Nik Schulz, an illustrator (Wired, New York Magazine, Make, and others), actually did something a lot of us dream of: He checked out and headed for a remote, one-mile-wide island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic, just before the changing of the millennium.
Actually, he did something else a lot of us keep saying we’ll do: He kept a journal. Here are excerpts from it, originally run in a series on emerson.
Excerpt 1
---11.01.99---
I suppose that as long as I’m taking notes I might as well give you some background on why am I flying halfway around the world to spend the winter on St. Agnes.
There are a lot of reasons but my work may well be the primary one. I haven’t been that happy with it lately. For the past year or so I’ve worked as a one-man design studio under the name L-Dopa. I’ve had the chance to work on some pretty high-profile projects and that’s been great but after reading a couple of books and articles about design ethics and sustainability I’m having a harder and harder time justifying to myself the value of what I do. My efforts go solely into helping corporations sell their products. I see the waste consumerism generates and the resources it burns and I think, "Shit, I’m on the front lines putting a slick face on that machine." It gnaws at me. I’d like to spend more time working on projects that solve real problems, improve the quality of life and/or help build a more sustainable world.
I have to say I’m looking forward to living a more ecologically sound lifestyle, to being more aware of the energy I use or don’t use. I’m looking forward to not having to deal with traffic or pollution or garbage in the streets.
I’m also looking forward to living in a small community, knowing my neighbors and working together on whatever needs to be done, to not being anonymous, to being known, to being integrated.
And why St. Agnes? It’s small. It’s remote. My friend Jack lives there. I’ll be able to live in the cottage his family rents out to summer tourists. I’ll be sharing it with a guy named Phillip who wants to do the same type of thing I’m doing.
And lastly the most superficial reason, without which, sadly, I may not have come: it’s the millennium and it’d be great to spend it on a little island.
Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 2
---11.06---
I’ve just arrived on St. Agnes and still can’t really grasp yet that I’m here. Yesterday I took off from the airfield near Land’s End on the southwestern tip of England and about fifteen minutes later I was on St. Marys, Scilly’s main island. In the 45 minutes I had to wait for the ferry over here I went grocery shopping, bought socks, inquired about setting up a checking account (at two banks) and lugged my loot back to the quay. It’s amazing how quickly you can get some things done around here. On the down side my luggage is waiting on the dock in Penzance until the freight boat is repaired and can pass sea trials. My dingy pants, already stained in London, will have to suffice another week.
Upon arrival at the cottage, Hendrik (my friend Jack’s dad) went over the essentials: the electricity is on a timer—plonk the (outdated) coin through the timer every morning to keep the power on; the heating oil for the stove flows in from a small plastic tank outside—top it up daily. Check. Notably, he doesn’t hand me a key to the cottage, not that I really need one. I put away the groceries and made a pot of tea (when in Rome...) and sat down, feeling unsteady as if the horizon line in my head were swaying to and fro. I was very much looking forward to everything but reality was like jumping off a bridge—such a change. Here I am on this little island. All of the things I rail against aren’t here, no McDonalds, no Blockbuster, no noisy, rude people or trash in the streets. Yet all of these things, dislike them though I do, are familiar. Yes, culture shock has set in.
This morning I took a walk around the island, which is covered, in wet, green grass, compact, springy moss, and purple heather. There is also a tenacious cousin of the fern here, quite fecund. It clings to many a hedgerow and overpopulates many a gully. There are no roads here, only a scant network of paths, each one a Land-Rover’s width wide. It’s a tight fit since the plants and ferns keep trying to reclaim the path for themselves and given that there are only a couple of Land-Rovers and a few tractors on the island my guess is that the odds lie with the plants.
Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 3
---11.06---
Down the road, I’m told, there is a dairy where I can order my milk unpasteurized, straight from the cow. This will be a first for me and I’m looking forward to being able to thank the cows personally for their efforts. I have to say I didn’t spot the dairy on my brief round this morning. It’s funny that I wouldn’t be able to spot something as substantial as a dairy on an island that is a mile wide across its longest length.
Behind our cottage stands the old coast guard building, built the wrong way around in the early part of this century. The look out tower is supposed to face out to sea, but someone laid the plans down wrong and... well, let’s just say the view of the rest of the island is pretty good from up there. Today I believe it houses a bed and breakfast as well as a couple of private residences but no confirmation on that yet.
