I travelled to Prince Edward Island last fall to attend a wedding, despite the fact that some in our government didn’t seem to think it exists. I got to stay in a genuine tourists’ cottage, complete with a deck and a hot tub and a fully-equipped kitchen. I got to stroll around downtown Charlottetown and enjoy the sights. I got to help my girlfriend off the ground after she accidentally slid down some steps, landing heavily on her knee, ripping out her jeans and skinning herself very thoroughly. I got to endure the frowns and furrowed brows of passers-by as Sham, with tears in her eyes, kept telling me that my camera was okay, she tried not to break my camera, she hoped my camera wasn’t ruined.
I even got to hold her hand while an entirely far-too-attractive firefighter came over from a nearby first-aid tent to take care of her knee.
“I wish I got to do stuff like this all day,” he said far too attractively, while he pressed a cold compress on her knee. Sham tittered. I held her hand as protectively as I could, doing my best to demonstrate to the still-frowning pedestrians that I valued my girlfriend more than my digital camera.
Yes sir, folks: Prince Edward Island is for lovers.
And when I wasn’t being supplanted by excellently good-looking firefighters or being silently accused of abuse by suspicious Islanders, I had the chance to tour around the countryside — and by “countryside”, you need to understand that I mean “everything that isn’t Charlottetown” — to take in the sights. The ground was still very green in September, and as we rolled down the main roads that crossed the island, I remember thinking that it didn’t really look that different from driving through farm country in western Ontario.
There’s a hay bale. There’re some more hay bales. There’s a small lake, and a little river. Stone bridge. Yep, local businesses selling fresh produce. Down home country folks. Tourist trailer parks. Regular trailer parks. On it went, very scenic and pretty and Canadian and familiar, until we hit the coast.
And you know, seeing the Atlantic Ocean didn’t wow me the way I thought it would. I guess I thought that somehow I’d be standing at the easternmost tip of Prince Edward Island and I could look out to see gigantic waves rising and crashing, as if oceans were just like lakes except to the extreme. But instead it was just like any other body of water I couldn’t see the other side of, huge and wide and gray and cold. Bigger than I could probably wrap my head around, which I would realize every time I saw a hole open up in the clouds overhead to cast a very tiny ray of light onto an impossibly vast body of water.
But the clouds would close again, the contrast would dwindle and vanish, and it would just be me, the wind, and the long, flat, wide plane of gray. I stood on the red cliffs and felt a little let down by the Atlantic, hoping quietly that when I saw the Pacific someday it would do more for me.
Oh, and also that I wouldn’t fall off the cliffs to my horrible death.
See, the point on which I was standing features a lighthouse, a little shack for groundskeeping, a small tourist shop staffed by cute local girls who’d probably rather be doing anything than selling Lobster-flavored potato chips to Ontarians, several hundred yards of fence, red sandstone cliffs, the Atlantic Ocean, and a series of dire, frightening signs. I don’t remember their exact verbage, but it was something like:
ATTENTION: PLEASE STAY AT LEAST 2 METERS (6 FEET) BACK FROM THE EDGE OF THE CLIFFS! DUE TO EROSION, THE SOIL IS VERY UNSTABLE AND MAY COLLAPSE AT ANY TIME!
They went on, in a much friendlier font, to explain that the soft, red soil of Prince Edward Island was worn away by the ocean at a rate of 0.5 meters to 1.0 meters every single year, and that very often the ground within six feet of the edge was held together with nothing more than the root systems of plants and grasses. So, idiot tourists from Toronto, the smart move is not to hop the fence so you can get a better photograph of the coastline.
Suddenly, I was much more impressed by the Atlantic Ocean.
Now, I don’t want you to think that this was the first time I had ever heard of erosion, or that I’m so easily entertained that the thought of active geological processes thrills me in my daily life. But there was something particularly amazing to me about the fact that I was standing on ground that, in two years, might not actually be there any more. I come from a place where the same buildings have been standing in the same place for a hundred and fifty years or more, and where the very act of standing in the same place for such a long time is so noble that even the owners of those buildings are forbidden from altering them. If a house falls down where I live, it’s because someone drank too much and crashed a car into it; it’s not because the very earth itself is being worn away beneath it, causing it to tumble into the ocean and be lost forever.
In other words, if I picked a spot on the PEI coastline and stood there long enough, I would be gone.
I wondered how you lived in a place that was constantly shrinking on you, a little at a time. When you buy a coastal home, do you just accept that ten years from now, the ocean was going to be that much closer to your porch? And that by the time your grandchildren come to visit, half of your property might be gone? That one day while you’re mowing the lawn, you might accidentally cut too much and end up sliding down the cliff? Would you just throw candy to the kids on Hallowe’en, pleading with them to come no closer or face their own fates? Do you move, or die?
Right up until that moment, reading a pleasantly-worded sign about unstable earth and falling from great heights, I had never actually seen the world shrink around me. But there it was, right down there, if I had the guts to lean over the edge and watch it happen, 0.002 millimetres every minute. I’d felt something like this before — the same sensation that hits me somewhere around a Thursday afternoon, right between the moment I feel happy about my week going by so quickly and the second that I wonder what it is that I did for the last four and a half days — but this was the first time I’d actually witnessed it. I was watching my world getting smaller, my options decreasing microscopically with every moment I let pass me by, and I was struck with a sudden fear of standing still for too long in any single place.
I still feel it. I haven’t been able to shake that feeling like the world is falling out from under me a little bit more every day, and that the longer I stay in one place, the more likely I am to just tumble down and disappear. The ocean is out there, patiently lapping away, and it’s really only a matter of how long I can stay ahead of it. Have I put down roots too close to the edge already? Am I already looking down at the rocks? And would it be so bad to just to gradually slide away?
I might be back in Ontario, but the landscape really is the same. There’s a hay bale. There’re some more hay bales. There’s a small lake, and a little river. Stone bridge. Yep, local businesses selling fresh produce. Down home country folks. Trailer parks. And off in the distance, the ocean and the shore. The edge, and the warning: Move or die.