By Neil King Jr.
Seven summers ago, we bought a small cottage along a distant shoreline rimmed with rocks and flickering birch. Bald eagles mate in the pines on the little island offshore. Mergansers skitter in a long armada past the front window every morning. You can see for miles to where ancient mountains spill into the North Atlantic. A vigorous paddle gets you to the back of a beach where two miles of gentle rollers break on the sand. You can see those rollers like thin ribbons of froth from the house. Gulls hang in the breezes overhead. The summers are transcendent; the autumns go on and on.
Every day I’m here, seated at the window or roaming the shoreline, I wonder if all this really exists. I’ve come to realize, in being here, that the whole of it is as it is because it’s so far away. That distance protects it. The place has taught me that distance now ranks among the world’s most elusive treasures.
When I say distant shoreline, I’m not kidding. Getting here requires 22 hours of driving northeast from our house in Washington DC, past Baltimore, New York, Boston, all the way through Maine, up and around the Bay of Fundy, and then straight east across the entire length of Nova Scotia and to the outer tip of Cape Breton Island, where you turn left down a gravel drive beneath maples and oaks and arrive at a small cottage along the shoreline of a magical bay at the end of North America.
I hesitate to put a name to the place because it basks daily in its astonishing dearth of humans. It has just enough of those, and not too many.
Its distance, you see, is of its very essence. Its embodiment of the faraway compounds its natural beauty. It is what it is, in no small measure, because of what it isn’t.
God forbid that it ever be spoiled.
The trip to this humble place requires three demanding days of driving or two very grueling days where you fall into a butt-numbing trance and marvel at the vast stretches of road you forgot were ever there, no matter how many times you do it. And yet, when you arrive, when you pull down the drive and curve under the limb of the white maple, the feeling that you’ve somehow suffered through all that driving lasts hardly a minute. As with a black hole in outer space, the particularities of the place itself devour all remnants of the miles driven. Then you are simply there, suffused in the joy of arrival. Every mile crossed in getting there is repaid in kind, twice over, the second you step from the car.
If all this were any closer to those places passed along the way—two hours closer, five hours closer, half a day closer—the whole of it would be diminished commensurately. Proximity would diminish, not improve, the essence of the place itself. Those miles in between are like the rind that protects the sweet fruit inside.
Let us get to the fruit.
Known to European explorers and fishermen for at least 500 years, the bay yawns about eight miles wide between two rocky points. Between those points, cliffs to the north plunge to the sea and then slowly give way to a vast arc of sand in between, miles upon miles of beach. Those beaches are creased in places by sandy channels that bring water in and out of large natural harbors, three of them in all, or what the Basque fisherman long ago called barrachois.
Our cottage looks across one of those—a river-fed lake, essentially, that exchanges water daily with the ocean beyond it. Beyond our harbor, as it’s called, is the ocean itself, and the ocean comes in and out according to the tides through a wide meandering channel rimmed on both sides with sand. The dimensions of that channels changes every winter, according to the storms that batter the barrier beach.
If you go to our beach channel at the right time, its swift current will pull you merrily right into the rollers coming the other way. You can float, arms spread, straight into the surf. If you go when the tide is incoming, the channel will pull you into the harbor as though the land itself wants to take you from the sea. Such are the mysteries of this place, hard to imagine, harder to explain.
When you go out to the southernmost point that defines our bay, you will find a sacred place, a treeless thumb of rock and tundra that has given shelter to whalers and cod fishermen for centuries. On its sea-facing side you will find deep coves filled with stones rounded smooth by thousands of years of pounding surf. You can stand in one of those coves for an hour with arms crossed and brow furrowed and maybe, just barely, figure out what made it as it is. When you do that, you are trying to decipher time according to a metronome whose action is that of waves against rock. A fledgling bald eagle may circle you, as one did the other day when I was there, to get a fix on your intentions.
The other point, the northernmost one, represents the final gasp of a mountain range first formed when today’s continents all resided as one within the super ocean Panthalassa. That was a while ago. Where that range now slopes into the sea you will find, after a long scramble down its steep face, a gentle grassy headland rimmed with dwarf spruce. When I went there the other day, descending an old jeep road so steep it made my knees cry out, four horses nosing the grass on the headland came to see if I had brought any carrots, which I had. They then went with me to the ruins of an old lighthouse.
Wonders abound between those two points. Let us just touch on the rivers. There is a brook near our cottage that fails to impress when you whizz across its lone bridge. But when you make your way up that brook through maples and spruce, hopping stone to stone, marvels multiply around every bend so that you have to stop in awe to digest it.
Often your progress is blocked by the splendor of a new stretch of water cascading in ways you couldn’t have imagined. You will come to a waterfall that feels like an ultimate destination until you climb over it and find, around several more bends, a still more splendid waterfall that spills into a pool that appears to have no bottom. The rivers there are like that, boasting of waterfalls that get better the further you go. I have caught palm-sized trout in that brook that flash orange and red on their bellies as they slip back to freedom through my fingers.
All of this is preserved, swathed, buffered, and protected by distance. The spaces in between this and all the routine conveniences astonish city folk. We’re five hours from the nearest real airport. Want to buy a sofa? That’s four hours roundtrip. The island has 140,000 people across nearly four thousand square miles. Across the length and breadth of the island there are maybe a dozen traffic lights. I would have to drive nearly two hours to speed through a late yellow.
People look at you strange, with a touch of pity, when you mention you have a place so far away. But I don’t want it to be an inch closer to anything than it already is. At home, I can wax on about how my house is just blocks from this and just blocks from that. Shops, cafes, groceries stuffed with every cheese and jam—they are all within 10 minutes walking.
Here, in this cottage far away, the absence of all that magnifies the wonder. You find the plentitude at the heart of all deprivation. Here, in this place swaddled by distance, the bare minimum of human amenities is made up for by the maximum of everything else.
—Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and the author of the forthcoming book, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal. When not at home in Washington DC, he is very happy to be elsewhere.