{"id":553,"date":"2020-02-24T10:33:31","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T14:33:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/?page_id=553"},"modified":"2021-04-15T11:16:20","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T14:16:20","slug":"megan-lane-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/a-walk-on-the-edge-2020\/megan-lane-macdonald\/","title":{"rendered":"A Walk on the Edge 2020 | Megan Lane MacDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On the Edge<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Megan Lane MacDonald<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When I visited the Summerside boardwalk in early January, I had to jump from the last step to reach the beach below. The bottom part of the stair must have been removed at the end of the summer. This is probably to deter people from going down to the water in the winter. I remarked to myself that it was strange to have such a barrier between pedestrians and the shore, while in the summer the beach would be full of people. Why shut us all in by blocking off the beach? The thought made me feel almost claustrophobic. The beaches surrounding the Island often feel more like bridges than barriers, connecting the land to the deeper ocean that lay beyond the horizon, but the thought of blocking off the beach in this way felt like putting a wall up around the Island. Closing us in like the ice creeping in the harbour and preventing escape. These cold snowy months already cause enough cabin fever as it is. Visiting the water usually helps to open up the boundaries of my mind and imagine the larger world around me but this visit did not inspire the same kind of energy as previous summertime visits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not feel the usual sense of homecoming and connection that I get from staring out at the sea. I could not really even see the sea, just an endless expanse of white trailing off somewhere to grey. It was hard to tell where the ice stopped and the unfrozen water began, it was all one gradient. The water, when in this state of churning half-ice, is not impassable but uninviting. It is unwelcoming to sailboats or ferries and unfit for the iceboats of old. The water felt like more of a barrier than ever. An unmovable wall between us and the world. The water barred me from what lay over the horizon, and the ice enclosed the waters. The usual blending of sea and sky was removed. The ice divided up the elements with hard lines. There was a feeling of loneliness to the quiet but it was not a sad loneliness. It was more of a patient waiting. An expectation of the eventual return of activity. No fishing boats crawled across the horizon that day. No beachcombers roamed along the shore, pressing countless footsteps into the sand. The sand lay untouched, hidden beneath blankets of snow and a hard shell of ice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the sea was\nquiet. The same sea which usually bashes against our sandstone, chipping away\nat the Island\u2019s borders, shrinking it, eating up the cliffs and devouring the\ndunes. Its usual steady breaths, inhaling and exhaling its waves onto the\nshore, were gone. The sound of my own footsteps crunching through the layers of\nsnow echoed in my ears. I was unused to the silence. I have never before been\nto the beach and been unable to hear the waves crashing onto the beach,\nseagulls screaming in the wind, or laughter in the dunes. It felt as if the\nland and sea were collectively holding their breath. I kept quiet myself,\nfeeling it inappropriate to break the restful silence. Nothing sang, nothing\nmoved, not even myself. There was a pervasive stillness that seeped into my\nskin through the cold wind until I stood at a standstill looking out over the\nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was not\naltogether unpleasant. There was a serenity to the stillness; a restfulness. I\nmight have stood there forever if I hadn\u2019t been so cold.  My body shook with wave after wave of\nshivers, providing the movement that the landscape lacked. Since the sand was\nhidden away by the snow, I couldn’t stoop to feel the sand slip through my\nfingers as I normally would at the beach. I couldn\u2019t climb the massive piles of\nred sandstone. I couldn’t hunt for seashells, snails, or crabs, yet I still\nmeticulously scanned my surroundings as if I were habitually searching for\npoints of interest. The whole beach was devoid of life and colour. Any\nintricacies were hidden beneath an all-encompassing layer of plain white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The harbour was\nnot the shape I had seen last summer. It astonishes me how much a place can\nchange over the course of a year, or even just from one season to the next, and\nyet still return to old familiarity once again. Standing on the icy shore, the\nIsland felt larger than it ever had. It was difficult to tell where the ice\nstopped and the water began. The layers of ice grown around the coast had moved\nthe border between land and sea farther out into the water\u2019s territory,\nclaiming it as its own. The ice caged me in so that leaving the Island felt\nimpossible, and for that my world shrunk. But that world was still somehow\nbigger than before. The entire shore had expanded. It was as if the Island had\nstretched itself out before it settled into its winter nap. The entire beach\nhad fallen asleep. Those still waves were now a frozen ring encircling the\nshores. Silent. Hushed by the breath of winter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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RETURN TO ‘A WALK ON THE EDGE’ 2020<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Edge Megan Lane MacDonald When I visited the Summerside boardwalk in early January, I had to jump from the last step to reach the beach below. The bottom part of the stair must have been removed at the end of the summer. This is probably to deter people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"parent":505,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/553"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1551,"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/553\/revisions\/1551"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.upei.ca\/mais\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}