Twenty-five years ago on Prince William Sound, Alaska, I paddled a sea kayak over an enormous forest. I looked into deep green water and kelp, the size of trees, drifted under my paddle in the cold current. The sight was mesmerizing and felt significant in a way I couldn’t understand.
Before I arrived in Alaska I had read Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams. He’d prepared me for a new world, but not for the clout of colonialism. I found myself on the other edge of the Pacific, in a landscape remote, wild and foreign and yet with names as familiar as the well known south coast of NSW. Montague Island. Snug Harbour. The names were stuck on, no more a part of this landscape of calving glaciers and towering forests than they were of the other side of the Pacific. Captain Cook had been to both places. Both places had been before Captain Cook.
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On the window sill above my writing desk I have a collection of treasures, an altar of sorts. Amongst them is a shell with a holdfast embedded so deeply that the shell and the holdfast are as one. It’s a tiny impossible sculpture.
To understand a holdfast we must know that kelp take their nutrition, their life, from the world around through their fronds. They don’t need roots. They need an anchor.
A holdfast must be strong enough to withstand swell, to withstand the inclination, the effort of the plant to seek the surface. By holding, they create a new place.
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We’ve just had a week of wild winter weather. It was a terrible week to be shearing ewes.
Last Wednesday, as dawn pinked the horizon, J came in to my study. We were both tired. The night before we’d lain awake and listened to the rising wind, the hiss of rain on the roof. We’d hoped the full belly of hay, the shelter of sheds would be enough to keep shornies alive. It was not a kind night. The question of whether we should go on hovered between us.
Our ewes are shorn on the cusp of winter and though it is counter intuitive to shear just as the weather gets cold there are good reasons1. Both of us have worn out our weather apps updating the forecast. We decided to press on.
We finished shearing as the southerly swell beat its way up the coast. From the back door I could hear it, a steady heartbeat in the quiet cold.
On Saturday, before the worst of the weather arrived, J brought all the ewes back into the sheds. The one exception was the fat mob who were in the most sheltered paddock on the place. Dark clouds banked to the west. The wind had stripped the oak of its last golden leaves. In the paddock beside the house my pets, warm in their heavy fleeces, grazed oblivious to the fury.
The next morning was clear and cold, but the freezing, scudding sloughs of rain and sleet were gone. The ewes grazed their way safely back out to their paddocks. I went walking and the bush was thick with birds. On the limb of a huge dead tree a pair of mountain ducks perched. The male, resplendent in his chestnut waistcoat honked his alarm at my soft steps. I have seen them in this tree a number of times. I wonder if they’ve found a hollow to make their downy nest. Walking I keep tumbling the idea of a holdfast through my head. The metaphor of it is a little different to the idea of putting down roots. Unlike roots a holdfast can outlive the organism that relied on them and create a place for other creatures to live. I wonder at the holdfasts in my life.
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There was a lot I did not understand when I paddled for a month through calving glaciers, under snow drenched peaks, through pods of orcas. I did not understand my privilege for starters or my youth. I travel over the memory and see what I missed in the huge kelp forests. I missed what was holding them in place.
mm
Reading
Not much, because…shearing. But I finished Courtney Maum’s The Year of the Horses and I enjoyed it, not least because my journey with Frank continues and after each ride I write in my journal and hope there is the beginnings of a book. I read this article Maum wrote about memoirs that informed her writing. Have ordered the one about the arctic and autistic brother. I’ve started Luster, a novel I had read so much about a year or so ago. It’s incredibly accomplished, the writing razor sharp and yet, well, I feel old reading it. I can imagine my younger self demolishing it in a night. At the other end of the age spectrum I’m reading and rereading Louise Gluck’s latest poems Winter Recipes from the Collective. She’s so good.
Looking
Loved these photos - the winners of the Big Picture Natural World Photography.
Doing
Cooking, cooking cooking. This recipe for an (at least) 12 hour lamb shepherd’s pie from Sophie Hanson’s newsletter has added another regular to my shearing arsenal. It was sensational, even without half the ingredients.And this recipe from Jill Dupleix’s excellent newsletter is what I am going to cook tomorrow night.
Writing
This week I’m writing a profile for Graziher and a column for Country Style. I am clearing the decks because my manuscript is due back from my editor on Friday! The plan is to retreat up the coast with dogs and my computer and work through the edit and hopefully get the final scenes written.
Mostly it’s to work in with the timing of when a ewe has a lamb. A ewe lambing in a full fleece gets cast (stuck on her back) easily and has a harder time lambing. There is a theory too that she will be less likely to take her lamb to shelter in bad weather.
Holdfasts
always a delight ... wind has stopped at last here.. still sunny winters days
Love Lopez. Love the Pacific memories. As an east-coast aussie now in the US Pacific Northwest, I feel the oceanic opposites: my summer solstice soon, your winter.