Sable Island is a weird and wonderful place.
Nearly 300km off the coast of Nova Scotia, Sable Island is a narrow crescent (about 42km long by no more than 1.5km wide) that sits smiling out into the emptiness of the north Atlantic Ocean.
It’s also responsible for so many shipwrecks that it’s cheerfully known as “the graveyard of the Atlantic.” At least 350 downed vessels surround it.
With minimal vegetation, no trees, and a history of killing sailors, it would be natural to assume that Sable Island is a barren, lifeless strip of sand…but it’s not. Life is in abundance here. Sable Island is home to the world’s largest colony of grey seals, with a population of about 400 000. It’s got a species of bee and a species of sparrow found nowhere else on earth.
Oh, and hundreds of wild horses.
The horses were brought over by Acadians expelled from the mainland in the 1700s, who quickly realized that the landscape was useless for farming, and who – I guess – left without their horses?
The horses have somehow survived by feeding on the island’s grasses, drinking from its many freshwater ponds, and even adapting to eat seaweed that washes up on the beach. Over generations, they’ve evolved to be shorter, stockier, and woollier than their ancestors. Despite being highly disruptive to the island’s ecosystem when they arrived, they are now protected by the Canadian government (the whole island is a national park), and it seems like the island’s ecology has successfully absorbed the horses; their carcasses enrich the soil and provide food for untold multitudes of scavengers and insects.
If you want a by-the-numbers deep dive into the island, YouTube videos abound, but the documentary I’d actually recommend is called Geographies of Solitude. It’s far less factual than most documentaries, far more artistic, and almost meditative in its slow-moving account of Sable Island and the closest thing it has to a permanent resident: Zoe Lucas, a researcher who has spent most of the past 40 years there, collecting everything from insects to horse dung to washed-up garbage.
British composer Angus McRae didn’t write this week’s song for the documentary, but he very much could have. His work captures the film’s simultaneous and contradictory sense of scale: one moment you’re lost in a tiny world of detail as Zoe Lucas sorts microplastics by colour, and the next moment you’re lost in the breathtaking isolation that Sable Island represents.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The plaintive violin could be an echo of a grey seal’s bark.
2. Sable Island’s constant wind is captured by the sweeping string section.
3. At the end, the strings back off, leaving a piano to gallop across the landscape.
Recommended listening activity:
Being by yourself.