Out of Place No.04: 'The Summer Book' by Tove Jansson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Floating on the water like a drifting leaf.’ – Islands and imaginary worlds in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness.

In a cabin on an island somewhere in the Gulf of Finland, a little girl awakes under a full moon to find herself alone in bed. Perhaps it is the moonlight that illuminates and sweeps across the island to wake her, like the sea covered by ice at its shores. She remembers that she is sleeping in a bed by herself on the island because her mother is dead. She climbs out of bed and looks out of the window. It is April, and the floor is very cold under her feet. The fire is lit and flames flicker on the ceiling. The black ice on the sea mingles with reflections of the room, and its furniture and objects. It appears as if the suitcases and trunks that are lying open on the floor are filled with moss and snow, and ‘coal-black shadow’. There is a dreamlike intensity to the images and reflections that she sees, a mingling of perspectives of inside and outside, so that we are not sure if she is awake or dreaming. She watches their luggage float out in a river of moonlight, ‘All the suitcases were open and full of darkness and moss, and none of them ever came back.’ As she drifts back to sleep, Sophia lets the whole island float out on the ice and on to the horizon, as if she is letting go.

The Summer Book is full of such moments of space and solitude. Ali Smith writes that ‘the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.’ The presence of water is a constant and the book is full of images of floating and drifting, sinking and diving. For the inhabitants of an island, the sea is always there, ‘a long blue landscape of vanishing waves,’ an immersion in water. The book contains beautiful and striking descriptions of the sea and the archipelago, such as the arrival of a storm, when the island begins to look small and insignificant and the sea becomes immense, ‘white and yellow and grey and horizonless’. 

Tove Jansson, known mainly as creator of the Moomins, was a writer, illustrator, and painter, who wrote several novels and short stories for adults including The Summer Book, published in 1972. Running through the book is the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter, and their shifting perspectives, which Jansson navigates with a light touch. They are companions who explore and have adventures together, arguing and playing together during a summer on the island. Recurring throughout are their thoughts and conversations which touch on questions about life and death in a way that is open-minded and truthful, irreverent, and unconventional. 

There is a sense of displacement and loss that comes from those images of the suitcases gliding away, the black ice and the moonlight, reflections of the darkness outside and the fire inside. This moment of grief is never dealt with explicitly, but perhaps a sense of loss hovers at the edges of the narrative. Jansson wrote The Summer Book after her mother’s death and in some ways the book feels like a remembrance of absent friends, and of an intense spirit of creativity and imagination which seems emblematic of her art and personal relationships. Contained within its pages is a deeply held belief in difference and free thinking, and a tolerance for others. It is a book about age and wisdom – ‘you have to come to it by yourself’ - that manages to be both weighty and understated, philosophical and poetic, moving and very funny. 

It is a book that resists characterisation and one that creates space for the reader through its structure: a series of vignettes, of connecting episodes and stories that are interlinked and overlapping. Ali Smith describes how the ‘profound quiet of the setting’ allows space for all the things left unsaid to be heard. ‘Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story.’

It is a book that rewards re-reading, one of those books in which you notice different things each time you read. Reminding me of a time when I sat down to write, with the book beside me, in the early mornings of a long dark winter. I would set an alarm for 5am and sit with a blanket around me, often lighting a candle, and write for an hour or two when daily life would start to intrude again; the rituals of getting ready for school and work. The flame of the candle was the space I was carving out for myself, and sometimes a glimmer of an idea would surface. Writing back through the lens of memories real and imagined, I started to realize that it was places I was seeking to capture in words, a particular kind of longing.

The Summer Book is rich in place with a deep respect for the natural landscape. The setting is a tiny rocky island in the Pellinge archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. Tove and her brother Lars built a house on the island of Bredskär in 1947, and Tove and her long-term partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent many years together on a nearby island Klovharun further out on the rim of the archipelago, where it is possible to visit their summer cottage. The book is set during a summer, or perhaps a series of summers spent on the island: ‘It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.’ For me, Tove’s writing, and her descriptions of the island, render a landscape I recognize from summers spent in Sweden as a child, the forests, lakes and archipelagos, the moss and granite rocks. The vividness of that landscape for me feels like the experience of summer, a place I associate with space and light.  

The book describes how these tiny rocky islands are remarkably resilient and self-contained. A small island ‘takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is a drought the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it and wait quietly in their roots.’ The human inhabitants of the island are self-sufficient too and the book is full of reflections on island living and island dwellers. In her foreword to The Summer Book, Esther Freud describes her visit to the island and how amazed she is to find how tiny it really is. She marvels at the use Jansson made of her surroundings ‘investing so much detail in every patch of ground’. Here, she thinks, was a writer who understood ‘the proper magnitudes of our small worlds’.

Although its setting is a tiny island, it is a book that is full of travel and imaginary worlds. When a picture postcard of Venice arrives one day, Grandmother begins to recall her travels in Venice and Sophia is curious about this city built on the water. Tove herself loved to travel and had spent time in Italy. The postcard is ‘the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen. There was a long row of pink and gilded palaces rising from a dark waterway that mirrored the lanterns on several slim gondolas. The full moon was shining on a dark blue sky, and a beautiful, lonely woman stood on a little bridge with one had covering her eyes.’ The image of Venice sinking into the sea fuels their imaginations and they build their own pretend version of Venice, carefully constructing palazzos and bridges and gondolas: ‘There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom.’

