Four days at Sea

Half a dozen of us with children went for a stroll before sunset to a small harbour, for four consequent days. I knew about this, but I must have been so tired that I got caught out completely unprepared by the innocence of the statement. The first evening we walked along the harbour which had a row of anchored fishing boats on one side and a wave breaking wall of large broken rocks on the other. Most of the fishing boats had returned from sea and the fishermen were either washing the boats down with water or were arranging the fish in ice packed wooden trays. A couple were still working on their nets and a handful of boats were preparing to go out to sea after sunset. The whole thing hit me really heavily on the chest. To begin with I just stopped in front of an anchored fishing boat and stared at it as if I was not understanding something. After I stood there for a bit I started walking again with my heart thumping wildly in my chest. A few boats ahead I stopped again and moved closely to the boat staring at it all the time. Then I started walking faster to the end of the harbour where a large trawler was anchored. The faster I walked the less time I hoped I had to stop and stare and the faster I could return back to the start. The large trawler was full of Egyptian fishermen, two talking to each other and one working on repairing the net, part of it hooked around his large toe. I caught a couple of words they were talking and felt the most natural urge to get on board and join them. Of course I did not and had to move myself when one of them smiled at me warmly, as if I was a lost chick. The walk back was even worse. My legs were almost moving by themselves towards the boats and when one of them was about to go out I almost ran and jumped into it. At that particular point I would have just done that had it not been for the others and the children. A sharp cry from a kid woke me up with a cold slap and tore me away from my leaving boat.

The next evening I had more or less forgotten about the harbour and the fishing boats, partly because of the children and partly because I was too busy to think. Because of that the image of the boats hit me as hard as it had done on the first day. Determined not to disconnect completely from the others, I took my camera out to take some pictures of them. After having taken a couple, I turned to the boats and used the camera as an excuse to stare at them, taking the occasional photograph. The boats were less busy on that day and I could stare longer as some of them were vacant from people. The smell of the sea was so strong and so fragrant with windy saltiness, I wanted to cry. It was like torture. Like when you are a kid and there are freshly baked biscuits or something, which have been put out of reach on a high shelf in a tin. Only this was worse, as the sea and the boats and the feeling was larger than yourself; you were tied up on a chair and the biscuits were all around you, smelling and steaming hot, but you are unable to touch a single one of them, yet you are exposed to a sea of them in every sense. At that point I felt as if I had not been who I should have been for a long time and what I should be, at least now, was a fisherman on a boat in the sea, for as long it took for me to feel like myself again.

The following day at least I knew what to expect. So I stuck around with the children and the others most of the way along the harbour. When we reached the end of it, where the large trawler was anchored again sideways, I went closer by myself and had a good look at it. It was a large Greek trawler fishing for industrial purposes and the same Egyptian men were there again, having something to eat. It just clicked to me then, that in my state of having missed the sea, the boats and fishing so much, I had become completely unaware of how I must appear to these people. Probably like a woman, a mother, a wife, maybe a city girl, maybe a desk job person. Or even worse, I thought, a tourist with a camera taking photos of fishing boats to take back to her friends, like she has never seen them ever before, let alone spent weeks working on them. That realisation made me very angry and my heart started to pound again from the unfairness of it, of having been misunderstood, misplaced. The idiocy of this unreasonable request, that some stranger men should have to guess just by looking at me that I am in a way one of them when it comes to the sea, made me even more angry. I had this hope just because it happened that I have always been able to distinguish people of the sea, fishermen or sailors, since I was a kid, and would spot them in the play grounds looking after their kids, but always having a faraway dreaming of the sea look about them. I used to approach them even then and get some stories out of them. Now in fact I did not feel like a woman or a person, but more like I was a fish or a boat or in any matter something that should be in the sea and I was desperate that someone amongst these people would notice it.

That night I dreamt of the sea and of being on a boat and of fishing in the night, of waves and of sea salt wind. The last day I had a beaten look about me, of having given up something; but I was also very glad that I would not have to endure this any longer. Everyone was walking along the harbour with sharply ironed clothes, smelling of clean Marseille soap. That smell in this context near the boats made me very sad, made me think I would like to be doing this, to be wearing these clothes smelling like that, to be strolling along the harbour, after I had been out to sea, but not without. At the start of the harbour there was a Russian looking and sounding woman who was selling of all things, many different types of cacti. They were all arranged in rows according to size and style and amongst them there were some very peculiar specimens. Apparently she was selling them there every weekend for many, many years. I thought a lot about her since, how strange it looked to me for a woman to be selling such weird plants originating from deserts, near a harbour. Herself coming from a far away cold land, what did she feel of the sea? She spent a lot of time near it, did she like it, did she notice it? That day I must have had that far away lost at sea look about me too, because one of the fishermen shouted out at me from his boat, something like: "you're at the wrong side, come on board whenever, my son's left". That made me so happy, I could hardly stop smiling for the rest of the evening, I felt suddenly transparent and light and as if I was in a boat at sea already. With the first opportunity I really must do something about this and arrange a few days at sea properly.

Each day at the harbour I picked up something from the floor, a piece of plywood, a flattened out rusty tin, a snake or rope shaped drift wood (which broke afterwards in transit) and a flattened out piece of aluminium looking like a dog.

Dog lost at Sea, 1

Dog lost at Sea, 2

Dog lost at Sea, 3 

Dog lost at Sea, 4