Feeds:
Posts
Comments

The Sum of Quiet Abundance

May 29, 2012 by julianhoffman

For an audio version of ‘The Sum of Quiet Abundance’ click the play button.


Insects are contagious, both in their profusion and appeal. In the cool hours of early spring they are few and far between, like solitary wanderers striking out across a desert. A roving ground beetle might rise into view, clambering with slow deliberateness over the dunes of bare earth. A bee occasionally drones across the March garden, its sound a solo when it will soon be orchestral. With the first flowers unfurled by the warming air insects multiply beyond all calculation, waking from a winter torpor or hatching out from safely-stowed eggs and pupas. The world fills with the most fruitful of things.

The lilac in the garden sways with more species of bees than I can count on my hands. The perfumed bundles, purple and drooping with the weight of their splendour, are an irresistible magnet in the brief span of most insect lives, like the bright lights of cities are to youth. They taste urgently, diving into the depths of what must be the insect equivalent of ecstasy: bees weighted with pollen grains, dusted and furred about their legs like they wore anklets of gold; the emerald sheen of chafers glinting in the sun, drunk on nectar and nuzzled into pillows of soft petals or moving woozily about the leaves. Time slows like a ceremony when I see this sweet ardour.

Around the lilac butterflies lose some of their timidity, having weighed up the gains of such riches and shed their natural caution to make the most of it. The delicately furred swallowtails, their cream-white wings ribbed with black veins and flecked with eyes like blue summer seas, almost touch my nose as I edge nearer. The proboscis works like a mechanical drill, plunging into the purple tubes in search of a sweet nectar seam. Carpenter bees swarm around the aquilegia; despite their size and heavy flight, they hover without being awkward, drawing shy and lazy circles about the hanging lamps of rose, mauve and maroon flowers. On a walk a sea of baby grasshoppers part with my steps like waves before a boat, jumping as though one. And amidst this brash and brazen plenty hunting spiders lie in wait, sharing in the prosperity. Still and unseen behind a petal, the spiders await the inevitable moment when an insect strays to the chosen flower in its random and roaming way, poisoning their prey into paralysis.

Each afternoon a hush descends on the village with siesta, when farmers draw curtains against the sharp mountain light and birds relinquish their songs until evening. Even the dogs curl quietly into the shadows cast by trees. But it’s a surface hush that I’m aware of, swimming in the foreground of my consciousness – a silence that is neat and obvious. At the edge of the world is a murmur, the thrumming cadence of untold other lives, small and often inconspicuous affairs. The insect song drones throughout the hours, like the heat haze that wraps itself about the day. I listen in – perhaps tuning in would be more accurate, like it were a radio signal, fainter and more distant than birdsong and machinery, nearly out of range in the ebbing afternoon. But as I still myself it clears, focusing into the notes of a complex, creaturely music, as varied as their kinds.

There are few things as numerous as insects. About a million species have been discovered, named and described, and each year more of them are found throughout the world. Their number is greater than all other known fauna put together, comprising perhaps as much as 80% of the animal species present on the planet, an abundant sum whose total weight would easily dwarf the biomass of man. Whether it’s mosquitoes rising from warming ponds, a trail of ants sending intricate signals with a touch of their antennae or the entrancing work of butterflies opening for the first time to fill their fragile wings with blood, building them up into weightless scaffolds of flight, insects are about us at any moment in numbers beyond our knowing, in water, in earth, in air. But despite their achievement, their pervasive presence across the planet, insects are as vulnerable to threats as the less numerous mammals and birds. In recent years the mass die-off of bees has shown us how fragile abundance and diversity can be. Colony collapse disorder has decimated bees throughout Europe and North America, putting at risk an insect crucial to crop pollination and the health of plant communities. Amongst a litany of probable causes, the intensive use of pesticides and diminishing numbers of wildflowers due to habitat loss are high on the list. There is no safety, necessarily, to be found in numbers.