For Grandmother, moments of stillness and of careful observation are meaningful. She observes with care a blade of grass, a fragment of seabird down, becoming entranced by tiny details - the way they are constructed, how they move in a draft of air. This attentiveness to details can be revelatory, and Grandmother knows that she must give these moments her full attention: ‘It was important for her not to stand up too quickly, so she had time to watch the blade of grass just as the down left its hold and was borne away in a light morning breeze. It was carried out of her field of vision, and when she got on her feet the landscape had grown smaller.’ A tiny piece of driftwood, a scrap of bark that she finds on the shores of the island, could become a whole world. ‘If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools.’ 

Running through the book is a deep awareness and respect for the living creatures they share the landscape with, for every plant, insect, bird, and animal that dwells on the island. The magic forest is a ‘dense, sheltering wall of trees’ that ‘had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable.’ They leave the trees untouched, for to clear a space between them or attempt to separate them ‘might lead to the ruin of the magic forest’. Grandmother sits in the magic forest and carves animals from driftwood that she finds: ‘They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest.’ As for the forest, left to themselves, ‘the trees slipped deeper and deeper into each other’s arms as time went by.’

This sense of preservation and letting things be is part of their existence on the island, to leave parts untouched, to not leave too many traces. They are part of a bigger system, a sustainable island environment in which you sense that all things are equal and have their place. The human inhabitants of the island stick to narrow paths by which they wander the different parts of the island, the rocks and to the sand beach, bypassing the carpet of moss and being careful not to step on the frail moss: ‘Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on the moss, it dies.’ Their habitation of the island is based on a deep understanding and reverence for the other forms of life with which they co-habit. 

‘The Tent’ is an incredibly beautiful and moving section of the book, in which the story seems to echo through the dual perspectives of grandmother and granddaughter. Sophia wants to hear Grandmother’s stories about the past and about her days as a Scout leader, and what it was like to camp outside in a tent. But when Grandmother tries to put her memories into words, they feel fragile and distant; it is as if everything is gliding away from her. Sophia sets out to spend the night in a tent, and as she sets out on her adventure, the creek where the tent is placed starts to feel like a ravine, distant and forsaken. She zips up the little yellow tent which feels small and friendly, ‘a cocoon of light and silence’. In the long summer evenings, it is still light outside, and she falls asleep. Later, waking up in the night, she finds that darkness has entered the tent and now surrounds her. She can hear strange movements and sounds, ‘the kind no one can trace or account for’. In this darkness she finds she really listens for the first time in her life and notices the feel of the ground under her feet which is ‘cold, grainy, terribly complicated’. In this awareness and surrounded by darkness she has the sense that the island has grown tiny, that it is ‘floating on the water like a drifting leaf’. Returning to find Grandmother awake, Sophia begins to tell, in her own words, what it feels like to sleep in a tent.

As the summer nights begin to fade away, the human inhabitants begin to remove their marks and traces from the island, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.  Grandmother feels the island becoming cleaner and returning to its original condition. It begins to feel lonelier and more distant and secret. There is a sense of taking leave, as Grandmother sits by the water at nightfall, watching the passing boats. The Summer Book is full of such quiet moments, where the lightness of Tove’s writing reveals depths. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

The Old Fishing Village

By Holger Klein:

For us it was once a landmark, the old rusty wind wheel beside the channel connecting the small fishing harbour with a large lagoon, a former bight of the Baltic. The wheel was the first we saw when we approached the harbour on the new road from the west. Once the wheel drove a wooden Archimedean Screw which drained the surrounding wetlands for agricultural use. In our early years, we visited the wheel occasionally, musing how it works. 

The lagoon was separated from the Baltic by a spit which was extending westward over centuries until only the small channel-like outflow was left. During the last decades I often visited the harbour at the mouth of the channel, but it was only a few years ago when I realised that the wheel is no longer visible from the road. Rusty and motionless, it is now hidden behind high trees and only to be seen from the small bridge crossing the channel. 

In early summer, I took the small path (No Trespass!) through high reeds towards the wheel. I was curious if the Archimedean Screw was still in its place, possibly even workable. But there was no way through. The shaft for the inflow was totally overgrown by thick brambles, unpassable in shorts and without a machete. But a few metres away I found a new drainage ditch where an electric pump took over the wheel’s work. 

For me, this wind wheel stands for all the things that changed during the last decades, in the harbour and in the old fishing village about 2 km to the east. It was by the late 1960s when we discovered the village and the harbour, surrounded by lakes, large beech woods and endless fields in the hinterland. 

On our first visit to the village, we took the old small and curvy road leading north-eastward from the main road directly to the beach near a row of green wooden sheds. Here the fishermen stored their gear, mended their drying nets suspended between wooden poles, or repainted their boats. In the shallow bight small open fishing vessels were gently rolling at their moorings, gulls and other waterfowl soaring in the wind. We instantly fell in love with this place and for me it felt like paradise.

