Waterlines
As part of Book Week Scotland's drive to bring people all over the country closer to the pleasures of a good book, Waterlines celebrates rowing, reading and writing: a chance to introduce and celebrate some lovely writing about being on the water and the outdoors.
Writing
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On the water's skin
by Linda Cracknell
Loch Tay: a vast vessel of light cupped between dark hills. Gravity decides the downhill slide of water towards river and sea. It takes its ancient time. The decline is certain, but sly currents can confound the flow in the peat-black beneath.We hang on the water’s skin in a seed-pod shaped from wood. In muscular trust, hearts beating, lungs working, we bend and lean in devotion. Unwieldy on land, our long, slim oars turn elegant. Slicing through water, they skim the boat across the dazzling sheet between vault and chasm.
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rhythms of water
by Geeta Roopinarine
a boat–
a pod
two leaves together
a plank of wood floating
on which a butterfly lies, wings trembling
a place to rest, reflect, a place to be –
to journey from one point to another
to feel with the soles of your feet
vibrations of whales
singing love songs across the sea
to watch cormorants sail the water and land
heads like periscopes,
stately matrons out for a walk. -
The Boat
by Sarah Clayton
The empty boat, the space inside and out is endless in the silence.The manned boat. I belong. I close my eyes and that feeling remains. I open my eyes to the rain falling and the water rising. Mischievous elbows, ancient shapes and odd angles. Sounds of toil and love. Catch and pull. Ebb and flow. Four rowing forward, pushing and pulling into an empty space of possibilities. I belong. Each tight lipped, determined. Rising up and over the swell. Down. Up and over. Onwards.
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Ready to Row
by Wanda Macgregor
Ready to row. Oar poised above the wave, feet anchored, I pull back, push down, reach forward ready for the next stroke, oar now poised above the wave. My hand grips the solid wooden oar tight. Too tight. My body–from jaw to calf–feels solid as the oar which I do not take my eye off. I have to do this right, keep with the cadence of my fellow rowers… each of us a person in our own right, but here on this skiff we are one, an organic piston propelling the craft through wave and across riptide. Ready to row, oar poised above the wave, feet anchored I pull back, push down, reach forward ready for the stroke, oar now poised above the wave. I don’t want to make a mistake that will throw us out of sync. I don’t want to sink. Ready to row, oar poised above the wave, feet anchored, I pull back, push down, reach forward read for the next stroke–I feel the boat’s buoyancy as it skims across and through the water, and begin to feel comfortable. I look up at the shoreline.I feel like a thought, an idea that hasn’t quite reached consciousness–I am buoyant and not set in stone the way that a thought is as it arrives at the conscious mind, to be pinned down, made static, to be considered as useful or not, discarded or not. I am a thought that, like this boat that bobs on the surface of something–the mind, the cosmos–that is so much larger than me, like this body of water on which I float.
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On the Water
by Alex John
Ripples skim across the surface leaving a calm stillness. A flood tide flows in covering the sandbanks, filling the nooks and crannies around the rocks and silent bays; water crawls up the shore, in and out, in and out, the pebbles rattle. The Skiff waits for launch, waiting for her crew to take her toward to the water’s edge, unclipped from the trolley, a push and she enters the water, free and buoyant. The crew take up their oars, following stroke, in-out, in-out, in-out, feeling the pull of the oars as the skiff slides through the water. She responds to movement of crew, as we move, she moves, as our pace picks up, so does her speed. She slices her way through the waves, wind and waves try to turn her, spin her like a top, to toss her around like foam on bobbing in the tideway. The strength of the crew keeps her steady, on course, going forward. We feel as one, the rowers and the boat, making headway, then turning for home the tide and wind are with us, a fish jumps, a seal pops up choosing to follow the boat for a while, curious at this stranger on the water. -
In the water
by Geeta Roopinarine
Cracked glass
green shadows
confused
feeling of being alone
in the universe,
it looking back at me
gently I let air out slowly,
watch
bubbles drift away.Enclosed
a turning in,
seeing myself as a body
as a fish, or a dolphin perhaps.
At first I am afraid;
I stop,
go up for air;
I come back down again.
Nothing is changed.
It is waiting. -
In a Skiff
by Kim Grant
On a calm day rowing a skiff can be a truly emotive experience. The sea glistens like the stars in the night sky, as the sun catches at the ripples all around you. Together you catch the water and pull in unison, allowing the skiff to glide through the water like a swan paddling gracefully across a tranquil lake.A wooden vessel created with love sits by the shore awaiting its crew. Lined now with willing passengers to-ing and fro-ing together in rhythmic motion.