The house that I’m staying in is easily well over a 300 years old. There 3 bedrooms upstairs and two sitting rooms and large kitchen downstairs. It was built by a shorter generation of islanders. I have to watch my head. The ceilings, floors and beams all heave and bend showing the elasticity of wood over great periods of time. The walls though are solid, having been built out of jumbo-Igloo-cooler-sized blocks of granite. It’s a house in progress, at one point a bathroom was added, then a sunroom, then, in the 80s, electricity, and, most recently, before I arrived, phones were installed on our behalf. The other new addition is a 30s-era Rayburn stove which heats our water and the cottage itself by burning white oil fed in from the tank outside. I say “tank” but it’s, basically, sawed-off plastic container standing on a rusty barrel, with an upside-down Tupperware tub for a lid, which is weighed down by a large rock.
It’s a little hokey but it works and I think that’s the criteria by which things are judged around here. Our water is collected from the roof, so the odd bit of moss or stray bug’s legs sometimes makes it through the tap (and into the tea). It has the look of a guesthouse: furniture, rugs and dishes are all hand-me-downs from various sources and eras. It’s old and a bit disheveled, but it’s home for the winter. After all, we have all that we really need: a roof that works, running water, heat and friendly neighbors all around. It’s really quite civilized.
Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 4
--- 11.12---
Yipes, loneliness is hitting me like a brick. The initial couple of weeks will be the hardest I think. Quiet house, pitch dark island, I’ve just the throbbing hum of the refrigerator to keep me company. It really is a shock to go from the media-saturated, instant-everything culture that we live in to the slow, methodical, weather-worn quiet that I’m in now. What a drawn out, pulling, emptiness in my chest.
------
I’m noticing that time slips away easily here. There are cats to pet, walks to take and cows to talk to, and since life isn’t rushing past around me, I don’t feel rushed. I heard a story when I was here last summer. I don’t know if it’s true. Maybe it was just something to test the gullibility of outsiders but it was told to me like this: A woman once wanted a porch added to the back of her house and a local carpenter said he’d do it, but he wouldn’t be able to get to it right away. “No problem,” the woman said, “whenever you have some free time let me know.” A year went by, then two. “Are you going to have time to build that porch this summer?” the woman asked again. “Oooh, I’m not sure but I will let you know,” came the reply. “Well, do keep it in mind.” That summer passed, as did the next and the next and the next. “I was really hoping that this spring you might be able to build that porch for me,” the woman inquired again. Came the retort: “Look, if I’d known you wanted it done that quickly I would have never taken the job!”
The point is yesterday it was Tuesday and today it’s Friday and I don’t know what happened in between. Anyway I do remember this:
I took a bath the other day with water from the roof heated in the stove. (We don’t really have a shower.) I fiddled with taps, let the tub fill and went to pour more heating oil into the tank outside or something. When I came back to get into the bath, the water was tinged green and floating with bits of moss. I’m not talking the odd bit of moss dancing and darting around as I tried to scoop it up. No, it was basically a moss-bath. Not wanting to waste water, I figured it might be good for my skin (can anyone confirm?) and jumped in.
It occurred to me, after I was generously moss-covered, that there exists here a much greater integration of inside and out. A lot of inside spends time outside: chairs sit for years in the garden. Cans, jugs, buckets and bottles crowd together near the path at the side of the house, and notes and notices brave the weather on the wall down at the post-office store (one building, two entities).
Conversely, outside often has no problem making itself at home indoors. Observe: my bed in the barn last summer (four shipping pallets and a mattress) now has a large row boat resting on it, various implements of yore have found retirement accommodations in various homes: propellers, oars, the odd oxen yoke. A tiny patch of clover has snuck in from a larger patch outside the door and now grows inside, near the door frame. Beyond that, moths, moss, wind and water all manage to drop in on occasion. But our door is often (standing) open and I don’t mind because I feel somehow more integrated into the bigger scheme of life than if my inside and outside never mingled. Did I mention that there are about 70–80 people living on this island? Well, there are about 70-80 spiders living in our house.
See how nicely everything works out?
Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 5
--- 11.12---
Today for lunch I’m having three eggs, three sausages, bread and butter, and I’m ramping my tea consumption up to world-championship levels. Later on, I’m going to put on my boots, tuck my pants into the tops of my socks and walk through fields covered with cows and manure, along hedgerows and over massive granite outcroppings, past more manure, and eventually down to the sea. If there is any truth to the idea that we are products of our environment, there’s a good chance I’m going to be an English farmer by next spring.