On both sides of the village the cliff line changes into smooth shores. In the west lies the former bight with the channel and the wheel, the spit secured by a long dike. Eastwards lies a smaller lagoon, separated from the sea by a barrier beach. It is also a former bight, connected to the sea by a small, meandering outlet. Both lagoons are surrounded by extended wetlands and reed belts, partly protected as bird reserves. 

All along the coast are broad sand and pebble beaches, surrounding the shallow bight with a seabed of sandy patches, big boulders, and seagrass beds. The colour of the water changes according to the weather, offering a range from a dull steel grey over all shades of blue and green, culminating in a tropical turquoise over the sand beds on sunny days. I especially love sunny days when cloud fields are drifting moderately over the sky, causing a pattern of continually changing water colours with different intensities.

One or two years after our first visit my father bought a holiday apartment on the backside of the cliff. Here I spent most of my leisure time for years: First school holidays and weekends, and later, with my own kids, also a lot of our vacations. Right from the beginning I loved to walk the beaches for hours at all seasons, becoming a real beachcomber, a passion I’m still following today. 

However, gradually things were changing. The little harbour was enlarged and is now a marina for leisure boats, the fishery declined step by step, many houses have been renovated and enlarged, and of course new houses and hotels were built. The pub favoured by young people was closed and a spacious golf course was laid out just a few kilometres away. New green sheds were added to the old ones, hosting a sail and surf school and a cosy café. Today there are only one or two part-time fishers left who still use their sheds for the initial purpose. 

The coastline changes gradually too. Due to heavy landslides after strong, eastern gales the cliff retreated metre by metre over the years, an accelerating process due to climate change with severer and more frequent storms and higher sea levels. On the other side, the local campground at the small lagoon was closed, removed and changed into a nature and bird reserve, a place we often visit to observe birds. Not all changes are bad. 

The surrounding landscape changed only marginally. The lagoons are still surrounded by their broad reed belts, the large beech woods not cleared. Like a long swell on the open ocean, the seemingly endless fields are still waving over the soft moraine ridges, partly still owned by local counts. A few weeks ago, I swam together with my youngest brother out into the bight and we realised that, compared to the last decades, from this perspective only marginal changes are recognizable. However, the locals have to make their living and must adapt to the demands of modern tourism and therefore there are more changes to come during the next few years. 

Some years ago, the municipality set up a couple of plates along the promenade, showing old black and white pictures of the village. They were taken in the first years of the last century, about 120 years ago. Some photos show the proper village and we recognized a few things which we could still remember, though they disappeared during the last decades. Other pictures show the old fishermen sitting together on a bench in front of a shed, smoking their pipes and looking over the bay. Other pictures show them mending the nets or processing their catches in a small smokehouse. 

When we stroll through the village, occasionally times are merging. We ‘see’ how it looked a few decades ago and how things are today. It’s like walking in the same place simultaneously at two different times. And whenever I approach the village on the old avenue lined with mighty oaks on both sides and negotiate the narrow curves and the ups and downs of the road, when I pass the neolithic grave-mound to the right and the manor house and the wide view over the great lagoon to the left, I’m the boy once more on the day we discovered the village. 

***
Holger Klein is a retired oceanographer who spends a lot of time exploring the coasts of the Nordic Seas and isles, and is a regular hiker in Lapland. 

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Blowout Tide

By Joe Labriola:

You shift across the pebble-pocked sand, scouring the pale flaxen dunes for all manner of seaside treasures. Pink spiral shells and sand-smoothed stones are among your favorites, peeking out from the wild patchwork. But among these beautiful bits of beachside bounty, more than all else, you find trash.

You’ve noticed more in recent years. More and more. Harder and harder to ignore. Bleached water bottles and frayed strings sit tangled within the tidal muck. White bags hiss upon the tips of inland reeds, rippling in the cold March wind as if waving, as if wavering, as if breathing their surrender.

You aren’t a vagabond can collector or a hipster hobbyist. But you see. You see candy wrappers and drink caps. Glints of plastic waste simmer in the sunlit brine. You can’t say why you do it. You can’t say how much it helps. All you can say is that it just sort of feels like the right thing to do: picking it up, one piece at a time.

You and your four-legged companion work hard. Harder every time. You are the only two who seem to care, even as the ocean vomits more trash each weekend, seemingly to replace whatever you’ve filled your big black bag with, and then some.

“We just gotta keep at it, boy,” you say, struggling to maintain your balance upon a steep tuft as you pluck battered sandals and cracked milk jugs out of the weeds. “We’re doing good work.”

Your dog just sniffs and stares.

You continue this way for months. Years. You never venture beyond your route from the parking lot to the pier. There’s always plenty to clean right here. Always more and more.

But one day your old dog pants and wheezes. He sighs and slumps. The vet says he doesn’t have long. Maybe days. Maybe weeks. But not long. You know the truth but don’t want to believe it.

“It would be for the best if we put him down,” the vet tells you plainly.

