RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Everything has been slowed down; a slow pace for a slow place. A Provincetowner lends me Sten Nadolny’s The Discovery of Slowness, a retelling of the life of Sir John Franklin, would-be discoverer of the North-West Passage. Nadolny’s prose itself slows the reader as he lays out Franklin’s story: his slowness to respond to his teachers in his Lincolnshire school; his slowness to draw fire on the enemy at the Battle of Copenhagen, where Nelson appears, never quite appearing; his slowness to stop strangling a Danish soldier with his bare hands; his slowness to respond to a man overboard when sailing with his uncle, Matthew Flinders, to Terra Australis, where Franklin would become lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land; the way he leaves a pause before he answers, the consideration he gives to what he is about to say, the manner in which he seems to militate against an accelerating century. All these happen at a glacial pace. Slowly moving through history, slowly moving across the ice, eyes protected against snow blindness by wooden spectacles, the sea slows him down too, as well as providing him with a kind of certainty. ‘As long as there was the sea, the world was not wretched.’

  But most of all, the explorer’s slowness slows him to his ending on Erebus – named after the god of darkness – out on the slow-moving, ever-reforming ice which, it seemed then, would never end, and where he succumbs to a stroke, leaving his starving men to eat each other. To the native hunters who saw them, the lost, bedraggled adventurers were dead men walking.

  In the dark morning I pace the deck, waiting for the light and the tide to arrive. It is shocking when the sun comes up, lifting over the sea, as if I’d forgotten it was there.

  As I swim off Pat’s bulwark, there’s a commotion on the sea wall. Running along its concrete edge in front of the Icehouse, a fish storage block turned into apartments, are a pair of foxes. They’re in peak condition, red and ginger and grey, brushes held out proudly as though they’d come straight from the hairdresser’s. ‘Would you like some product on that?’ They follow one another nose to tail, resplendent in their ordinary otherness, calmly trotting over the deck before vanishing down the alley.

  Pat calls me in after swimming to warm myself by the stove. I crouch over it, dripping, clad in a towel and my trunks. Its cast iron is piled with bricks to radiate its heat, creating a votive altar on which little metal figures perch as household gods: a long-eared African running dog; a bronze rat, wired to a whale vertebra; and smallest of all, a tiny cold-painted pale-green monkey with wire-thin curling tail. The stacking and burning of wood from the cords piled outside; the lichen-covered logs scattered with frozen cats’ turds; the loading into the barrow and the trundling to Pat’s door (Caliban would complain that there’s wood enough within) – all this proposes a primal exchange: trees for heat; my body for the sea.

  Pat stokes the fire with a poker, the incandescence catching the light in her eyes and her hair. Lulled by the dumb cold outside and the dry warmth within, we talk about her past: how her mother left her father when Pat was three years old; how her uncle, a naval commander, arrived on his aircraft carrier in New York harbour, and how she climbed right up the rigging. She still remembers that feat: the fourteen-year-old hoyden caring nothing for convention, running up the ropes as if to spy out her future over Manhattan and the sea beyond. She calls her father Daddy and repeats his full name, Ernald Wilbraham Arthur Richardson, as if to draw him near.

  All too soon the afternoon darkens into night and the windows, which briefly burst into life with a final flare of the setting sun, turn into black screens. ‘What a fine frosty night,’ says Ishmael; ‘how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.’

  I retreat upstairs to my eyrie. It’s like living in the nineteenth century: the creaking wood, the clicking latches, the fugitive light; the smell of mothballs and departed summers; reading into long nights on the salvaged sofa, my legs covered by an ‘Early’s Settler’ blanket labelled with an embroidered Red Indian head, its thick cream wool pelt like Ernald Wilbraham Arthur Richardson’s snow coat; the drowsiness induced by the cold, the lull of a doze; rising in the dark morning as if nothing had changed while I was asleep, to read under the worn bedclothes, a knife beside me to slit the uncut pages of Ariel, André Maurois’s nineteen-twenties biography of Shelley, as though even old books are still dangerous. And as I read, I’m held under the heavy blankets and quilts, bedded down and layered against the sea and the wind like Ishmael in bed with Queequeg the noble savage, rejoicing in the contrast between the warmth of his nest and the frozen tip of his nose, ‘the more so, I say because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast’. I am most comfortable in the cold; and I seem to be cold so much of the time, whether in the water or wrapped in wool in my attic.

