Robert Hichens, the man at the helm of the SS Titanic when it made contact with the iceberg on its way to New York, was a Newlyn boy. In fact, there were five Newlyners aboard in total. They are there, these Cornish men born of salt, in so many of our stories about the sea. Hichens was one of those lucky rescued few, on Lifeboat 6, to be exact. After his near-death experience on the Titanic, Hichen’s life was not easy; other surviving passengers attested that he had refused to help rescue other people in the water, calling them ‘stiffs,’ a fact that he denied during the US inquiry. Despite these accusations and the traumatic nature of his experience, Hichens continued working on the sea for the rest of his life, dying of heart failure aboard the merchant ship English Trader in Scotland, when he was fifty-nine.
— Dark, Salt, Clear: The Life of a Fishing Town, p. 171
Month: March 2021
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WILL WE EVER LEARN?
March for Our Lives, March 2108: Courthouse Square, Redwood City, California:
This generation of kids has been through the wringer. How many of them, self wonders, had to start college on zoom?
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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Each day at least four freighters are lost to the seas, their cargoes spilling out into the water to be dispersed by the waves and discovered on beaches years later — trainers, cogs from machines and plastic packaging mixing in with the seaweed and foam left by waves.
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Fluent
I would love to live
— from Conamara Blues, which Dear Departed Father Richard Haslam gave to me on my first visit to Ireland, 2014
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding. -
Discovered another Photo Challenge! This one’s from Buddha Walks Into a Wine Bar, and it’s called Challenge Your Camera.
This week’s Challenge Your Camera (# 11) is STILL LIFE.
Here are a few pointers for the Challenge:
- What is a Still Life? A still life is a work of art that focuses on inanimate objects. Usually commonplace objects which can include both man made objects (vases, items of clothing, and consumer products) and natural objects (plants, food, rocks, shells) as examples.
So, here are self’s still lifes, all of which she pulled from her archives. They’re mostly food-related.
Still Life # 1: Self loves farmers markets. The ones in her area are held on Sundays. She bought these mushrooms at the Menlo Park Farmers Market. This picture’s from a few weeks ago. The farmers markets stayed open throughout the pandemic, and self went regularly (of course masked). Her last COVID test was ten days ago, and that was negative.
Still Life # 2: Shoreditch, East London, November 2019. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to get back to London until late 2022, at the very soonest. In the meantime, she has a huge trove of photographs from her last visit. Someone with a sense of humor left this on a window ledge.
Still Life # 3: Her last visit home was September 2019. She spent her time in Dear Departed Dad’s hometown of Bacolod, and spent a few nights in a city close by: Silay. And ate herself into a food coma. All the variety of food made from rice! These are just two examples, and they’re from the public market.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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The action unfolds to the accompaniment of ‘Elvis with the Philharmonic Orchestra’ booming from speakers “at the back of the wheelhouse,” music selection made by Don, the Captain:
Andrew and Stevie fling the fish through the air into buckets. Every time they come across small sharks wriggling out of the pile and snapping their strong jaws, they fire them back into the sea like shot-puts. I lock eyes with one and see across its rubbery face an expression of utter disbelief as it flies right past the wheelhouse window.
— Dark, Salt, Clear, p. 44HA HA HA!
Bless her heart, Lamorna Ash makes being out at sea with these men feel like a grand adventure! Great description.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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Self is on p. 42 of Dark, Salt, Clear. Exactly one year ago, at the start of the lockdown, when everything was scary/dark, self was reading this. Amazing, to think of the year that’s passed between, even just in terms of books read (each book is a world).
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If Lamorna Ash had written about nothing else except the pubs of Newlyn and the eight days on a fish trawler with six (or was it seven) Cornish fishermen, this book would have been worth the read. But we are only on p. 40, so one can only imagine what other Cornish memories lie in store!
So far, on this eight-day fishing trip, Ash has made reference to Moby Dick and something by Conrad, this interspersed with anecdotes about the crew (Kevin, a flaming redhead and the youngest of the crew is, naturally, the cook. First night’s dinner is “chicken burgers and lovely fucking peas.”)
Speaking of Moby Dick, self read that book for the first time in her first quarter as a Creative Writing Fellow at Stanford. Everyone else was reading Raymond Carver but, self being so obstreperous, she read Moby Dick. It took her, she thinks, something like three months, and she was in pain the whole time.
The trawler’s name is the Filadelfia –why? Next thing self knows, she is trolling her archives for pictures of Philadelphia, her favorite American city next to her own, the city where Dearest Mum attended Curtis (Dearest Mum was only 11 when admitted, and became super-famous, a famous like Britney Spears! For winning the New York Times International Piano Competition, at 14. Her teacher at Curtis was a Madame Mengerva, who told Dearest Mum she should never get married, which is why, when Dearest Mum was 21, she eloped and ended up having five children with Dear Departed Dad)
On p. 40, self reads about the Fishwife Call, that lovely seafaring tradition where “whoever is on watch puts the kettle on, makes mugs of coffee and then heads down to wake the snoozing crew for the next haul” with a hearty ‘Alrightfuckers!’
So interesting.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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Lamorna Ash is a beautiful writer. Self appreciates the precision in the following description, especially “they will repeat this performance over fifty times more in the week to come”:
Dressed in their oilskins, the men head out onto the uncovered deck to spread the nets ready for the first haul. They will repeat this performance over fifty times more in the week to come. The ancient, bird-like being heaves her wings back up, pulling the chainmail-clinking nets high up into the air above us, before dropping them down into the water with a smack. They break its surface and disappear beneath. The nets will remain sunken for the next few hours, stroking along the seabed, gathering fish into their cod-ends.
The salt-licked wind makes my eyes red . . .
— Dark, Salt, Clear: The Life of a Fishing Town, p. 33And since self has so many pictures from her own trip to Cornwall in 2019, she’ll just throw in one more, why not?
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This week our topic is Anything that Flight. Your photo can show anything in flight or is capable of flyings through the air.
Be creative if you feel like it, and fun with this challenge this week. Remember your photos needs to be black and white, desaturated, sepia (brown tones) or selective color. Iām looking forward to seeing what you all come up.
— Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge (CBWC)Here are self’s B & W Anything in Flight pictures:
Reading Tim Dee’s Landfill: Notes on Gull-Watching and Trash-Picking in the Anthropocene, and reminiscing about the Cornwall pub that had the Hemingway quote on a wall:
Print by the German Symbolist artist Max Klinger (1857-1920), in an exhibit at the British Museum, April 2019 (Pictures of the art were allowed)
Here’s one more, since it looks like the call self received a half hour ago, alerting her to an imminent power outage, was Spam.
This garden ornament consists of broken shells, arranged to look like birds in flight. Not quite black & white, but close? It’s in her backyard.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
Kanlaon 