“Not yet,” you strain to say back. “Not just yet.”

The next morning you take your old friend for one final stroll. It’s breezy, breezier than usual. But that’s never stopped you before. It’s slowed you, yes, but never stopped. You follow your usual path. Of course you don’t come close to getting it all. You never do. But you needn’t go far. You still fill your bags, and that seems to count for something.

“Biggest haul yet, boy!” you say through a gust, loading your garbage and recyclables into the trunk.

The old dog gazes back at you with big, shadowed eyes. He tugs on his leash. A weak motion but with conviction all the same. Maybe he knows?

You glance up toward the opposite direction where you’ve never ventured on your weekly cleaning treks. But why not? Why haven’t you ever gone that way? Because you like your way? Because you’re just used to it?

You don’t know such answers. But you smile tiredly and grab one more bag from the car.

You trudge down the beach together into the cutting wind. There’s even more trash this way. Much more. “Won’t get it all today, boy,” you call down to your friend. You continue, smiling as best as you can.

You stop after you reach a sharp bend along the dunes. You almost turn around here where the wind is strongest, rippling your loose shirt. But then you notice a small brushy clearing atop a stout cliff not far in the distance. Perched upon its edge are a group of teenagers: five or six scraggly-haired youths. They lounge in various positions, surrounded by beer cans and take-out food containers. Some of the debris has already trickled down the crumbling wall of hard-packed sand. You watch for a while. One kid hurls a sack of fast food remnants out into the water. Another chucks a half-empty beer at his friend, who dodges and shoves his friend back playfully.

They all laugh freely.

You open your dry mouth to cry out. But the warm wind sucks at your breath. You stare for another moment, and then finally just plop down in the sand, watching the trash-ridden tide rise closer.

“That’s enough, boy,” you say, scratching your old dog’s ear. “That’s enough.”

***

Joe Labriola is an author, podcaster, and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University in New York. His short fiction usually features some speculative or environmental lens with the goal of helping to raise awareness about ocean plastic pollution. He regularly hosts beach clean up events, presents lectures, and tries to spread awareness however he can. You can most often find him scouring his local shores filming his detrashing experiences—and enjoying a swim once the water is cleaned.

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

Reflections in the Maine Light

Photo: Tina Long

By Doug Long:

A hillside led to the sea—its rising waves tipped with white foam seethed in a rush over colored and smoothed stones. Gentle thunder filled the salt air. Then a quiet whoosh—a rhythmic encore at the water’s edge. 

Nowhere does the light change and reflect and lift my soul into unworldly realms as it does along the Maine coast. It’s oceans and lighthouse beacons and fog shrouded shores and granite rock peninsulas reflect nature’s spirit. It’s the essence of life. 

I stood a stone’s throw from an old three-story. While faded and worn, it was quintessential New England. Its paint weathered. Summer’s open windows displayed red geraniums. Steps to its front door were cracked, slanted from years neglect. But it somehow still stood—stubbornly proud in the growing light. 

The renowned Maine son, Andrew Wyeth, rowed his wooden dory here most mornings from a half-mile up the back bay. His reflections of Maine were often defined by the people who lived here—spending an entire summer in 1948 sketching, working his brush to capture the moment he saw Christina Olson on the ground; crippled in life, yet finding her way home from her garden of wild flowers unable to use her legs. 

He painted from an upstairs window. Hathorn Point was his canvas.

Richard Meryman, of Life Magazine decades ago, described the Olson House as “looming ... lit by slanting sun, weathered silver-gray ... soaked in coastal storms.” Meryman was invited deep inside the Wyeth world and learned how blank canvas became iconic art for the ages. 

It was a complex task. Wyeth appeared to view the Maine landscape in a way that exceeded sunlight and shadows. 

In Meriman’s book, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, he stated how the artist often contained fragments of the outdoors framed by windows, amplifying the mood and meaning of the interior. 

“The glimpse you get of a landscape, whets my imagination—if I don’t see too much,” said Wyeth.

Others deeply rooted in Maine’s granite and pine tried to capture the true light in books and artwork and narratives of nature. Winslow Homer had a carriage house transformed to an art studio at Prout's Neck in the late 1800’s. 

He captured sensory elements—the drama of the sea; the breeze of a passing storm and man’s relationship with the natural world.

“So I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat,” wrote Annie Dillard. “And saw a new world ... turning mute and perfect.”

Along the coast, it often becomes a world transformed from sunrise to sunset. 

I remember the early morning charter I once experienced on a sleek Alden-designed wooden schooner. As a young boy, John Alden’s family moved to the New England coast. It was here he often sat on a hillside overlooking a harbor filled with Grand Banks fishing schooners that the boy—a future naval architect—began to sketch the gentle curves and towering masts of pine and cedar and the canvas of billowing sails that would later inspire designs of boats considered classics today. 

His sketches would come to life.

Our sails were raised high as we left the tiny harbor. I could see the cedar shake cottages sprinkled along the shore—screened porches offering Maine-sized views of a flashing light on the point. The clamor of US 1 and lobster roll stands quickly behind us, a cloud of misty fog was soon filling the chilled air of late summer. There was a brisk rush of northeast wind as our captain adjusted his jib—a watery tide of salt splashing against the well-polished hull. 

