People sometimes ask if, in our retirement, we go south for the winter. Although we often get as far south as Boston, we normally head north. We’ve circumnavigated Newfoundland four times, visited Iceland in January, explored the Gaspésie, shopped beneath the streets of Montreal, and spent winters in Maine’s Thomaston to Belfast seacoast.
In Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, we are “from away”. At the moment we are as far away from our chaotic world as is imaginable. We’re in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, the archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, about equidistant from Newfoundland, Labrador, and Prince Edward Island. It’s harder to get here and takes about four times as long as a trip to Paris or Rome.
Winter comes early here. You are never more than about a mile from the sea. It’s windswept most of the time and a little like being on the surface of another planet. In fact, they recently filmed some of the latest Star Wars movie on the windswept lagoons. Pristine, silky sand with occasional black spots, which I was pleased to discover aren’t oil slicks. They are black ferrous sand. Instead of a little shovel, you can pick it up with a magnet.
The daily ferry here is booked months ahead, so once you are here, you are captive to the captivating landscape. You see the rest of the world as if from a distant galaxy. In the past year, our world in the U.S. has been one where it’s sometimes difficult to see the forest when you keep bumping into trees. From here, there’s time and inclination to take stock of it all. Where are we and where are we headed?
We’re less than two months away from the mid-term elections. Trump is desperately trying to turn our country into a fascist dictatorship, and an imperial one at that. But he’s clearly too self-absorbed and stupid to do it alone. It’s the dangerous forces behind him that we need to worry about most.
At home, every firing, threat, and court fight arrives with its own breaking-news banner. From here, the daily uproar starts to make an unpleasant kind of sense. Apparently, we are supposed to be freshly astonished several times a day.