Nowhere Man 2

Returning from my service with the RAF, I returned home to the island. I was fit, clean-cut, and looking.

Life felt slow moving. I bought a secondhand Norton 750 motorcycle for the sake of my sanity. Dad was doing well; the cod wars were ending and in the nine years away, Dad took out a loan and purchased a second trawler, Nights Shadow, equipping her with new, superior equipment.

Local folk, their businesses killed off by the Cod Wars, felt grateful to find work. I had forgotten the bitter icy chill blowing in off the rough waters. The pungency of decayed and discarded fishing nets, lobster pots, and diesel engine fumes assaulting my nostrils. In winter, the cold air bit hard, the wind came from the northeast, bringing blizzard conditions. Long months in which Dad and the men worked under an iron-gray sky. The summer brought its warmth: the emerald greens, gold, orange, browns, pinks, and blues that glowed, lighting up the mountain’s south side.

Trawlermen will tell you there are only two ways of gaining riches: one is finding it in oneself over wealth or increasing your possessions by decreasing someone else’s. I grew up among people who, and this is the truth, did not concern themselves with wealth, but with life’s riches. There is a difference. The richness of a life involving hard work, fierce manual labor is not comparable to a man working the stock market. Wealth may divide their lifestyles, but the richness of life separates them as men. I was never a trawlerman at heart. My father knew that. I had a softness that let me down, yet the love I had for him was hard as a rock. Never broken.

Time felt like it had stopped still. Island folk seemed oblivious to modern life, away from the harbor and the shores. I had returned to be with people who knew nothing about excursions into drugs, promiscuity, curiosity, and computers, yet none appeared disillusioned with their lives. 

I sat in dad’s study, sitting in his chair, looking out across the Sound. A study filled with banged up furniture, old photos in frames, Margaret Tarrant prints hung on pale yellow walls, and seafaring memorabilia that spoke to dad’s personality. A calm sea made Dad uneasy. Without wind, without swell, the sea was not itself. It was always hiding something, luring men with its peaceful mask. For Dad, the ocean and the heavens were as one, and I sensed, after he retired, a great loneliness filled his heart.

No longer a child, but a returning military officer, I still wanted to remember the hours spent above the shoreline walking with Dad. But I knew if I remained with my parents after military service, I would be the author of my own sad story.

I met no loves while serving. I’d kissed a few, felt up a couple, but was still a bachelor. They tell me everything comes to whoever waits. So I waited.

Katie was Swedish. Her beauty was the cliché of her nationality. It was a serendipitous meeting; she took the wrong order at a coffee shop in London. We laughed and spoke about how she was handling being away from home. We agreed to meet again the following day. She was generous, kindhearted, and alone in a foreign country. A month later, Katie took three day’s sick leave from working as an exchange nurse in a London hospital. She had agreed to visit the island. We flew to Glasgow and rented a car, boarding the Ferry at Oban. We walked the cliff tops, sat on the harbor wall, with our backs to the colorful buildings that form a rainbow around the harbor.

I had become a different man to the one I imagined myself to be after spending so few days with Katie. I knew nothing about love outside of what I felt for my parents. If I was indeed falling in love with Katie, I remember it feeling full of joy and laughter. She was a bright flash, a beacon, a light, a vision, a woman waiting to finish her love with one man. I wanted to be in her world; more romantic, more articulate, a man in her world, walking among other men. But how does a man like me, with no beginning, find enough in himself to offer everything to his end?

When I left Katie, having both returned to London, the pain was unimaginable. I had committed myself to HM Coastguard. Three months of training at Shoreham, and Katie was going back home to Sweden in three weeks. I signed up for three years.

Katie’s letter, written in London on the Thursday before she returned home, lay on my bed in Shoreham. I was always timid about her loving me, having known each other just four days. It was simple enough, she was returning to live in Sweden, to be with her family, adding that relationships are never solely about feelings, but practicality and place.

The first thing that occurred to me, laying her letter down, was that life was never going to be the same. For the next couple of days I tried to tidy up my own feelings. It felt so far back to the starting point.

Her letter ended: I never thought about meeting a man with strange gifts.

No woman is ever flawless perfection; no man ever meets every woman’s needs. I cannot brood or feel discontent. Katie had entered my life and knew the task I had set for myself. This was not the time to reconsider. I kept telling myself, it was four days in my life.

I had no friends to talk with, no-one who had gone the whole way with me. I had fought every day with G-forces, flight plans, exams, 14 hour long days. and then revision, revision, revision, only to fail at the advanced level. Now I felt challenged by the greatest force known to humankind; love. Fuck it. It’s just not worth it.

In life there are super achievers, at least if they excelled throughout their careers. After winning my wings, I graduated in the top ten percent of the class, and it was this achievement that earned me an application to join strike command as a candidate for advanced flight school. I was also a man born of rape, incestuous rape. I had no God given right to be alive.

Meeting Katie was a fleeting few days. Soon over. There were stark facts to be faced, an entire way of life to think about. Pride is an ancient treasure, a bloody revolution. I could never share the inner reservoir of my life, its murkiness, darkness, its indecency. It was better this way.

I left Katie’s letter on the table. If there is love, it is born in the pit of your stomach or it floats on the air, and if you can capture its beauty, it is yours just so long as you can let it go. It cannot be conditional, for if it were, the most reliable would be that of a woman in chains. It is a creation; a fulfillment. Love pushes you sideways, bites your lip, makes a mockery of you — but love is all.

I got back into the disciplined world of flying.