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Below Water
by Wanda Macgregor
I won’t put my head or face in the water. I don’t want to see what lurks. In a strange way, I am exposed to what I can’t perceive as I am immersed in the heaving mass. If I lie back and look down the length of my body, it doesn’t look like my body belongs to me.When I am on the water, I know the water is there, I can look at it, I can look into it and I can acknowledge all that it might contain.
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In the Water
by Kim Grant
Nowhere makes me feel more alive than being immersed in the cold water of the ocean. The initial shock sends a shiver through my body. As my breath subsides I am filled with a real sense of euphoria, and then calm. I can see the flickering of light run through the water, sun beams of light all around me. -
Below
by Linda Cracknell
In tropical waters, a mask allowed me a sudden window into a mirror-walled world. Complex with colour and movement, I was permitted a landscape of wafting grasses, textured coral, striped quick fishes. I lay face down, legs slightly parted and arms wide. Slowed by awe, the salt held me whilst I swayed with current and tide. Sunlight highlighted pink and green coral pin-cushions, yellow flashes between grasses. My ears tinkled with fish-talk, bubble, sea-music. Here was an undiscovered galaxy; a place that had no concern with me. That didn’t look back.And then, a sudden vertigo as the reef’s edge dropped into a dark void.
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In the Water
by Sarah Clayton
The shadows below the waterline are playful illusions. I stretch and push, and they switch and turn. Together we are beneath, over, beyond, in front. Above the waterline the sun catches the back of my neck. Swimming, not forward, but still.In the depths of the calm lagoon I am lighter but not in charge. The watery pit below is limitless. I am afraid and the fear is mesmerising. Listen to the hushed music of that calling, faint, urgent, beckoning me to swim deeper.
Or it is a voice from above the waterline, mindful of my human limits and the strength of nature’s generosity?
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Wavelets Lap the Shore
by Dai John
The lagoon lies, limpid, languorous, though it conceals within the potential for violent upheaval.Wavelets lap the shore….
Free, fast flowing and multi-faceted, the stream pursues its headlong rush, impatient to join the open ocean’s spume-specked infinity. And the wavelets lap the shore, rhythmic backing vocals to thought, or thoughtlessness. Made by hand, to be rowed by hands, she waits patiently for those who gave her form and will shortly give her life and purpose.
Wavelets lap the shore….
The skiff settles, the ballast of bodies – her full complement of five – displacing the water that cradles her. Footrests are adjusted and oars are grasped in anticipation of the cox’s commands.
And the wavelets lap the shore….
The oars’ blades strike the surface together, as the skiff, her prow rising to the occasion, surges through the choppy surf, alive, alive at last.
And the wavelets lap the shore….
In my imagination, in my experience, the skiff promises adventure, an opportunity to test myself against myself and others. A place also to which I may withdraw while remaining in company. Somewhere where I can inhabit, a space which lies between sky and sea, a place only accessible to me. A small wooden capsule. She is my escape pod, my shuttlecraft, my starship.
And the wavelets lap the shore.
Waterlines
essay by Gail Low &
Kirsty Gunn
I was born on a small island, and that nearness to water has shaped many of the choices I made about where to live. Water, ponds, lakes, lochs, rivers, estuaries, and above all the sea where a far horizon teases me with possibilities—adventures that will carry me from myself, journeys into new ways of being. In books and stories I read and write, water thins the intensities of event and drama so that individual lives and events are washed through with larger themes and prospects, seas and lakes and rivers bringing charge and mystery to my pages. I’ve been in the water as beachcomber, wader, swimmer, and as scuba diver where the watery world beneath the surface reminds me that we are but guests when we enter this shifting, unknowable medium that covers more than two thirds of the world’s surface. Yet it’s only recently that being on the water has been as important as being in it… Which is where I want to begin. For I started rowing in a skiff about five years ago and this has changed how I think about the land around me, the body of water that is beneath me as I go. It reminds me anew of all the things about water that I love and has also taught me how to be with others in close proximity in a year that has made strangers of us all.
And how to consider this? This being in a boat, sitting behind and in front of others, part of a larger craft to which we all contribute movement and flexibility? Part of a larger vessel that holds us closely together, separate but as one? Perhaps I can think of what we do on the water as an act of pooled intelligence, a metaphor for the same sort of mutual understanding and pleasure that comes from reading books. For yes, as I write this, I can see the connection...That feeling of sharing ideas and responses, the fresh thinking and action that comes from reading and being with books might well be imagined as an onward pull of oars and ease of shared motion. A kind of thinking about writing that is made up of separate responses, ideas, opinions, and questions as different as the others with me in the skiff… All met together in a connective rapport, “essaying” here with me, on the water as on this page.
