Foreigners

‘The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out’

                                                                                                                             -J.R.R. Tolkien

Dawn has yet to break fully over the mountains behind me. It will make little difference when it does anyway. I am tucked out of sight between the rocks only three feet from the water, water so calm I can make out finer details in my wavering profile – bags under the eyes and a slight rash of stubble. The cloying damp and the tang of ozone thicken around me like last night’s soup in this dark nook.

Despite the month, it is cold. There will be little to differentiate July from November until the sun has been up for a few hours, but I am prepared. Travelling light, I am almost nomadic in my body warmer, carrying only a bucket and a light rod, my grandfather’s tattered canvas knapsack, carrying a small flask of tea and a few odds and ends, slung over my shoulder.

Nothing is moving in the windless morning; every small sound I make ricochets out from this rocky enclave. This close to the water, every move I make must be quiet, stealthy, the sinuous connivings of a ferret on a riverbank. Slowly I slide the plastic box from my bag, taking out a chunk of pre-cut mackerel. It’s easier this way, less movement and fuss when the bait is prepared at home before this kind of session.

The hook is threaded in and out a few times, leaving the hook point proud in anticipation of the moment when a bass may slam into the simple rig, allowing the needle sharp barb to drive home. A gentle, pendulum-like swing and the baited hook slips into the water with a faint plop only five or six yards from where I am perched. The ripples recede, everything settles once again into silence and my friend and I, thirty yards apart, are absorbed back into the gloom.

On the distant promenade, the first simple stirrings of life flit around the solitary outlines of early strollers and dog walkers stumbling through the dawn’s first blush.

 

By ten the world has woken, both the tide and the sun have risen considerably and by now we’re not alone. In the passage of a few hours the first of the others have arrived and settled around us; at various points blunt, white torsos chipped into shape by the sun have begun to appear on the tips of the outermost rocks, facing silently out to sea.

Another twenty minutes and nothing but a handful of mackerel and eels drift through the morning, are swung in juddering and quickly, but gently, released back into the water. We have not come for them today. More have arrived to populate the platforms around me, the nearest bodies marked with inked out patchworks of multicoloured whorls and serpentine coils, tribal insignias flickering across flesh pierced and glinting. Behind this, the steady throb of R and B blurs the air as a long, snaking line, gaudy in summer colours and loaded down with boxes, buckets and bags undulates down the breakwater toward us.

Other noises have now begun to rise above the music. A group of Polish lads twenty feet away buzz like a small swarm of bees in their vowels and soft consonants; an Indian man barks at his two young boys as they skitter about and chatter like macaques, all wide smiles and action. A Chinese family further up towards the end huddle into themselves, relaxed and flicking low susurrant whispers to each other.

The languages and dialects merge around us into a dense mesh and the mackerel are starting to come in thick and fast. The whole pier is a vibrant thrum of industrious activity, arms thrown forward and back as lines are cast toward the sea, the steady sink and draw of the rods calling to mind the steam driven pistons of a Victorian dockyard or factory as dozens of mackerel and lithe, flexing garfish are hauled efficiently from the water in dangling, pearlescent strings, to disappear kicking into rustling bin liners and Tesco carrier bags.

Finally, it happens. The rod jerks alive in my hands and is almost wrenched from my fingers as it makes a sudden jagging lunge down towards the sea. The line sings that eerie single note that always thrills down the back of my neck like icy fingers, raising the fine hairs as I lean back into the fish, watching the line zig zag in and out from the rocks like a living cardiograph, then swoop around in ever smaller circles. All this waiting and it’s over almost as quickly as it began. Two minutes of struggle, a few head shakes and crash-dives and I’m guiding the bass over the lip of the waiting net in front of me.

We skip from the rocks to the flat concrete surface above to weigh our prize, a four pound bar of silver flaring in the midday light, all shimmering scales and armour plated spikes, tight, muscular and ready to take flight at a moment’s notice, a raptor of the sea.

Looking up we notice for the first time how drastically the breakwater has been transformed. Deckchairs, tents, umbrellas and cool boxes are scattered in a multicoloured shambles under plumes of cigarette smoke. Everywhere beers are being opened, glistening bodies are reclining in chairs and along the concrete, splayed out in the heat; shouts layering over shouts as the smells of sun cream and hot flesh permeate the air and mingle in their warm biscuit aroma whilst the breakwater shimmers like a souk in the sun.

