On a clear day you can see as far as PEI

Alistair MacLeod can be heard in this NPR interview. Recently while watching an NFB documentary, I was struck by his writing shack. It is perched on the edge of land & sea. Walking to the shack, carrying tools, is an old habit of fishermen, gardeners, or this writer. The seasons on the cliff and the sea air permeate the mood of MacLeod's stories. Like an office cubicle exorcised of corporate control and plucked from the group, it offers independence and simplicity. A place to work.

Jack White, of The White Stripes, is a descendant of a Cape Breton family which includes Ashley MacIsaac and Natalie McMaster. His song Little Room, a short 45 second blast ends in a chant that strikes me as an exasperated ghost wailing a lament that is etched in the acid of DNA tracing back through to his Cape Breton roots.
Shacks bring to mind the Unabomber. It is as if the government foreclosed on the mythical unpaid taxes of Henry David Thoureau, seizing the shack from the imagination of escape and indicting isolation. What I mean is the shack itself as a symbol was played as crazy. At the other end of square footage, large homes had and still have a TV channel dedicated to them. The home as obsession. To the obsessed the shack had to be put down as shamefully tiny and poor.


My own obsession, as a boy, was to go off and live in the woods in a shack, pitting my wits against nature to survive; with a few modern tools (gun, radio, axe, etc.).
Radio Shack catalogues, sparked my interest in electronics. Ham radio operators had to build a shack to house their transmitters, due mainly to fire and lightning risks.

The camera obscura is a small shack with no windows - a darkened shack with reflector on the ceiling that directs light from a pinhole onto a white table surface in the shack. It is a shack sized camera.

I built a plywood shack in 2001. It is 8'x8'x8' which saved a lot of cutting as plywood comes in 8' sheets. This shack, which once stood alone at a distance of about 30' from my house, is now joined to my second shack, which was 8'x12'x8', and a third 16'x8' space. This nucleus of three shacks is where I work now, and it is joined by a porch to the house. I looked for a photo of my 8'x8' shack when it stood on it's own, but could only find one. It was a picture from inside the shack of my wife's big beautiful pregnant belly and discretion prevents me from posting it here.

My father has a smelt shack in Bedeque Bay, behind Bakin' Donuts in Summerside this year. It is his winter pastime to fish smelts. I think he likes giving them away, calling on old friends to see if they want a feed of smelts, more than fishing them. It's a very social world among the smelt shacks in and of itself, a winter community of shacks.