The St Ayles skiff I row in is a 22 feet wooden boat crewed by four rowers and a cox. As rowers we have to work together. We lean forwards with straightened arms to pull back on the handles of single wooden oars, pushing hard simultaneously with our feet on foot braces. This action propels the boat forwards. Forward lean, catch and pull in one motion. Rowers row backwards into the direction of travel, trusting the cox to steer and guide, to let us know what’s ahead, if a big wave is set is to hit the boat, or if the floating debris of last night’s storm needs be given wide berth; these events, interruptions, challenges that the water puts in our path have to be negotiated. The skiff alters course a little, we change. Just as in life, interruption and danger are calibrated and managed by each of us in concert with others, so do our movements on the water reflect a changing tide to which we react and respond. Our individual actions, our own speaking and doing become a social self, aligning with others, considering them and their needs and capabilities, and that same tug and pull of trust and reciprocity is crucial in a skiff. It keeps us in synch; though we are all separate here still our actions together allow us to move on.
In a similar way, books engender ideas that keep our minds in motion. We move through life in words, in the language we speak to each other, each deepening of expression like the dip of our oar in conjoined activity so we might settle into our place on the water. Just watch how rowers follow the person in “stroke” position at the front of the boat, matching movement for movement, rhythm for rhythm... Is what I’m getting at here: the forward lean, the catch and pull, the drive backwards, and the recovery... As a kind of understanding, a reading, a comprehension of others and their ideas and individual selves...
Forward lean, the book calls to us, as the cox calls out to those of us in the skiff
together.
Forward lean...
Catch and pull...
A gesture, an action, a yearning, a learning to be part of a wider world...
In our singular lives
So I dive deep into the waters of that great nineteenth century novel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville and read these lines, “Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship’s lee, when a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern... Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull my little ones...” * I feel this text, its paragraphs and pages, as tilting and shifting with the swell of the sea beneath it—as much a journey as a story. It’s a reading of shared movement, this, individual but also part of the historical, cultural and imaginative wellspring philosopher Carl Jung called ‘collective unconsciousness’, those depths beneath our own separate lives that resound with ideas and sensibilities plumbing the profundities of what makes us human. So a book written well over a hundred years ago is calling to me here, in 2021, in this Book Week Scotland project of ours, a reading and writing of personal histories and experiences in association with the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association: And, come in this essay calls, “Pull, pull my fine hearts-alive”. Be part of this. Read, share and write. “Pull, pull...”
Indeed, this rowing, essaying, might be well expressed as an act of communal faith—the skiff as a space provided for a language of social interaction, a place wherein is enacted a generous and generative shared volition. Just as reading and writing, and a saying what we think in a communal context of trust and reciprocity is a good description of essaying together, so my thinking about individuals in this delicate craft upon the water is individual and personal and also completely interconnected. Together, moving forwards... Catch and pull. A literary approach to formulating ideas that makes space for a mind to follow other minds in a skein of words, ripping, flowing, concircling, aligning and dispersing like the patterns made by our oars in the water...Have you read this book? Do you want to have another look at that poem? What meanings do these words suggest to you? Questions, thinking, in a dip and pull. What moves you here? These patterns on the water are also lines written on a page. What is it in this story that you love? So imagining rowing together as conversations, exchanges, the sharing of responses we bring to others when we are deep inside a verse or a text. Yes, I am starting to see the overlaps more and more as I essay deeper into this project of ours.
So I find here, in this novel, how the boat “held on her way north eastward... one transparent blue morning”... and I see how Melville’s words are arranged in a way that draws us into them and onwards in a clear and lovely motion, “a gentle air impelling her keel...tall tapering masts as three mild palms on a plain.” Here in his sentences is the same forward lean...catch and pull… and again, lean... An action, a shared understanding, felt in a book as I do on the skiff, a reaching forwards, into “the surrounding serenity” of becalmed waters...To see what’s ahead, and then moving towards there. Onwards, reading on, rowing on...Thinking, writing, entering our own imagination, moving through the water of our days.
Someone said recently: Row to a waltz rhythm, make your recovery twice as long time-wise as your pull, and I think about the effect upon the reader of a rich and complex text, requiring thought and concentration, that long “recovery” of thought that arises when ideas coalesce and settle around a theme, reading and the time to reflect upon texts mirroring my actions on the water. So the mind and the body is in concert after all, again in forward lean...In catch and pull. Just as every rower’s learning starts with watching the oar blade, with more experience all of us look straight ahead at cox, watching the shoulders and back of “stroke” and other rowers, each matching their pull and drive to the rest. So, in the same way, every reader’s learning starts in patternings that are social, collegial. School, Libraries, Universities... In these accommodations, the “deep hulled boats” of The Iliad they may as well be, the world that is the ship of The Odyssey, there is space for all; the sea faring craft can hold us and we come to texts together, a “dance of the intellect amongst words” upon the water.