I was suddenly thrusted free of life’s complexities—rolling waves rocking gently toward the Atlantic sea. 

There were barking seals on rocky islands; the bellowing fog horn from a distant cove, the light tap dance of rain and images of so many ancient mariners still peering ahead to distant horizons.

In 1943, Ruth Moore published The Weir capturing life survived on offshore places with fishing wharfs and wood-framed homes; the pined forests and jagged cliffs a stage for hard seasons and lonely years isolated from the mainland—lighting fires on cold nights and gathering cords of driftwood, “to git our stoves through the winter.”

She observed “spruce-covered islands ... neat against the horizon. To the east, the tremendous blue plain of the ocean spread, empty except for three lobster boats, small as bugs in the distance, circling for traps under the pale December sky.” Winter is a time, she once wrote, “the land huddles into itself—a time for “gear-overhauling in the fish houses ... of building traps and painting buoys.” 

She later describes an early Maine morning, “blue with snow and coming light, the deer comes to the orchard, digging with her cold hoofs for the frozen buried apples ... the boat is painted, content comes out or loneliness bites deep.”

Thoreau said coming here was like “returning to his senses ... seeing things purely extracted and dazed.”

“It rained all this day and till the middle of the next forenoon,” he reflected, “concealing the landscape almost entirely ... I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fur and spruce tops ... peering through the mist.”

He called it the “unaltered face of nature.” 

I stood in the waning light—Wyeth’s most painted New England house overlooking the sea. Laced curtains drifted gently from an upstairs bedroom. A harbor bell sounded. Its deeply pitched ring seemed echoing spirits of Maine’s past. 

I held a faded photograph—standing on a spit of sand. My little boy—just beginning to walk, running toward shallow waters. Tiny footprints. A pathway soon faded and washed by tides. Time stretched to years. The boy would move away; the future transcending like the downeast wind.

So much of this place now lived inside of me. The nighttime fires on rock-strewn beaches and blueberries on hillsides—the silent moose in the forest mist. Years of aging memories.

In that moment, I saw a young Wyeth oaring across in his wooden dory—paints and brushes and fresh canvas palates—ready to recapture the Maine light.

“People will say, ‘did you notice the amazing sulfur yellow in the sky’ ... “that stuff never strikes me to paint. It’s got to click with something I’m already thinking about,” said Wyeth. Then my hair rises in the back of my neck. I get goose pimples.”

“It was a place you were homesick for, even when you were there,” wrote Weir.

Reflections. Fragments of life—each a window in time.

***

Doug Long is a writer and traveler living along Florida’s Gulf coast who enjoys exploring natural landscapes. He often writes about people and places defined by nature; discovered in quiet coves, blue mountains and wild coastlines. Reflections in the Maine Light is an essay inspired by visits along the rocky shores of Maine. The piece was captured through a camera lens by his wife, Tina Long. Doug has been published in Lighthouse Digest, Saw Palms Literary Journal and Lowestoft Chronicle

Between the Forest and the Sea

By Sara Bellini:

I don’t know why the sea. I like expanding my gaze, following the waves in reverse until they reach the horizon and the water dissolves into the sky. It must be this idea of infinity - the line you can never reach, the water you cannot quantify - and of all the things that exist beyond the horizon and that I hold in my gaze without seeing them; another coast; another country; people and birds and trees. And while I contemplate these transcendental thoughts, I hear the waves in the background, repetitive and calming, always the same and always different.

When I was a child, we’d have a seaside holiday every year, and yet the sea of my childhood is different than that of my adulthood. The first one symbolised summer, ice-cream, playing and swimming, while the latter is more often a place of cold wind, of fish and chips, of walking and healing. This new relationship was forged around a decade ago, when I was living in London and unhappily so. Work was stressful and I needed to slow down. The lack of time, money and energy dictated my escape route: a Southern Railway train to Brighton. Every few months I would spend a day there, more rarely a night or two. I didn’t do anything special. I just wandered for hours and stared at the sea. 

When I found myself in a similarly strenuous situation a couple of years ago, with no possibility of taking significant time off work, I thought of the sea again. The closest option from Berlin was the Baltic. My friend K. also needed to step out of her life for a moment, so we stepped out of our lives together, at the same time anchoring each other in order to avoid drifting away. 

The trip itself was serendipitous, but the reason behind it was rooted in our existential impasse and the tiredness of not being able to find a way out. In our perception we were akin to severely ill pious women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Our Lourdes was nature. It was the sea.

If you take a train from Berlin up to what the Germans call the Ostsee, you reach a city called Stralsund. But the railway doesn’t stop there - it arches over the water to land again on Rügen. The island is connected to the mainland via a bridge, it’s that close. And yet, like every island, it is its own world. 

