Afloat

I

Landing in the Past

There’s a moment when, riding a heavy swell, you make the choice to turn the nose of your little boat to shore and let the breakers tower above you as you ride their raging forms towards a beach. If this has been a long journey, and this is a shoreline you don’t know, there’s fear in the possibility of a black rock reef or other unseen danger amid the swirling foam. But once the breakers grip you, there’s no hope of stopping and little chance to turn.

It's the point just before committing to that chaos that’s most memorable. One moment the swell lifts and drops you dramatically but gently. It carries you up and down twenty feet in the space of seconds while you guide your bow along a low-risk line. Suddenly, though, you’re staring at the backs of rows of water that are angry and angular. They appear willful and alive in the strange shapes they seem to choose to take. What was slow, inky swell now runs white and turquoise and is violently, frantically, loud in all directions.

There’s a moment, looking at the back of the towering breakers, but before the white water hammers down on you, when you imagine what it will feel like to be in their midst. You experience a stunningly vivid empathy with a version of yourself who is just two short seconds in the future but who still feels an infinity away. That moment of visceral imagining is both accelerated and slowed, both full of joy and fear. It involves committing yourself completely to a drastic risk, taken in faith that perfect safety lies just beyond the bruising clatter into sand.

This moment always lodges itself in memory in ways unlike anything else. It returns in dreams. It flashes suddenly into focus when waiting in a queue or immersed in office admin. What I love most about the way this sublime split-second echoes through memory is that it means that once you’ve had the ocean roar around you, it will never truly let go. It feels like you’re, paradoxically, scarred by joy. You return to everyday life a little wilder: you’re emotionally slightly unmoored, and psychologically salt-rimed. I spoke, in the course of this project, to people in care homes and on dementia wards, for whom memories of steering sea squalls long ago are keys that unlock their clear-eyed younger selves and inspire a kind of elemental eloquence.

These moments that twist time and skew perspectives do so in multilayered ways: they can seem to carry you beyond the present completely, evoking fellow feeling with those countless others whose daily lives have involved confrontation with ocean. The voices you hear on the wind might be men in sealskins or tweeds shouldering oars or paddles, or women in thick woolens, wading waist deep in sea to drag the boats ashore. They’re voices joined in the chanted rhythms that happen wherever a community comes together to haul its heavy boats. That your moment in the wave could be situated at any specific time between deep past and present seems as improbable as dry feet in a sea storm: nothing could make me feel more like a fragment out of time, or more like I was renewing a timeless dance of people, boats, and sea.  

To be a historian is to seek out the meanings of experiences like these: to observe their fabric and pull at its threads, unravelling any knowledge they might reveal. This book’s journeys among small traditional boats on North Atlantic seas, like its conversations with boatbuilders and seafarers, and its many nights spent on elemental shorelines, are attempts to attune empathy with past people of the coasts. To recount their boatish stories and songs is to build a portrait of distinctive ways of life and modes of thought. To try to think with their sea knowledge, and see the world as if through their eyes, is the way to survive in a small boat at sea. But I hope to show across the pages of this book that the diverse worldviews possessed by these cultures of small boats also provide possibilities for living that can help our floundering societies stay afloat.