  The old-newness of this house, which is actually younger than me, makes it seem as if all these things have always been here, or that they have only just been found: the slowness, the isolation, the layers of clothes worn over and again, too cold to wash, too cold to get dirty; the elemental demands, the forgetting and the remembering, the short days and long nights; the sticky porridge I stir on the stove; the heavy red kettle I boil for my tea; the dull roar of the antiquated heating system rumbling into action like a ship’s engines, as though there were a great steam pump somewhere in the bilges of the house; the clatter of Pat’s yard-sale ironware crockery, with its transfer prints of birds and English idylls recreating the unremembered land that she lost; the pitted cutlery and its cracked bone handles; the faded rugs, the wonky furniture, the globular lights with their fitful glow, the tattered aristocracy and resilient fabrics of the past: stone, iron, sand, beach.

  I think of all the people who have stayed in Pat’s house, living over its fierce mistress. She has to remember to forget. How else could she deal with all the visitors who come and go? The night is still, still cold. Snow turns to ice on the sand, spatters my deck like a Greenland whale ship. Ducks talk in the darkness. The sea might be full of extinct animals out there. The cloud cover bounces residual light off the snow.

  Early on a bright Sunday morning, Dennis and Dory and I go clamming off the breakwater. On one side lies the open bay; on the other, frozen moors and marshes. There’s such a width of seeing here. The snowy flats lie at low tide, scattered with townsfolk out to gather the harvest of quahogs. From a distance, their little black figures spread across the whiteness, holding rakes and wire baskets, resemble a painting by Brueghel. They’re foraging with the other animals. Gulls drop clams on rocks to crack them open; Thoreau recorded that ducks feeding on clams were caught by the shellfish, their feet ‘tightly shut in a quahog’s shell’. Dunlin stitch through the sand for smaller prey, so intent that they ignore my shadow falling over them.

  I tug the wide rake through the sand, feeling for the chink of shell against its tines. The tide is returning like a sheet over a table, and with it the end of the morning’s foraging. Dennis carefully replants the clams too small for our basket, telling them we’ll see them next year. That night, their elders open up in the pot, each ‘little brother’ receiving an apology from Dennis as he drops them in. The softness out of the hardness makes me queasy, as if we’re doing something we shouldn’t. I think of the giant oysters found off the Azores, five hundred years old. We’re eating centuries encased in islands; consuming the ocean bed, one pebble at a time.

  Still the weather draws in, reducing degree by degree. The crust of the frozen sand crunches underfoot like compacted snow. It’s easier to walk the beach in the cold, says Pat. I watch her figure diminishing up the beach, towards the town limits, with her own animal momentum, stomping as if she’ll never stop. The brent geese have arrived on the low tide, a gently honking fleet, so familiar from my home shore that I wonder if they’ve followed me here. These are their pale-bellied cousins, and they look even more pristin
e against the beach. They forage in the iced-up eel grass. In the dull light their subfusc markings, brown and black and white, seem to distil the land and the sea, connecting them. They gather in a shallow pool, upending their rears.

  Overnight the mercury falls even further. I read of lifesavers on the ocean beaches caught in snowstorms that froze their eyes shut. At dawn, the bay is blue with cold. Slabs of light lift and shift over the half-fluid, half-airy surface. It’s difficult to tell what is water and what is sky.

  Then something extraordinary happens.

  Far out, the sea’s relative warmth meeting the cold air causes localised clouds to rise, lifting in tendrils from the surface and drifting steadily across the bay. Imperceptibly, they begin to coalesce, drawing together.

