Treading the faded edges

Briefly:

Support me on Patreon | Why I love the edges of everywhere | Audible’s scripted drama of Electricity of Every Living Thing | Catch me on Changes with Annie Macmanus | I’m on holiday so this will be brief :)

Hello from America!

Early this summer, driving home to Whitstable after a trip to the local farm shop, I suddenly remembered how I used to feel about the seaside. 

Your relationship with a place changes when you live there. It becomes more mundane, less exotic, the place where bills drop through your door and you have to put the bins out once a week. I suppose, like everyone, I tended to visit the coast on warm days, and stayed away in winter, fearing north winds. Moving there meant that I got to know my town off-season, when everything was quiet and shuttered. I found I liked it even more then.

The first glimpse of the sea has always provoked a shift deep in my gut. It still happens when I catch that stripe of blue or green or grey beyond the town when I crest the hill on my way home. But on this particular day, it was as if I time-shifted back fifteen years.

Through the eyes of my former self, the land began to fade before it met the sea, its colour washed away by the insistent weather and bleached by the sun. Everything was dry and whitened, like favourite clothes softened in the wash. It seemed to me that the sand on our beaches was evidence of a kind of disintegration, as if the land could not hold together at its furthest extent. This was not about the mechanical action of waves against rock. It was more that reality itself was eroding at the furthest reaches of the island, the bright shock of everyday life bleeding away until a pale, gentle place remained.

I’ve felt this again since I’ve been in Port Clyde, Maine, four hundred miles north of Manhattan, where I spent most of last week. This place could not be more different: it is wild and spacious, lush with goldenrod and wild carrot, spiked all over with pines. Everyone told me that it would be my kind of place, and of course, it is. It’s sleepy and peaceful, abundant with good things to eat. At my reading at Barnswallow Books on Tuesday, I was given a carton of local native blueberries, tiny purple spheres that tasted floral and sharp, quite unlike the bland ones we get in England. You could almost pick up the brackish tang of the sea.

What I like most of all, though, is that it is an edge place, a spot where basalt meets the clear, silvery Atlantic, where there are seals, puffins and guillemots, ospreys and bald eagles, creatures who veer away from the centre of things. In the workshop I ran with Elissa Altman on Monday, I asked everyone to find their own space in Barn Swallow’s beautiful old barn, and I noticed that they all found an edge in one way or another - a spot far to the back of the loft, a doorway, a corner from which they could survey the room. It was where we all felt safe, standing back, avoiding the action, taking stock. 

My people are edge people, just as my places are edge places. That’s why I always holiday by the sea - even now, when I get plenty of it at home. The centre just doesn’t interest me somehow. I leave it happily to others. I always want to walk the land’s furthest extent, to trace with my feet the shape it makes against the water, to be a part of the fading.

Live dates & workshops

Literary Festival: Liverpool, UK, 30th September, 7pm - 8pm. I’ll be appearing via Zoom at the Gravity Festival, in conversation with Prof. Philip Davis and Melissa Chapple. Tickets here.

This week’s newsletter is short and sweet, as I’m now taking a few days’ rest after a busy week. I’ll be back very soon. Take care.

Katherine

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