Journey to the Sea

by Gil McNeil

  He wanted to know, outright, whether she’d changed her political views.

  ‘I haven’t changed my views. They’ve just evolved. This life I lead is the alternative collective life we were seeking. The only change I’ve made is realising you can’t force everyone to live this way. That was a great arrogance.’ She smiled at him for an unnaturally long time. ‘And I realised you can’t live in the future indefinitely. Birds don’t live in the future. Fish don’t live in the future. But we tried to, for too long, and then disappeared.’

  While they’d been tramping around the island he’d noticed several people keeping vigil on them through binoculars. ‘What do you do here for fun? Apart from spying on one another?’

  She slipped her hand inside his arm and he felt the warmth of her wrist burning his own. ‘I don’t know what you mean by fun. I work to eat, eat to work. What greater pleasure is there than that?’

  He told her the only work he’d been engaged with, off and on, for the past eleven years was at an oceanography centre, using satellite technology to scan the oceans for severe weather conditions and trying to link it to climate change.

  They returned to her cottage to sit in her garden as the last of the daylight receded over the island. Her garden was a map of flowers. Biting stonecrop, a star-shaped yellow flower, draped over her walls like rugs. Around the edges of her lawn were Hottentot fig – a South African iceplant with magenta flowers that could survive gale-force winds and driving salt spray. There were red campion, clusters of pink oxalis from South America, Mediterranean bear’s breeches, whistling Jacks – like scarlet bells on stalks – and arum lilies. As windbreaks she’d planted veronica from New Zealand and a few stiff Monterey pines from California. Surrounding the garden table were tree echiums, a strange semi-tropical plant eight feet high with purple flowers in dreadlocks.

  They drank tea with powdered milk and ate freshly baked soda bread with peanut butter. The way she poured him tea reminded Travis of something else. ‘I can never forget how the comrades made you make the tea in our weekly meetings.’

  ‘The comrades were very unenlightened in many ways.’

  And with that they suddenly dropped right back into the centre of things. But it wasn’t their vision of a counterworld they remembered, it was the fateful decision they made to postpone a family. It was more a pact than a decision. But in any case the revolution had cost them a family. There were no children in either of their lives and he felt it keenly now, marked by another period of stony silence.

  They sat in her garden as the last of the light slanted across the earth and darkness began to fall over the island. An audible shrieking drifting from off the coast alarmed Travis. She explained that it was shearwaters reuniting with their life-long and monogamous partners in the nest as they returned from feeding binges in the Atlantic. Then she asked if he wanted to stay. As a matter of protocol she offered him the sofa, but was kidding no one. Sleeping with a person again after an eleven-year lapse can be the closest you get to living in history. But if she wanted to feel how his body had aged, he felt the distance still. The leap from talking to sleeping together was too big.

  Finally he said, ‘I should go to my yacht. If the wind changes I’m going to have to move it.’

  Early next morning he was sitting in the cockpit, meditating on the jagged Western Rocks when Laura rowed out. She carried a large bouquet of white narcissi on the thwart as though on her way to a Viking funeral.

  ‘You came to visit me in my house,’ she shouted over the wind, ‘I thought I’d come visit you in yours.’

  He leaned over the side and took her rope, tying it on to a stern cleat. He relieved her of the flowers as she landed clumsily inside the cockpit with the wind blowing her hair into her face. They sat side by side as the yacht rocked gently in the calm water and as he rocked back and forth with his chin low on his chest. In his arms he cradled the flowers.

  ‘Actually I was afraid you’d take off this morning without saying goodbye.’

  ‘I’m only waiting to leave with the tide.’

  She put her arm around him and brushed her fingers across his forehead, recalling other times when she’d offered solicitude. But she didn’t understand him any more, didn’t know what to tell him. Men’s despair is only truly understood by other men. All she could say was, ‘Why not stay on for a few days?’ When he didn’t answer she added, ‘You can’t live on a boat for ever, Travis.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘When men go travelling they are left with only themselves.’

  ‘You are left with only yourself.’

  ‘I still have my feelings for you. You don’t always have to be in the presence of the object for love to be revelatory.’