------
I was sitting in the yard in a folding chair today; taking advantage of the sun while it was out. (The days are getting shorter.) I held a leaf up to the sun and was stuck by its beauty. It’s one of the most beautiful things I think I’ve ever seen. It was transformed from a dull flat slice into a radiant, sharp jewel—deep, luxurious, densely green, with a bright finework of lines, each expanding fractally into a sub-network, finer and more intricate than the last. Such a dazzling array, it was almost as if one could see the energy left over from its creation as lighting, flash-frozen in an instant, formed the capillary channels.
Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 6
--- 11.12---
You would think that in a place like this time would have no real bearing. Well, you’d be wrong—it means everything.
The post-office store is open for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon (but not on Tuesdays). The boat to St. Mary’s, the main island, can be had three days a week. It sails promptly at 10:30am and returns even more promptly at 1:30pm. If you miss it, you’re screwed. There’s no other inter-island boat for two days. Nobody’s going to give you a lift either, because all of the smaller boats are hibernating on land for the winter. So you have to know it takes ten minutes to walk to town from the quay, twenty minutes to do your shopping, half an hour to try to convince the woman at the bank that just because you’ve just moved here and have no credit history in this country, you’re not a liability and should be given a checking account (which won’t work by the way), an hour to have a crab sandwich, a pint of stout and a conversation about island politics with a friend at the local pub, and ten minutes to walk back to the boat. And the pub, that stalwart bastion of English culture, is only open for a few hours a week (on St. Agnes anyway) starting at 9pm tonight.
No, time is of the essence.
Excerpt 7
--- 11.14---
Just got back from a walk tonight down to the boat shed at Pregliss Cove. It’s been raining. The air was cold and the night was absolutely pitch black—no streetlights. I’m glad I never saw Blair Witch, because if I had, I’d never be able to set foot outside at night without wetting my pants. The island was solid black. Things wobbled and jumped into the beam of my flashlight: boats lying on their sides by the shed for the winter, bushes, bracken and old churches.
The tide was out once again and I walked forever down the old lifeboat ramp, past clumps of seaweed and unidentifiable plant life, down to the very end. I started to breathe heavily as I tested myself by wading into the water in my knee-high rubber boots. The water swirled around my ankles, slyly, keenly, flashing grimly in the beam of my light. I backed out again chastening myself for taunting the sea late at night, after not even telling anyone I was going out. Not wise.
I pointed my flashlight out into the cove. The thin beam couldn’t penetrate more than 50 yds into the fuzzy, damp night. I scanned the soupy air back and forth and then... bang! A flash of white shown back at me, an aberration heaving to and fro in the chop. What the...? Whatever, or whoever I thought it was, turned out to be the beam of my own light reflected back at me in the cabin window of a small fishing boat, still moored in the cove.
It would almost be easier with my light off. With it on I could only see a small bright circle in a world of nothing. Seeing a small circle of churning sea, or there a boat, then a lobster trap jumping out of the darkness and disappearring again, made me uneasy. I did turn my light off and the sky calmed into a dark, grey glow. Stars shone and clouds slept, sprawled out above my head, while faint shadows showed the way and lighthouse beams swept the landscape from opposite horizons. Isn’t it curious that, sometimes, when we try to see, we see only little, and when we give up trying, we see everything.
I stood there trying to breathe as the cold, the sea, the night, the residue of history, and the vast sky, faintly lit like dim wool, all conspired to take my breath from me. I breathed as if underwater, as if it were all new again and my lungs wouldn’t do it on their own.
After a while, I started back up towards the boat shed, lungs still under manual control and jumped when I saw a shadow appear on the hull of one of fishing boat sitting along the path. It flashed twice in front of me as the double beam of Bishop’s Rock lighthouse, five miles to the southwest, swept past. The shadow was my own, I realized. Jesus... I’m going to have to get comfortable with this place or I’m just going to spend the whole winter being spooked by my own shadow.
The thing is, this place is so old. So many people have lived and died here, and countless others have lost their lives in the surrounding sea, that I’m pretty much expecting to see a ghost most of the time. Then again, maybe spirits won’t bother with me because I’m only going to be here for a few months. I don’t know too much about ghosts, but aren’t their souls are trapped in some kind of eternal limbo? Given that, I kind of picture them looking for long term commitment. I guess I’ll test that theory tomorrow night when I go out again and try to breathe some more.
