There is a spot — see it above — on northwestern-most tip of Prince Edward Island where the Northumberland Strait meets the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Here you can see the waves from both sides come together.

This place, called North Cape, is home to a research wind farm with as many as two dozen huge wind turbines. The turbines had no trouble spinning today. They were amazingly quiet. At the same time, the sea was so rough that the fishing boats stayed in the nearby harbor.

We stood on this wind-lashed promontory, in the shadow of a laboratory, where scientists and engineers are creating a sustainable form of energy and watched as a man harvested Irish moss with a hand rake. This crop has been gathered on the western shores of the island by locals since the 1930s, both by hand and also using horse-drawn rakes. Carrageenan, a thickener used in dairy and other products, is extracted from the moss. As evening approached, the moss farmer hurried to move his old Toyota truck, just feet from the incoming tide, up the steep, red, rocky hill and on home with the day’s harvest.