Sable Island - one hundred mile due east of Nova Scotia, in the midst of the worst weather in the North Atlantic - is a thirty-mile-long sand dune, uninhabited except by a couple of government agents and by bands of wild horses that have populated the island for more than two hundred years. Yet this small place illuminates grand and global themes, both human and natural. For centuries, Sable terrorized legions of mariners crossing from Europe to America - more than five hundred ships have been wrecked on its shores, fully ten disasters for every mile of coastline. Sable is constantly moving, its beaches disappearing and reappearing in storms, its very body in slow motion to the east. Because of this, it is a metaphor for the way the planet governs itself, because to appreciate Sable is to understand the workings of the great ocean currents, the winds and the North Atlantic gale, and the forces of entropy.