When everything seems still I listen for the buzz and the hum, the murmur of a million things. Across the sunlit hills and meadows, the rain-soaked garden and plain, this chorus of trilling and clicking leads to some of the most commonplace and charismatic creatures about us, the countless minor lives burnished with a brief beauty, blazing through the afternoons with no time to live any other way. And while spring pulls us into summer, the quiet is more song than silence, abundant, rich and full.

Posted in Butterflies and Moths, Garden, Insects, Nature | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

An Uncertain Country

May 5, 2012 by julianhoffman

To listen to an audio version of ‘An Uncertain Country’ click the play button


To near the coast in April is to stray into uncertain country. At times a hot sun bathes the orange groves until they glow. Then the lashing rains return, hurled by the wind across the hills like ragged grey sheets. Mist and cloud roll cold over the plain where green seedlings stand shivering to their knees in drowned fields. A burst of sun sheers open the sky, only to be snapped shut by a lid of dark clouds.

The uncertainty stretches to more than just the weather, though; there is a sense of things hanging in the balance when we arrive. Birds make landfall throughout the day, so that at any moment a silent and secluded pool might be riffled with the murmur of wings. Migrating across the Mediterranean, they turn up anywhere on the salt marshes and lagoons that frill the Ionian coast across the strait from Corfu, steering out of the bleak storms or flung hurtling ahead, aiming for these small islands and edges of refuge, the dwindling places of wild necessity.

The Kalamas estuary spreads between the mountains and sea, an in-between world where salt and silt entangle. But however impressive these wetlands can be, they’re only an echo of their original size and substance, like pockets without a coat. Diminished by draining and dumping, and the pollution from fertiliser run-off, they still sparkle with concentrated life. Spoonbills huddled like the first fall of snow. Heads lowered together, they trawled the waters as if they’d been cinched into a pure white circle by rope. Cattle egrets rode the backs of cows like they were droving them home. Marsh sandpipers riddled the mud and herons speared the shallows, all feeding with the eagerness that follows a long journey. In places I could see how the fields claimed for farming were filling with wings as well, the salt water seeping back in, rising along its native course to restore an ancient equilibrium.

The wild world has a way of returning. Scattered across the mountains above the estuary were the silhouettes of empty houses. Whatever small sounds our steps made as we climbed to the ruins of old Sagiada were swallowed by the rain, sealed up by the squalling April weather. A pair of ravens hung as if black commas in the sky and Judas trees blazed like candles from the dark forest. The village had been torched by German forces in 1943, and its inhabitants fled their homes for Corfu, striking out across the narrow blue waters from the harbour far below. Through the grey mist that layered the strait I tried imagining the ragged line of boats escaping through the swells, the flames the passengers would have seen engulfing their homes as they sailed away, the sound of weeping trailing across the sea.

Having left behind their fields of sesame, rice and cotton, along with their animals and belongings, some villagers returned from Corfu at the end of the war to the handful of homes that weren’t completely destroyed. But as if forever condemned they were forced to leave a year later when the Greek Civil War swept brutally across the mountains. From that day the village has stood empty, an isolated home to the church and its fading frescoes. All that remains are the echoes of the ruins, the wild arbour of vines spreading like a fan across the walls and the fig shoots growing from old kitchens with no one to steep the young, budding fruit in syrup to be stored in jars for winter sweets. Stone arches clad in ivy mark a way between rooms, or passages from the houses into lanes that once led to the market square. The earth was furrowed with the habits of forgotten days.

Whatever certainty there might be is rarely ours to know. It eludes us like mist about our fingers. Driving the edge of a coastal lagoon the day before, yellow wagtails had fallen about us like rain. Wearing fresh lemon coats for the new season, they dropped out of the storm in their hundreds, as though a door in the clouds had swung open to release them. Spilling from the marsh tussocks and tamarisks lining either side, they were joined by swallows that swooped and swirled, circling us on our slow journey like chaperones from the skies. The air was woven with wings as we inched along; movement sustaining a stillness, a moment poised around our shared and unexpected laughter, the singular and irrepressible joy of being a part of the world. Our lives come and go with these moments, diving at depth or buoyant the next. And like birds or villagers making landfall after the uncertain crossing of seas we never know what we’ll find until we arrive.