  What was she saying? What she was saying was nothing. He was all at sea with her words, could feel the current of time pulling him under. His mouth grew bone dry and he was finding it harder to breathe. Cold sweat broke out on his chest and on his palms. He began to fear he would break into tiny fragments and be scattered over the sea.

  Before he left he invited her to go with him. It was a gesture neither one believed. She could no more accept his offer to share his home than he could accept hers. ‘My love for you may be resilient, Travis, but can’t survive seasickness.’

  She slipped off the side into her small boat. He watched her row to shore, then left St Agnes on the engine, following the pilotage instructions to clear the underwater cables, channels and sandbars into St Mary’s Sound. When the north corner of Mincario and Great Minalto islands came in line, he altered course to 053 and glided over the submarine exercise area.

  He rounded Wolf Rock just as the tide changed direction in his favour, pushing him along to Lizard Point. By force of habit he maximised his boat’s efficiency even without a destination, reducing leeway and trimming the sails constantly as the wind strengthened. He engaged the Autohelm and radar alarm and dissolved into the big sky, into tiny parcels of sleep. He was still on this eastern tack several hours later when he suddenly changed his mind, changed course for the west.

  For another four hours he maintained a reach. A beam reach is a pleasant sailing position. Great pleasure comes from balancing the main and genoa, in hearing the sails inhale the wind. Then Scilly appeared again off the starboard quarter. The enchantment of the islands was irresistible but he fought it off anyway, altering course again to close haul up the north-west wind, making for the southern tip of Ireland.

  The weather near the Irish coast held fine. There was a gold sheen to the sea. But after leaving Cape Clear behind he started to feel the swell running under the yacht. He picked up a storm warning from the coastal radio station at Baltimore and headed in that direction. A force-ten storm was two hours away.

  Of the two thousand storms in progress at sea at any given moment, no two are the same. Some have multiple centres of depression; some are thunder and lightning induced. None are house-trained. They pay the most unexpected visits. Some stay four hours while others take twenty-four hours to blow out. He had no idea what this one would be like when he got there. Its character would be all its own.

  After he had sailed for two more hours, the waves had reached their maximum height over a thirty-mile fetch, a composition of swells outside their area of generation and surface waves in perpetual conference. Travis studied them fiercely from the cockpit, tying to take his mind off her and return to himself. Where the swell and surface waves met the strength and height of the combined waves was the addition of each for a few seconds, before splitting apart and going in different directions, diminished in size once again. Every eight to ten minutes, two swells in a train got into step, and he noticed the seventh and eleventh swell in sequence were always the highest of the group. Every twenty-third swell was twice the height of the average. This is how freak waves occur, when a wave travelling fastest in its group picks up other waves, confiscating their energy and strength. A freak wave has a short life and can expire just as quickly as a wave a t
hird its size. But if you are in the way at its moment of greatest strength then the odds are against you. Odds like i in 23 (twice the average height); 1 in 1175 (three times the average height). He was surrounded by prime, rational numbers and he was in chaos.

  He was thirty miles out in the Atlantic, fighting the big seas. His Decca was letting him down. Its signals were getting weaker the further he sailed into the storm. His GPS handset was giving him a reading but he didn’t believe that either. His yacht was under solid water almost permanently. In a force-ten storm everything becomes a battle to keep the yacht afloat. The force of this storm was stunning and bold. He didn’t know for how much longer she could hold up. Eventually he sheeted in the storm jib and lashed the tiller, locking the boat in the water. An hour before, his yacht had been a thing of life. Now it was a dead weight hanging in the sea.

  Going below he found in the saloon a shambles of flung crockery and pots, like the forlorn aftermath of some marital brawl. Water in the bilges had risen to above the sole. It leaked through window seals, cracks edging the cockpit lockers, the ventilation and the cabin hatch. He lay in his settee berth and in the close, damp atmosphere watched the leaks and the condensation running down the bulkheads. Not for a second did the yacht stop shaking and trembling, nor did the noise of the sea abate. He monitored transmissions on the radio, the lonely sound of masters’ voices in Russian; his unknown neighbours in an unknown place talking to one another, bridge to bridge, with the intimacy of spouses. In that same moment something became finally clear to him. The future was already existing, as surely as the past, and had been merely awaiting his arrival. He had reached the future and there was nothing to do now but survive it the best he could.