Excerpt 8
---11.18---
...While the other night was spooky, dark and windy, tonight is
quietly beautiful. It’s the first relatively clear night we’ve had in
a in some time. The night before last was absolutely lights-out, bag-
over-your-head black. Tonight the moon is shining down through the
clouds, soft, grey and cold. It’s a haunting light, a light that
feels like the moon is watching, seeing through us, drawing us out,
naked, and all of the little houses sit, quiet and still, trying
really hard to be good.
------
... I’m outside again and have taken the laptop with me. I’m sitting
against a rock called, "The Nag’s Head," a natural standing stone,
one part of which looks like the head of an old woman. The screen,
obscenely bright, drowns out my view of the landscape. I tilt it
down, so that I can see, and it illuminates the keyboard. It’s really
quite cold. Trying to type now with fuzzy gloves on, I feel somewhat
like a large Muppet. Boulders jut out of the moss to my left, frozen
in place as they tried to scurry past. The moss runs across to
neighboring pastures and down long, grey slopes towards towering
rocks, jagged and weather worn. I’ve come out late tonight to be with
this black island, and its secrets. This landscape, a faint, dark,
primeval beauty, lies silhouetted against the lit patchwork of a
shimmering sea. When the moon shows its face from behind the clouds,
everything changes in a transient rush. The land lies dusty now in
the chalky-white night. I’m transported—”wait, please!”—to another
planet.
I, voyager, sit quietly and scan the terrain ticking off
messages home, across plains named long ago. Time means little now.
This same magic night, with its same nocturnal dawn, transformed
landscape and cold, were experienced by shadowy figures that lived
here millennia ago. This shared experience transcends time. It
connects us. The same Nature that saw them, now sees me, alone on a
hillside, black parka illuminated, slick by the light of the screen,
marveling as, surely, they once did. It sees me, held in this
landscape of quiet and dreaming, as rabbits run in their sleep.
Excerpt 9
----11.18---
I set off for a third time tonight, now with Phillip, for a late-night walk to Gugh, the island next door.
We both donned full waterproofs because it had begun to rain. At low water, Gugh is connected to St. Agnes by a sandy land bridge, known simply as, “the Bar.” At high tide, however, the connection is cut. Having not checked the tide tables, we arrived at the Bar only to find it sinking under the waves.
Our plan ruled out, we settled for a half lap around St. Agnes. There is something humbling yet emboldening about walking the island late at night. It says, “Come, walk my rutty paths. Let those souls, lost at sea and buried in my bosom, whisper to you as you trod o’er their graves. Climb my rocks by the light of the moon and let your torches rest. Admire me this late hour, for you do not know when you will chance this way again.”
And we did. We admired her, her organ fields, her pale, translucent grace, as we walked on through clear night and rain. Coming around the western side of the island, through the remains of ancient hedgerows and formidable outcroppings, I again had the overwhelming sensation of being on the moon, similar plains and rocks, same quality of light.
Then, surveying the scene, I saw something I had never before seen in my life. It took me a while to even recognize what it was. Curving across the sky was a pale arc of light. We looked behind us. The moon was sitting low on a cloudless horizon, full and bright. As it shined, it cast over the island a ghostly, white rainbow.
We both stared in amazement at a phenomenon we had never known to exist. I felt thankful, chosen, like Nature had taken notice of us and blessed us with one of her secrets. We spent a while longer marveling at our discovery, then walked the muddy farm track home, wet but happy, as the rain picked up again...
The Bar at low water. Photo by Nik Schulz
The Bar at high water. Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 10
---11.25---
...There are spring tides and neap tides. The term “spring tide”
doesn’t refer to tides at a specific time of year, but rather to tides that occur when the sun and moon are in line, their combined gravities producing much greater tidal fluctuations. Neap tides occur when moon is 90˚ to the sun and the earth, thus producing smaller tidal fluctuations. Two spring and two neap tides occur every month and, in this part of the world, the spring tides are quite dramatic. They can alter the height of the ocean almost fifteen feet.
What that means for us, is that during a spring low tide, large tracts of coastlines are exposed and shallow coves and flats are completely emptied. Six hours later, at spring high tide, the water swallows everything up again, chewing on unfortified coastline and claiming anything in its path. I’ve found it exciting though, this quiet drama unfolding twice daily, culminating in giant-swallowing seas every two weeks. It’s nice to go out and observe it. To see it gives me a sense of boundary, a sense of the limits of sea and land. It defines a range of possibilities and a sense of place.