Posted in Birds, Habitat, History, Landscape, Wetlands | Tagged , , , , , | 19 Comments »

First Things

March 19, 2012 by julianhoffman

To listen to an audio version of ‘First Things’ click the play button


You hear the long, quavering call of a blackbird and open the window, stiff after the swelling snow. The song slips inside, spins and swirls for a few moments, and then steals you from the room. Standing outside, warmth lilts about your fingers and face for the first time in months. You sense the sap rising to the apple buds, the stars of white blossom on the cusp of erupting.

A lizard skitters madly along the wall, darting over the stones as if they were coals. Crocuses purple the dark earth and water runs as if in a race, unlocked from snow and ice to stream down the mountains and pour as a river into the lake. Tree sparrows fumble in the branches of the quince, shuttling old leaves and grasses, sometimes shiny candy wrappers dropped by kids, to furnish a nest in a stone cranny of the house. Pale green shoots are spearing through the ground. You look down to see you’re standing on a new season.

Brimstone, tortoiseshell, Queen of Spain fritillary: the names of butterflies on the tip of your tongue, forgotten there all winter like the handsaw you set down and didn’t find until the shrinking snow returned it, wet and rusted on the grass. But seeing those first flights – the early and uncertain flutters of amber, lemon and orange wings glinting in the sharp sun – and a whole language falls into place, a homecoming book left dusty on a shelf. You turn the pages of returning things, feel the shape of their names in your mouth. Swallowtail, wheatear, nightingale. You let them linger on your lips, trembling and ready to fly.

The first things of spring are ancient and repeated, and yet somehow uniquely new. No matter how many springs have preceded it, the season always feels like it’s arriving for the first time. There’s a quality of the ecstatic to it all, like the spell of first love wild and requited. But a first love that’s recurring. All that appears shares the mystery of being simultaneously intimate and unfamiliar, the paradox of a circle that turns, bringing the same season back to us after a lengthy absence. The same season seen differently. You feel the sun that’s unfurling the world and know it could be the first you’ve ever felt. You hear the long, quavering call of the blackbird and let its song slip inside.

Posted in Butterflies and Moths, Garden, Nature, Prespa, Wildflowers | Tagged , , , , , | 39 Comments »

Water Music

February 10, 2012 by julianhoffman

The earth has its voices and songs. It has its own languages crafted over millennia through slow and patient processes, its dialects peculiar to geological regions or areas of weather, to places of particular precipitation. The earth has its voices and songs just as we have our own, a music born of place, notes threaded together by winds and tides, by land and water.

Avalanches thunder across steep slopes and reeds crackle in the cold like old bones. Rocks tumble into canyons, a distance measured by a long receding echo of stone hitting stone that becomes fainter as it falls. Grasses whisper with the wind, a restless conversation moving through a meadow. Trees sigh in a storm and dry leaves rattle across parched earth. Seedpods snap open in the sun. Rains fill a jungle with the beats of a million drums. Even the silence of snow is a song, in the same way that John Cage’s 4”33 is a song, something rich and articulate, a compressed aria of the sounds around us we so easily miss.

Ice covers the small lake this winter. It wears a shawl for the season as though it were suddenly ageing with grey beauty. Some days channels of black water open and close on it like eyes blinking against the light, while on others the ice borrows a speckled sheen that resembles the cryptic plumage of birds that nest in its reeds. And on some days the ice is masked by cloud, shrouded by fog or mist that unrolls like a dream after waking. Then the lake is only there in your ears.

The music is haunting and beautiful, shifting in ethereal and unknowable ways from one day to the next. There are songs that could come from a lost tribe of sea creatures stranded beneath the ice, a moaning and wailing from the depths. Sonar pulses rise through the cold winds, composed into a suite of strange and otherworldly sounds. The music can resemble water that is boiling, bubbling up in a pan the size of the lake. Or it might pop and ping, tinkle like ice cubes in a glass. There are days when it could be a xylophone being played, a cold fiesta on the frozen surface. The music is as varied as the shapes that water can take.

