Geekrant vs the Landscape of Memory

Greetings, Geekranters!

Sometimes living so far away from where you began, your heart, emotions and mind can surprise you. Surprise you with just how much the places you once knew are not really that distant while they live on in your soul.

Memories sparking suddenly like forked lightening striking from a mid-western sky in the dying days of summer. The feelings caused persisting long after the event, lingering in the smell of ozone on the wind.

There are moments in my life here when all that should seem so different to what I knew, at least in theory, become strangely familiar in practise. A sight or a sound taking me back to a childhood, four thousand miles and what feels like a hundred years ago.

Memory brings me back and forth, in and out, like the tides of the sea breaking over and over onto a lonely beach. The ebb and flow, the surf crashing into my mind and breaking into my conscious thoughts.

Perhaps its because some things don't change in this world, and the further you get from the start, the more you can see that. The sea is the sea, wherever you go and whatever name it takes. Eternal, gifted with more permanence than all of mankind's civilisations and discoveries.

The sun still rises in the morning, no matter where in the world it finds me when it does. The wind still blows from here to there...

So it came to be, that standing on a beach in Crescent City, California, in the dying moments of the day, with the sun dropping ever more speedily towards the western horizon; a thousand memories cascaded through my mind, echoes of a myriad of holidays before, childhood moments on beaches the length and breadth of the British Isles. 

And always the sea...

As far back as I can remember I have loved the sea, although my mother says that when I first saw it I did nothing but wail, crying incessantly on a beach towel somewhere on a British beach when the 1980s were still young.

Maybe that is a way that the British are different from the Americans. We are an island race, our identity and our history wrapped up in that most mercurial of mistresses, the sea. We are tied up with the ocean, its ups and downs, its tempestuous winters and placid summers, its calm surface and rolling undercurrents. Many mid-westerners assume that when I see Lake Michigan, my longing for the sea will be satisfied, but it doesn't the feeling in my soul. It is a lake, large as it is and I was born on an island by miles and miles of sea. It is not the same.

The sea is a wild thing, a force to be respected, barely thirty miles from where I was born, in  the fishing port of Grimsby, fleets of trawlers would tempt fate and head out into that indigo expanse, never knowing whether it would be their last voyage. 

So often, it seems to me, the ocean portrayed on American t.v. or in Hollywood movies, is a playground, a tamed landscape of ultramarine blue, created by the divine for our recreation. To surf, scuba dive and swim with the dolphins. 

The sea of northern California was not that sea, sanitized and bluer than blue has ever been and ever will be in nature. As if such things like hurricanes never came from the sea. This was like the sea of my youth, beautiful but dangerous, wild but untamed. Waves building seemingly miles away from the shore crashing like the angry thunder of a displeased ancient deity and breaking into a billion sparkling jewels of surf.

Crescent City lies, isolated and seemingly overlooked by many, on the Pacific coast of California, only a few miles from the Oregon border and the Jedidiah Smith Redwood Park that I mentioned in my last post. 

We arrived there late in the afternoon, winding our way out of the hills to this northern most of Californian seaside towns. It was a strange place to our eyes, I'm not sure what we were expecting, but it whatever it was, it wasn't what we saw.

The whole town had a haphazard quality to it, not ugly, but seemingly thrown together, no two buildings looking quite the same. Startlingly different to the miles and miles of suburban housing that can be seen throughout the United States. Even the fast food joints and restaurants seem to have been placed where there was a space at the time. This far off the beaten track, it seemed, town planning was not a priority.

Still, the place possessed a peculiar sort of beauty, as we walked along the beach, the wind whipped in from the Pacific, catching the sand and sending it flying across the beach like miniature sandstorm and I found that something that was missing since I moved to America was filled. Something in the soul, the unspoken desire of every natural-born citizen of the British Isles to see the sea. To feel salt spray on the skin, apparently makes me feel complete.

Here was the beginning of a California unseen, a forgotten highway if you will. A collection of isolated and disparate settlements, each unique in itself, cast away, flotsam on the waves. An enigma in the American state that influences so much.

California here, felt less like the sun drenched, celebrity filled, densely populated land of surfers and endless sunlight and plenty, a Beach Boys soundtrack floating on the wind; instead here was a land of barely tamed wilderness, where the giant forms of prehistoric trees crested craggy hills that fell steeply towards the waiting waves.

It was somehow a place where time had ceased to be, a neolithic landscape that had never really got used to the human intrusion.

Even in this moment, memory persisted, driving down the lonesome highway in the bright light of the early morning. It bought to mind Scotland, of all places, echoing in the awesome untamed nature of the craggy cliffs. 

My Grandfather, that is my mother's father, was a painter, an artist. It wasn't his profession, he made his career as a jeweler and had been in the British Army in Italy around the end of the Second World War. Still he was a painter, though in all that time I never heard of him selling even one of his magnificent landscapes. 

My Grandparents house was full of his work, breathtaking renderings of the Lake District or quiet Scottish glens, places that he loved to be. His paintings had a serenity to them,  a stillness, that transmitted the awe that monumental landscape imparts to a soul and how my Grandfather felt about those places.

As we drove that road, between sea and scrubby grassland, through verdant tunnels of mammoth trees and deep rock cuts through ancient hills, I thought, not for the first time, of my Grandfather's paintings, I wondered what he would have made of these high forests touching the sky, the sparkling sea, the strange souvenir shops that appeared as if by magic out of the undergrowth at the side of the road.

Memory is a strange thing, for it tells as much about who we are today as it does about who we were then. I realised in that moment that in many ways when I write about these places, I am trying to do with my words what my Grandfather seemed to do so effortlessly with paints, brush and canvas. I attempt to paint a picture with words, to impart the feeling that a place that has given me or describe the landscape of society. I use so many different methods to do this, tidbits of information, pieces of trivia, I highlight the differences between the United Kingdom and the United States, even the general weirdness of being me. Still, I am in a sense trying to paint landscapes of the mind. 

Then there are places, that can't be explained with words, that have a feeling that can not be captured in a bottle. Places that spark both memories and hopes, the past and the future. Highways so vast and immense they overwhelm and make us look deep into our own selves. This forgotten coast was just such a place. In a place like this, I try to write as best I can and wish that I could paint like my Grandpa.

Till next time,

Goodbye, Geekranters!