It has rained and the forecast is for more of the same. I had finely judged my timings but had been awake an hour before my alarm and so, with nothing more to do indoors, I checked out early enough to nab the shelter down by the town beach. Departure day, with baggage, some of it anyway, the things I don’t want to entrust to handlers and the vagaries of container shipment, and five hours to kill before embarkation. I recall what Steinman says about killing time: it will kill you right back.*
So I change my perspective. I’m not killing, I’m spending, using, enjoying even. I have a sheltered seat over-looking the harbour. A good place to people watch / life watch. There’s no activity at first. I cannot figure if the small boats are facing into the wind or away from it. Either way, they’re all lined up – a hundred or so, I start to count but lose my place – lined up facing the same direction, as if they’re waiting for a starting whistle that would send them racing slap-bang into the quayside wall.
A lady in shorts and a white hoodie is hunting at the edge of the water for sea glass. I have no reason to know that such is her treasure, but it does seem to be a local fascination, one that I admit to having contracted. I had never found sea glass before, for all my years of beachcombing. Perhaps it is a thing, like panning for gold, that takes infinite patience, or like hunting stars, where you ‘have to get your eye in’ – adjust your vision appropriately, in order to see what is already there. I am travelling home with a few fragments, and an idea as to what they carry within their smooth and frosted surfaces…as if I need yet one more project right now. I will trust my pieces to hold the idea until I have the time to come back to it.
A black labrador barks a gull into the water, but fails to frighten it into flight. The bird bobs on the surface, more oblivious to the coldness of the water than the dog, who shoots off after other saline- or fish-scented things.
The tide is on the ebb. The sun makes an effort to break through the clouds. The price of my rain-free shelter is that I’m sitting in the shade. While the warmth of sun would be welcome, I don’t want to risk a drenching. Away beyond the harbour, above the islands of Tresco and St Martins, the sky is dark and glowering.
I eat cheese for breakfast, the last thing left in the fridge apart from a near-empty bottle of salad dressing. I threw the latter away, along with the remains of the sun-screen and after-sun lotion which somehow would not fit back into the bag they came out of. I need to learn to travel lighter.
The first pleasure boats leave. The anchored run-abouts turn on their ropes briefly, towards the channel and back again, as if watching them go and waving them off.
Sparrows hop around my ankles, checking if I’ve dropped anything worth scavenging, then leave with a disappointed, or perhaps reproving, squeak.
Clouds darken, but I can see the white tower of the lighthouse on St Martins.
An empty boat trailer rattles along the quay.
Below where I’m sitting, down on the beach, ropes stretch in parallel lines, shining white ropes and those green with more than one season’s algae. I try to follow their lines to their respective craft but once they disappear into the water, I cannot tell. The few nearest the land are beached now the water has abandoned them for a while.
The trailer rattles back with a RIB on board.
The morning elapses. The tide changes its mind, decides it cannot penetrate the barricade of boats, retreats back to its beach-head. The first stranded boats are re-floated. The wind or the current has shifted. Bows are now all pointed at the mouth of the cove, straining under starter’s orders to be released into the open waters.
Couples come and go, sit on the benches, move away. Mostly they say nothing, to me nor to each other. What is it with these silent relationships? How do people survive them and why do they bother?
In photographs, my parents look happy. Not ‘smile for the camera’ happy, but ‘sharing a joke’ happy. They always had things to talk about. Beyond work and the kids, they would discuss what was going on in the world, talk politics and science and what they’d been reading, and what-ifs. They told tall tales and life stories. My parents would never have sat together on a bench in silence. If all else failed, they would talk about what they could see in the harbour and beyond it. Debate which boat they would buy, and Mam would repeat that he could have it to himself…she’d fly and meet him the other side.
I talk to the sparrows at my feet, who have returned to see if I am yet dropping crumbs, just as I talked to the ducklings yesterday. Swimming with ducklings had not been on my list of things to do, but it may be something I will love to do again.
I had watched a man with yellow wellies board a small blue boat with oars and an outboard motor and head out beyond the harbour. He returns with shopping bags. Surely he cannot have been all the way to Cornwall and back, while I have sat here. More likely he has been to one of the other islands and is bringing back family produce, not shopping at all. Once he has off-loaded and tied up, I watch his boat pull out into the incoming tide, testing the length of its rope, and then settle to wait its next excursion. Such a small insight into island life, which I would need to brave a conversation to fully understand.
I don't know where or how to start the conversations I really want to have.
If you watch the sea closely you can see the tide coming in, one step at a time, one wave at a time, but I don’t and so it seems to sneak in suddenly, like a child playing “Grandmother’s Footsteps”. The horizon clouds are lower. I cannot see the St Martin’s light. The islands are becoming ghosts. Memories. Sea fret kisses my face and the waters inch towards the wall. I’ve a-while yet, but I think it’s time to take a walk, stretch my legs before boarding for the journey home, and the
making of plans to return.
*Out Of The Frying Pan & Into the Fire
