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Hard Light

Page 7

by Michael Crummey


  bound as I was to the island of my birth;

  I wanted an excuse to stay and found one

  but a man’s heart is never satisfied

  and there is still a song

  in my head on times that

  will not let me be

  ‘Boat Building.’ (1899)

  Before the snow settles in

  have your wood cut and

  carried to the dockyard where

  you can work away at her

  through the winter.

  Scarf the joints to frame her out,

  fit the beams, sides and stanchions,

  then caulk her timber tight with

  old rags or moss chinked in

  with maul and chisel.

  Give her a name before you

  fit her out with rigging,

  christen her bow with a prayer.

  When the spring drives off the ice

  launch her into the harbour

  and hope for the best

  when you let her go.

  Remember this if you can:

  a boat on the water belongs

  to the water first

  regardless of her name

  or who it is that names her.

  ‘Who can understand the heart of a man.’ (1907)

  He sat reading a paper until eleven,

  knocked out his pipe,

  doused the lamp.

  His wife already in bed,

  he undressed in the darkness,

  folding his clothes across

  a chair-back.

  Around midnight he turned out

  to get his knife,

  his wife sitting up to see

  what he was about.

  He had two daughters,

  the eldest screamed Daddy Daddy

  look what you have done

  and he ran out of the house

  to the canal where he drowned himself.

  I watched them haul his body

  from the water and carry him

  to the dead house.

  He was a stranger to me –

  met him coming across from Tilt Cove

  aboard the Marion two days before.

  I slept next to him in the forecastle

  and he did not stir through the night.

  When he bolted from the house

  he carried the knife with him

  and there’s no saying

  where he left it.

  In the mouth of the harbour maybe,

  the silver blade still catching light

  beneath the shallow water.

  ‘Distance from Newfoundland.

  Northernmost grave in the world.’ (1913)

  A cairn of stones tells the story,

  broken oar and a sledge runner

  roughed into a cross

  where the remains of George Porter lie,

  the end of an expedition to Ellesmereland

  eighteen hundred miles from St. John’s harbour,

  the vessel found wrecked

  and nearly forgotten

  on the Carey Islands.

  I have travelled twelve thousand miles

  to Van Diemen’s Land,

  crossed the line and lost sight

  of everything I had looked upon,

  the North Star put out like a pauper

  when the Southern Cross

  appeared in the sky;

  the Water Bear, the Albatross,

  the South Sea Seal guiding overhead,

  so many strange things that seemed

  strangely familiar

  as if I was visiting an old city

  I knew well from maps and stories.

  In Constantinople I stepped into

  the Dardanelles that drowned Leander

  swimming for the light of Hero’s torch;

  I walked the streets of Salonica

  where a seller of purple and fine linens

  became Europe’s first Christian,

  a convert of shipwrecked St. Paul,

  the two of them praying together

  among bolts of cloth, Lydia

  was the woman’s name.

  George Porter lies under stone

  only eighteen hundred miles from Newfoundland

  and almost further than a man could travel –

  an initialled watch beside the cairn

  where sailors stumbled upon it,

  a notebook with the dead man’s name

  how close he came

  to being lost forever.

  ‘Life and its pleasures.’ (1921)

  The only lesson the years have to teach

  is that life is a lottery and

  my name has been called a few times

  when I wish it had not.

  My third year trading

  I engaged John Pelley of Exploits

  to build me a fifteen-ton boat,

  brought her down from

  Little Burnt Bay in the spring

  and went into Art’s Cove

  to cut a load of birch wood,

  leaving her at anchor.

  She was fitted with everything new

  and was worth four hundred dollars

  when a hard breeze of wind

  took her ashore,

  I sold what I could save

  for ten dollars and fifty cents.

  Coasted lumber between Gander Bay,

  Brown’s Arm and Botwood in

  the little schooner Mary March

  she lay frozen in ice all the winter,

  and a heavy sea close on

  the breakup wrecked her

  before I could get aboard

  in the spring.

  Served as master on the forty-seven-ton

  schooner Rolling Wave

  when she parted her chains

  in Deep Cove and the rocks beat

  out the bottom,

  keel and planks floating

  out of the harbour like

  life’s pleasures lost,

  we were lucky to get off her

  before she wrecked.

  The eighteen-ton sloop Blanch

  came free from her anchor

  on the last trip of the year,

  the Arthur Janes struck

  a rock in Dildo Run;

  the Prima Donna we salvaged

  and worked on all the winter

  only to lose her on the shore again.

