storm gifts

notes from the first storm of the season

(i)                  the quiet before

The air is still, the sea calm, the light – gently – leaving.

It is low tide, the lowest I have seen it. The exposed rock is alien to me, a moonscape lifted from the water. We find a whale vertebra that would usually be tucked into the seabed. Our own little morsel of moon.

Two seals are floating in the bay. Every now and then, one flips over and flops its tail out of the water. The haunt of their voices skims across the sea. I wonder what they are saying. If they are saying anything at all.

We watch them until the light is gone, but we stay a little longer.

The moon slips across the still water.

There is nothing like the sea before a storm.

(ii)                the stones

The storm is coming, although the meat of it is not yet here.

Early on Sunday, I go to the beach. Two neighbours are there, also enjoying the peace before the chaos. “Don’t let Magnus in the water,” one says. “The sea is powerful this morning.”

The water does not look particularly rough, but when I stop to listen I can hear the churn and grind of rocks scraping against one another. The undertow is pulling them back, thrusting them forward. This motion sends vibrations through the ground. I feel the power of it thrumming through the earth, into my feet, into my bones. It lights an ember within; an ember that burns between fear and awe.

Never trust a person who knows the sea, but does not fear it. They have misunderstood their power in this world.

“The beach has been rearranged,” another neighbour tells me as she passes, and she points to the far end of the bay. Where there was white sand yesterday, today there are only large, gleaming pebbles, each the size of my fist. One must get used to geographical dysmorphia on these islands.

(iii)              the wind

The wind has come. A speed of 85 miles per hour is recorded.

We take the dog out and we cannot walk without bending into a right angle. It feels like we are wading against a current. The sound of the wind is an ocean. The grass moves as if in the clutches of a river.

When we speak, we must shout to hear each other. It stirs something in the body, this shouting, this inflation of our lungs. I feel a surge of adrenaline, as if my body is preparing for something.

On the beach, the waves are huge and powerful and trying to break, but the wind is keeping them from folding in on themselves; it is pushing their tops backward, demanding that they stay upright.

I look to the cliffs. The streams that usually fall are blowing upward; they are defying the rules that physics has imposed on them.

It is disorienting. It is like the world has, for a blink, forgotten how to hold itself together.

(iv)              the boulders

There are boulders on the beach. They were not here before the storm. They are huge: the size of bodies. Between two, I find a beautifully polished dome of rock, its skin taut and shining like a pregnant belly. Next to it, a spherical stone. When I pick it up, it is like a boiled egg in my palm.

(v)                the birds

I think, at first, it is a butterfly, this body flitting past mine, this body swept along in the wind. I look again. It is a wren. A wren rendered light and powerless as a butterfly.

It will never cease to astonish me, that creatures so small survive weather so wild.

Later, outside the kitchen window, a raven hovers as if it is a marionette. It goes neither forwards nor backwards, despite the movement of its wings.

Even the giants are struggling.

(vi)              the rain

It hits like hailstones, the force of it bruising our skin. We turn around, walk backwards into the wind. The rain pummels and pummels, stings our cheeks when we try to turn. The wind gusts and punches. The howl of it leaves us breathless.

The howl follows us inside. Over cups of tea, we listen to the song of the storm.

(vii)            the body

On the rocks, I find the corpse of a young seal. I have not seen one so fresh before. It still has its grey-white fur, but the skin is torn open and I can see the pinks and violets and blues of its insides. Later the same day, the corpse is just bone and skin. Soon, these will be gone too.

I try to imagine all the creatures this seal has been, and will be, consumed by. I see a thousand strings reaching out from this small body, tethering it to the stomach of a black-backed gull, the beak of a raven, the pincer of a shore crab, the forelegs of a fly. The storm gifting one creature’s carbon to another, who gifts it to another, and another. I try to imagine it, all these strings connecting us through space and time, but it is a network too expansive for me to hold.

(viii)          the quiet after

I go to the beach again, to map its autumn face. I find that it is almost a stranger, now.

The sea is still.

The air is silent.

The world feels like glass.

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