Category: water

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liquidity

Another day, another city. Edinburgh, the Water of Leith. The bonny brown ribbon running through the city with its familiar metallic smell, the sun gleaming orange in the water. I recall my childhood at the foot of the Pentlands, where the river begins, playing in the parks and on the old railway line that ran alongside it, then, when I worked at the university, exploring the river paths that passed by my small flat in Stockbridge.

As I stroll into Saunders Street, I come upon a former university colleague, now, I discover, a recently retired professor. We discuss some of the people I used to know; she recounts the varied courses they’ve taken. Times and places, times and people. Water carrying it all along. A tear sits on her check, the cool weather she tells me. I feel liquid inside, the river of memory momentarily stopped, welling up, reminding me of its constancy, its resilience, its renewing presence.

Stockbridge, Edinburgh, Scotland
14th November 2024

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autumn

shaking aspen
shivering ripples
we quiver on the cusp

Unnamed lochan at Ardroe, Assynt, Scotland
4th September 2024

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heat

It’s like the sultry summer days when I lived in Montreal, heat so thick your skin’s running with sweat,and all your thirsts want slaking. You’re heavy with desire and you want to do something about it but the sun’s pressing in relentlessly and your will is liquefying and really all you can do is wait: wait for the humidity to build, wait for the humidity to break, and then….

First there’s the thunder – the clap, the flash, the weighted brightness – and then comes the rain. You’re standing out in it, lying out in it, feeling it patter all over your body like a thousand darting tongues; touching, tasting, quenching the heat of you, until you sigh and subside and gratefully dissolve.

Those were the days, and this is one now, although in this case the thunder is a low rumble rather than a violent crash, and the sky isn’t dense purple but medium-grey, and the rain isn’t filling the hot street with warmed flooding water: this is a Scottish summer, more temperate in all its aspects. Yet still the heat comes in, still the rain insists.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
13th June 2023

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afloat

This is where I am at home. And, after all these years of absence and homesickness, it’s not on the land of Scotland at all. It’s on this sea loch.

It struck me a few days ago when I was out in the tender on one of my wee rowings-about. It was a bit choppy and I was pulling towards my usual pausing place midway between the harbour headland and the loch’s southern shore – where I’m in the habit of drawing in the oars and laying my head back on the bow – when it occurred to me that, out here in the middle of the loch, I felt perfectly at home.

It’s not that I don’t usually feel at ease here. I’ve been living aboard our sailboat in this harbour, on and off, for years, and I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed our marginal position, tethered between the mountains and the Minch, between the evolving dock community and the local life of the village: I’ve always been most at ease on the edges of things. I’ve also come to feel very at home on the boat itself. Sailing the seas or coorying up in sheltered havens, its familiar fibreglass hull has become a cocoon, a container, not just for myself but for the skipper whose presence is soaked into every inch of it; a reliable and sea-kindly vessel bearing us onward together.

I’m sitting aboard the boat as I write this on a long still summer evening. The sun has just set and the northern sky is a thin lemon yellow and the sandstone faces of the mountains in the east glow pinkishly in the last of the light. The air is utterly clear and the water in the loch is glossy pink, yellow, and black-green, and almost mirror-flat. I feel at home right now, perched in the companionway, poised between these worlds of water, sky, mountains and folk, but the realisation I had out on the loch in the tender is more powerful. It means that my ability to feel at home here, to feel a sense – however slender – of belonging, does not depend on a particular boat or a particular location or particular company. It depends on me being afloat.

It’s time to find my own craft.

Loch Inver, Assynt, Scotland
9th July 2021

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going backwards

“It’s going backwards!” he cries in confusion. “It’s going backwards!” I try to walk him a wee bit closer but he’s not having it. I suggest we run towards it as goes out then run away from it as it comes in again but he’s not convinced. I’m surprised by his reticence as I thought he’d be keen to go for a wee paddle. Usually he loves water of all kinds – puddles, ponds, baths, burns – and generally delights in making as much of a splash as he can. Admittedly, the sea is a very different prospect to these more contained bodies of water but it’s not as if he hasn’t been to the coast before. Just a few days ago we were on the pebble beach at Ardmair and he was completely unperturbed, merrily pitching pebbles into the sea and eagerly trying to clamber over the last seaweed-covered stones to get closer. We had to hold him back to stop him going in. I’d have thought the sea here would, if anything, be less daunting. Compared to the open sweep of Ardmair, this beach – just north of Achmelvich – is sheltered, enclosed on each side by long rocky headlands with the distant horizon safely contained between them, and the water is clear as glass.

It’s not the water itself that’s unnerving him though – it’s the motion. When we were at Ardmair it was low tide and the sea sat slack and quiet on the stones. There was a bit of a breeze and the water rippled briskly as it received our ineptly skimmed pebbles but there were no real waves. The waves today are small – wavelets really, rolling gently over the pale shell sand at our feet – but there’s an energy to them, and their pronounced back-and-forth movement is evidently unsettling him. We try to explain it to him to put him at ease, telling him how the wind makes the waves and pushes them onto the shore, and about the tide itself and its approach and retreat, but at two-and-a-half he isn’t interested in the abstract. He’s absorbed utterly by what’s in front of him: this line of liquid mysteriously drawing away from him then all of a sudden returning. “It’s going white!” he exclaims as one wave rushes closer and spreads out at our feet in a wide lacy froth.

He clearly doesn’t want to go in so I pick him up and hold him on my hip and reassure him that we’ll just watch. And as we do, standing here quietly together, it strikes me more than ever how much this motion of the sea is like breathing. It seems animated, washing forward in exhalation then sucking back in, its rhythm measured yet capricious, like a great creature breathing. Maybe that’s what he feels too. Or maybe he has no idea of it at all and is simply sensibly wary of something whose nature and action he cannot fathom. I watch him watching, innocent and intent, and it strikes me too how moved I am to be here with him, on this sand in front of this water, witnessing him have this primary and elemental encounter.

I’ve always felt the seashore to be powerful. “A place of revelation,” for the Irish poets of old*; a place of alteration. No matter how familiar the shore has become to me over the years, it’s the one place I can always be freshened, the one place I am reliably renewed. But seeing him meet the sea like this with his young spirit and young eyes stirs something else in me, movements that I too cannot fathom but which rouse in me a profound tenderness… for him? for water? for this endless turning over? I don’t know. And anyway, that’s an abstraction again and this beach is anything but that. It’s “sand!” It’s “waves!” It’s froth and awe – and fun.

I give him a mischievous giggle and, still holding him, run in.

* From the Imacallam in dá Thuarad (Colloquy of the Two Sages, twelfth century Irish manuscript)

Vestey beach, Achmelvich, Assynt, Scotland
19th May 2021