The Scent of Seaweed and Salt Air: I’m Drowsing Off

In Boundary Pass, 300 yards offshore from our prow on South Pender, there is a pleasure craft that appears to be adrift. Its engine is off, its bow is pointed west, but it drifts slowly east. Backwards. Have the occupants inside fallen asleep?

Does anyone care?

It’s mid-afternoon. It’s warm, the air is still. The water in Boundary Pass is placid for the most part, though there are patches of wavelets, currents and, further out, a busy rip tide with crests of white water.

Yeowing and nudging

There is a low hum, and I think I hear waves in the distance. But the sources of these sounds are invisible.

A tangle of bull kelp lingers off the Living Rock Island at Craddock Beach. A solitary gull watches the ocean from its peak while other gulls congregate in the pockets of currents further offshore. There is anchovy in those currents, but not in large numbers. Otherwise, the gulls would be yeowing 1 and diving.

A neighbour’s orange-hulled zodiac bobs in our quiet bay, nudging the buoy it’s tethered to.

Ravens pick at the barnacles on rocks below us. Swallows soar and dive. A pair of turkey vultures circle slowly above the trees on Tilley Point. A trio of dragonflies comb over the golden grass of our lawn, hunting insects. “The murmurous haunt of flies!”

That osprey ruffles me

An osprey sits on the branch of a ghosted old arbutus. Its intense gaze ruffles me because I’m dropping into a state of languor. But this majestic creature is hunting, and soon, it will circle the bay and hover mid-air watching. When it sees a small fish near the water’s surface, it will dive, ferociously, hit the water with an open beak and snap up the poor bullhead. All that focus makes me sleepier.

I’ve just been on the phone with my daughter, who was on the Île de Ré, earlier today, off the coast of France. She was telling me about her adventures in Barcelona and Lyon, but I felt myself being lulled into the slowness of this summer day.

Sunbaked, languour … and sleep

These are the dog days of summer, though that expression might be mistakenly applied. In the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the “Dog Days” originally referred to the period of sweltering heat in late July and early August. The middle of the summer. It coincides with the dawn-rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, which the Greeks thought contributed to the hotter temperatures.

It’s not sweltering today, but I associate Dog Days with that sun-baked feeling and a sense of laziness and torpor. I could watch the gulls all day, I think. Or follow the changing patterns of currents in the Pass. Or count the minutes it takes for waves to hit the rocks after a freighter passes by.

Instead of getting on with errands, I might rouse myself back to the house for a book, a cold drink and some sunscreen. But all that work moving the chez longue into the shade! Sleep beckons. A book wouldn’t hold my attention long anyway.

“And with thee fade away into the forest dim”

It’s intoxicating, these Dog Days of Summer, and the lines of John Keats come to mind:

O for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim—
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Is that the only poem I know? No, but it’s familiar and describes that sense of fading away I feel out here on the prow.

It could also be lines by Robert Frost, though from a different season:

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

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The scent of apples comes in a few months.

What form will my dreaming take?

Right now, the scent of seaweed and salt air is in my nose, and I am drowsing off. I can tell what form my dreaming will take.

The currents swirl and eddy all around me, overlooking this water world, tangled and knotted like the bull kelp forests and bladderwrack covering the rocks below. Barnacles and sea stars, beached anemones and jellyfish, crabs scuttling under rocks, a frayed piece of driftwood lying on the beach in its own state of torpor.

The dog days of summer lie sleeping on the grass beside my chaise longue, like a dreaming golden retriever, breathing softly in slumber.

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