  THE WISDOM OF THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS

  PETER HILL

  JUST AS THE world is coming to appreciate the philosophy of ‘slow’ – slow living, slow cities, slow cooking – lighthouse keepers, the real champions of slow, have been made totally redundant. But their wisdom lives on.

  One of the happiest summers of my life was in 1973 when I worked as a relief lighthouse keeper on three uninhabited islands off the west coast of Scotland. Uninhabited, that is, except for the glorious, warm and eccentric company of around a dozen fine men with whom I worked on the islands of Pladda, Ailsa Craig and Hyskeir. Collectively, they taught me a great deal. It was as if I had entered a great learning machine, as complex as the routine of keeping the light itself. Green around the gills, I went into the machine a twenty-year-old hippie art student with my Captain Beefheart tapes, my Jack Kerouac novels, my frayed jeans and my hand-rolling tobacco, and I emerged six months later able to cook, fish, polish brass until it shone like butter, stay awake through the wee small hours and, most important, keep the light burning and turning. But my real education came at the change of watch, especially at two in the morning, when stories would be told to help the keeper coming on duty stay awake and alert for the long, dark hours ahead. This was when I learned that Vietnam was not the only war that had been fought for all the wrong reasons, that Nixon and Kissinger not the only corrupt politicians, and that the old men with whom I worked (or so they seemed to this child of the 1960s) had been young once themselves. Probably the greatest thing they taught me was how it is possible to work together, even if you have differences, and that an ounce of good humour is worth a ton of bossiness or bullying. Your life may one day depend on your fellow keepers, and theirs on you – it doesn’t get much simpler than that. And while there are no churches, universities or government buildings on lighthouse islands, there is a great deal of wisdom to be found amongst the men who work there.

  Importantly, each keeper had his very own individual take on life. Most had lived adventurous lives in the merchant navy, as firemen in big cities, as gold prospectors in Australia, or submariners in the Second World War. For them, becoming lighthouse keepers had been a sea change, almost like retiring into a new kind of life. It was the sort of thing cashed-up city stock traders do today, but much more fun. And the tips on life that each of them gave me at two in the morning – Finlay Watchorn, Duncan, Ronnie, Stretch and the Professor – I now refer to as the Wisdom of the Lighthouse Keepers. And you know, I think the world would be a far safer place today if it was run by lighthouse keepers instead of politicians. It would certainly be more relaxed. Drop a few Iraqi, American, French, North Korean, British and Australian lighthouse keepers on an uninhabited island for a long weekend and they’d have it all sorted out by Monday – probably over a large pot of tea and an endless supply of biscuits and cheese. Saving lives, of course, is their whole reason for being. But sadly there are no lighthouse keepers left any more.

  Thirty years later, when I was about to turn fifty and now living on the other side of this infuriatingly wonderful planet, I decided to set off and visit some of the lighthouses that shine like an ocean necklace around the enormous coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. I packed my Pogues tapes – good for take-offs and landings – some Albinoni for quieter periods, a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, and the latest edition of the New Yorker. I also took an old copy of the Lighthouse Journal (Summer 1989), as I do on all my travels. It is, or was, the magazine sent out by my former paymasters, the grandly named Commissioners of the Northern Lights – all of whom were usually tucked up in bed well before midnight in their Georgian houses in Edinburgh’s New Town. But most importantly, at the back of my mind, I unpacked my memories that I’d kept all these years. I’d take them with me and see how useful they’d be in the early years of the twenty-first century.

