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Church and Guvvie DSC_8803

Church and Guvvie DSC_8803

The Guvvie and the Go Forth

Sunrise would often find Noah already outdoors. He liked to savour every moment of the village’s awakening. On weekdays, it was a short dash from wherever he might be to the school bus, whose arrival he was made aware of by the beeping of the bus as it stopped and backed into the dirt lane by his house. On weekends, he would have made his lunch already and be carrying it with him, so he could ramble more freely.

On this Saturday, remembering a photo his grandfather had left him, he was out in the harbour in the beat-up old yellow dinghy his grandfather had also bestowed upon him. The water was calm with that calmness that was the gap between the night’s offshore winds and the day’s onshore winds. His idea was to put himself in exactly the same position for witnessing the sunrise that Daddy Mac had been in when he took the picture. There he was, keeping the dinghy in place with slight flutterings of the oars, when a sensibility of the scene struck him in a deeper way than the printed image had managed to do.

From sea level, he was looking up in the foreground at the government wharf and the ladder up the face of it while from the background the steeple of the church ascended into the colourful clouds of daybreak.

The levels of ascension were what struck him. How the ladder rose up from the sea, how the guvvie led on to the hill that led up to the church, how the church apprehended the sky, and how the cross was the jumping off point.

He said to himself, “So go forth. Arise and go forth.” Yet he scarcely knew what he was saying, and when he had said it, he had no idea what it meant.

As the sun surmounted the church and broad daylight reigned, Noah rowed on. And although any glimpse of understanding that had been his was gone, the sensation of arising and going forth remained with him.

He plied the worn and weathered oars for several minutes as if a race had just started, and then, without his delight ebbing in the least, he subsided into a normal rhythm and headed on out of the harbour and toward Saul Island and its sand beach, where he planned to feast on his bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich and the chocolate chip cookie he had brought for dessert.

18 April 2024
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca
Category:Scenic
Subcategory:Coastlines
Subcategory Detail:
Keywords:Canada, Nova, Prospect, Scotia, cross, fishing, furze, harbor, harbour, hillside, ladder, morning, sky, steeple, trees, village, wharf