The Split - Part I of VI

This story was written as a companion piece to a story that Dominic had written in 2007. It is written in homage to the form of tale telling. It takes the conservative tone of the tale tellers of the 19th and early 20th Century - Lovecraft here is evoked by name - only to later show the point at which the tale itself breaks this linguistic conservatism down.  

This story explores several themes. There is a concept of obsession-as-transference, where confession and contamination become a coupled operation. Other theme concerns the struggle for organization or order within increasingly dispirited systems of knowledge. Finally, there is the theme of the confrontation with an absence I mentioned in discussing Dominic's writing. 

I hope you enjoy this first segment. 

THE SPLIT

by Jesse P. Hiltz

I

My name is Raymond Bale and I have, at last, a tale to tell. The circumstances that surround this tale are wrought with regret, for this is as much confession as narrative. Having marked these words fifty years after the fact, the images flash now before as spectres. But ghosts are not what there is to fear within the violence of these words. We are to fear, rather, that which we hold to be the most secure, most transparent. That which we see and understand as translucent, as trustworthy and comforting, yet within that, hidden in the details, there is something that transgresses this trust and transparency; a limit is only gain sight of when something defiles it.

 

***

 

When I first heard of Cape Split, I was sitting in a lounge in a Halifax hotel in 1956. The subject arose after a lengthy discussion with a middle-aged passer-byer named Brandon Hymel. We spoke of Halifax’s recent Fair Employment Legislation and Chris Anderson’s success in the Halifax Rugby League Club. After talk of politics and sports subsided, topics turned to electricity and economics. Hymel was a Yankee in Halifax on business, lobbying the provincial government for funding for a hydro-power project proposal in the Bay of Fundy.

“Highest tides in the world,” Hymel said. “Right there in between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. I’ll tell you one thing; with the amount of water rushes through that bay every tide, you could generate enough electricity to power all of Canada, maybe the United States. The person who started that project would be wealthy. That’s why I’m here. If I can get this project financed, Nova Scotia could be the world leader in tidal-power.”

I have to admit, even though this salesmanship irritated me, I was excited by the prospect of a hydro-technological revolution in the province. I had called Halifax home for the past three years.

I had, for some years, engaged in undirected study at Dalhousie University and was completing a sadly weak degree in English literature. After these few years, I was eager to take my leave back to England. My education in the Maritimes had been, more or less, a reason to leave what I had thought was the unnecessary formality of my native London. Why, you must be wondering, would a lad from England come to the New World to be taught of his own country’s literary legacy? As a boy, North America, Nova Scotia in particular, had the charm of a quaint and evolving culture. That hope was dashed so enough. After my years in Halifax, I had found myself more and more yearning for the formalities and luxuries against which I had rebelled in my youth. London called, and I was eager to answer.

I passed my time in Halifax attending the meetings of a small, eccentric handful of college students, obsessed with the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. Just of few of us labs, keen talk and a few pints. To be honest, I’d never read of word of Lovecraft’s work. They journeyed around Nova Scotia collecting strange, local tales of the macabre, ghosts and the sort. I went mostly to listen

The remainder of my time was spent with an American Graduate student name Lynn Gerald; dark haired, stern willed. She and I had been close for some two years. Sweethearts, I suppose. Maybe more. If you should ask if we meant to marry, I cannot say either way, yes or no. Circumstance sometimes outweighs all our best intentions. 

 “You simply must see Cape Split,” said Hymel. “The tides are so powerful that they’ve cut the land in two. Like a loaf of bread; no lie. The cape reaches out into the Bay of Fundy like the arm of God himself, five miles out and jagged are its cliffs. The cut-off part of the cape juts of out of the water like a knife. Tidal boars, whirlpools; simply breathtaking. Can you image it? The sheer power it would take to split the land like that.”

 

***

 

An hour later, Hymel left to attend a meeting with a potential investor, thanking me for letting him ramble on. I told him that it was interesting and I would like to be kept up to date, so to speak, on the progress of his project. We agreed to meet the following week and he would explain to me in better details the science behind hydro-electric power production. We parted ways. Instead of returning home to my dormitory, I decided to take leave to the library and attempt to locate some photographs of the Cape. If nothing else, this stop over would be a reason to further put off my studies from which I’d been hiding for days.