“Beyond their actual geographical coordinates, islands will always be places we project onto, places which we cannot get a hold on through scientific methods but through literature.”*

Rügen became famous during the 18th century, when the Romantics made art of nature and in nature itself found the sublime. It was the painter Caspar David Friedrich who showed the world the charm of the island, its stunning white cliffs covered in leafy trees on a background of cobalt and till sea. The Romantics had good taste and heavy moods, and we followed in their steps with a ravenous hunger for the sublime, looking for something that would overwhelm us with beauty and shake us out of our skin.

The core of our stay on the island was an excursion to Jasmund National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in the north-eastern part of Rügen. To be precise, UNESCO granted the title to the primeval beech forests in Germany, which shaped the whole continent after the last Ice Age, and have been severely damaged by human intervention. The title is there to keep these ecosystems intact, to protect them from us.

Tourists visit the park every year, mainly to see the impressive chalk cliff known as Königsstuhl. K. and I found it rather curious how people would pay to step on a platform on the cliff, rather than admiring it for free from an adjacent cliff. This is named for Victoria of Prussia (daughter of the English Queen Victoria) by her father-in-law Kaiser Wilhelm I, because she loved that spot. We thought about how the fact that someone once found that particular cliff so lovely brought someone with temporal power to give it a name and put it on a map, initiating a process of conservation and meaning-giving. It reminded us of the many ways in which human and natural history were intertwined, and how the former - shorter and more insignificant - has so often tried to claim the latter.

From the Victoria-Sicht we walked along the Hochufer - the path following the shoreline down below - dipping in and out of the woodland. It looked like some trees were growing from the rock walls, almost parallel to the sea underneath. A sign told us that the cliffs were made of chalk, which has the property of freezing during the winter and then thawing once more in spring. When that happens, the cliffs crumble down, taking pieces of the forest with them. This process is called natural erosion and it made me muse on the idea that the island we were on was the same island of Friedrich’s, but also significantly different. If I go back to Rügen every year, I thought, it will always be a geologically altered place, where the cliffs scratch and reshape themselves ever so slightly each spring: an island of entropy.

That was the first time I’ve walked in a forest on a cliff, and it was sensorially baffling. The smell of the wet ground and understory mixed up with the saltiness, whose scent was coming in waves, mirroring the water that generated it. On our right slugs and mushrooms, and on our left swans and a lonely red sail. 

All of a sudden we had to stop, stupefied and awed, on a man-made path descending towards the sea. The dappled light made everything look green: our hands, our faces, the ground. The phenomenon appeared almost fairy-like, and we felt like we were about to metamorphose into sylvan creatures. The light seemed to possess a tangible quality, a volume, a physical presence. A few steps away, everything looked normal, and wooden stairs led us down to a pebbled beach.

We sat in the sun, enjoying the marine breeze and the glistening depth of the Baltic. We had swum the day before and we would swim again the day after, allowing the cold water to remodel our skin and turn us into marine creatures, dissolving the distance between us and the natural world where we craved to belong.

Walking in the woods was a richly immersive experience and we felt we were part of our surroundings, just like the birches and the chaffinches, the fungi and the mosses. Our minds were too busy processing all these inputs, in being present, that we didn’t have the time to get caught up in anxious thoughts about the future and the lives we had briefly put on hold. Wasn’t that what we were looking for - a reminder that we were made of the same matter of the sea and the forest? The cliffs themselves didn’t worry about anything, including their own demise, so it felt silly to do anything other than simply being.

The trees suddenly ended at the outskirts of the village of Sassnitz. We walked silently under the sun to reach the station, barely meeting any other people. As our bodies moved from nature to tarmac interspersed with rose-studded gardens, our headspace shifted from a present mode to our city-life mode, at the same time leaning forward towards the future while looking backward at the past. And yet we knew we had left some of our worries back in Jasmund National Park, perhaps lifted up by the birch branches while we were staring at the green light.

We started and ended our stay on the island in the same way, with fish and chips and a cup of coffee from a stand near the beach in Binz. At that moment, it was the best fish and chips we had ever had.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

* Judith Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

View from Bo'ness Harbour

By Andrew C. Kidd: 

Pink skies purple the hills.
The contrast of colours sharp-edge
to collage like clippings
cut out of a magazine.

Raggy strips from lighter pages
tear softly across
in three or four distinct
tincture lines:

lilac, peach, cream and soft yellow
smudge the down-curtaining day.
A faint thumbprint
of the moon is half-pressed

slowly bleeding into evening’s
blue hues, blending with water’s margin,
interrupted by
light-dot lattice and towers ahead

from where smoke ropes up
or down
depending on whether fire or sky-melt
pulls you in the hardest.

***

Andrew C. Kidd is an emerging writer. He is currently writing poetry that explores the intersection of the environment and industry.

The Green of Swimming

By Sally Gander:

You slip into the water from the moss-wet shore, the slanted rocks sometimes sharp sometimes smooth beneath your palms as you edge your way deeper. The opening to the cove is white with surf but here the water is glass still and cold enough to make you gasp once, twice, three times, but then your lungs expand, the shiver over your skin rejuvenating against the humidity of the day. 

