Rough Crossings

JOURNAL ENTRY

14^th February, Wednesday (St. Valentine’s Day)

“Outside,
No coat,
On the hill that runs down to the cut.

Warm sun, fleeting,
Cloud chasing with the gulls
And the circle of two buzzards.

Maggie sits, watching,
From a throne of dried grass
And teasels.

I too watch,
As the seconds pause.
I had never realised that the cormorant’s
Buoyant flight
Was quite like that.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

There is a quietness that has descended along the canal tonight. It is very mild and the rain falls, freefalling vertically, pebbling the water. Even though it is heavy, there is a gentleness about it. Liquid light dances by torchlight beam. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a wet winter night, to you wherever you are.

Thank you for coming, I was hoping that you would make it. Come inside, shake off your wet clothes, find a spot by the stove to dry off. The kettle is on, the biscuit barrel is full. It's great to see you, welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

"By the fifteenth of February," the old sores used to say, “the back of winter is broken.” I’m not too sure, in these times of new seasons whether sayings like these still hold true. Perhaps they do a little, for a short time more. Besides there has always been a certain amount of fluctuation and, ebbings and flow – so that they have always really only been useful as very rough pencil marks on our seasonal almanacs. But it is sort of nice having them. Familiar, time-worn, milestones and finger posts. Reassuringly authoritative – fresh with the scent of earth, and leaf-mould, and thin rains, speaking to us down the tunnel of history; the cycle of the year still turns, the long walk of the sun across the eastern horizon continues and, whatever the weather we are having, sunshine and warmth will come. The days will get longer and old friends will meet across the skies once more.

No doubt, winter has still plenty of puff in its lungs. Almost daily, my weather newsfeed is packed with media-posts each vying with the other to announce the exact day and hour that the next catastrophic meteorological event will come crashing down upon us. We seemed to have moved away from ‘snow bombs’ and ‘polar vortices’ to ‘walls of snow’ many hundreds of miles long. For all its faults, the good old Met Office seems to chart a fairly even course through the roaring forties of media outlets desperate to catch the rolling surf of the algorithm’s next sweet spot.

The fifteenth of February may have passed this last week, and there is no guarantee that winter’s bite has eased, but nevertheless, there are many signs of the season’s wheel turning. The damson blossom is out, airy constellations of snow-white stars- as white as hawthorn, braving the tempestuous winds that funnel down the valley to the canal. And the winter-long, deep greens of ivy and holly are now being joined by the emerald tongues of fire of new growth along the bankside and towpath hedgerows. The ducks are still clustering, although, in times of quiet separating into pairs or small adolescent bluey-beaked groups. The deference of male to female when it comes to feeding has still yet to emerge this year. Once eggs are being laid and hatched dynamics within the relationships shift. The swans are now in their third winter together. They too will be looking for nesting places – although last year it was pretty half-hearted and was quickly abandoned. They are still, relatively, young. I still sometimes think about Cyril, where he is, what he is doing, and if he has survived the devastating avian-flu outbreak.

The other day, the young farm boys were playing with the first lambs that they had helped deliver. It is half-term. Racing up and down each with a puppyish lamb frisking at their heels. All oblivious to the drum of rain. And “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb” – not quite, but perhaps for the time being, nearly.

Yes, there are signs that the back of winter has been broken, but it has been a strange, break-neck, chaotic roller-coaster, ride of a winter, both in terms of weather, but also personally. A lot of travelling and living out of bags – even on the boat, things now tend to remain unpacked, ready for the next trip. But the good news is that Dad is making a remarkable recovery – although, at the moment, he doesn’t quite see it that way. I guess that it is difficult enough being ill when you are not used to it, but when you have had 95 years of unbroken good health, it must seem all rather disconcerting and frightening. It is still, of course, early days, but things are moving in a positive direction. This also means that, although I won’t be able to do the regular podcasts for a while, I will be able to do some recording when the time allows.

Although they might be a little sporadic and possibly a bit truncated at times, I miss being here and need this space, this quietness. Lack of time has also meant that my social media presence has been rather low and I am feeling a bit out of touch. In that sense, it feels very much like the days when I started, just recording a few observations, reading stuff out that I liked, freewheeling words among the windstorms of a dark night. ‘Duck calls in the night.’ I like that, and that is not a bad thing.  

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

ROUGH CROSSINGS

‘A rough crossing’ is a phrase that has been running through my head a lot recently. Partly, it has been prompted by the weather. The winter so far has comprised a seemingly never-ending succession of storms – high winds and heavy, flooding, rains. Listening to the Shipping Forecast first thing in the morning is a catalogue of gales and storm-force winds. So far, we’ve not had any significant cold – although it did drop to around -10°C (14°F) for a couple of nights a few weeks ago. But what we have could best be described as a battering winter; already waterlogged ground being further drenched by very heavy and sometimes prolonged rain and wind. Just as the towpath becomes – not dry, but almost useable – it once more becomes a quagmire. Some of the local fields now have fairly permanent ponds in them and the water level of the canal keeps rising and falling at a speed that I haven’t known before. Consequently, there has been a lot of videos and photographs featuring stormy weather, particularly at the coast. Perhaps my being at the coast that has a small fleet fishing boats (mostly inshore) has also put me in mind of being in a boat out at sea in storms.

