Ghost Ship
When my apartment building gets torn down there will still be a little box in the air where we used to live
Last spring, I was running along the Dartmouth waterfront in the fog. It was one of those soupy days that felt so foreign when I first moved to Nova Scotia, with pillows of thick, warm air and the sensation of being cocooned in moisture. Days like these were new to me, because BC doesn’t get humidity like that, and I have grown really fond of them. I think the birds like it too, because on these days they’re especially loud.
This is a recording of some birds from the park near my house. Can anyone tell me what bird this is?
I took my headphones off for a second; if memory serves I think my brother texted me and I stopped running to reply to him. As soon as I took off my headphones, I emerged into a cacophony of birdsong. It sounded like that recording I linked above, x5. I remember being astounded that I had been deaf to it all. I looked out over the water and imagined what it would have sounded like generations ago, with the voices of tall ship crews echoing across the harbour over a steady drone of birdsong louder than I can imagine.
In J.B. Mackinnon’s book “The Once and Future World” (once of my favourite books), he writes about the sheer enormity of the natural world in generations past. How sailors in the pre-industrial age would have carved routes through schools of fish kilometres wide. When my great, great grandfather’s fishing boat came within shouting distance of land in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, the seabirds would have all but blacked out the sky.
Back then, both the biodiversity and the number of living things were on different scales of magnitude compared to the present, to the point that it would probably be quite frightening to 21st century dwellers like you and me. It’s kind of thrilling to picture, don’t you think? They literally made a horror movie about it.
This moment on the Dartmouth waterfront inspired a song called Ghost Ship. It’s going to be on my album but it’s not quite ready to share yet, even in a sneaky way. I do have a live video of it though, from a show at The Baby G in Toronto in April.
When I play this song live, I often get messages from people after the show saying that they miss the Nova Scotia they once knew. I moved to Dartmouth just as the condos started to encroach, and even in three years of living here, I’ve compiled an ever-growing list of lovely old buildings to mourn.
Of course, it’s a nuanced issue, and I would hate for someone’s take-away from this email to be “Sophie thinks Development is Bad >:(”.
We need to make room for the millions of people who deserve a safe home here, on this land that we don’t own but (with hope) steward. We have space in this country for refugees of climate change, persecution, and war.
In one hand we hold grief, a natural response to change and the destruction of what we hold dear. In the other, we hold our responsibility as citizens of a global community to share that which we were unfathomably lucky to be born into. What do you think?