This is not a nature allegory

You have had those moments too: moments that make you stop, and wonder, and reconsider everything, and contemplate your place in a universe built of four forces and a veritable menagerie of exotic particles that seem to exist only as chalky mathematical equations.

Like the night you climbed to the top of Third Hill in Pack’s Harbour, with a full moon rising over the tickle, the black cliffs of Newfoundland Island, as the chart calls it, Prisoner’s Island as the folklore gives it, glinting and gleaming. You would think there was nothing left to reflect, those inky black rocks absorbing every ray of light that strikes them, but there they were, reflecting the reflected light of a moon whose rocks are just as black.

Or the first time your feet wandered the Forteau shore, trod those fossil seabeds where, uncounted millions of years ago, strange Cambrian animals first trod, or slithered, or whatever it is Cambrian invertebrates did. You can still see their burrows in the sand, long since cemented into stone. You contemplated the forces which first cleave those limestones and sandstones and arkoses into geometrical blocks, like some giant quarry whose quarrymen have downed tools and vanished into thin air; then tilt them into the sea, edges rounded like dice, then slowly dissolved, ashes to ashes, sandstone to sand. New sea bottom to be populated and fossilized by flora and fauna; will they seem equally bizarre and exotic, in fossil form, 450 million years from now? Will Danny Williams still be in power then?

Or the way that a warm breeze off the coast at Sept-Iles, counter-intuitively, warm from the north, but that’s the way an offshore wind blows there, carrying the esthers of spruces and birches, empetrum nigrum, mossy bogs, and dying forest fires, could trigger a cloud of memories. The nerves that run from the scent receptors, they say, connect to the brain near the memory centre. Newly-mowed grass. Spilled diesel. Jeye’s Fluid. What mystery and magic must there be in the olfactory sense, working equally on the gunpowder scent of a freshly-smashed rock, or a dog fart.

Or how the rays of the setting sun in winter set every notch, every crevasse, every ravine and gully of the Mealy Mountains off into crisp relief, like some kind of massive intaglio block, the purplest shade of purple, a purple that drives out even the thought of all other colours, purple-prose purple, as the shadow of the earth deepens beyond, somewhere far out over the icepack on the open ocean, and how a passage from a journal, from 1843, describing the same scene, never fails to bring it flooding into view, if only in the mind’s eye.

Or like the time, early one morning, late in the summer, on the crest of a hill, on a stretch of a highway the government seems to have forgotten even exists, where a brook babbles down over a rocky bank, lush with the native vegetation that anywhere else you’d call weeds, but here are as perfect specimens of natural selection as Darwin ever found in the Galapagos, then, by becoming the roadside ditch, turns an unnatural and ugly brown, a shade that Edward Burtynsky might have captured in his “Shipbreaking” series, a brown fast-food coffee cup, long since crushed, half-rotted, but not enough, the non-biodegradable bits anyway, with the corporate logo still visible, sneering, leering at you out of the lightening mist, made you think to yourself out loud:

“I'm not spitey, am I?”