Now all eyes are on us, two strangers dressed in jeans, body warmers and boots who have appeared from nowhere. Out in the open I realise how hot is has become, how much we’re sweating now in our seemingly ill-suited clothing. I remember that I am still holding something this day has not yet seen, the only thing we came for.  Everybody crowds around for a closer look. Closer still.  The crowd parts then seals itself behind me as I pass, continuing to watch as the fish is tenderly cradled then released to slide back with a flick of its tail, a streak of mercury plumbing the depths.

This is no longer any place for us. Ours is a different world, a sparsely populated outpost, not this booming cosmopolis. We decide that now is a good time to leave, packing away quickly and leaving as quietly as we came. I imagine those left on the pier watching us shrink and disappear into the wavering middle distance, growing smaller and smaller so that, after only a couple of minutes, it seems that we were never there at all.

© copyright Simon Smith 2011

Fun and Games

Lord,

The sea is so wide

And my boat so small.

Be with me.

- prayer of a Breton Fisherman

Make no mistake about it: we are at war. We are always at war, though you wouldn’t think it today.

It is one o clock, the sun is blazing down, keeping the mercury hovering around twenty eight degrees; the tide has slunk back, the sand a glistening layer of honey softly levelling itself.

A hundred years ago this beach, Aberavon Sands, was one of the premier coastal resorts in the country; the sweep of its long, sandy bay attracting visitors by the busload from far and wide, packing the trains that would run back and forth from the valleys and through the town like a steel artery, every day throughout the summer.

Scattered across the walls of some f the town’s pubs and shops you will find pictures from this bygone age  of glory. Men in striped blazers and boater hats hooked arm in arm with parasol carrying ladies, their skirts ballooning around them like falling parachutes. They seem to stare eternally out from images he colour of the sandy earth to which they have long since returned.

Even now, decades later, if you drive a few miles up into the valley behind the town and on into Afan Argoed Country Park, after fifteen or so minutes of walking you will arrive at one of the old stone platforms overgrown with grass and punctuated by weeds, waiting timelessly like some stone sentinel for passengers to suddenly materialise like smoke from between the trees.

But no trains run to the seafront today, only car after car pulling up in one of the spaces along the gentrified avenue, calling into Remo’s for an ice-cream or sidling into one of the bays facing the Kite Trail – the crippled, rust-flecked eleven tonne giant that is our steel sculpture.

It never ceases to amaze me when I consider the amount of money that is now spent on seafront areas: massive developments and concrete facelifts akin to those beloved by glamour models and fading Hollywood starlets are now commonplace to the level of faddy must-have.

At any given time along any given stretch of the Welsh coast, it is almost impossible not to find hoardings bearing words like ‘project’, ‘development’, ‘leisure’ or ‘waterfront’. Still, should the Vikings ever wish to resume raping and pillaging any time soon there will, at least, be a strong possibility that they will throw their battleaxes and war hammers clattering upon the deck and wade ashore with lilos cradled under their arms instead.

Leisure is in actual fact, a very appropriate word today. Games of beach cricket and football are springing up everywhere; the neon blades of frisbees cut the air and the shouts and screams of laughter echo from the leisure centre to the chip shop, from the adventure playground to the skate ramp and out across the bay. Down on the sand in front of me a young mother is struggling to control a toddler who is squirming and turning purple as an angry plum with frustration to join his older siblings further along the beach. With a sigh, she puts him down and watches him go.

At times like this, in conditions like this, it is easy to forget that, aside from the Bay of Fundy, a rocky stretch of coastline tucked away on the eastern flank of Canada, the Bristol Channel has the highest tidal range in the world. On the biggest of spring tides the difference between low water and high water can be as much as fourteen metres in depth, the sea devouring everything between the low and high tide lines in its relentless advance.

But not everyone has forgotten. If you step back from all the fun and games and cast a general’s eye along the beachfront, you can’t fail to notice the long silver-grey scimitar of the promenade sweeping along its length, the lower tier separated from the upper tier by a drop of seven feet or so, giving way in turn to the fortification of rocks that arc down and out twenty feet, coming to rest on the sand and forming an impressive stone fortification. It seems that someone has remembered we are at war, and they have made preparations.

I look down again at the young mother, hands on hips. Her hair slowly begins to drop through the colour spectrum, gradually darkening, the facial expression blanking from mild irritation to nothingness, and although she hasn’t moved, now she is another woman and it is twenty years ago.