The smell of musk and old paper filled my nostrils as I rifled through the library’s dense collections of texts and works. I found nothing on Cape Split in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and even less elsewhere. There was little to no trace of what Hymel called “the Split.” I was only after an hour of probing the library’s insides that I found a small book that mentioned the Split. The book was a brief geological summery from 1925. It explained that the Cape itself was the continuation of the North Mountain range that cut through Nova Scotia’s King’s County that ran out into the Bay of Fundy, disappearing into the water. Hymel had told me that the Cape was long but he did not mention that it all but reached across the Bay of Fundy itself. It extending seven kilometres out, and pinched off a small piece of water called the Basin from the rest of the Bay. It was in the two kilometre gap of water that between the Bay of Fundy and the Minus Basin where the tide power is so strong. The tides pulled the water through this narrow gap four times in twenty-four hours, moving roughly six-hundred and fifty billion tones of water at day. The thought was sublime.

Upon opening another thin, bound package I found, to my delight, a collection of newspaper clippers haphazardly thrown together with paper clips and twine. Some spoke of flounder fishing, others of the growing popularity of lobster. I had never eaten lobster; a poor man’s food, I was told, but now it was evermore popular and evermore expensive, with the market on the East Coast. The Bay of Fundy’s bottom was crawling with lobster and over the last century, the fisherman had turned to them as their way.

Other articles described the tides and the dyke lands of the Annapolis Valley. Finally, I stumbled upon a gold nugget of sorts. A fairly recent article in the Wolfville newspaper described the beaching of a basking shark in Scott’s Bay, the small fishing village with a wharf and the only public walking trail onto the Split. The shark was discovered by a fisherman named Dale Cornelius. I can reproduce part of the article for you here. I’ve kept it all these years afterward:

June 17, 1950

Shark Washes Up in Bay.

Dale Cornelius found more than herring in his nets yesterday. Yesterday morning, at low tide, the Scott’s Bay resident found the remains of a thirty foot basking shark washed up on the beach.

Dr. Furlong from the University of Boston says that the discovery is not out of the ordinary. “The Bay of Fundy is in the middle of the shark’s territory in the northern hemisphere.”

For Cornelius, the experience was more exciting.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Cornelius says.

The shark’s remains have been removed from the beach and sent to the University of Boston for testing.

“It’s not often we get such an opportunity to study such an animal so closely” says Furlong…

The article lost my interest and I stopped reading there, moving on to the next clipping in the bundle.

   It looked as if it were a torn from a letter. The scrap of paper was folded and clipped to two sheets of foolscap. It was badly faded and water damaged. The fragment read:

“… given the condition of the specimen we cannot say confidently… all but the structure remains, however… even this I cannot say for sure.  - Furlong”

The two remaining pages were research notes on lined paper, some in point form, others written in long form. The handwriting held a different tone than what I had just read from Furlong’s fragment. While that writing was scrolled and hasty, the notes were printed by a steady, scientific, precise hand.

Why these pages had been put into the library, I could not say. They had no form of identification, rhyme or rational, other than their coupling with the geographical summary.

   The notes were concerned with the tides. This was unsurprising, but the aspect of the tide with which the notes were concerned was more attuned to the theme of the newspaper article, than with the geological summary. 

   These obsessively precise notes conveyed a feeling of sublime reverence for the force of the tidal currents. The author’s wrote of how the tides drags ocean life, like krill and plankton, in from the Atlantic and deposits it, in some times great quantities, in the Bay of Fundy. It is for this reason the Bay is home to many whale species who feed on krill and the like. However, the author also notes that with the tides come many of the ocean’s dead. Large, bloated whales corpses cruse into the Bay waters and make a fine feast for the tiger shark population. Most the notes on the first page went on like this.

On the second page, the author starts to writes a series of place names and dates, most of them in the late 1800s:

St. Augustine, Florida 1896. Fleshy mass. 23 feet long, 18 feet across. Found by Dr. DeWitt Webb. Unidentifiable.

Dunk Island, Australia.. Carcass 1948. Anon.

Scott’s Bay, Nova Scotia, 1950. Unidentifiable Mass. 34 feet long, 17 feet across. Origin unknown. Found by Cornelius.. Cape Split...”

I could only conclude that this bundle was once a collection of information for some sort of research project; one that would, something of the sort. Perhaps someone was researching the basking shark and found other dates for basking shark beachings. I found the size of the shark as Cape Split astounding. The Britannica had limited its length to 20 feet.

As you can guess, my interest in Cape Split and Scott’s Bay had suddenly gone beyond hydro-power and provincial infrastructure. I took the bundle of fragments out on loan and left the library. After pining over its pages again that evening, I left a message for Hymel at his Hotel expressing my interests in the Split. And, after Hymel found out, some weeks later, of the notoriety of my family in London, I was invited to accompany him on a survey mission to Scott’s Bay.

END PART ONE