I paused briefly, kneeling at the water’s edge, waiting for that split-second when the next small wave splashed on the pebbles at my feet. Fwush, it crumbled gently upon the shingle then began to drag itself backward, teasing along the shoreline as it went. I slipped the dogfish into the pull of the backwash and watched on as it swept its tail back and forth, sinuously slipping out of sight, none the worse for its brief encounter with me.
I straightened up, staring for a second at the patch of water where the fish had been, then widened my focus to take in the whole scene: a glorious early spring evening, a sky reddened by the setting sun, a gentle high tide and the company of a good friend as we caught a few fish and set the world to rights. What could be better?
Time for coffee. I dried my hands and turned to see my fishing buddy, Dai, crouched over the pebble bank on which we stood, clacking his way through layers of rounded stones as he scooped out a hollow and placed at its base a stack of kindling he’d brought especially.
Within seconds, the first fingers of flame clutched at the air as though the fire were trying to pull itself up into existence from nothing. They twitched and flailed and grabbed at the empty evening, desperate for any kind of purchase, so Dai ad I wandered back and forth across the strand line gathering armfuls of driftwood dumped there by the previous tide, dumping it near the fire, enough to see us through the rest of the session.
We stepped back to survey our work and there it was, a simple pile of driftwood. But it wasn’t. As I sat and looked at it, it became, once again, its constituent parts: fence pickets and pallet wood; logs and limbs; broken beams and box sides. Minutes passed, then hours, the fire magnetising us into some kind of orbit from which we only occasionally managed to free ourselves in order to rebait or recast r reel in a stray fish.
I don’t know how long I sat there for, all told, but as I fed the fire, offering up each piece of wood in turn, I followed them back, though the successive tides that brought them here, through the ebbs and the flow, the springs and the neaps, on out into the globe-circling gyres until they were washed back to all their imagined points of origin.
Here that fence post sits, planted once again in the manicured Wicklow lawn of the local History teacher, placed there by his own hand two years after he moved in with his young bride. That fence had marked the line between lawn and outer world, defined the play boundaries of his children and grandchildren for years until decades later, the children long since moved on and aged themselves, the empty house fell into disuse and disrepair.
There, those slats from a wooden fruit crate once held oranges; big, round ripe oranges that sat like miniature suns beneath the beating heat of the real thing as it shone down upon a little fruit merchant’s stall in the corner of a Marrakech market.
This broken pole, once part of a broom handle, had been the busiest of them all, sweeping back and forth, endlessly back and forth, keeping clear the floor of a Norwegian dockside warehouse as the man who wielded it spent forty years staring out through the doors at the same square of the world, watching the ships come and go through summers and winters, dreaming of retirement travel ad far-off places.
As each piece burned I followed it to another of those untold places: Liverpool, Glasgow, Seville, Reykjavik, Nice, Istanbul, as the stories were released in all their colours as the salt-soaked grain of the wood crackled and gave itself up to the fire’s touch.
On still they went, beyond the mundane, beyond the subjugation of human functionality until finally, each of those chunks of wood came to settle in woodland, forests, copses, plantations, part once again of the trees from which they were cut.
I saw them sway and bend and thrash in the harshest of storms; I watched them grow and reach out through nights and days and nights and days, their canopies seeming to flame in the light of each dawn, casting shadow om everything below, and I listened on for what seemed like an eternity as the daydream winds coursed and pulsed through their leaves time and time again like the sound of a gentle tide lapping onto a beach.