For over a fortnight, the South Wales coast had been doing what it does best – getting smashed. I mean this in the physical sense rather than the alcoholic but, come to think of it, either applies equally well.

We are a nation of drinkers. At drinking, we are incredibly talented. You could recite the list of possible achievements of the Welsh and discover this for yourself: rugby? Decent enough, fair to middling. Music? We do okay. Acting, then? Yep, not bad at all – Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen all hail from my home town. Drinking? Ah, now that is something at which the Welsh, particularly the southerners are superb. Astoundingly gifted, in fact. During Six Nations away games, drunks are our biggest export. I ask you, what other country could hold up with pride and reverence a chosen national bard whose dying words were “…eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record…” But I digress.

For weeks the prevailing south-westerlies had swept in off the Atlantic bringing bands of rain, huge swells and crashing surf with them. The banks of rock hadn’t yet been put in place; instead there was only a series of crumbling stone steps leading down to the water’s edge. On the larger tides, these would be all but submerged, and in weather like we saw that night, they were exposed to the sea’s full fury. With the arrival of the first autumn storms and the huge equinoctial spring tides that come with them, this had become a scene of chaos; the gales ushering in wave upon wave like massed ranks of brown and black-uniformed mavericks, battering into the land, hammering the coast into submission.

I wasn’t fishing but had, for some inexplicable reason, gone for a walk down to the shore simply to look at the sea. It’s always been this way with me and will never change. If I’m not in the sea or trying to pull something from it, I can still happily waste hours just looking at it.

Despite living in an age in which I can look at the Statue of Liberty or the Great Wall of China from the comfort of my armchair I, like so many British residents, still have the island dweller’s mentality.

It’s easy to take the sea for granted when any mystery can be explained by Jeeves or Wikipedia. Every once in a while though, there wells up a sudden impulse to be confronted with something that is at once inexplicable and indefinable, to feel that tiny upsurge of fear, to remember that despite the fact that we can carry its past present and future in a series of circuits nestled in our pockets, the world is actually a massive, untamed and often very dangerous place. And seventy per cent of it is water.

It was immediately clear that something was wrong. A few hundred yards along the promenade, the autumn evening was lit by a dull, unnaturally yellow glow which upon closer inspection turned out to be a haphazard zig-zag of cars nosed right up to the rusted railings, their headlights cutting into the breakers only yards away.

Between and around them, completely covering the cracked, crumbling hardcore of the gravel car park that would eventually be plastered over with smooth glossy tarmac years later, were masses of people, some armed with torches whose beams were added to the lights already thrown over the surf. Always the worst sign. No matter how educated, wealthy or religious a person might be, the vulture mentality will always take hold at the first sign of disaster, and this crowd had clearly sniffed something out.

With little else to do in the iron-grey wasteland, a group of teenage boys had been playing chicken with the tide – running back and forth along the top of the steps in between the waves – and one had misjudged it. In a split-second he had been floored, sucked out into the equivalent of a giant washing machine and had simply vanished.

The screams and pleading of his friends had brought bystanders running in their droves until the area was a scene of absolute mayhem – the shouting, the panic, the crashing spray and, behind it all, the insistent shush of the tide. For hours they scanned the dark waters, frantically searching for a sign, any sign; but they didn’t find one. Nor would they.

And despite all of this – the noise, the turmoil, the crush of bodies and the fear, there was, in the middle of it all, a void of pure, concentrated, heartbreaking silence. Nobody had identified her as such but I knew instantly who she must have been.

She stayed like that for a long time, at once lost and confronted with a conflict out of her control, a player in a game in which the rules kept changing with each surge of the tide, a game that she never chose to play. Her clenched hands tightened as though seized by the salt spray, forever locked now at half past six, quiet and unmoving as a memorial statue.

Her face is drawn down into one long, unanswered question, a question that the world, and all the mothers in it, have always struggled to answer and always will. All the while, her ghost-white, red-rimmed eyes stare out across the waves as they slink in and out, in and out through the night, the black and white of tomorrow’s headlines.

© copyright Simon Smith 2011

The Importance of being Absent

   ‘Upon these thousand acres of waves there is freedom’

-from ‘Angler’ by Li Yu (937-978)

The concept of ‘six degrees of separation’ – the idea that we, as individuals, can be linked to anybody else in the world through a string of no more than five acquaintances – has always fascinated and horrified me in equal measure.

