Since Before We Were Human

---01.18.2000---

I did an honest day’s work yesterday—well, it was more like a couple of hours—helping Patricia over on Gugh. She’s great. She asked for help getting some things done around the garden, general laborer stuff. So the two of us cleared a section of overgrown grass and bramble from behind the house. It was good to be outside and work up a sweat.

I went over to her house again today and tried crossing the Bar while it was still partially covered by the tide. The water rose to the top of my wellies within a few steps and the current still streamed through a gap in the sand further ahead. It was a little after 3pm. I decided to sit on the beach, wait for the tide to go out, and watch the moon rise over Gugh in the clear, blue, sunny, afternoon sky. It was such a joy to feel the sun on my face after a couple of weeks of clouds.

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Patricia told me this story the other day... In the late 1960s, when she was nineteen and living in Australia, she fell in love with an Englishman. He and she, and about four other people, had the idea to get on a boat and sail back to England. They stopped here and there to work a little and take on supplies. I remember her saying something about go-go dancing in South Africa. During the course of the trip some people left; others joined; and, all in all, it took them two-and-half years. Amazing! Nineteen! See you later Mum and Dad. I’m sailing off to England. She reported that all they said was, “Well, if that’s what you really want to do...” All I can say is, right on... That’s the best story I’ve heard since, “I grew up on an island a mile wide.”

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This evening I had the pleasure of taking part in a rare fishing experience that happens maybe once a year. The tide was still out and I joined a couple of fathers and sons from the island and went down to the Bar.

A few of us stood on one end of the beach and held an end of a fishing net while James Ross rowed out into the Cove, letting the net pay out as he went. At the other end of the beach he rowed back into shore. The net was now set in a long arc across the Cove. The long, rectangular net had an ample line attached to each corner. The lines now lay on the beach, two at each end.

We began to work in groups of three, one group at each end of the net, to pull the lines up the beach, now broad and flat near the shore with the vanished tide. We were all spaced out evenly on the ropes. As we pulled, and one of us got to the top of the beach, we’d run down to the shore, grab the line anew, and pull again. Then the next person would run down and so on, conveyor-belt style. At first it was easy but, as the net began to tighten and fill, it got progressively heavier. By the end I lugged and groaned, digging into the sand with every step, my entire weight heaving on the line over my shoulder.

Then I saw a different color line pass though my hands, an indicator that the net was near. A few moments later it appeared on the shore teeming with fish: a salmon, a couple of hefty mullets, and about two-hundred smelt. We filled a few of big buckets and set the rest free.

Fish are amazing. Our pile of smelt, at home, shimmering in the light, were all chrome, gray, and diamonds. They reflected the thin blues and purples of prisms and electrical flashes, their forms so sure, sleek, and pure, perfected over the long arc of time.

After another brief moment of reflection, they were scaled, gutted, relieved of their heads and tails, fried in a pan, and consumed with homemade brown bread, onions, mustard, and beer. So delicious! I hope with my heart that this pleasure will be experienced by many generations to come.

After dinner we cleaned up. I scooped the transparent scales out of the sink like a handful of crushed ice. Then Phillip and I took the heads, tails and entrails (along with the winkle shells from the other night) down to Periglis Cove and gave them back to the sea, the crabs, and the gulls.

Walking home I felt close to something very old: I’d taken part in a group hunt and been given a share of the catch. How many millions of years has that been going on? I didn’t think of it at the time, but I sensed now, from a far-off place, the vitality and charge of a behavior, an interdependency, that we’ve been engaging in since time immemorial, since before we were human.

I can’t think of anything else besides sex that shares a similar significance. And that delicate, fine, fiery bliss has been so shackled and used by media and commerce, that one must now search with great patience to find its gentle heart.

Here’s to finding joy in the deep arcs of time.