Oceanic origami

Of periwinkles and pirates and ancient shells

Dreamlike, the sea gushes in, out, in. It is like a heartbeat, a metronome. The sound folds itself around me and reminds me to breathe, deep and slow, so that the salty air pools, for a moment, at the bottom of my lungs.

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When I first move to this island, I hear a story of a young girl whose father was a fisherman. Many years ago – perhaps centuries ago – her family lived on the very edge of the land. Her father would go out in his small fishing boat in all weather; they needed the food and the money. But he knew that this, of course, was dangerous. Not just because of the wind, the waves, the currents, but because of the threat of the haar – the sea fog that could roll in, thick as flesh, in the blink of an eye.

Within the fog, the whole world would be warped. The geography of the coastline – a geography he had known and mapped and breathed since his earliest days – would become distorted, dysmorphic.

North lost to the silver mist.

Rocks emerging from where they should not be.

He would become, within the breath of that thick fog, a foreigner in this landscape, the form and fold of water and land unknown to him, and therefore unnavigable.

To avoid a salt-stricken death, he taught his young daughter to watch the sea from their cottage on the shore. If the haar rolled in, she had to go to the sea’s edge and find a periwinkle shell (a periwinkle is a species of sea snail) and hold it at a precise angle inside her hands, with her lips hovering across its opening. She must then blow. A piercing whistle would then slice through the fog. The sound would be his compass. He would turn towards the noise and he would find his way home.

On the beach the day after hearing this story, I give it a go myself. I pick up a bright yellow periwinkle shell, and I blow across the opening. I can’t make any noise at all until suddenly I can. The sound is shrill and sharp and loud. It cuts through the whoosh of the wind, the rustle of the water. It seems to shout out into the wild: come to me, this is where I am.

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There is something hypnotic in the movement of the water; a power to confuse, control. Sometimes, on stormy days when I have walked the coast for too many hours, it can feel a little hostile – this body so large, so brutal, so ancient and unyielding. I find myself both embodied and disembodied in its presence. I find myself losing my sense of place and time.

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On that same beach a few weeks later, I find a piece of something so black it is like a swallow of night tucked within the white sand. It is small, and it looks like glass, but it is a shade of black I have never known glass to be. I ferry it around in my pocket, showing it to islanders, asking what people think it is.

For a while, we think it may be obsidian; a natural glass forged in the belly of volcanoes. But then one day, turning it over in my hands, I decide to hold it against a lightbulb. A liquid-looking green-gold orb shines back at me from the edges.

With this new morsel of information about the glass, I turn to google. I learn that I am actually looking at what is probably pirate glass, used from the 1600s to make thick glass bottles and one of the most prized types of seaglass. The air bubbles that form within it glow green-gold when held to the light.

Back on the beach, I put a periwinkle to my lips and whistle. I imagine that time has folded itself around me, in a sort of oceanic origami, and I am calling out to a man on a ship with a thick black bottle in his hands, a thick black bottle that will one day break into shards that might wash up at my feet. I am calling out through time and the man with the bottle is looking across the sea to me. The both of us are wonderfully, awfully unanchored in the gush and rush of all this ocean.

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Just as the sea erases the land, one small lick by one small lick, with each wave I feel a little more eroded. The sea offers to take some burden of selfhood from me and I offer to let it. A gift passed between us. A gift to remind me of the small, impermanent animal of my body; a gift to remind me of the powerful, ancient moonsong of the ocean’s. In the arms of the water, time becomes tangled, distance becomes unknown.

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I buy a book to help me identify shells on the seashore. While flicking through it, I am drawn to a description.

Ocean quahog (Arctica islandica). This mollusc can live for over 500 years. It is the world’s oldest non-colonial animal. It tends to live hundreds of metres underwater. Its shell sometimes washes up on coastlines.

I trace my fingertips over the image of the shell. It is nothing particularly memorable to look at, except that it is much bigger than any shell I have ever found here. I am in awe of it. I want to see one. I want to hold one in my hands and feel the weight of time. I even include the creature in the novel I am working on, rename a chapter after it.

I’ve heard from many different writers that there is a sort of magic to the writing process, in that when you write about something, you see that thing in the real world; you see it everywhere. It is almost as if you have imagined it into existence. Some would call this fate, others god, others manifestation.

I would call it a search image.

This is a phrase borrowed from ecology. It’s used to describe the way predator brains are primed to see their prey, at the expense of everything else. When we write, I think our brains develop a sort of search image for what we’re writing about. We see the subject of our writing with such acute, focussed attention that we teach our brains to be primed to look out for it in the real world.

This is how I explain to myself what happened with the ocean quahog.

One cool summer morning – about a week after reading about the quahog – I go back to the beach where I whistled with a periwinkle and found the pirate glass, and I see, half-buried in a pool left by the receding tide, a large shell. A shell larger than I have ever seen here.

I go to it, dig it out, feel the solid weight of it in my palm.

It is an ocean quahog, I think, and then I think, wait, no, can it be? I am doubting myself because this coincidence is too much, isn’t it?

I take it home, get my book out. I had, the week before, earmarked the page with the quahog shell. And this shell, this huge, sea-worn thing sitting heavy in the palm of my hand is, of course, an ocean quahog.

I put the shell on my writing desk. Sometimes, when I feel too closely bound to sense, I hold it in my palm and let the weight of it remind me to unravel the boundaries my brain has laid down for itself.

And sometimes I like to imagine, centuries ago, the creature deep in the ocean, metres and metres below the ship on which the man with the black bottle stands. And I imagine the piercing whistle of a small girl with her periwinkle shell, the man nodding a sigh of relief, the man turning his boat - almost lost within the thick haar - towards the sound of safety.

Of course, this did not happen. The story of the girl and the two ancient objects I have found on the eastern shore of this island are not linked. Or, rather, the chance is infinitesimally small. But still, I let the sea fold its distortion around me. Each plane of past and present and future and distance and chance re-aligned so that they are face to face. Oceanic origami. It is a fun game to play, to allow yourself to become a little unanchored.

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The water is shock and salt and storm and lullaby.

I stand at its edge, in the dark of an autumn night.

Behind me, beneath the sand dunes, lie the remains of a neolithic village. Before me, a body of water so big it seems like the very edge of the world. But it is also a passage, a door, the hypnotic tide of its breath an invitation to step out of my body, my mind, this time, into something unknown and unknowable, dictated not by logic or reason but by something a little more liquid, a little harder to grasp.

Dreamlike, the sea gushes in, out, in.

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A periwinkle (left), ocean quahog (back) and pirate glass (right)

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