The sea wall at the quay, flooded. Photo by Nik Schulz
The St. Agnes Quay at high water. Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 11
---11.25---
I’m outside again tonight, at Periglis Cove, near the boat shed. The water is impossibly high, further up the ramp than I’ve ever seen it. It’s consumed everything: the stones that were always there, the entire beach. It beats against the rocks of the sea wall, the island’s last defense. I walk further down. It has consumed the boat ramp with ease, rolling over it and swallowing it whole. Water lies on both sides of it now where, normally, all is dry. I walk a little further down into the blackness. All I can see is what’s in my beam, a roiling, churning break, looking angry when stared at in the light. Seeing it consume the land is like happening upon a pride of lions devouring an antelope. It’s all flashing white teeth, tearing in circles. Then it crashes dead in front of me with a roar and lunges up the ramp. Shit. I back away quickly keeping my light on it (like that’s going to help), hoping not to trip on the massive turnbuckles I saw laying there on the way down.
The scene is the same down at the quay on the other side of the
island. The water is higher than I’ve ever seen it, such a swollen
sea. The wall that makes up the outward-facing part of the quay,
normally a wave break, is completely under water. A metal sign that
marks the end of the quay is affixed to a ten-foot pole. At low tide
you can stand at the quay’s end and look up at it. Now it’s almost
completely under water. Standing atop the quay, at what is now the
water’s edge, I can pick it out in the dark of the cove with my
flashlight. It reflects back at me like a submerged road sign.
Piercing the water with my light’s beam reveals a sea deep and clear,
eyes gleaming. Suddenly it smashes, with a splitting crack, on the
rocks behind me to my left and floods the top of the quay, surging
past me from behind. Jesus… I take hold of my senses and leave before
I’m swept out to sea.
I’m over at the Bar now. It’s completely submerged. The water flows
over it vigorously from both directions. Every receding wave close the
shore reveals the tip of the Bar’s smooth crown. I walk along its
crest, around a few scattered boulders and stand on a smooth, new
slope of sand. I don’t shine a light, as the island reveals itself
only in the dark. It’s nice to stand here and blink, guessing at the
flickering, fuzzy blackness, allowing it to play tricks. Wow... surf
breaking several feet away is sweeping out and wrapping itself around
my ankles. Forcing my breath now, steady... Trying to relax and trust
myself with the sea. Again it sweeps in rising up to my calves,
holding me in place, sucking the sand from around my feet in a steady
rush. Flashing bits of phosphorescence lie on the sand as the sea
withdraws.
Picking my way back up the hill from the Bar, the sea disappears,
though I can still hear its rumble. The wet wool of heaven is dark
and thick tonight and the lighthouses, as always, are on watch. Their
beams move slowly, illuminating immense volumes as they pull through
the heavy air. The cove by the quay, on the other hand, is lit by a
single light from a window above of the pub, which casts a warm glow
in the balmy evening. The light source, behind the trees now, makes
the scene looks like fairy tale I might have imagined as a child. The
light rests tenderly on the landscape, the steep old boat ramp, the
picnic tables and grass, and softly on the drowned rocks and sea.
Excerpt 12
---12.06---
...The most pleasing memory of the last week was recorded on top of a modest granite outcrop on the edge of Periglis Cove, opposite the boat shed. Phillip, his friend of his from London, and I clamored up there in the dark after a night at the pub. I found a small grassy bit and leaned my head back between two lichen-covered stones and stared at the unending sky. It was so nice to rest against the lichen while feeling the wind rush in off the ocean. What’s more, the lighthouses scanning the sky from every distant corner, gave the impression of a massive horizon-to-horizon disco. And there we were, elevated in the center of it all, in the giant, dream-found still. I stayed there, cold but warm, nestled in the rocks, and left only much later, after the others, after it had begun to rain.
Fire on Wingletang Down I. Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 13
---12.09---
A couple of weekends ago Paul Fisher, whom I’d met on a previous trip, was over from St. Mary’s staying with Ellen and Bryce. He and I were about to go for a walk in the afternoon when we noticed, apart from a stunning sunset in progress over the Western Rocks, huge amounts of smoke and a fire blazing on the other side of the island on Wingletang Down. We gathered cameras and gloves and went over to see what was going on and to possibly lend a hand.