Your guide has brought you here from the village, trekking past a farm and through a verdant wooded valley where everything was some shade of green except for the dark earth of the path ahead of you, then up onto the cliff top and along and around and down a natural stairway created by layers of rock that have been folded and fractured into steps and gullies, small waterfalls and archways and the cave you swim towards now, the place known as the Witch’s Cauldron.

You want to swim inside but the gap between water and cave roof is too narrow and you imagine the clash of your head against the jagged rock, the witch hiding in the shadows to laugh at this fragile thing she has tempted into her lair.  Your guide beckons you closer to see the light beyond where a giant blow-hole resides and the witch keeps watch over the Cauldron itself.  We’ll be patient, your guide tells you, the tide is turning.

While you wait you touch the rock of the cave mouth, the browns and greens and yellows formed millions of years before humans were conceived, the world exploring its capability, playing with the potential chemistry and physics of the materials she was gifted. You run your fingers down a calcified vein that’s thick as a rope, formed by a rivulet of water, you suppose, but it is vein-like enough to be the back of the witch’s hand reaching over the cliff tops, her fingers deep in the water to find the things she needs for the cauldron, the seaweed and crustaceans and shingling pebbles and small silvery fish that bunch together in glittering camaraderie. 

As she works you lie back and float in the cradling stillness, letting your feet hang, only needing the smallest sweep of your hands to remain in place.  It won’t be long before the cold inches its way deeper into your body, numbing your fingers and toes and cooling your organs, but for now you rest on the rhythm of the tide, glimpsing the rocks and grassy cliff tops that frame the pale blue sky. 

Finally, the witch finishes her work and the tide retreats to her bidding. You return to the cave mouth to find your guide has already swum through, his face shadowed with the light beyond him. He reaches his hand out to you, Take your time, he says, take it slowly.

You touch the damp rock above you, kick your legs to move through the water, feeling the distance between the crown of your head and the cool cave roof, mere inches, sometimes less, and you are captivated by this sensation of buoyancy, of being drawn into the light of unknowingness and how quickly the cave opens up again, the roof now vast above your head and you within the glittering emerald green of the Witch’s Cauldron, smiling at the ease with which you can move into such a place.

You stop here and tread water, gazing at the witch’s creation and the power she has in those veined hands, and how, at other times when the volatile brews are composed and the tide is high, this cauldron becomes a broiling spitting turbulent fusion of white and dark, a culmination of everything the witch knows about the world, the actions and reactions, the people she has loved or been persecuted by, the centuries she has lived and endured and held faith regardless of her trials.

She knows the heat of chemistry that shapes the surface of this earth, the gravity that hugs things close, the movement of water and winds, of plants and trees and animals, of the animal humans who push beyond their natural realm.  She knows the power of the sea in which you swim and she has allowed you to be here.  Perhaps her new brew needed your human scent or the stirring kick of your tender legs, but you feel now that this emerald potion is complete and you are its ingredient as well as its recipient, held spellbound in the completeness of the universe — the sky, the rock, the water, the flesh — the witch holds it all in her palm and when she hands it to you the green glows bright, a green that whispers This is all you will ever need…

***

Sally Gander writes fiction and creative nonfiction.  Her work has appeared in Litro, The Real Story, The Blue Nib and A Word in Your Ear, and is forthcoming in Porridge.  She has also performed for Story Fridays in Bath.  For many years she taught Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and now teaches students from across the world at Advanced Studies in England. She is currently building a collection of personal essays.

At Ocean's Mercy

A short story by Audrey T. Carroll:

The hazy ash gray, like a sick snow, blended line of ocean with line of sky. Willow hugged her thigh-grazing cardigan around herself to guard against the pitiful sighs of the water’s surface. Her hair whipped her cheeks, alternating with the salt to batter her skin with pinprick stings like the jellyfish kisses when she was a girl collecting what she mistook for sea quartz washed ashore. Those years, losing herself in the collecting, that’s what she hoped to recite now in every rhythm of her body, to focus so intensely on the task that the context fell away, only leaving in its wake the digging and eroded minerals and the child-sized achievements of discovery.

The few other people walking the shoreline wore shades of slate and khaki, blending in nearly seamlessly with their surroundings, a chameleon smoothness. They seemed cold and distant, the grayscale and sepia tones of a long-worn photograph with facial features faded away. The albums in the basement that her mother had so carefully curated from a hundred year’s artifacts, dated, arranged, book after book until it seemed there was no end... Willow could not prod at her most tender places right now thinking of that word, end. Instead, she thought of the surface. In royal violet and denim, contrasting the others, she was practically a tropic fish out of place in Rhode Island’s Atlantic waters. No one noticed her. In summers so many would walk the shore and set up towels and garish rainbow umbrellas along the way. But the winter solstice was two days’ past, and it had been months since unfamiliar feet had trespassed here.

As Willow glided forward, her ballet flats cracked the packed wet sand, the fractures spider-webbing along the surface. It left behind clumps like in the boxes of light brown sugar that her mother used to bake with every autumn. The air hung heavy with brine, and Willow swore that she could smell the quahogs beneath the waves. The tourists were always trying to block that scent out, grilling animal flesh and smoothing on sun lotion like mortar over bricks; they never wanted the actual experiences beyond the sand and the sun and the view, something inoffensive and interchangeable that they could’ve experienced anywhere along the east coast. 

