Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith
I — Storm
A couple of days ago, a bank of grey cloud came rolling high over the hills behind the town, a foggy surf table that rose and then descended to break over the streets. One moment people, houses, cars and buildings scuttled around at its leading edge like so much flotsam, the next the town lay silent in a misted shroud of hush as a mizzle settled in, ready to last for the following couple of days.
In this most changeable of seasons, there’s none of the gradual ornate dismantling of the visual landscape as there is in autumn, no leaf-by-leaf taking down of the old to make way for the new. The murky blankness comes and everything else goes in this seasonal game of all-or-nothing.
The mist drifted into the space between our front window and the street outside like an ash haze. Later, while walking over to the shops, the streetlights and car headlights seemed momentarily a little brighter, as though kicking out in reaction to this smothering, but their pale, impotent glow was soon swallowed back up in the watery grey until those lights seemed to lose each other and drift further apart again, a distant galaxy dispersed in perspective.
A national obsession, the weather has become so deeply entrenched in our culture and our literature that it has become something of a personality all of its own, with its differing moods and personas and quirks. In some cases, it is depicted as the sullied villain of the piece as in Ted Hughes’ poem Wind, the wind itself a guilty rogue with a wild and unpredictable nature, whereas in others we see the eerie strangeness of the silent invader, supernaturally drifting through James Joyce’s story The Dead, his character Gabriel Conroy hearing seeming to hear in ‘…the snow falling faintly through the universe’, something reaching beyond mere weather into the metaphysical ether. Either way, there generally lurks a peculiar and unpredictable otherness about the weather and the way it ‘falls’ or ‘closes in’ or ‘comes down’ like the unexpected interloper, its schizophrenic temperament fluctuating all the time.
Being quite fond of this unusual, interchangeable time of year, I am fully aware that it’s an enthusiasm I may not share with many others. My wife Rachel, for instance, is a sun lover, and always has been. Where she loves lying in the sun I prefer to hide in cooler rooms through the summer. Spool the year on a few months to the slow, fruitful hours that pile up at summer’s back end though, and I come into my element while she enters a state of semi-hibernation, swaddled in bed socks and thick woollen cardigans. So, where I find a state of indecisive appeal at this time of year, I am acutely conscious of the fact that it can induce in others a state of irritability, shorter hours leading to blackened moods, cooler temperaments and dampened affability. This was the case last night, the wet, foggy conditions leading to confinement which, in turn, led to an occlusion of our moods, something that surged through the living room until, after nearly an hour of to-ing and fro-ing, we were deposited like castaways upon our own little islands of indignation at two very distant points, slightly disoriented and more than a little exhausted.
The room was full of the cloying atmosphere of annoyance so, the only solution to this being a blast of fresh air to clear the fug, I packed the car and went in search of some quiet space, heading out regardless of whatever the weather was doing.
A still-pregnant sky was awaiting my arrival at the beach, the first spots of rain arriving shortly afterward, recognised as a drumming against my hood. A lifeguard’s flag strained and slapped against its pole as the wind fretted it, its guitar string squeal adding to the dismal seasonal mixtape that played in my head.
The rain’s spattering began to intensify, each individual beat joining up until they finally formed one drubbing note just as I cast the first bait into the water and stood back to watch the rod tip in the midst of the mess of weather. In the downpour everything slowly began to soften out at the edges, including me, like a tiny background figure in a painting by an old master, blurring out beneath the shellac.
I endured this solid wall of rain, retreating back into my clothing and reducing my world to one small viewing screen beneath my hood. Eventually, after forty-five minutes, the rain slowed, then stilled, and a brief period of quiet calm fell upon the beach, allowing me to take down the hood and open up my view of the world. As often happens in such quiet moments, fishing soon gave way to watching — the swirls and eddies of the tide up the face of the rocks to my left; a giant iron ore ship waiting out in the bay for the tug that would guide its bulk into the harbour to ready itself.
Then came the first faint flashes of lightning from the west.
At first there was the occasional flicker, and I watched as the sky over the West country began to fill again and the thunderclouds tumbled through the sky with the consistency of paint swirled from a brush into a jar of water.
I looked on as the storm moved rapidly, spreading first over Devon then expanding outward across Cornwall. Onward and outward it rolled, reaching further and further until I began noticing flashes beyond Swansea where the storm had begun to circle around me and approach from the west, over the Gower peninsula.
After having caught only a solitary dogfish, and reluctant to be caught in the vicinity of two fifteen-foot carbon poles when the lightning arrived, I wound in both rods and packed away for the night.
Where my arrival had seen the last of the daylight punctuated by the passing darkness of sudden squalls, now, from the car, I watched the night deepen and some of its individual features picked out by brief periods of illumination as the storm flared up angrily over the bay. I had been reading Frankenstein with a GCSE class earlier, and now felt a little like Victor Frankenstein, watching ‘the tempest, so beautiful yet terrific’, the ‘noble war in the sky’ until a dark shadow returned to taint my night again. Sometimes even angling isn’t enough.
After another five minutes I started the car’s engine. Time to go back home. The lightning flashed on, picking out, momentarily here and there, the little tug preparing to meet the incoming ship, and I was reminded of the little Breton Fisherman’s Prayer that I keep taped to the inside of my tackle box:
Lord,
The sea is so wide
And my boat is so small.
Be with me.
I pulled off as the tug finally moved out of the harbour’s safety, caught the tide, and began its efforts to span the divide.
Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith (with permission). This book is published by and can be purchased from Cambria Books HERE