When we got there, we saw that Euan, Morgan and Aeron (three of David and Sara Higgin’s kids from
Tamrin Farm) had set the Down on fire and the bracken was burning like mad. It wasn’t an accident, nor was it mischievous pyromania (like when I was a kid). No, they were just maintaining the land. Apparently the bracken is a real fire hazards in the summer, so in winter, when the soil is wet and the wind is right, they set it all alight and by next spring the charred patches are sprouting again. Euan, the oldest, kept an eye on things, Morgan did most of the work carrying branches of flaming bracken from one spot to the next and Aeron played around trying to get little bits to burn here and there.
I really admired the amount of responsibility with which David had entrusted his kids. He basically said, go set a chunk of the island on fire, I know you can do it safely. What a better way to teach kids responsibility than to frame it around something they love, like burning stuff.
Fire on Wingletang Down II. Photo by Nik Schulz
Apart from seeing the boys take on the task, it was amazing to see the fields in flames against the evening’s thinning sky. This island so easily changes character, transforming itself, shaman-like, into a more potent form. I had seen it before on previous nights and here was a new incarnation. Before me the land shifted and swirled. Witches danced and spun, undulating wildly, heads drawn back, mouths open. They drove themselves into a fevered frenzy leaping over this, engulfing that, ushering up huge amounts of smoke and the glowing shells of former plants. They flushed out fairies, sprites and nymphs, herding them all skyward, and marched them out over the sea.
You may guess that no one else noticed this, and you’d be right. People came and went, mothers, kids. Dinners were ready and waiting. It got late. The sky went out, as did the fire. Paul left; Phillip came and went; even the gathered cows got bored and went home. Eventually, as the last spirits drifted away, I bid them goodnight and wandered back myself.
Eunuch bull. Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 14
---12.15---
I went down to see Tom and Mary at Tyneham Farm the other day. They provide us our milk supply, a quart-sized plastic bag of which appears every morning on the stone gatepost outside the cottage. I’ve wanted to say hello to the cows for sometime now, so one dark, rainy afternoon I put on my waterproofs and headed over there. The dirt road to the farm is what I imagine Minnesota looks like: land of 10,000 lakes (or puddles in this case). I ran into Tom outside as he took a bucket of cow-chow to the milking shed. “Hiya! Didn’t think you’d make it down in this weather.”
“Just a little rain,” I replied, feeling like I had earned a little admiration for braving the elements.
Searching for the cows, Tom and I headed up into the field, which turned into ankle deep mud where cows
funnel through the gate, their hooves churning manure into the soil. It turned out they were all crowded into a corner of the hedge, sheltering from the wind and the rain. As soon as we showed up, and Tom started driving them out, they all ran past me at once. I was momentarily caught in the middle of a mini stampede as they bolted towards the feeding trough. Their stampeding, was based on wishful thinking, however. They don’t get fed until they get milked. So I helped herd them down to the milking shed. Well, Tom did most of the herding. I slapped a few flanks, imitating his technique, and managed to get a couple of cows in motion.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me before, but cows come in all kinds of shapes and sizes: tall ones, short ones, wide ones and skinny ones. Wide usually means pregnant, a state many find themselves in by their third birthday. We were in the milking shed now. Tom slid the door open and ushered the cows in two at a time. In walked the first pair, stepping up onto elevated, concrete milking platforms. They started munching on feed, which was hanging in a bucket at the end of each stall. On went the milking machine: milk, milk, milk.
Then the stalls were opened at the other end, so the cows could exit through a door at the rear of the
shed. I started to get a sense of their personalities by the way they made their entrances. Next, the shortest cow of the herd came in. She looked like a real sweetie, pregnant and impossibly wide for her height. She carried her calf like a suspended bundle that pulled her skin taut across her hips and stretched round through her mid-section. As she walked into the shed, she averted her eyes, shy, perhaps, of a stranger in her presence. Her short frame and abundant girth made it a little tricky for her to climb onto the milking platform but she managed after only a couple of missteps.
The cow that followed her in was a grand dame. She was tall and not the least bit bothered by my presence, nor was she pregnant like the others. Tom tries to have them all “in calf” in the winter so that they give birth in the spring, when it’s easiest to deal with newborns. They’ll produce more milk then as well, which coincides nicely with increased demand as the tourist season begins. This one, however, the bull had not been able to knock up, though he had, as Tom reports, given it several valiant efforts over the past few seasons. The two bulls in the field across from our house are eunuchs, as it turns out, which explains why they’re so mellow all the time. They always have a look that says, “Well, you know, I can take it or leave it, really.” No unstoppable primal instincts in that pasture.
