The sea announces itself long before you see its waters. The trees thin on the approach and the land leans back, scooping you up into a sky grown large enough to accommodate the broad horizon past the next incline. The clouds breach the land, sailing upward on unseen forces and before you can take in the magnitude of their towering shadows, you are plunged into the panorama of the bay.
It is a flatworm of concrete, bristling with streetlights, that leads you across the tight bunch of hills, crossed with the gold of wheat and the green of fallow. When the car slows, there is a moment to appreciate the uncut land beyond the steel barriers. A tangle of rust-red sprigs sticking up between yellow bunches of flowers on a verdant plain. Then you are drawn through a nest of beige buildings, chipped and drained of colour by the barrage of high winds that push against the car’s steering.
Occluded by the onset of man-carved stone, it is an echoing shock to see the titanic carvings of nature. There it lies; a vast, sunken valley etched out eons ago by the manifold mechanisms of the earth and later flooded by a heaving mass of salinity. The sole witnesses to this creation sit beyond the confines of the bay, menacing on the horizon, obscured by a fog which is pierced by their peaks.
Halted, the car’s engine hums no more. Outside, the wind closes the door for you.
The waters are as brown as the sand that skirts them. The rush of white froth delineates the border between these two states and the static ripple on the wet beach mimics the live one seething amidst the waves.
Scattered grains are invisible on the strong gusts that cleave across the beachfront. All the denizens of this place huddle as they walk, leaning into themselves as if shielding their vision will conceal them. To open your mouth is to invite the sand in. So you bow your head like the rest.
At the tip of Trafalgar Point, large rocks gather around the assembled ones, covered by patches of pastel-yellow lichen. A rail, the teal of oxidised copper, runs the circumference of the pier. It is the sole boundary between you and the agitated waves, clapping against the stones below.
To the left, the open expanse of the coast is as flat as it is wide. The sepia of the sand and the sea is pressed below an iron sky and somewhere beyond your vision, the horizon melds them as one. The yawning volume of this image draws you in as surely as it sucks back the swollen tides.
To the right, the misted patchwork of human interference dots a coliseum of uplifted earth. Layers of rock enclose this churning void as it eats away at their bowels.
You see the head of a junior leviathan, it's head alone greater than the entire settlement, bulging below the water fogged with sediment. A single bellow would shatter the molecules of all the fragile things that cling to the surrounding hills. But only its eye, a gilt ring glowing, breaks the surface for a momentary glance at the tiny world above. For as vast as this place is to your form, this is but a nesting ground for the colossal beast, now too old to linger here. With that glance, all the tides and currents turn as it heaves its mass through these cold waters and pushes itself out into the fathomless abyss of the ocean.
With a blink, the vision troubles you no more.
Minutes later, you are eating a frankfurter and fried onions wrapped in a soft bun. A bag of salted chips threatens to blow away in the wind or else be consumed by the gulls looming on the lampposts above.
The swell of the bay settles.
Paddy Dobson
28th July 2020