  If Fortune shows favour

  she’s fickle besides;

  in thirty years trading

  I have owned more boats

  than I could name,

  and have lost almost

  as many as I have owned.

  ‘At home on a cold winter’s night.

  The changing scenes of Life.’ (1928)

  November bluster,

  the night sky obscured by cloud.

  On the tall ships I was taught

  to steer by the stars,

  took them for granted,

  like a portrait of grandparents

  hung in the hallway before

  you came into the world.

  There is a telescope on Mount Wilson

  in California whose lens

  weighs four and one half tons

  and measures one hundred inches across –

  they say it has mapped the heavens

  for hundreds of millions of miles,

  that the darkness is deeper than

  we ever imagined.

  New galaxies and constellations

  discovered every day

  and it is still only

  the simplest things we understand.

  The speed of light exceeds

  eleven million miles a minute,

  it travels through space

  for thousands of years after

  its star has collapsed;

  it is possible

  that all my life I have

  taken my mark by

  a body that does not exist.

  A chunk of wood shifts in
/>   the fireplace,

  falls;

  through the window I watch

  winter clouds drift and gather.

  Clotted field of stars beyond them,

  light rooted hard in darkness.

  ‘An old sailor’s portion.’ (1932)

  I am an old man now

  hard aground in Twillingate

  and telling tales to skeptics,

  my finger dipped in tea

  to sketch a map across the table.

  The young ones drop by with

  whiskey to hear me talk,

  I give them streets

  cobbled with marble in Italy,

  the long spiralling line of China’s wall,

  the songs I learned while drinking

  with the darkies in Virginia,

  those sounds as old as a continent ...

  I can tell they don’t believe

  the half of it.

  It’s an old sailor’s portion

  to be disbelieved so often

  that he begins to doubt himself;

  the best part of my life has passed

  as a shadow, and shadows are what

  I am left with –

  perhaps every place I have ever been

  is imaginary, like the Equator

  or the points on a compass.

  Don’t ask me what is real

  when you hear me talk,

  I can only tell you

  what I remember.

  Look down at the table.

  The map has already disappeared.

  ‘Pulling along toward the last end of

  the Warp of life and the man changes.’ (1935)

  I can’t explain why I was

  never happy to stay ashore back then ...

  159 thousand nautical miles

  I have travelled,

  laid my eyes on the colours

  of thirty-two countries around the globe

  and gladly said goodbye

  to them all

  I used to say I loved the water,

  knowing from the start

  it wasn’t that simple

  I’ve sailed in seas running higher

  than a ship’s topyard,

  watched it take down

  mast and sail together

  before settling into a meditative calm,

  the waves like saints of God

  resigned to death

  When I was a boy in Twillingate

  the sailors would say

  the ocean is a cruel master,

  but I know now it is merely

  indifferent, distant,

  like the stars;

  that it will go on being

  what it is long after other things

  are lost forever in the dark –

  grey horse, garlanded with foam,

  at night alight with phosphor;

  or lying placid on the tide swell

  spangled with a map

  of constellations

  A Map of the Islands

  This is what it means to use a map. It may look like wayfinding or a legal action over property or an analysis of the causes of cancer, but always it is this incorporation into the here and now of actions carried out in the past.

  – DENIS WOOD, The Power of Maps

  . . . a map is but one of an indefinitely large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data.

  – MARK MONMONIER, How to Lie with Maps

  WHAT’S LOST

  The Labrador coastline is a spill of islands,

  salt-shaker tumble of stone,

  a cartographer’s nightmare –

  on the coastal boat fifty years ago

  the third mate marked his location after dark

  by the outline of a headland against the stars,

  the sweetly acrid smell of bakeapples blowing off

  a stretch of bog to port or starboard,

  navigating without map or compass

  where hidden shoals shadow the islands

  like the noise of hammers echoed across a valley.

  The largest are home to harbours and coves,

  a fringe of clapboard houses

  threaded by dirt road,

  grey-fenced cemeteries sinking

  unevenly into mossy grass.

  Even those too small to be found on the map

  once carried a name in someone’s mind,

  a splinter of local history –

  a boat wracked up in a gale of wind,

  the roof-wrecked remains of a stage house

  hunkered in the lee.

  Most of what I want him to remember

  lies among those islands, among the maze

  of granite rippling north a thousand miles,

  and what he remembers is all I have a claim to.