Out went the short, pregnant sweetie and the grand dame and in came the next pair for milking. Tom hooked them up and explained more about how the dairy runs, as the milking machine pumped away. Then he paused. I was standing directly behind one of the cows. “You might want to move this way a bit,” he gestured.
“Sure.” I shifted myself to the right and not a second too soon. All I could think was “garden hose” as I watched a heavy-duty stream of cow pee splatter on the ground next to me. I gave myself a mental thumbs-up for wearing waterproof pants. “How did you know she was going to do that?” I asked.
Eunuch bulls. Photo by Nik Schulz
“Well, I’ve been doing this for a while,” he answered. Yeah, I guess with a bit of experience you learn to see things coming. Just then another cow stuck her head in through the exit door, curious, with big eyes, to see what was going on. Good fun, those cows.
As I walked back up the road, not really minding that I was covered in more urine and shit than in all but the earliest years of my life, it occurred to me that a lot of people here have great deal of responsibility. Tom and his wife have animals to look after all year long. They look after guests in the summer. They deliver milk. They’re responsible to flower distributors for their crop, and that’s not all, I’m sure.
Then I thought about my own life. What responsibility do I have? None really. Here I am on a little island, under no great pressure to produce anything, self-employed, 30-years-old. I have no one I am responsible for or to. I have arranged it this way. There are those that would say, “Lucky devil,” but I think that responsibility is the load that drives us. Too much and it crushes us, not enough and we spin freely, our virtues going untapped. It’s good to feel the weight against ones shoulder and to pull it well, to find joy in it. It’s being able to support the ones you love, to provide for your children, to do good work, and have your efforts appreciated.
It may sound like dewy-eyed, old school sentimentality, but that’s what was tugging on me as I walked up the road that night.
I’ve been thinking about it for a while, I suppose. It’s been vague and cloudy lately, an unaddressed yearning. How to take on responsibility? How to love? How to work at something that fills one with joy? These are all of the big questions aren’t they? I don’t think the answer can be ferreted out through endless rumination (as I’m prone to do). The answer, I think, lies in the doing.
Coming back from St. Mary’s on the Sea Horse. Photo by Nik Schulz
Excerpt 15
---12.19---
...The sea has been amazing lately, brightly lit and emerald green. The whole island has been astoundingly
vivid. Electrically enhanced, candy-chrome hues snap against black, rain-laden skies. Any more luminous, and every blade of grass, every drop of water, would simply burst from chromatic tension. It was like that when I came back from St. Mary’s the other day on the Sea Horse, the boat that normally serves the island of St. Martin’s. I stood on deck, watching the piercingly green, churning seas, my arms lashed through the railing, as we were rocked by huge swells and plunged from the crest to trough. It was all I could do to just hang on, as I grinned from ear to ear, and licked the salt from my lips.
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Daylight has its virtues, but I’m finding darkness to be an even greater luxury. True night, flickering in front of ones eyes, playing tricks, allowing the faint outlines of buildings and blind lighthouses to slowly emerge, is a rare pleasure. How often does one have the opportunity to explore ones surroundings, familiar, like a lover in the dark, to trust touch not sight? London’s queasy orange glow keeps it up all night. Even some small towns never dare close their eyes. Here, however, we are blessed with velvety blackness. At first I felt uneasy in it, now it’s all I can do to never let my light pierce the dark.
Excerpt 16
---12.30---
Even before I left for Christmas, intuition told me that pilgrims
coming to St. Agnes for New Year would bring
with them a young woman, whom I would find undeniably beautiful. Providence, always looking out for me, ensured that she would be among the group of friends staying with Ellen and Bryce across the way.
This afternoon, Jack, his brother, his brother’s wife (who were also here for New Year) and I, went out for a walk and ran into more friends of friends, all here for the coming celebration. On our way home, the four of us went over to Ellen and Bryce’s to say hello. We saw Ellen through the window of one of the guest rooms, relaxing on a bed with two other women, slumber-party-style. She smiled and came to meet us at the side door. After a round of hellos and kisses, we poured into her already full sitting room. She disappeared into the kitchen to prepare tea. For once it was nice to see the little island full of people my own age. There was joy in the room as we all talked and introduced ourselves. The two girls I’d seen through the guest room window were missing, presumably still talking to one another. When one of them came into the sitting room for a cigarette and left again, I didn’t even have to see her face to know she was the one my intuition had told me about. Her movements, clear in the corner of my eye, drawing my attention away from the conversation I was having, were all effortless grace and easy elegance. This grace, established so many generations ago that the characteristics were inseparable from her person, such that they no longer described her, but rather, she described them. Her name, I would find out later, is Mia. What all this foreshadows can only remain to be seen, but I am loath to say more.