It is, on the one hand, quite an exciting prospect that, even in some distant, seemingly implausible way, I might have some tenuous bond with the President of an emerging foreign superpower, an Italian shoemaker huddled over a pitted wooden bench in a tiny workshop heavy with the aroma of leather, or even a warrior monk perched on some distant, windswept peak far to the east.

On the other hand the idea loses its appeal somewhat when I consider how much smaller this makes the world, the relentless march of technology only heightening this, super-accelerating it to the Nth degree. Now that those six previously flimsy strands have been swept away by e-mail, online forums, chat rooms and social networking sites (and no, I haven’t missed the irony in the fact that I’m writing about this in an online blog), they don’t seem to have been so implausible after all. It is a sobering thought that almost anybody could reach me at almost any time in some format or another.

*

I have fished since the age of eleven, when my Grandfathers performed, completely independently of one another, a perfect pincer movement. Armed with a solid glass boat rod, spinning fixed spool reel and a head full of fantastical, esoteric stories, I was hurtled headlong into a world I have never really left since.

Between the ages of eleven and eighteen I fished as though my life depended upon it – all seasons, all weathers, all times including the ‘stupid o clock hours’ usually only seen by alcoholics and shift workers. Because of these irregular hours spent either in the company of my Grandfather or later, alone, I developed a kind of unsociable streak which I actually learned to love. Any time spent angling became more than just the sum of its parts. The hours I spent in my own company became something sacrosanct, an untouchable alter-reality all of my own into which I could disappear at any time.

After the age of eighteen, things began to change. Like the fat thunderheads that so often threaten my horizon, other priorities began to loom large  - University and Teacher Training, work, starting a family – all highly rewarding and wonderful experiences in their own way, but all things which demand their own share of the day’s ever dwindling hours. And so, with time at such a premium, angling became less of a priority, fading away to half a dozen or so sessions per year while life picked up the slack.

After a couple of years, routines were established, life began to bob back to an even keel and I began to look for something, anything, to do in the little bit of spare time that I now found on my hands; something for myself.

It is a universal truth that once you’ve found angling, you can never lose it. There will be periods of weeks, maybe months or even years when it may slip from view, disappearing back into the aquifers of life, but this doesn’t mean it’s no longer there. It still exists and flows, and eventually there must come a time when it bubbles to the surface to resume its course which, like all others, eventually leads to the sea. And so it was that fishing came back into my life. And the solitary streak came with it.

Despite the online stores, e-mailed correspondences from these stores, online forums and YouTube clips centred around how to cast, how not to cast, how to catch this fish, what it ate for breakfast, and the look on its face as it was slipped back into the waves, I managed to find the kind of fishing I once knew, carving out a few hours every Friday night to leave a me-shaped hole in my life, wandering alone in the night to some deserted beach whilst my family slept.

Suddenly, no-one was sat at the dining table correcting essays at ten o’ clock. Dad wasn’t in his usual chair, tuning out to mindless TV programmes or flicking through a Wilbur Smith in bed. For a few hours each Friday I was absent from my own life.

Now, I realise that this might seem slightly maudlin, even downright depressing, to many. This isn’t helped by the fact that some of the beaches I fish aren’t that popular as tourist hotspots.

These are not the beaches of spring which lure you out for a leisurely stroll along the promenade, blind you with the clarity of their waters and blue skies then leave you tottering into the nearest beach front cafe for a quick latte. Nor are they the quick-game-of-footie, slather-on-the-suncream, sand-in-every-orifice, lie-down-on-a-towel-resembling-a-bad-acid-trip kind of beaches.

The beaches I’m talking about could out-Brontë the Brontës.

Miles of uninhabited, almost desolate sand or, perhaps, some moonscape of rocky terrain resembling a primordial nightmare tumbling down like dragons’ teeth toward the water, are often the places I am to be found on a Friday night, the silence broken only by the surf jackknifing up the strand.

So what makes this so appealing? Nothing. Nothing I have to do, nothing I have to say, nothing I have to think. Here, I am anonymous; there are no expectations and no obligations. I enter the world of angling and become a nonentity in the real world; as soon as I take a fishing rod in hand, to all intents and purposes, to everybody else, I simply cease to exist. Please hang up and call again later. Separation here is no longer a matter of theoretical degrees, but a physical reality of minutes and hours, yards and miles.