There’s a training manoeuvre where we are asked to close our eyes and simply follow the rhythm we’ve started with, listening to the plash of the oars as they hit the water. Here I am too, in that way, in rhythm with others’ thoughts, feeling the expanding of my own ideas into something deeper and larger that resonates with all of us. When rowers are all in synch and the skiff slices through the water I feel a fluency in speaking, reading, thinking... An inwards flow outwards. And when our rowing rhythm is out of joint, and the skiff rocks from side to side, the awkwardness—the hesitancy of the surge forwards is like a stuttering. And reading, I don’t want to stop. Be held back. I need to know what I mean. I need to understand my difference in order to learn how to be someone who is part of a “together”. To be part of a conversation. To be at a point where individual participants, the books and their readers all converge. So help me find my rhythm again, show me how I might learn and engage that I might contribute to the whole, feel necessary, a part of something larger than myself.
For sure, encounter and reciprocation, and enfranchising have been at the heart of the St Ayles skiffing movement since its earliest of days. The first St Ayles skiff, modelled on the traditional Fair Isles yoal, is now built and assembled by communities all over Scotland ... so yes, “together”, “to be part of”... These words are real. The activity was begun as a venture to grow local communities
from boat-building and friendly regattas, the craft designed by Alec Jordan in consultation with The Scottish Fisheries Museum in Fife, “The Scottish Coastal Rowing Project” ̶̶ as it was then called ̶̶ spread far beyond; local clubs are now to be found all over Scotland and even internationally, the association having its own “Skiffie Worlds” Championships, the next one in Kortgene, The Netherlands in 2021.
“That’s amazing” a friend responds when I tell her. “What a life affirming thing, to hear of this,” she says. “A connection formed on water, by water...What a
beautiful idea.”
“That’s amazing” a friend responds when I tell her. “What a life affirming thing, to hear of this,” she says. “A connection formed on water, by water...What a beautiful idea.”
And so words do reflect these networks, actions, communities. Beautiful, to make of a time spent on the water something shared; beautiful to celebrate this in words and actions, both. Newly formed clubs encourage the making of new friends between diverse individuals who may not necessarily cross paths outwith the sheer pleasure of rowing, but now forging lasting bonds that arise from shared passions or bodily exertions. Racing regattas, companionable and convivial, are as much a time of feasting and celebration as sporting exertions, enabling local communities to get to know each other as they come together. The project has breathed new life into what was a historic tradition of Fife mining communities building boats, hosting regattas, rowing and sailing against each other. The Scottish Coastal Association (SCRA) formed in 2010 is now a network of more than 70 member clubs, and coordinates some of the major races in the rowing calendar.
In the same way, Book Week Scotland has been established to engender reading in all kinds of communities, households and places... Bringing together books and enquiring minds, sharing words, stories and ideas with those who may not have come upon them in much of their daily life. So we bring them here, to the water, to read together in the same way that to row is also a reading of the watery world around us. For why should the two activities of mind and body be set apart? The physical, the contemplative...They arrive as one here on the page, a project supported by Book Week Scotland and the SCRA, the making of essays, reading and writing words all arising from the experience of being on a skiff on the water with others.
*
So let me honour that experience as I close this long line of words and water by reminding myself that 2021 has been designated the year of the RowAround Scotland, marking a decade since the formation of SCRA, and delayed one year by the global Covid pandemic. For it‘s been joyous to come together again, after time away, joyous to find ourselves on the water again, feeling it, reading it... And, to celebrate, two specially crafted wooden batons, named “Community” and “Spirit”, both with central sections of clear resin encasing a model of a skiff on blue water, have been passed from rowboat to rowboat, club to club in a gesture of friendly affirmation, greeting and good will. When the RowAround Scotland venture is complete, these batons will have circumnavigated all of Scotland’s coastline, and also some of her inland waterways and lochs—outlining a watery map, connecting all of the thirteen Scottish regions, affirming each local club’s place in the spirit of friendship and community that enables us all to thrive where we are.
And what a story for Scotland, this! A narrative of association, society... Of adventure, fun, health and experience and, yes, joy. A story of being on the water, together and apart, apart and together...Moving onwards, forwards around a country whose edges are written in water. Here in this celebration of lines written by skiffs in the water, drawn by their oars, joining the action of one to another in this essay...and another...and another...might you catch something of our enjoined project, hear articulated in these pages an activity that is also a literary experience written and read, shared and enjoyed.
Come in! Be part of this! Lets take our place in a real or imagined skiff upon the water, or both!
Forward lean...
Catch and pull...
Let us discover what is ahead for us all...
Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low
1st October 2021
* Herman Melville, Moby
Dick, or The Whale, Harold Beaver
ed.,( Penguin English Library, 1972) p.319
For more information on Book Week Scotland 2021, see https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/book-week-scotland
For more information on Scottish Coastal Rowing Association RowAround Scotland 2021, see https://www.rowaround.scot/
