger, cars softer. It’s more difficult to figure out who’s coming down the road. The fog is what protects the islanders from the relentless gaze of their neighbours. It holds all their secrets in its moist grasp and draws them back into the ocean with itself. They sink to the bottom and nourish the long, green-feathered plants living there. It is deep here, off Long Island. Deep enough for whales, deep enough for oil, deep enough for secrets.

I am living in a spooky house. It’s down the road a piece from the whale watching business, where the wwoof host lives. A kind of staff house, although we eat with him. It’s not even his spookiest house apparently. It’s the mirror image of one I drew when I was a teenager. It has two front doors. One opens onto a stairway that leads to my bedroom. The other opens into the kitchen, from which you get to the stairway through a completely unlit passageway. On my first evening, the woman who works in the whale watching business invited me to her home for a barbeque. Returning through the fog alone, many hours and many drinks later, I pick the wrong door. It took me a while to figure out how to get to my room. A bit scary because I was alone. Story of my life I thought miserably, as I finally made it to bed and realised I had no curtains.

I have two housemates. Helen is English and working here as a SWAPPER. Mykyle is from BC. He has cycled across Canada to get here. His speech patterns remind me of Andrew Farrell, if Andrew was trapped inside Denzel Washington’s body. Helen and Mykyle are at opposite ends of the human spectrum as far as I can see. I have to try and get on with both of them. Luckily, they are never together, as Mykyle is an organic vegan and eats alone. We discuss his theories on the universe, which are very strange, coming as they do from the perspective of a mathematically inclined brain that has had no formal training. As I said to him, you could be spectacularly right, or you could be wrong. But I’m never going to be able to tell you which. Maybe Keith could have a word while he’s here.

Whale watching………..

I go whale watching. I see Minkes and Humpbacks. I see a humpback calf playing around in the water, with the rest of the family watching over it. Lovely. The best moment is when I am sitting on a rock in Bear Cove, taking photos of the fog. I can’t see past shore, but I can hear a sort of watery, sucking noise that came and went every couple of minutes. It’s a whale rising and blowing. It is so close to me, feeding away, it is great. The whale watch guy zooms past twice in the Zodiac without seeing it. I laugh to myself.

Apart from whale watching and fishing, there ain’t much to do on Long Island. There are some nice trails. One leads to the Balancing Rock (see photos). The Balancing Rock is a geological freak that has ended up being quite a nifty tourist trap. Somebody told me that the locals tied a rope around the rock and tied the rope to a boat and tried to topple it into the sea fifty or so years ago. Another leads to the lighthouse. There’s a park and some nice coves.

Flour Cove is one of the prettiest. One end stretches out into a little point, with trees stepping in a line towards the sea. It’s on the west side of the island, so it has spectacular sunsets (again see photos). The other end has a lot of flat rocks that are perfect for bonfires and parties. We have one there one Friday night, going down to watch the sunset, before building a fire and hooking my laptop up to a car radio with iTunes on shuffle until the battery ran out. A couple from Montreal who were camping in the cove decide to give in and just join the party. Their Labrador, Bob spends all night trying to get the hot dogs out of the fire.

I get to know the locals a bit. They’re all very friendly. Some are a bit more friendly than others, but that’s the way it goes. They all tell me all the scandal about all the others. I feel full of secrets. I don’t repeat them to anyone. But some of them are superb novel fodder, I tell you.

One of the locals is having a messy break up with his wife. He moans about it to me a lot. I try to sympathise, try to help him talk it through. She’s having a psychotic episode, she keeps stealing his car and driving it round the island, screeching to a halt whenever she sees him. Shouting and screaming through the window. She bites him on the face one day. I am really shocked. Nobody else seems to be as shocked, although they complain about her behaviour and call her Medusa.

Pretty soon, her eyeliner-circled racoon eyes start to focus on me. I am standing on the porch of the spooky house drinking a cup of tea one evening when she drives past. Screeches to a stop. Reverses back. Rolls the window down.

“I hope you enjoy him now, cos he’s got nothing left!” she screams at me.

I say nothing. I’m trying not to laugh.
She drives off.

The next day, I am walking on the main road up to the Balancing Rock when she drives towards me. I can see by the movement of the car that she is deliberating whether to point it at me. I look at the ditch and calculate my chances. But then she’s past and the moment is past and nothing has happened.

I have moved out of the spooky house at this stage, my wwoofing week being over, and am staying for a couple of days in the house of the brother of the man with the psychotic ex-wife. The weather is fantastic. I sit on their porch sunbathing and watching the cars drive on and off the ferry. One day I am sitting there alone when she drives past on her way to her friend’s house.

She screeches to a halt again. Rolls the window down. Starts shouting at me. I have my back to her and I don’t react. Don’t turn round, don’t move a muscle. Eventually she goes away. I am relaxing back into my sunbathing when suddenly I see her car make its way up the hill towards me. I am out of my chair, off the deck and into the house with the screen door slammed behind me faster than you can say “psycho ex-wife”.

She comes into the house after me. We stand, tense, neither of us sure what to do next. Up close, she looks tired and ill. She starts the shouting thing again, but as I don’t react at all, she eventually calms down. She wants me to give him some garbled message about something he has to do in half and hour or he’s dead. I refuse. She’s a bit taken aback by this. We agree that she should leave and she does. I am shaking. I decide I should leave the island, but it is almost evening so I will have to stay the night.