By Neil King Jr.
The sun was just breaking through clouds and splashing its warmth on the mountains across the bay when I turned left out my gravel drive for the long haul home. If you plot a route from New York to my cottage on the shore of South Harbour, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, you will see it’s at the outer end of North America, just miles from where the road runs out as the final remnant of the Appalachian Range spills into the North Atlantic. This is where Cabot and the other early explorers first spied land and where the passenger jets now fly overhead on their way to London and Berlin. Between my cottage and Central Park lie nearly a thousand miles of forest and jagged coastline and stretches of asphalt that go on and on first mainly west, and then bend south for a very long time.
I was heading home after two weeks finishing a book about a spring walk to New York, surrounded by the full forested radiance of fall far to the north of there. Days of writing in front of a large window with views of still water though yellowing birch trees and beyond that, the white rollers breaking on a distant beach. Mergansers came by in their merry flotilla every morning, and crows pestered the bald eagles above the little island studded with pines. Leaving wasn’t easy.
I had finished the book, though, and my mind had an emptiness that perfectly fit the long drive ahead. I hadn’t begrudged a mile of the road on the way up and would similarly take the curves as they came on the way back down.
I picked a more circuitous route back along the island’s south coast, through a polyglot of towns called Sydney, Main a Dieu, Big and Little Lorraine, Fourchu, Framboise, Grand River, a tableau of dense forests broken by sudden expanses of the seething sea. Early that morning the sun found an opening through clouds the hue of chrome and sent a yellowish halo of rays cascading onto the ocean, a heavenly glow, a crown of God.
The Atlantic heaved over rocks and sent spumes of frothy foam into the air and I wondered as I drove if I weren’t addicted to that sight, craving evermore sea crashing against evermore rock. Ocean porn, I called it. It may sound overwrought to say my eyes pulsed with pleasure whenever the road left a wooded stretch onto yet more water, more rock and sea, but often I had to pull over just to take it in.
The towns I went through that first day with their huge boats in the yard beside their little white houses were so stern, so locked down and unwelcoming that I laughed as I cut through them. A taciturn fisher folk—French, Scottish, Cornish—settled here and their descendants still had little interest in catering to the passing stranger. I couldn’t blame them. I was not going to find a cup of hot coffee, or a buttery roll plucked from the oven or an egg with bright runny yoke. There were no illuminated signs to catch the eye, no flashing neon arrows to say, “Stop here!”
The sea pounded against the rock and carved it, smoothing the boulders, turning capes into islands and tittles of stone, the endless work in progress designed to grind it all one day into sand. For a day I went mainly west, south and west, with the coast always on my left until I crossed the Canso Causeway and saw on my right a slice of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and a glimmer of Prince Edward Island. Further on, still heading west, the Bay of Fundy flickered for an instant on the other side and then, after an entire day of driving, the road bent south the next morning and I cut down through forests toward Maine.
Across all those hours and hundreds of miles the first day there was almost nothing in the way of commerce, no real reminder of the Anywhere that is most of North America, and then suddenly there was an excess of it, a tangle of competing signs a hundred yards high and the promise of food handed in wrappers through little windows as you idled in your car. An entire world you already knew even if you’d never been there before. I slept amid that the first night.
At the border, empty of traffic, a petite American border guard in a green uniform stepped up to my open window and examined my passport and asked about guns and liquor and I showed her my bottle of rye, partially sipped from. She didn’t bat an eye.
“The purpose of your visit?”
“To see a cottage I hadn’t seen for 26 months,” I said.
“Welcome back to America,” she said with a wave of her arm. The gate swung up and I kept driving south.
I had slipped from Canada into America but the two looked and felt to be of similar cloth, the same pale people from across the sea, the same houses with idle boats in front and wood piled high for the winter. The further south I went the more I drove from fall into late Indian summer as the colors leached out of the trees and the leaves shaded increasingly green. For hours there was no water, no surf slapping rock, no romantic little harbors, no lobster traps or tangles of net, until finally U.S. Highway 1 brought me to a glimpse of misty water in a kelpy cove, my first sight of the Maine coast, America’s longest in all its contortions of inlets and bays.
Why, I can’t explain, but Maine sends so many bony fingers into the Atlantic it would take a person a decent portion of a lifetime to walk its entire shore. I passed watery fragments of all the bays and rivers named by the early people—Penobscot, Muscongus, Damariscotta, Casco—words that flowed past me on the road but not easily off the tongue. That second night I spent with the oldest of good friends. Around their kitchen table as the rain splattered outside, we pried open huge oysters and slurped them with wine. I played chess on Halloween morning with their grandson dressed in his executioner’s robe, a plastic scythe in one hand, then set out for a last day, properly fed with bacon and eggs.
The New York traveler then cuts inland and leaves the sea and must settle for the short flashes of river water that speak to our origins. The Merrimac, the Concord, the Contoocook, the Connecticut, the Housatonic, until you swoop down and skirt the wide and slow-flowing Hudson, which again the eyes respond to for its placid beauty and the abundance of light it casts off. When I came down along the river, I could feel the miles only as a numbness in the butt and a dull ache in the lower back. But how often do any of us get to devote days like that to crossing such an expanse? Driving backwards through a season. Noting the shortening of the days and the shifting of the sun. Seeing the ocean erupt so surprisingly around another curve in the road.
–Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and a writer who, when not at home in Washington DC, is very happy to be elsewhere.