  My father nods toward the coastline,

  to the bald stone shoals almost as old as light –

  That was fifty years ago, he says,

  as a warning, wanting me to understand

  that what’s forgotten is lost

  and most of this he cannot even recall

  forgetting

  NAMING THE ISLANDS

  Inhabitants and Explorers

  Iles des Esquimaux. Indian Island, Indian Bay, Indian Tickle.

  Frenchman’s Island. Cranford Head, Turner’s Bight, Gilbert Bay.

  Lac Grenfell, Tom Luscombe’s Pond.

  Cartwright, Cabot and Granby Islands.

  No Comment Necessary

  Island of Ponds, Bay of Islands.

  Iles du lac, la Grande Ile.

  Woody Point, Rocky Bay, Stoney Arm.

  Fishing Ships Harbour.

  Drunken Harbour Point.

  You’ll Know It When You See It

  Table Island, Square Island, Narrow Island.

  Saddle Island, Iles Crescent.

  Chimney Tickle, Quaker Hat, Spear Point.

  Castle Island. Conical Island.

  Tomayto/Tomahto

  You Say Napakataktalic!

  I say Manuel Island

  " " Tessiujalik

  " " Lake Island

  " " Nanuktok

  " " Farmyard Islands

  " " Wingiayuk

  " " Lopsided Islands

  " "Nunaksuk

  " " Little Land Island

  Mostly Wishful Thinking

  Belle Isle. Bonne-esperance, Baie des belles amours.

  Comfort Bight. New York Bay.

  Paradise.

  Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

  Devil’s Lookout, Black Tickle, False Cape, Bad Bay.

  Savage Cove, Brig Harbour.

  Battle Island, Cut Throat Island. Wreck Cove.

  Pointe aux morts.

  The Dead Islands.

  Phallic and Phallocentric

  Big Island and Long Island. Cox Head. Stag Island.

  Halfway Island about ten nautical miles from Entry Island.

  The Shag Islands.

  Snug Harbour.

  The post-coital Tumbledown Dick.

  All Creatures Great and Small

  Porcupine Island. Crab Island, Caribou Run, Deer Island.

  Iles aux chiens, Bull Dog Island.

  Seal Bight, Capelin Bay, Partridge Bay Pond.

  Goose Cove, Fox Cove, Hare Harbour.

  Duck, Eagle, and Gannet Islands.

  The Ferrets, the Wolves. Otter Bay.

  Venison Island.

  Snack Island in the mouth of Sandwich Bay.

  Come Again?

  Haypook Island. Horse Chops Island.

  Bed Head. Separation Point.

  The River S-t-i-c-k-s.

  Nothing Bay.

  ALL THE WAY HOME

  Hawke Island Whaling Station, late 1930s

  The Kyle went into Hawke’s Harbour every season,

  shallow bay stained the colour of wine;

  storm of gulls over the water,

  a racket like the noise of

  some enormous mac
hine choked with rust,

  grinding to a standstill.

  Went ashore to have a look one year,

  the whaling room about the size

  of an airplane hangar but lower,

  the air inside the building bloated

  with the stink of opened carcass;

  the one I saw was as long as a small schooner

  maybe sixty or seventy feet,

  five men in cleated boots scaling the back and sides,

  hacking two feet through hide and blubber

  with a blade curved like a scythe;

  hook and cable attached to winch

  it off in strips then, as if they were

  pulling up old carpet from a hallway.

  A man can get used to anything, I suppose.

  I tried a piece of whale meat and liked it,

  although it was coarse, and stringy

  as a square of cloth.

  One of the whalers showed me the harpoons

  up close, explained how they explode inside

  the body or open up to grapple bone and tissue.

  He said a big one might drag the boat

  half a day past Square Islands before

  they could winch in and turn for the harbour,

  a narrow trail of blood on the water’s surface

  like a string they could follow

  all the way home.

  STEALING BAIT

  Nain, 1957

  The year he came to teach at the school

  someone began following the trappers’ lines

  through the bush, stealing bait,

  setting free whatever was found alive.

  There was talk of spirits and such at first,

  we should have known it was just the white man.

  He’d come into the classroom with bandaged hands

  or a nip in his face where the foxes got at him

  when he knelt to pry them loose.

  An elder went down to see him,

  explained how the legs in the trap

  are broken, the freed animals

  limping off to die of starvation

  in a hole somewhere, it made no difference.

  He was a crazy sonofabitch anyway,

  off in the woods all alone like that,

 

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