  Slowly, I realise I am seeing something miraculous, some phenomenon out of the ages. A natural philosopher ought to be at my side to witness it. But I don’t really want it explained. I can’t stop watching.

  Raising my binoculars I see it all as if framed in one of Pat’s paintings. Or is it the other way around? With every second, everything changes. The geese lift off into the sky, sharp black shapes against the white-grey. As they fly across my field of vision, the vapour rolls below them, driven by the light. Layers of mist move one way; others in the opposite direction. Dissolving and re-forming, resolving and dissipating, they swirl and dance like the mist on an English river on an autumn morning.

  They might be airy icebergs, or the spoutings of spectral whales, or the ragged sails of a ghostly armada. They seem to echo the currents below. Then behind the white wisps even more attenuated plumes rise and twist like water spouts. There’s so much smoke on the water it looks as though the sea is on fire.

  It is the single most astonishing effect of weather I’ve ever seen, as if someone had dipped a brush in the water and drawn it up in swift strokes. The horizon has become one long mountain range of white peaks. A flurry of snow drifts through the air, light and granular, whipped up by a god of water and ice. And just when I think the whole performance cannot get any more beautiful the sun breaks through, throwing the scene into silver relief, sending it all into shards of glitter. The scrims of mist which looked two-dimensional a moment ago are suddenly thrown into three dimensions by the sun’s rays breaking through the clouds like the eye of God.

  Then the whole thing starts all over again.

  Landing on the flattened beach, I follow the footprints I left there last night. The receding tide has left a thousand rivulets in the sand, a venous branching pattern running from single shells or stones, each expanding into miniature deltas which might be the world photographed from twenty miles above. On this shore, leviathans have also lain. John Waters, who has no interest in whales, gives me an old postcard, showing a fin whale shouldering up the sand, with onlookers gathered around like spectators at a seventeenth-century stranding in the Netherlands. Back in old Europe, such a spectacle would have been taken as an omen. But their modern regard is curious and interested, unsurprised. It might be a carnival, a ritual that happens every year, without anyone actually deciding it should.

  All whales bear their own stories. Stormy Mayo, Charlie’s son, remembers this one well. It was the winter of 1959, and he was still at high school. The whale first washed up on the Mayos’ beach, still alive. At high tide the Coast Guard tried to haul it out to sea, ‘but the line parted about two hundred yards off our beach … you see the line still around the tail’. Out in the water the whale began thrashing in its death throes, before coming ashore, down towards the town, not far from where Dennis and I found the dolphin. The artist Elspeth Vevers, who lived across the street, remembers its arrival too. She and her husband Tony, who later painted the scene, tended the whale, keeping it wet with towels. Its jaw was askew, Elspeth recalls, and they gently removed the bricks which people had thrown into its mouth. All the while it looked directly at them, following them with its eyes.

  Then a team of scientists from Woods Hole appeared to take specimens and observations. They found it was a male, weighing forty tons. His body temperature was ninety degrees Fahrenheit; his fins and tail just fifty degrees. It was cold there, on the December beach, but the life was still in him. They recorded his heart beating twenty-five times per minute, one-third the rate of a human; one reason why fin whales can live to one hundred and forty years old, perhaps even older.

  But not this whale. Sometime that afternoon, after further attempts to tow him back to the sea had failed, and having given up his data for science, his heart stopped and he took his last little sleep on the shore.

  The nor’westerly has returned. It starts gently enough, spooling and eddying over the sea’s surface as though it were a cup of tea and someone were blowing on it to cool it down. Then hammered latches rattle. Frames push against panes. Now there are poltergeists knocking at the windows and doors, all those artists trying drunkenly to get back in. I feel I’m in the way of big things: whales, winds, waves. If the house should lean either way, the whole thing might fall apart, the cedar shingles flying off, nails springing out in a hail of tacks, the wind lifting the gables like the flap of a tent.