Leaving the lake behind for another day I see snow moving across the ice like a line of dancers dressed in white, a choreography of wind, a sinuous sweep that echoes the cold front pushing down from the north. It is the lake’s equivalent of the village festivals that roar through the summer nights, the wild blaring trumpets and irrepressible dances that turn in a circle to mark a season of plenty. The lines of snow weave and wend over the ice, like ghosts moving to the music from below, celebrating the voices of winter, hearing the songs of the world.

Posted in Landscape, Nature, Photography, Prespa | Tagged , , , , , | 28 Comments »

A Winter World

January 19, 2012 by julianhoffman

To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read. The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combinations change in meaning…It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone and will come again. ~ John Haines, ‘The Snow, the Stars, the Fire’

Some winters I see lizards scattering across stones as I clamber the hillsides, retreating to the dark crannies that pockmark the slopes like the hollows of a sponge. I see butterflies resume their flights with the same uncertainty as children learning to ride bikes, slow and unaccustomed to light after a period of hibernation. I see reckless wildflowers uncurl towards the sun, prescient, fragile, doomed if the weather turns. But until it does they spark like coloured lights amongst the wind-raked grasses.

Other winters are different, mysteries of crystals and ice, when a world of white snow settles after falling, falls and settles again, a silent stillness austere and astonishing. Snow muffles the season, hushes the hours like a monastic spell. Ice lengthens into hanging spires, a winter citadel upturned along each village roof. Burst rosehips are scattered red across the snow by small mammals, little bundles of seed and skin, one of the few wild fruits to be found with any certainty in a frugal season. Hare tracks stipple the drifts, a loping set of indentations separated by white space, revealing how little they are bound to earth when they move. An afterimage of feathers shows where a bird has landed on snow to leave an imprint of its presence, a delicate etching akin to animal calligraphy.

From the first frosts of November I watch the skies for storms, looking for the grey ceiling of clouds that might coincide with a chill air, searching for the metallic, glittering light that often signals a fall. But in recent years the snows have been scarce, and all but the highest mountains have passed the winters bare. In our warming world I worry about the lake which is sustained by snowmelt, the rivers that bring life to the wet meadows and irrigate crops throughout the basin. Winter is no longer a sure thing.

But I also miss the joys of winter. Seeing snow fall from a mountain sky never fails to delight me. It takes me back to my childhood in Canada, when snow instigated a building of forts and ramparts, a cairn of snowballs at my side, as my brother and I spent the dwindling hours until dusk pummeling each other’s defences, or traipsing through the white drifts in snowsuits that hissed with our steps, ploughing paths with unrivalled excitement. We were explorers in a vast and uncharted wilderness, sending boats of bark sailing down rivers of ice we’d cracked open with our heels.

That mystery has never faded; I still thrill to the falling snow because of its simple and elemental beauty. It casts a spell that is different from other weathers; encourages intimacy with one of the planet’s magical processes. And the notion that each snowflake falling from a billowing white sky is unique in its form is as astonishing as the multitude of stars that umbrella the clear winter nights. Each one a rarity, a pattern indescribably its own.

Born in 1865, Wilson A. Bentley was entranced by snow by the time he was a teenager growing up on a farm in Vermont. Absorbed by the long winters, Bentley set out to photograph snowflakes, eventually overcoming the technical difficulties of the age by attaching a bellows camera to a microscope and transferring each flake from a piece of black velvet to a microscope slide, capturing his first snowflake image in 1885. Before he died of pneumonia in 1931, after walking six miles through a blizzard in order to make more images, Bentley, also known as The Snowflake Man, had photographed more than 5000 snowflakes, including 2,500 for his 1931 book Snow Crystals. In all that time he never discovered two that were alike. One of the first to capture the ephemeral forms of snow before they melted, Bentley proclaimed that each flake was unique.

“Under the microscope I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design, and no design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

While the beauty of a snowflake is visible individually, taken together they have a cumulative and transforming power. Snow strips the land back to the bone, revealing its very essence, the shape and profile of a place. It’s like seeing a first draft of the land, an outline before the grace notes were added: the lichen-frilled rocks and scattered shrubs, the wild and tumbling grasses.

