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Lesson One -- Day Is Done

© J. M. Bridgeman

Lesson One -- Day Is Done

We were first-year teachers in a town so small that, within months, it would lose its high school. Claire was there to teach French to students who spoke English and heard Icelandic, or possibly Cree, at home. Far from her big close family, she begged her sisters and friends to visit. The day they did, we drove to the nearest beach, a curve of sand with a fringe of twisted willows atop the dunes. Driftwood logs had been tossed by wind and waves off the big lake into a sculpture garden, a natural sitting pit.

The beach was deserted at that time of year. Fall. At that hour. Twilight. We stacked wood for a campfire inside the circle. We cut wiener sticks and leaned them on the logs. Storm clouds roiling in the western sky were far enough away--without thunder or lightning--that it was still safe to go into the water.

We kicked out of our sandals and stashed our clothes. Dare. Dash. Dip. We immersed ourselves in the shocking warmth, our toes gripping the silt to hold us submerged beneath the draughty surface. Rushing back for our towels, rubbing their roughness into our pebbled skin, we turned, in a synchronized salute, to watch the blackening billows. Indigo, charcoal, smoke-grey, singed with tongues of backlight flame, the clouds moiled and chafed. Rolling over, bunching up, bumping into each other, bouncing back, they gashed a hole in their blind. Sun burst through, streaming in visible lines like a spotlight, touching down in the farm field west of the beach.

The others began to jabber and snicker amongst themselves. I picked up only "les soeurs," the sisters, the nuns, with my slow school French. Claire turned to clue me in, translating the gist.

The nuns used to tell us, she said, when you see the sun like that--how-do-you-call-it, a shaft?--its beams touching Earth, you are seeing God.

We laughed, eager young teachers that we were then, at the kind of brainwashing that used to pass for education. But it was such an incredible skyscape, ominous, glowering in front of the pastel wash, pierced, that, before the sun was gone, I tried to take a picture of it, there from the sand in the willow wood.

Then we turned our backs to the black water, to the golden field, to the high blue vault. We focused on our driftlog fire, concentrated on our toasting and roasting, our perfect evening of telling stories and singing songs.