Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia (J.S. Graboyes/Duck Pie)

Time may be linear or time may be cyclical, but, for many in Nova Scotia, time is divided into six-month increments. In summer, when the tourists come, you work. You run your business, you man a visitor center, you sell your handicrafts, you operate boat tours. The rest of the year — when the air is cold, the days are short, the skies are gray, and you sometimes walk out of front doors several feet off the ground to account for the snow — you do something else.

I remember one summer night about a decade-and-a-half ago, one of those endless twilights you find only when you get far enough away from the Equator. We were at a lobster pound on the Minas Basin, off the Bay of Fundy. The restaurant itself was a wooden shack surrounded by scattered picnic tables in patches of…