The ridges above my home are white and skeletal this winter, curved into smooth and sinuous lines. Bare trees stand sentry across the fields. And at the foot of the valley the lake has taken on the hue of ice, though it isn’t frozen. Instead it seems to know this winter is different, more in keeping with the way the season should be, what it means in this corner of the world. Far from being a dead time, winter restores and replenishes; it lays the ground for the long, searing summer months. For now the lake reflects the sky off the snow, turning deep blue in the process, the blue of distance and longing. The same watery blue the snow will melt into come spring.

Posted in Nature, Photography, Prespa | Tagged , , , , , , | 28 Comments »

Glimpsed, In Passing: 2011

December 28, 2011 by julianhoffman

You’d be quite right in thinking that this isn’t part two of our journey to Szczecin in Poland. And rather than have you looking for it, or wondering whether I’ve deleted the subtitle of the previous post and therefore the obligation to write a follow-up, I’ll confess to not having written it. Not yet anyways.

Much of this past year has been taken up with putting together a book-length collection of essays called The Small Heart of Things, and the wonderful but slow process of writing, revising, arranging and shaping it. Followed by the same again, and then again. It’s a process that I deeply enjoy and which reminds me of the way stones are polished smooth by the endless interest of waves. But this book project has also meant that I’ve had less time than I would have liked to devote to Notes from Near and Far. As December sped on and snow began falling across the mountains I realised there was little chance that I could do justice to the experience of being in Szczecin before the year’s end. My apologies for the delay, and I’ll do my best to take us back to that fascinating port city in the new year.

While watching the hours slip by in recent weeks I was reminded that I’d marked the end of last year with a post called ‘Glimpsed, In Passing,’ which borrowed a quote from V.S. Pritchett about the fragmentary nature of short stories which I’d adapted for photographs. Recalling some of the highlights of this year, the striking moments that still lingered with me at its end, I began thinking how curious a concept time can be, and to what degree we each forge a relationship with it that goes beyond a common sense of measure. The duration of a particular moment is different for us all, calibrated according to the depth of the experience. Sometimes a moment can expand until it fills with a light that will keep it burning for years. Or it might stand out from a crowd of other moments through its rarity, or the suddenly seen beauty of its everyday quality. Virginia Woolf described these as “moments of being,” memorable because they are so different from the ordinary stretches of time bookending them. Moments that bring us fully into awareness, enduring long beyond their insignificant span.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who’ve followed Notes from Near and Far this year. I’m grateful to all who have taken the time to read the blog or any of the longer essays posted here like Faith in a Forgotten Place, with an especial acknowledgement to those who’ve lent their thoughts and shared their experiences here. Your gifts have enriched the blog by making each post a conversation, and I’m deeply grateful for that.

And on that note I’d like to wish you all a wonderful end to the year, and plenty of joy, inspiration and creativity for the coming one. Here are a few glimpses of the past year that will stay with me for a while. Thanks again…

 

The year began with a January walk above the cliffs of Great Prespa Lake. The stillness of the day was absolute, born of cold and cloudless skies. The lake was as smooth as glass, timeless and blue. There was the clarity of silence about it. That evening I opened a book of Chinese wilderness poetry and unknowingly found the words of Liu Tsung-yuan as if they’d been summoned by the lake itself.

“A thousand peaks; no more birds in flight.
Ten thousand paths: all trace of people gone.

In a lone boat, rain cloak and hat of reeds,
an old man’s fishing the cold river snow.”

- Liu Tsung-yuan (773-819), ‘River Snow’

 

We turned a corner on a remote forest walk this summer to find a cluster of lizard orchids unrolling their marvellous forked tongues in the sun. Though they’ve never been previously recorded in the Prespa National Park, other small clusters of this most remarkable of wildflowers, Himantoglossum hircinum, were discovered in varying places over the following week. Whether it was simply coincidence, or they’ve all been biding their time for this rare and unlikely display, it just goes to show what extraordinary species we sometimes unknowingly share this world with, and what you can stumble upon at any time.