After my training was through at Shoreham, I met Steve in Amsterdam. Steve was a Greenpeace activist and had several times felt it suited me to the life of causing trouble. He talked about the cruelty and conflict going on, referring to commercial whaling in particular. I got caught up in his passion, his enthusiasm for the work. I toured Greenpeace headquarters with him. The pursuit of knowledge need not destroy the planet, he told me. Whales are being deafened and disoriented in the great silence of the seas.

They were then a young and dynamic organization and the public expected great things of them. An organization, through public funding, charged with the responsibility of bringing about answers to their concerns. Greenpeace could become one of the world’s brilliant environmental protectors.

We have grown up making mistakes. How else were we to grow? The world expects us to go on arguing for protecting our planet.

t Amsterdam, heading to Steenvoorde. It was cold and uncomfortable, impossible to get a bath. The food was poor. But what a delight it was to have no responsibility. I had no decisions to make and could waste time with a clear conscience. Till then, I always thought time precious, never affording myself the opportunity to use it wastefully. There was so much I wanted to learn, so many places I wanted to see, so many experiences I felt I couldn’t afford to miss; but the years were passing and time was short. The fact is, I had never been without a sense of responsibility. To what? Well, I suppose to the work. Steve was a founding director of the environmental group. I liked him enormously. He had conviction. What he asked gave me reason to think about my future.

People come into your life, and you know right away they were meant to be there, to serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson, or help figure out who you are or who you want to become. Steve was such a person to me.

Look, our role is to expose the environmental criminals and corporations, challenge governments when they cannot live up to their mandate to safeguard our environment and our future. Join us, Steve said, help to preserve our planet.

I had served twelve years working for the government. The idea of working against them did not settle easily with me. Steve invited me to travel to California with him, to San Diego to visit the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. There, we would meet Professor Walter Munk.

What have you got to lose? You’re wandering around like a gypsy. Come, see his work, I think it will give you new horizons, Steve said. Greenpeace was a name well known to me for its work. Still, it was never under consideration to become involved. First, those I met appeared shabby, a sorry bunch of individuals. Dear God, I’d have to wear a T-shirt and grow a beard.

Steve made plans. Three days later, we arrived at an aquarium on Point Tacoma, Washington State. There Tom, another friend of Steve’s, just as untidy, with a beard, joined us.

On September 27th, 1982, in the late afternoon, we three stood by the pool’s curved glass wall in which three Beluga whales swam confined. After a few minutes, two of the Belugas began swimming back and forth, looking at us with a particular curiosity. I won’t ever know what prompted me to place my lips against the glass and begin humming. The humming entered the water. Tom and Steve joined in. It was as if a song of compassion had reached through the humanly constructed wall of glass, transcending the perimeter of the unknown between species.

The whales are imprinting you with their sonar, Tom declared. This was the first interspecies communication I had ever had with whales. Something happened that was inexplicable to me.

Two days later, we traveled to San Diego. Professor Walter Munk was not a freak, not a scruff, not a sorry individual. Nor did he have a beard, but had committed his life to environmental issues and learning about whales and how they communicate? He explained the risk to whales, the increase in commercial shipping, intense, long-lasting sounds into the deep sound channel over long periods will undoubtedly interfere with whales’ ability to hear each other. Some whales communicate over long distances. Blue and fin whales find each other spontaneously over hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles. Listening to distant voices means listening for faint sounds. Take the Humpback. Their sounds are the most beautiful form of non-human culture we know. We don’t understand why the whales sing such elaborate songs. We know how tragic it will be to see them disrupted, Professor Munk explained.

I returned home on the last day of September 1982 with new visions regarding work. Mum was baking. I was a grown man, but being a boy still felt so real and close. On school days, I took a bit of getting up. Mum called me for breakfast three times, reminding me not to miss the bathroom on the way down. Mum, the one woman in my life who never knew when morning ran into noon; or when the clock said done. A child shouting for a towel also needs help to find a homework book, while a husband has forgotten where he last took off his glasses.

It is impossible to compile, neatly, what happened during each day for Mum. It started early every morning, ended late in the night, then the morning appeared again. No brief pause, no rest, not even a curve in the day. It was the household circle of life.

Being a child, life was more simplistic; I interacted with the world in long days of discovery; the first step taken, the first tooth grown (then lost) on the first day at school. It goes on and on. As a child, I felt things in different ways because feelings were also adventures. What I thought about music, games, school, and how I associated and made friends assured me that every day was different.

Mum appeared to be always standing in the kitchen, pressing clothes, polishing shoes, in my bedroom, helping me find matching socks, or making my school lunch before preparing my breakfast. I assumed, quite naturally, that she had a magic wand. The fact is, mum did it all without magic. There were other things, too, scraped knees, illness, all the different times when the safety of her arms made my whirling world seem still and calm.

Whenever neighbors and friends visited, mum was welcoming. She wanted everyone to feel at home, offering all to look in the cupboards to find a treat to have with their cup of tea. This might be a stretch for some, but not for mum. I don’t know what I can attribute her kindness to other than it being something beautifully natural. Tears flow today, just in writing.

That evening, we all went to the Craignure Inn. Dad played the mandolin while the island folk danced, the women still wearing pinafores. Men stamped their feet on the timber floorboards and thumped fists on tables, singing a sea shanty. Dad always said, even husky voices need to sing. I mean, how is it possible on a blank page to describe this joy? Music flying into the rafters, escaping out of windows, creeping under doors, and flooding into the street. So it was, on that one day, yesterday, in yesteryear, that my song lyrics, and Leonard’s too, washed out from those windows and across the street.

Life, as I recall, could not be better, even if damned by the rainbow.

But where was Katie?

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Part 3 soon