Fundy’s Rhythm, More T&H, Berlin Soon

Scott’s Bay, Nova Scotia

This is really a good life. I know it isn’t always going to be like this – like today, or yesterday or last week – but my goal is to make it so. Give it a shot.

Regarding this life, so far, so good…

And I’ll pay my dues, so to speak, do what I can to make things better, cosmic balance and so forth. But never mind that for now. I just spent the day on an amazing beach, as beautiful a piece of shore as I’ve seen anywhere on the planet, and yes I’ve been around.

Okay. Technically, and I have to own up here, it may not be an actual beach, given that no sand is involved. The beaches here are pebbles, and… horrors, sometimes even… mud. No surf to grind the pebbles to sand. Plenty… plenty of water movement, just no breaking surf. But a beach walk here is a unique aesthetic experience. Peter Beard would appreciate Fundy’s pebble-art, its various hues, especially shades of purple and rose. It’s been a long time since I hung with Beard but I recall his house being strewn with bowls and bottles and cups and you-name-the-container, all piled with Montauk pebbles; Pete’d varnish the good ones for the wet look. Pebbles pebbles pebbles…

But trust me for now that as a sort of connoisseur of shorelines, this one is way over on the right hand end of the great-shore spectrum. What’s more, today is Sunday, late August, high season, right? I saw maybe twenty other folks on this sweeping cove called Scott’s Bay, where Fundy narrows and squeezes the flood tide into the Minas Basin.

It’s just dusk now as I write and everyone’s left. Just me here in the lot. Overlooking this magnificent… I already said that. Remember the old flick The Beach? After a nuclear war, everywhere is deserted. Sort of feels like that. Where is everybody?

My Scott’s Bay site, low water.

Have I mentioned the tides?… Somewhere in In Search of Captain Zero I compare the world’s ocean – there is only one – Big Blue – to a work of art that somehow transmutes even as you regard it… Hold on, lemme look it up…

…It is a three-dimensional and lively entity, that watery world. It has depth and mobility and with these qualities come the capacity to cover the adjoining land if it is moved to do so; to subsume the earth and make it part of itself.

If it is moved to do so?! Well, hell yeah, Fundy is moved to do so twice daily and with certain astronomical alignments (the sun and the moon) it just flat outdoes itself. In fact, a new moon is either today or tomorrow, depending on how you define the separation (between today and tomorrow) and I have to get back to Kempt Shores, to a special campsite I found wherein a couple weeks ago I just missed the super moon tide and still the rig was surrounded by Fundy on three sides, the wrack line forming a mere yard or so from my wheels (all of them)…. For my Fundy film I want a shot of the tide actually lapping my tires.

At any given time the sea is not only what it is (calm and tranquil, say; a soothing influence) but it is also its capacity to be something else (a medium for wave riding); and then, a moment later, something else altogether (a destroyer and a killer). Imagine gazing at the Mona Lisa with the knowledge that her little-girl smile could at any moment transmute to a vicious snarl or a lascivious smirk or a goofball grin. An indication of caprice as to the artist’s intent would add an edge to the fascination, no?

Well, there’s little caprice in Fundy’s rhythm. Aside from the effects of wind and weather (which can ameliorate or intensify) Fundy will come and go as predicted by the charts. It’s a complicated matter – bless whoever figured it out – based on not only the heavenly bodies but a phenomenon called basin seiche: bodies of water have a resonance, a sort of subtle slosh back and forth, like a bathtub that’s been disturbed. When the seiche happens to be in tune with high water… it can lap the tires of your (still unnamed) rig.

You might not hear from me for a couple or so weeks. I’m headed to Berlin, for the International Film Awards Berlin (ifab), so as to be there when Water Time screens first time in Europe. Leaving the rig and Gus in the care of the good folks at Peterson’s Campground, Kempt Shores, Nova Scotia. I fly out on September 2, return on the 9th.

It’s going to be fun. The other thing I’m doing is reuniting with an old crony from Pavones. Joachim Gerlach appears in CYGAWA, and also in my The Surfer’s Journal piece, ‘A Night at the Cantina.’ A true wild man back then (we met in 1997); look up the term soldier of fortune and Joachim’s photo might be an inset. He’s calmed down, married now, with a daughter and a successful carrier as a full-blown businessman. Remembering some of his hair-raising, lunatic exploits, well, I gotta see this for myself kind of a thing. I’m bringing my Gopros and a tape recorder. So more to come on Joachim and Berlin…

Rich Grove and Lisa Arbecheski posted another of our Tragedyandhope.com studio sessions, and although I like them all, I really like this one. Be advised, it’s long and winding, but Rich did a yeoman’s job in the edit, giving the piece a super-balanced tone and substance, even including a passage from the book-on-tape of In Search of Captain Zero; I shouldn’t be surprised but he picked my favorite mini-yarn out of the whole shebang. It’s been so long since Zero I sort of… forgot… but hey, I did good with some word-stringing here and there. Thanks, Rich.

The other thing Rich put in the vid was our talk about an essay I wrote in 2009 and which no one in the ‘alt media’ or ‘truther’ communities would go near, although no one can dispute my facts and conclusions about FBI Agent John O’Neill’s complicity in the events of 9/11. That Rich chose to bring up the subject during our session and put it out there for all to hear is another reason I value his views on the state of our world.