We were on holiday nearly 400 kilometres from home when we decided to stop into one of the many shops selling homemade honey on a peninsula reaching out into the sea. From the dozen or so shops we chose the closest, and were then led around the workshop by the owner as she explained the process of honey-making, including the crafting of candles from the wax. Finally asking us where we were from, she laughed when we told her we lived in Prespa. “Then you’ll know the beehives that produced this honey. We keep them on a hill just beneath your village.”

Greece’s eastern province of Thrace is dotted with Turkish Muslim villages, a relic community from when the two countries exchanged minority populations in 1922. The only exceptions to the agreement were the Turkish villages of Thrace and the Greeks of Istanbul. Visiting one of these villages for the first time we immediately saw how different it was; it was unquestionably poorer than its Greek neighbours, and all of the houses were fronted by high walls so that the village looked inward rather than out. Within seconds of arriving a young man raced over with a smile. He took my hand in his own and began shaking it with great enthusiasm. After the traditional Muslim greeting of Salam alaikum - May peace be upon you – he welcomed us by saying how pleased he was that we’d come. Please enjoy your stay in our village, he said, and thank you so much for visiting. It was one of the most heartwarming welcomes I’ve experienced anywhere in the world.

The eagle owl is easily Europe’s largest of the owl family, and this particular bird was found injured near Thessaloniki. It recovered, arrived in Prespa in a cardboard box after a three-hour journey in the cargo hold of a bus, and was released one November afternoon amongst a stand of ancient junipers. As dusk fell about us it hissed wildly to be free. Hearing the gasps from the gathered children and adults as the five-foot span of its wings took it away through the trees was a sound that will linger for a while.

For nearly two days rain lashed the Evros Delta while we tried to watch birds on their spring migration. Low grey clouds tumbled over the wetlands, obscuring all but the nearest species. We trudged through the mud, leaning into cold winds. Birds suspended their journeys and kept cover close to ground. But when the sun found a way through, revealing a brilliant blue sky rinsed by rain, the birds rose in waves. Pelicans spiralled in their thousands like a great white bowl spinning on a wheel. Storks walked the emerald meadows and raptors sliced open the sky. And as the sun spilled over the delta it was as though the place had never known rain, as if light was all that had ever been, as if light was all that would ever be. 

Certain species have a tendency to elude us; whether it’s a particular bird you’ve always wanted to watch or a mammal that others say is easy to see, we’re sometimes missing the necessary luck that is a big part of observing the natural world. For years I’ve tried to photograph the marbled white butterfly but have instead compiled a large archive of out-of-focus images, to the point that I began calling the butterfly the blurred white in homage. But while out one day this summer there was a single individual that stayed still amidst a cloud of swirling others, allowing me to get close enough for the first time to its delicate beauty. Though it’s one of the most common butterfly species in Greece I felt like I’d glimpsed the rarest of gems.

Posted in Balkans, Nature, Photography, Travel | Tagged , , , , | 29 Comments »

A Family Affair: Szczecin, pt.1

November 29, 2011 by julianhoffman

To listen to an audio version of ‘A Family Affair’ click the play button


“All origins become mysterious if we search far enough into the past. And almost all peoples, when we look at their earliest origins, turn out to have come from somewhere else.” -Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History

A fierce north wind struck the boat, chilling us to the bone. Waves from an oil-tanker slapped the hull; the pilot boats taking it out to sea resembled the small fish that keep company with whales. Towering cranes lined the docks, their metallic arms reaching through air, loading and unloading cargo from around the world. Fishermen cupped cigarettes to their mouths, the thin nets of smoke sheering away in the wind. A grey sky skimmed the world.

A class of Polish university students huddled on the open deck, listening to a lecture about the historic importance of the port, the trade of nations that made its way through the waters, the momentous and violent events that altered the fabric of the city. We picked up fragments of the talk when one of the ship’s crew, a kindly mariner who wore his many decades at sea with a smile, brought us coffee and tried with a few words of English and motions of his hands and arms to explain the essentials. In light of our reason for being there, his considerably better German should in theory have been our common tongue. But between the three of us we couldn’t muster a sentence.

