Sandy Hirst Revisited

The way in — a broad track, columns of tall pines, shafts of sunlight slanting through as from the mullioned windows of a cathedral.

I step into a side aisle through the ferns, climb over a fallen tree trunk and come to the edge of the wood. A row of huge concrete cubes, anti-tank defences from the war. East Lothian was once considered highly vulnerable to invasion. Now these dark blocks subside gently into the vegetation, in a strange way become part of the landscape.

I pause and run my hand over the cold surfaces, then pass through, emerging into the light, and find myself once again standing at the neck of the long, narrow peninsula that is Sandy Hirst.

Or, to look at it another way:

I stand on the shore — the sea and its ceaseless approach, the sand shifting beneath my feet.. I’m on the edge, a microdot of human consciousness nudging through time, recycling future, present and past, as the waves quietly approach and withdraw, reveal and delete, discover and forget. There is a story about how I came to be here. It involves an unimaginable explosion, much heat and gas, atoms, whirling matter, suns…then a planet, fire and ice, sludge, a single cell and an everbranching tree of life spiralling down, up, to me, standing here reflecting on all this. It is, like everything else in my head, part of the phantasmagoria of scraps of knowledge, fleeting impressions, intentions, memories and feelings which make up human experience, where time is not linear but swirls about, appears and disappears at will, chaotically, like the little sandfly darting around my feet.

I set off along the shore into a cloudy sun. Angular rocks and boulders straggle out into the bay, dumped here by glaciers. I am marking my progress with a series of pen sketches done with a sepia fine-liner; I have also brought my camera. Today my eye is drawn to textures, surfaces. Sometimes in my eagerness to lap up the broad view I miss the wonders that lie at my feet.

Shells, gull prints, driftwood, twigs…..

The vegetation of Sandy Hirst is monopolised by marram grass and sea-buckthorn, whose berries are ripening in the September sun.

They are said to do wonders if you make them into juice or tea. I haven’t tried it ….yet.

Despite the masses of impenetrable buckthorn, there are in the central part of the spit small verdant groves of sycamore, their seeds helicoptered on the wind or floated on the tide from the woods of Tyninghame Links.

Whatever groundswell of evolution keeps us pushing on through time, I for one often experience life as a series of contingencies — odd, accidental connections, chance collisions. Logically, there has been a sequence of cause and effect that has led to the little girl waving from her window as your train speeds past but you are not party yo it. The experience seems random and takes on some sort of personal significance…which will be different, of course, for the girl at her window.

I collect a few contingencies today. Spent cartridge in the sand, shells betrothed to the buckthorn, feather lodged in wormwood…..

I am approaching the tip of Sandy Hirst. The rocky shore has given way to a gentle arc of sandy beach. The tide has washed it clean and left it out to dry.

Across the estuary, shifting planes of light, and the plume of smoke from the cement works as good as any weather vane…the wind is from the south today.

There is a low sandy bank at the south-easternmost end of the spit where I like to sit, looking across to the plantations of Hedderwick, part of the John Muir Country Park. Between us the Tyne slides serpent-like towards the bay and the Firth and the North Sea. A little act of grace…or another contingency…as a solitary swan drifts by.

I sit on the sandy bank lost in wind and light. A couple of pencil drawings…..

The turning point — the route back along the nether shore, into the freshening wind. and the hazy green layer of the salt-marsh, a huge sponge sucking in the tide and releasing it twice a day. The shoreline is intermittently marked by curiously stunted sycamore trees, their roots exposed by the attrition of the wind and wet, a tangled network drawing whatever it can from the sandy soil.

On the outer fringes of the marsh grows the silver-grey foliage of sea-wormwood. I remember smelling it before I knew what it was….a sharp, aromatic scent, lavender with a bitter edge, absinthe. Boiled into a potion it is supposed to cure nervous disorders. I’ll remember that. It flowers late…still no sign of the tiny dusty yellow florets.

Towards the neck of the spit the buckthorn peters out and marram grass flows up from the shore in waves. The response to light dwells deep in the animal consciousness: sleep and waking, birdsong and silence, the rousing of a long hibernation. In human animals it has acquired a powerful, often strongly spiritual symbolism. I cannot explain what is going on when a shaft of light breaks through the clouds. An image flashes into my mind. In the Lakes once, walking along the ridge of Scar Crags and Causey Pike having slogged up Grisedale Pike in overcast weather suddenly the shadows cleared and sunlight gleamed through, illuminating the fellsides and valleys below. That sensation of excitement and uplift! Here things are not as dramatic, but the light glittering off the narrow blades of marram, flickering in the wind, has the same effect.

Driftwood, sometimes sizeable boughs and complete trees, ends up on this shore. I come across a prostrate trunk, stripped of its bark by the weather, naked. I sit down on it for a while, looking out over the salt-marsh and time once again wheels back….. I am sitting at my father’s bedside. He is dying of cancer, drifting in and out of the morphine.

Driftwood

A beached tree trunk
white as bone, the quiet tide
folding over the clean sand
like the sheet of the bed I tucked him in
and saw his eyes look through me.

Then I was holding the bones
of his hand, that stranger,
my father, while he muttered
something about a brewery
and his face emptied.

But, like the waves, the generations keep coming, throwing up fresh souls on the shores of life. So when my youngest grandson arrived, little Laurie James, I wrote a poem for him.

Looking back across the sand I see
a little set of footprints by my own
uniquely tracing out a special track,
risking the shore where, in good time, you’ll find
infinity in the castles you will build,
eternity in the pebbles you’ll be skimming.

Just now, my facebook friend, I’m watching you
asleep. I feel your tiny fingers reaching out…..
maybe one day you’ll lead me by the hand,
enticing me along the ways you’ve wandered,
so that sometime you’ll remember an old man

Looking out to sea, watching the streaming waves
Come in, come in, forever coming in.

I’m almost at the end, or is it the beginning, of Sandy Hirst and I decide to cut across the marsh. The channels and ponds are pools of sky. My boots squelch in the spongy moss. I hop across the narrow silt gullies noting to my delight little flourishings of sea-asters, relatives of the Michaelmas daisy, now in flower.

Eventually, I gain firm ground, climb the bank and once again pass through the defence works. I have left Sandy Hirst behind. There is a stone seat here with the name ‘Anne Lewis’ on it. Thank you Anne, whoever you are, were. It is good to sit here and look back over the salt-marsh and the sandy spit. It’s been an excursion not only for my booted feet but also for the ebb and flow of that seductive illusion, my soul.

A couple of pages from my sketchbook:

The way out — a neat stubble field, pale ochre in the autumn sun, along a track lined with tall beech trees. I look at my watch. I must get back. Clock-time resumes.