But contrary to being some kind of solipsistic wet dream it is, in fact, quite the opposite. And it is this paradox which brings me back to one night in particular, sometime around the twentieth of December three years ago.

I had decided to fish Rest Bay, a small cove surrounded by low cliffs and rock platforms that open out onto a longish expanse of bare sand at low tide. There is little in the way of development upon this beach save for an old peoples’ home and golf club set a couple of hundred yards back from the sand so that, in the dead of night, there is very little ambient light, leaving the beach and anyone upon it wallowing in darkness. I blended right in.

The session had been a miserable one. It had been meticulously planned -  a range of baits including half a pound of fresh, wriggling ragworms, a packet of frozen sandeels and squid that would be cut into strips to wave enticingly like a white flag in the tide; one rod cast out no more than thirty yards to pick off any lone predators lurking behind the dwindling surf line, and one rigged up with the latest in bait clips to make the rig more aerodynamic, cast around a hundred and forty yards from the beach to reach the smaller, more uncertain shoals of whiting and pouting loitering in the safe harbour of deeper water.

Despite my best efforts it’s not going according to plan. Four hours faced with no bites, occasional rain and a biting easterly wind to match anything out on Heathcliff’s moor. I’m freezing cold, damp, and seriously debating the merits of darts and snooker. Suddenly the rod tip trembles…then taps down. There it goes again!

No matter how dire the circumstances, no matter how quiet the session, the angler will always clutch the tiny flame of hope to his chest, hoping against hope, just looking for that one more cast that might change his fortunes and snatch victory from the jaws of despair. There is a fine line between madness and inspiration and at this moment I’m pirouetting upon that line on one toe.

A third, more determined, rattle tells me that in what little tide movement there is, the short snoods have done their job. The fish has grabbed at the bait and hooked itself, pulled up short against the resistance of my breakout lead as it tried to swim away with my worm.

I’ve caught thousands of fish over the years, but even now each bite is no different. I practically jog to the waters’ edge, the beam of my headlight flicking to the water, to my reel, then back again to the water, finally coming to rest on the whiting which slides from the sea to lie like a bleb of new solder glimmering through the darkness.

This fish is smaller than the worm it has just eaten. At eight ounces, it would barely be enough to get caught in Captain Birdseye’s teeth, yet all I want to do is share this minor triumph with someone…anyone! Knowing that my house will be in darkness, I decide it’s probably better not to wake my partner and our grizzling two year old to share this momentous event. Not if I want to live to see next Friday.

All that’s left to do is re-bait, re-cast (just one more cast)and huddle back in against the wind which, by now, is making me question the whereabouts of my genitalia, as my seated shadow tries to curl into itself like a squat black zero in the middle of nowhere.

Then, through the darkness, I hear it. At first it’s just a few faint snatches passing by then tossed away on the wind, barely there. I think I’m imagining it, but there it is again, fading in and out, a dozen or so voices in chorus, singing. It’s indistinguishable at first but gradually, ever so gradually, the lone voices begin to knit into what I finally recognise as O come all ye faithful.

There isn’t another soul in sight, the nearest buildings are hundreds of yards from where I’m now standing at the low tide line, and it’s extremely late but here it comes again, clear as a bell and I can’t help but crack a slight chapped smile as I listen to this these hushed, almost ethereal tones.

I finally get it. No other episode in my angling “career” ever has or ever will so reinforce why I go fishing.  It has run in my blood for so long that it’s taken for granted – picking up a rod and scouring the surf line for hidden features now comes as naturally as breathing, so I had never really thought about why I go fishing. I have come to love the fact that I can disappear from one world into another, but over time, I have come to know the true importance of being absent.

It’s not really about distancing myself from anything else; it’s more a case of distancing myself from myself. Angling allows me to step into another existence, to look at the space I’ve left behind, albeit temporarily, to see where I will fit so neatly back in and, like so much in this other world I inhabit, find the balance.

I decide I won’t have that final cast after all. Instead, I pack up and make my way back to the car, shaking off the sand before cranking the heating up and trundling off into the night. Behind me, the voices waver and flicker still, even as they fade, reaching out like strands of marram in the wind. Perhaps, if I were to listen long enough, I’d recognise one of them.

© copyright Simon Smith 2011