Szczecin, 2010

Szczecin, 2010

It was our last day in Szczecin, in northern Poland, and my parents sat across from me on the deck. Despite the cold, we rarely went down below to the warm comfort of the lounge while journeying around the city’s extensive docklands, shipyards, waterways, repair yards, cargo terminals, channels and lakes. Staying up top afforded us our best view of the city, a peek into its historic heart. But while the skyline and riverbanks drifted past we were searching for something else as well, something more elusive and intangible. We were hoping to catch a glimpse of its past.

Stettin, 1594

The layout of Szczecin’s harbour has changed little in centuries, straddling both sides of the Odra River since the Middle Ages. It’s a seafaring city, and always has been, shaped by the salt waters of the Baltic that mingle in the estuary with the river. These ties to the Baltic, for both better and worse, led to the city’s coronation as the port of Berlin, an ideal arrangement for a landlocked city only a 150 kilometres away by rail and road. Trade brought Szczecin a substantial wealth, but for its strategic importance it paid far more than it gained. By the end of the Second World War, more than eighty percent of the city had been left in ruins by Allied bombers seeking to sever its connection to Berlin.

Stettin, 1929

Szczecin, 2010

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit writes that, “when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one can know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back…” This is true in so many respects, but what of yourself can you find if the place you’re travelling to was known only by an ancestor? What memories and associations might linger over the years? And what meanings can we make from the traces? If the past is another country, can it ever entwine with today?

Szczecin, 2010

Before my great-grandfather jumped ship in South Shields, England sometime around the year 1900 for reasons that will never be known, he worked in the merchant navy out of the port at Szczecin. This was the place he belonged to, where whatever memories and associations he might have seeded from the first part of his life would be stowed. Only the city of his birth was called Stettin back then, and was German rather than Polish, behind a line on a map that moved after the war. Charles Hoffmann (as the family name was spelled at the time) was the son of a police chief, and about 26 when he left the city. So angry were his family at his desertion that they disowned him, and eventually he signed over his rights to inheritance, severing ties to his native land. Whatever his reasons for choosing to stay, the moment my great-grandfather decided against rejoining his ship as it sailed away from England many things were set in motion that he couldn’t possibly foresee. A cutting from the family tree began rooting a long way from its ancestors.

Szczecin, 2010

Stettin, 1936

Journeying around the harbour, my parents remarked upon how eerily familiar it was to the English coastal town they both grew up in, only a few miles down the coast from where my dad’s grandfather had landed. I find myself drawn to these similarities, these “memories and associations” conjured by two distinct places. Years ago, when we began tracing the family history, I was immediately struck by the resemblances, the fact that Charles Hoffmann had lived out the span of his life between two coasts. And yet port cities have long been gateways where sailors, traders and immigrants first landed, where languages and cultures coalesced and collided. To stay in a place that might have reminded my great-grandfather of his old home, and where his skills as a mariner remained useful, seemed obvious after only a short while in Poland.

Szczecin, 2010

Stettin, 1931

But something else sparked my fascination while we trawled the waters of Szczecin harbour. I don’t know whether it was the open sea that the Odra River ran into, or the flags of countless countries rippling above ships, but I became aware of how common an experience my great-grandfather shared in. All across our planet people are moving this very minute, led by wanderlust or economics, out of love or out of fear. People are leaving homes and crafting new ones, slowly, surely, spurred on by optimism or desperation, moving a little or wandering far, searching with determination for a place that seems right.

The reasons for movement are immeasurable; it’s what our species has always done from the moment it spread out from Africa, crossing vast, forbidding seas and inhospitable deserts, pushing on over land bridges and funnelling down through continents, migrating, dispersing, gathering in unexpected ways. And with each movement a line is altered, a lineage like a vine encouraged in a new direction. The world shifts a little each time, is remade by our steps.

Szczecin, 2010

Szczecin, 2010

While the contemporary photographs of Szczecin are mine, the historic images are taken from postcards bought in the city. The original photographers are unfortunately not attributed. The pictured airship is the Graf Zeppelin, famous for its round the world journeys, and from which the overhead image of the Odra River was also taken two years later.

Posted in History, Travel, Urban | Tagged , , , , , , | 33 Comments »

Older Posts »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 403 other followers