However, talking to a few people, I am conscious that also in a metaphorical sense this winter has felt rather stormy and our seasonal crossing being one that is rather rough. Rough crossings seem to mark the character of this year so far. This might have added extra significance and relevance to a book I have been reading and particularly the vivid descriptions of sailing on storm waters made such an impact in my mind.

The book is The Aran Islands by J.M. Synge and first published in 1907, but republished in 1979 by Oxford University Press. It is a rather strange little book that recounts the Irish author and playwright, John Millington Synge’s five visits to the trio of Aran Islands tucked in the Galway Bay west of Ireland at the end of the 19^th century. It is part travelogue, part ethnographic study of the people and their land. Lyrical descriptions of the islands and their inhabitants are interspersed with his own translations of the various stories shared within the rich oral culture. This was a people who could read the wind and the seas, who were deeply rooted within Irish Catholicism and whose worlds were inhabited by witchcraft and faerie. On his first visit, Synge fell in with an elderly islander who had become blind following a fall from a cliff when he was middle-aged. Synge noted how the man’s face would light up “with an ecstasy of humour when he told me anything that had a point of wit or malice” and yet would grow “sombre and desolate when he spoke of religion and fairies.”

A number of the stories that involved fairies related to missing children and loved ones who suddenly disappear or appear to lose their minds. Several of them are attended with blood spatter found on the inside of the croft walls.         

At one time, Synge attended an eviction, a heavy-handed dispossession of a family from their home and their livestock (such as it was). He was told that the two previous attempts to evict the family had failed because, even though on each of these occasions the weather was fair, a sudden storm had erupted which made it impossible for the steamer carrying the bailiffs and the troop of armed policemen from landing. The storm, Synge was told, was the work of the local witch.

Synge was captivated by these islanders, hardy and yet apparently also sensitive to the elements, resilient, skilful. Eminently practical and yet also for him, quite childlike. It should also be said that he too seemed to have made a favourable impression on them. He treated them as fellow humans, listened without prejudice or comment to their lived stories, and always treated them with respect. Well, at least to the men. Synge’s record of his further three visits gives the impression that – whilst still in love with these islands and its peoples, he began to see past the initial Edenic splendour. It was on one of these visits that he came to realise that, while he got on well with the men and also thought he got on well with the women, his admiration was not necessarily reciprocated. On one occasion, having been left on the shore with just a group of women, they turned on him haranguing him and viciously mocking him for not being married. Once the men return, the status quo is resumed. To give Synge his due, he just accepts this, in the same way he accepts the news from the islanders that tragically their crops had failed; “the potatoes were bad, but the rye had begun well, till a dry week came and then it turned into oats.” This was a world, Synge observed, in which the miraculous could still occur daily.

John Synge suffered most of his short life from Hodgkin Lymphoma, necessitating surgery for the removal of a swollen gland from his neck at around the time of his island visits. Contemporaries describe him as volcanic in nature, fierce, fearless, and loyal. It may have been the battle with his illness and sense of morality that resulted in a sense of heroic devil-may-care attitude that attracted artistic-romantics like William Butler Yates (who was the person who persuaded Synge to give up his academic dreams and visit the Aran Islands). It was also the sort of temperament that society in general finds difficult to handle. But it is possible that it would have been appreciated by the islanders, who could run across the razor-sharp seaweed-slick rocks and cliffs with the lithe fluidity of a goat. It was the harsh, unremitting, often brutal, unromantic life that Synge found and expressed so romantically and into which he threw himself. 

Synge’s writing captures well the continuous onslaught of Atlantic weather on the island and the islanders. When not in the simple room of his lodging recording oral stories, songs, and folktales, he spends as much time outside as possible. Even on his first visit, he recounts how he would crouch under a wall as the storm plumes of ocean spray hit and battered against his body.     

But it is the rough crossings that I wanted to read to you. Synge visited each of the islands, conveyed in a four or six oared currach. A wooden and canvas rowing boat rowed by either two or three men with one at the stern who used his oar to steer. 

On the premiss that there can be few things nicer on a dark winter’s night than curling up in a chair or in bed and listening to stories of those who brave the weathers outside, I want to read to you Synge’s account of two such crossings that, I think, help to get to the heart of this hardy community of island sailors and their relationship with the elements.

I think it also shows that, even in the midst of rough crossings, as much as we might hate and dread these times, there is a beauty, a sense of life, and aliveness within them, that can transcend fear. 

[READINGS]

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very peaceful and restful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG