Light on a Monday morning; fall begins

Snug Cove a few hours ago, looking over the Queen Charlotte Channel to the east wall of Atl’katsem/Howe Sound.

It’s a bright, warm September, and the light in the sound is softened by water vapour, condensing over the cold water. Humpbacks and seals are eating and resting and the birds are active, eating seeds and insects, preparing for, or stopping over on, their long migrations southward. Orb weavers are busy building their evening webs.

Just Bowen Island things unfolding. This morning I stopped in for a routine blood test at the health centre, and our local technician, Kelly, had a live stream of the Vancouver Aquarium sea otter pool showing in his clinic room. He said it’s been the most successful calming presence he has ever had for his clients undergoing tests. His daughter suggested it two weeks ago. Now nobody can stop talking about it.

I’m reading two books at the moment. In hardcover is Seamus Heaney’s incredible translation of Beowulf. The book itself was sitting in the window of Canterbury Tales Bookstore in East Vancouver. Last Thursday, I was walking past with my friend Ciaran, and I caught sight of it. I went in and said “I would like to buy Beowulf, please.” It’s incredible.

I was reading it in the waiting room when Kelly called me in. I had just read these lines, from Beowulf’s story of a seven day swimming contest against his rival Breca:

Light came from the east,
bright guarantee of God, and the waves
went quiet; I could see headlands
and buffeted cliffs. Often, for undaunted courage,
fate spares the man it has not already marked. 

The image of the headlands and buffeted cliffs is so evocative to me. And that line about the light. It landed with me this morning partly because I have also just started Crossing Home Ground, a book by David Pitt-Brooke about a John Muir-inspired walk he took across 1000kms of the central interior of British Columbia, charting the changes of landscape and community. As he describes pitching his tent on the first night, in a meadow high above the Similkameen Valley, he perfectly captures what it looks like to see the night arising in the river country of central BC:

Only six weeks past the solstice but the days are already closing in. The sunset is long gone. The western sky has faded to a pale aquamarine. Glowing twilight still bathes the summit but the night-tide is rising from the east, pooling in the deep gorges far below.

Here is a man who has read Heaney and probably Gerard Manley Hopkins too. As a person whose house faces east, the “night-tide rising” is the most evocative image of the purple darkness of the earths shadow creeping across the sky. I can’t wait to dive into his travelogue.