The Dream and the Nightmare

When I was a child growing up on Georgian Bay, I used to sometimes lie awake at night trying to imagine what the Bay would look like without any water.

Anyone who's ever visited the 30,000 islands knows what a task that is for a young child's imagination... the landscape is so wild and so rocky and so windswept, so dotted with islands and so convoluted with the curves and swirls of precambrian granite frozen in most ancient time. It was unimaginable without its water.

But over the last few years as the climate has radically shifted, I've seen the Bay drop by feet and feet, and from what we can tell, it's not coming back. The waterline in Killarney last summer was 4 feet below the levels I grew up with... and a body of water is an inverted cone. There's more at the top than at the bottom. If the trends continue, you don't have to be Euclid to do the math.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed I was in my childhood home, and looked out on the water, and saw the biggest freshwater fish I'd ever seen, swimming circles in what remained of the Bay. Pike, bass, muskie and sturgeon, trapped in what were practically puddles, "swimming around like dinosaurs," I thought to myself in the dream, and I wept and wept and wept.

I want to sum this up happily, or philosophically at least. And I find that I can't do it. We're entering a new age, is all I know. And there will be no going back. Dream, or nightmare?

We'll only know which, when we awaken.