The sand here, closer to the water, was more densely pocked with bits of quartz and amethyst. Willow bent over, her cardigan greeting the sand. She clawed with an infant’s grasping fingers, piercing the wave-crashed sand in what would look to an outsider to be a mindless frenzy. Willow, however, was very mindful—she knew exactly the kinds of pieces she was looking for. Finally, she came across the pink underbelly of a ribbed half-shell, its jagged umbo evidence of the trauma of its split. When she excavated it from its dreary beige tomb, she found that it had been cracked not only at the joint but also vertically, as though the absent shell half had taken with it half of this piece as well.

An imperfect half-shell was of no use to Willow. She tossed it, underhand, back to the water. The water was more than water. Her waves curled toward the sky in an openhearted gesture, then reached down toward the shore with an eager curiosity. The ocean was filled up with life—sea stars and octopi and invasive green crabs. Her mother had been an ocean, once, in a way that had somehow through the generations been proclaimed unremarkable on account of its seemingly natural inevitability, but it remained mystifying to Willow. 

The waves, famished, gnawed at her ankles, disturbing her thoughts. It wasn’t until the water drained back to the ocean that Willow simultaneously remembered she was wearing cloth shoes and realized that they were ruined beyond repair. Willow hopped, her feet heavy with oversaturated sand clinging in its attempts to cement her to the ground. And so she hopped again, this time feet slipping from shoes. Her leap brought her forward the equivalent of two steps. The shoes were behind her.

It was behind her.

She was behind her.

And maybe, Willow dared in the deepest chambers of herself still nursing irrational hope, if she didn’t turn around then the pillar of salt would not be waiting for her.

We’re all pillars of salt she had told Willow as a child. Her mother had lost count of how many times she’d read Slaughterhouse Five long before Willow was born. The copy in her study, torn on almost every edge and kissed with coffee stains, folded on almost every corner and scribbled in like a love letter, was never to be touched. She quoted it constantly, so much so that by age five Willow had felt as though she had read it herself. That copy now sat in the two-bedroom beach home that Willow rented year-round, tucked away behind an antique doll with red ringlets of synthetic hair so that Willow could only barely be reminded of its love-roughed edges.

Willow coiled around and found her flats, abandoned, under threat of further attack from the encroaching waves. She scooped up the shoes. They smelled so harshly of salt—pillars of salt, pillars of salt, mocking her like a cruel and demented bird out of a Poe story. They smelled so harshly of the salt that she almost pitched them as far into the sea as she could manage. One shoe happened to tilt to its side in Willow’s hand. She glared at its rebellion. Inside, she realized, a hermit crab, deep red exoskeleton and iridescent pearl of a shell to call home, had taken shelter. Heartbroken at what she had almost done, Willow plucked the crab from the toe of her shoe. She nested the flats under her arm as the crab pinched at her cuticles. Willow forgave each sting instantly; she knew what it was to be hurting, to be afraid, and reach for any sense of command over what happened next—that resistance to being pushed and pulled as though by the unknowable will of the waves.

She positioned the crab with care in a safe spot in the sand; in turn, he gave her a gesture of his claw that, had he fingers, would have been profane. She stood upright again, careful to walk in the direction opposite the hermit crab so as not to cause him harm. Staring at her own two feet as she moved, the sand consumed and then regurgitated them, again and again. A cycle. Like the waves. Like the moons. Like the rest.

With a sudden change in direction, Willow sprinted toward the ocean, to feel closer to it, even if it felt nothing in return. But then Willow found that it needed to feel something in return, that if it didn’t she might suddenly transform into a starburst with no one to witness. She knelt in the sand, knees of her jeans be damned. She couldn’t think about such frivolous, shallow things. Not now. Not when she felt so close to a breakthrough. A breakthrough to what, she did not know. But it was there, just under the surface. If she could only tease it out…

Digging. Her nails became claws, built for nothing but digging in the sand. She was pushed forward by a compulsion not quite her own. Digging. Digging. Cracking sand and piling sand. She found one empty half-shell, two. Each was unceremoniously lobbed into one of her shoes for future use; she was not gentle. After five, six, seven shells found themselves torn from Earth where it invited ocean, Willow felt the compulsion lift and air reenter her lungs, expand them, the pungent water stinging her eyes, bringing warmth to their corners.

Her lungs found rhythm again. Suddenly her toes felt pained from cold—and, in another instant, they went numb and she was forced to remember that she was in the heart of a New England winter. Willow flexed and wiggled her toes in attempt of shocking feeling back to skin and muscle and bone. She took the shell-filled shoes, cradling them to her chest as their contents clinked together like the dainty porcelain hands of China dolls. Her heart seemed to swell against her lungs and ribcage as she heard the music of the shells, the promise of the prayers that Willow would speak later lost against the steady lament of the waves that suddenly seemed so far away, nothing more than an echo.

***

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016) and editor of Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft (Human/Kind Press, forthcoming). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Prismatica Magazine, peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. 
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