  The first piece of wisdom that I wanted to put to the test was Finlay Watchorn’s oft-made claim that the shorter a period of time you spent in any one place the more you remembered about it. He learned this during his time in the Merchant Navy, where he had also picked up his gourmet cooking skills. I remember that the first time he told me about this, he was making a lamb kebab with some meat that had been defrosting overnight. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘If you spend six months in a place, doesn’t matter whether it’s a big port like Rotterdam or a small harbour town like Stromness, it all becomes very familiar. But if you’re only there twenty-four hours you keep getting lost – especially after a few nippy sweeties. All things are new, the language and accents are different, strange smells fill the air, you remember where you’ve just come from and where you are headed, and because of all this it really stamps itself on your memory. And that’s just on this side of our dear little planet. Down in South America, or Australia, or South Africa, suddenly it’s summer when it should be winter and everything is topsy-turvy. I once had Hogmanay and New Year’s Day in Sydney before we sailed for Wellington. God it was amazing, down on the beach, blue skies, beautiful women, light until ten at night. Me and the lads got a wee poker school going under this palm tree. I think the place was called Manly, something like that. But dinnae tell Duncan about the cards and the girls or he’ll start going on about fornicators and the Devil’s pictures.’ Duncan was the elderly PLK (Principal Lighthouse Keeper) on Pladda, and a staunch member of the Wee Free Church, for whom today’s slow movement might seem a bit too exciting.

  This whole adventure would, on and off, take over two years to complete and cover a distance equal to the circumference of the planet. My first target was to get to Cape Leveque lighthouse in a remote Aboriginal community north of Broome. Australia is the world’s largest island and roughly the size of the USA. I once found a wall clock, in a garage sale, made in the shape of Australia. It was so kitsch that I had to buy it. Sydney, where I lived when this adventure began, is roughly at 5 p.m. on the face of the clock, its beautiful harbour, with Opera House and bridge, spilling in to the South Pacific. Diagonally across – way, way across, as Dublin is way, way across from Teheran – at 10 p.m. on the dial, lies Broome on the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Right in the centre where the hands of the clock join is Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it was formerly known, the world’s strangest monolith. It is roughly th
e same height as Ailsa Craig, where my second lighthouse was situated, midway between Glasgow and Belfast. Far to its north, at midnight on the clock, is the city of Darwin. I mention all this because in order to afford to get from Sydney to Broome and still be able to afford accommodation, I’d have to use frequent flyer points. I gave the good people at Qantas a bell.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Trudy the call-centre hostess told me from a cubicle somewhere in Brisbane, Hobart, or possibly New Delhi. ‘I can’t get you a return from Sydney to Broome on points until a couple of weeks after the school holidays. Let me have a look and see if there are any alternative routes.’ The wait was long, but in the end, worth it. I groaned through almost three minutes of a trad-jazz version of Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite Of Love’ before Trudy rescued me with the following offer.

  ‘What I can do is a single from Sydney to Alice Springs.’ The red heart of the continent, not far from Uluru – I was intrigued. ‘Then if you are happy to wait for a couple of hours, there’s a flight up to Darwin I can get you on, but you’ll have to stay overnight.’ Darwin! The only capital city in Australia I’d still to visit. Barrie Magic, as they say in Edinburgh. I was beginning to like the sound of this. ‘Then next day afternoon I can get you on a flight to Broome and return you direct to Sydney three days later.’ It was a done deal, one that Tony Soprano would have been proud of. Just before hanging up I asked Trudy if she had some charts that could work out how long the round-trip would be. With barely a pause she said, ‘It’s about nine thousand and six hundred kilometres. Half your luck.’ Half a continent, I thought, speechless, as all my frequent flyer points flew out the window.

  Before leaving Sydney I found myself a second-hand copy of The Short Stay Guide to the Northern Territory. Not until I was firmly strapped into my seat for the flight out of Alice Springs across the northern half of the continent did I turn to the index and locate Darwin. I read with heightened anticipation that: ‘Through the decades, Darwin town gained a reputation as a frontier of prawn trawlers, buffalo catchers, croc shooters and wild waterfront bars. It was the boozing capital of a thirsty nation.’ Sounded like my kinda toon, I thought. The writer of these words, Chris Baker, sketched in more of the background history to the place, as my eyes darted eagerly between the red desert below the plane and the white pages of text leaning on the fold-down tray in front of me. ‘Records show the first European explorers arrived in 1623 aboard the Dutch ship, Arnhem . . . Darwin harbour was discovered in 1839 by the first officer of the HMS Beagle, and was named in honour of Charles Darwin, who had sailed on an earlier expedition on the ship. It was a strategic outpost for the British during the Second World War, and suffered tremendous damage during 64 air raids, with the loss of 243 lives. The Tiwi people on Bathurst Island, who were the first to see the Japanese bombers, perform a corroboree (dance) that tells the story.’