Twilight on the saltmarsh
At the end of the day, I am a creature of the saltmarsh. I mean 'end of the day' quite literally, as twilight is by far the best hour for these places-between-places; a time when they shine silver inked with indescribable tints of umber, steel-blue, and viridian; a time when the sky and the advancing tide merge into one; a time of the curlew call, and the returning suck on lone ragwormer's boots. Growing up on a Sussex estuary, the salt marshes were my life: the silt of me, the water that crept into my channels, the salvage that built on my shingle banks; and the evenings were my preferred haunt, replete with danger and fascination. It was, more generally, a space for those who grew up with the saltmarsh's caprice, its quick-sands and sea grasses with quick-vanishing stability; but, in the evening, the saltmarsh wasn't just a space of familiar and confident adventure for those of us that knew how to navigate its oily muds and samphire banks, but a space of magic: of rocks bound in string dropped quietly in inlets, of driftwood arranged in alignments awaiting the flow, of flint goddesses, and sigils in chalk on decaying sea walls. It was a space where the landscape vibrated.
My local, where I worked, and later drank, was across the marsh, and in the twilight and moon-cast nights I frequently saw many of the things we chose to ignore as a community: duck poachers low in their boats; watchful pilots of zodiacs running up the shore with parcels under their arms; excited young threesomes disappearing hand-in-hand into shoreline woods with bottles of bitter. I remember the strangeness of once finding my family gone, and, on walking outside, seeing the whole village streaming in from the coast, arms laden with the boat parts of the rich, yanked from the wrecks thrown up by the Great Storm – parts that rapidly disappeared under pots in sheds and into old rolls of carpet in attics, waiting for a fine day to reappear repurposed onto some poorer vessel. In short, if you kept your eyes open, you might see any amount of things to which one might otherwise have closed them, especially as the light fell.
However, by far and away the strangest thing I saw in this praeternatural space was one summer's evening, out searching for clam shells and the casts of spider-crabs, as the hue of the sky was stretching across the flats. There, far out on the glowing mud, I saw a flamingo of vivid, luminescent, pink; lone, dabbling with its bill for shrimp. What it was doing so far from its native lands, escapee or migrant, I could not tell you, but it raised its beak and stared at me, and I it, and we nodded to each other; two souls, at once at odds with the world and yet somehow at home on the saltmarsh. And then we each continued and went about our business, each to their own, but warm with that small moment of twilight recognition.
20 Aug 1988