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This brings me to the subject of my vulnerability, which I don’t mean to trot out like a trained horse at every opportunity in my life and in this journal, but merely hope to free for use. So many times in the past, when I’ve tried to open the door of my heart to allow people in, I’ve found it stuck like a rusty hinge. Being here helps. If I don’t open myself up to people, I’ll surely go insane. That simple bit of added urgency does wonders.
Excerpt 17
---01.01.2000---
Even minutes before midnight, I doubted the clocks unstoppable march. Would they really manage to make it to 2000? Would that last passing second really have the strength to roll over all those zeros? Incredibly, it did and we found ourselves drunkenly stumbling into yet another 1000 years.
New Year’s Eve on St. Agnes was to be celebrated with a “fancy dress” party (which is fancy English for “costume party”) at a deconsecrated church known as the Island Hall. By late afternoon I was still trying to get a costume together but coming up short. In deciding what to bring for a six-month stint on a remote island, I hadn’t figured on needing a costume. Show’s how much I know... I ended up improvising, finding some wire-framed sunglasses, a skin-tight, striped, blue and purple shirt paired with white overalls, recovered from the wreck of the cargo ship, Cita (which, I’m told, littered the islands with overalls when it crashed on local rocks a couple of years ago). I then blow-dried my as-yet-uncut-on-English-soil hair into an afro of gigantic proportions. This ensemble I somewhat convincingly passed off as 60s-era, art scene-chic.
To start off the evening, Ellen and Bryce had kindly invited me to join them and their friends for dinner.
For costumes, they had decided to all dress like their ancestors. While I knew this, I wasn’t prepared for the moment I walked into the sitting room and saw Mia sitting there in strappy, low-cut, vaguely Egyptian shift, wearing a black, onyx necklace fanned out from pronounced clavicle to pronounced clavicle. False eyelashes, a long, platinum-white wig and a tiny, butterfly tattoo, probably taken from a child’s sticker book and sparkling below the corner of her left eye, only added to her otherworldly appeal. She was so gorgeous, I almost stopped breathing. After a moment I recovered and spent the whole dinner trying to figure out how to spend as much time with her as possible over the coming week. The only thing that distracted me was the fact that Ellen and Bryce had prepared a fantastically delicious meal of local beef, sea spinach mouse and potatoes, alongside unspeakably good crepes topped with salmon, creme fresh and caviar, all accompanied by an astounding 10-year-old champagne, one bottle of which they uncork at every significant milestone in their lives.
At some point this fine dinner among friends degenerated into a raucous, champagne-fueled sing-a-long as we charged, at top volume, through the musical standards of our generation. It was, without a doubt, the most fun I’ve ever had exiting a year.
We ate, we sang, we ate some more and slowly made our way down to the Island Hall. It had been decorated to ring in the New Year and shined like a beacon at the far end of the island. Inside, the tinfoil stars and dark sailcloth sky, the snowy white and frosty blue windows, white plaster walls and wide-planked floor gave the impression of a high school theater set. “2000” was spelled out over the door in Christmas lights, rendering the date in home-town proportions. It looked lovely and they had done a marvelous job decking it out for the occasion. As we arrived, we saw that the revelers were already in full swing, so we got drinks and stood outside.
I found Mia and struck up a conversation. After few minutes her mouth formed the bullet, “My boyfriend blah, blah, blah...” I wasn’t sure if she realized she’d been carrying a rifle, or was even aware that it had gone off, but the words left her lips like a gunshot. Wits not yet dulled by the champagne, I dove out of the way hoping to avoid the little missile as it flew past. Too late. As I got up and brushed myself off, still in mid conversation, I knew I’d been hit. The flash of her words erased from my memory everything else that she said the entire evening. All I can remember is her platinum hair, demur smile and the most perfect fireworks display I’ve ever seen, as a group of men lined up to launch expired ship’s flares at the stroke of midnight. They rocketed into the air and exploded, floating in the near sky like weightless lanterns, illuminating us in the misty-wet night, as we huddled together behind a little round hill, glowing in front of the Island Hall.
Names have been changed for privacy concerns.
Link: Nik’s website
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