  Forty-eight hours later the front changes direction. Now it’s blowing with full force from the south, straight from the bay.

  In the darkness of my cabin, the fever increases. Everything is shifting. Something buzzes like a trapped fly. The house has become a theme ride. Or perhaps some spirit has crept out of the water and into the crawl space and is busy shaking the timbers in revenge for some long-forgotten wrong. The wind rattles the tin cowling on the chimney like a destitute begging for money.

  My body is gently trembling against the couch as I sit on it. I’m not sure if it’s my heart beating, beating for all the cold I have inflicted on it in the ocean. I feel like a sailor swinging in his hammock, swaying sickeningly to and fro. The noises increase, in an ever-stranger symphony of dissent. In The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger describes how fishermen judge the intensity of a storm from the sounds made by their wire stays and outrigger cables. If they scream, the wind is Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale; a shriek means Force 10. Force 11 is a moan. Anything over that is ‘something fishermen don’t want to hear’.

  It is the house shaking, like a washing machine. Perhaps this is what an earthquake feels like. I look out the windows; I can’t open the door. The sea is crashing at the feet of the house. Suddenly, stirring me out of what may or may not be my dreams, Pat appears at my door in the shadows, her hair electrified, silver like my mother’s. It’s the middle of the night, but she has come to make sure I’m awake to witness the storm, knowing that it is more important than sleeping. Even she seems nervous, although her house has stood worse assaults. I try to go back to sleep, but my mind starts creating escape procedures, working out what I will save before it all becomes wreckage, so much flotsam and jetsam.

  At dawn, with the arrival of the light, the world has gone quiet. Sometime during the night, Pat’s raft has been torn from the chain that anchored it to the sea bed. I wade out to retrieve what is left of it, ragged with torn wood and bent screws, lulling in the what-did-I-do tide. The beach has been lowered so much that it’s now too far to jump down from the bulwark. Bits of stairs and uprooted buoys litter the shore. This town is remade after each new storm. Its heart is jumpstarted by the climate. I am in no danger of being wrecked.

  I think of the people who have climbed this same ladder to my bed; perhaps they might be climbing up to join me in this animal loft. Pat tells me that a woman who stayed in the ground-floor studio – which I can see through the cracks in between the floorboards – complained of the noise made by men having sex up here.

  That night in the calm darkness I watch a comet, a blue-green blur on the edge of Orion, an ancient smudge forty-four million miles away, glowing with its own gases. To say ‘watch’ isn’t quite right. I only witness it; or rather, it is shown to me by the sky. Even through my binoculars it looks like nothing more than a puff of smoke, the ghost of
an exploded star, or a blow from Cetus, the whale that surfs the winter horizon. Nebulous, more cloud than star, its celestial distinction is its indistinction. I can’t see it directly, only out of the corner of my vision, as if its magnitude or its meaning were too great to take in. Such visits have long been seen as omens; as Nathaniel Philbrick notes, it was a blue-green comet that appeared in 1618 which prompted the Pilgrims to contemplate their flight from Europe to this coast.

  A comet’s tail always streaks away from the sun, fluttering like a sail on the solar wind. It may stretch for hundreds of millions of miles: the great comet of 1843 reached halfway across the solar system. This heavenly body is both hot and cold, moving so fast and so slow; even its sea-like colour evokes the paradox of a ball of burning dust and ice, and the possibility that we owe our oceans to water which first arrived on comets or asteroids. All the while it emits x-rays, as if examining the other bodies which it passes.

  I know that my friend Mark is looking up at the same phenomenon from southern England. I feel triangulated by the fact, fixed across the ocean by a natural satellite on its vast elliptical orbit; perhaps some flock of astro-geese or school of celestial cetaceans might use it to navigate, migrating from one galaxy to another. Forever roaming, never at home, it slowly swings out to the dark recesses of our system, passing Prospero and Ariel, returning to the sun a thousand or a million years later, only to leave again, a lonely body, like a trans-species whale that will never meet a mate.