She Stands Witness
"Cusp:: The Vibrant Space Between Fiction and Non Fiction" as defined by author Lidia Yuknavitch
Japan. Väddö. Two islands. One big. One small. Disaster struck. Fukushima. Corona. 9 years apart. An artist and a writer changed forever. The different artistic impressions juxtaposed.
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The blue glistening water stretching in front of one of the four windows that extended sideways across the wooden planked wall of the joint owned Swedish “stuga”* was calm, unusual for an autumn day in the North. Not even the smallest of waves crushed against the jetty that was under contraction at the moment. Years of being slammed by the Baltic Sea finally took its toll on the jetty that was always vulnerable to the sea’s strong streams. However, this morning when SHE looked out of the window, there wasn’t a whiff of wind anywhere in the proximity of the property.
“Hm,” she muttered suspiciously to herself as she took a sip from her first strong cup of Löfbergs* coffee for that morning. She was not used to such quietdom, not from the Baltic Sea, not from this North Archipelago island known by its human name Väddö.
For many years going to Väddö was in her mind equal to receiving a jail sentence. The island imprisoned her but she fought back. It was always “too” something - too dark, too cold, too many snakes, too loud of a toilet, too uncomfortable, too many rules, spiderwebs, you name it! It really really was a bad bad island. The more she resisted, the more - well actually, the island never had any opinion about her.
When she took her last sip of the warm liquid, she left her empty cup on the marble on the new kitchen island. Breaking the wall between the kitchen and the living room, an endeavour that was taken in the last few years since the house received two new owners, allowed for light and beautiful views throughout the whole room. The new renovation also took away some of her power to complain about their weekend visits. She walked by last night’s leftover ash in the fireplace only to be greeted by blinding gold coming through another four windows that punctured the opposite wall. Autumn foliage engulfed her like a richly threaded blanket. It made her smile in the year when there were no smiles left, it gave her something to be curious about. What she didn’t know at that particular moment was that it was that morning in October 2020, that the island captivated her, enticed her into believing that the typical lava formed island shapeshifted into an enchanted ö*.
If she was to reflect while putting on her black rain boots whose dark color was interrupted by small painted flowers, she would’ve realized that the spell started the night before when her family drove out of town for the weekend. It was the night after the Harvest Moon, the remains of the big moon, the most enormous moon that ever followed their car illuminated their path in every hue possible between the yellow and red range. Away from the city lights, on the road that was usually pitch dark in the autumn, they felt grateful; they started using the new jargon in the year of corona; to witness this stunning moon for a whole hour. Really, they were just very lucky.
To witness. To witness always sounded like a passive verb but in the year of 2020 the verb to witness definitely turned into action.
When the corona pandemic spread invisibly throughout the city, they came to Väddö for a few days, only to stay a few weeks on and off instead. The house that was never her home turned into a much welcoming shelter. In March, when they first arrived, not much happened. It was cold, the nature dark and dull. No one else was in the small village on the west side of the island. They created daily photo challenges to stimulate themselves and keep hope alive but there weren’t many living things around to capture. After a few weeks, they heard the familiar music coming from an ice cream truck. The joy was inexplainable. As it was pulling up on the little corner of their road, in lieu of the modern times, she took out her phone and framed the truck. “Did you just make a video of me?” asked the driver when he finally came out. “Yes!” She mumbled, adding a few more words in her broken Swedish; she could not express enough the exhilaration to see another human. If she could’ve she would’ve hugged him, but that went against the new corona rules and really just against the way Swedes interacted with strangers.
As the ice cream truck started making bi-weekly visits, two swans moved into the small bay in front of their house announcing that spring has arrived. She watched them dive into the water headfirst surprised that there were fish in the sea for them to catch; maybe that was the positive side of corona due to no water traffic. All humans were still stuck at home following the new travel restrictions. Her family witnessed the swan couple creating a small family of 6 baby swans. They observed how they glided across the water, the strategies they used to protect their young. Having the swans show up in all their glory each time they drove out to the island provided comfort during this time of uncertainty. In the weekend of the Harvest Moon they saw the swans alone again, back to just the two of them. It was autumn and the kids left to brave the natural world oblivious to the pandemic that rocked human lives.
That year, they also had a close encounter with a badger that woke them up in the middle of the night while fighting off a weasel. A moment when sounds coming from underneath the floor turned their lives into a horror film music score. For 20 minutes they stood petrified wondering if there are any holes in the old house that the critters could climb up to face them.
In the summer, they witnessed two young elks swimming across the bay next to a bunch of at first oblivious teenagers who quickly pulled out their cell phones to bare witness of this spectacular moment, once they realized that their youth is not the only thing occupying the air that day. The two young elks proceeded to eat leaves on a tree ignoring their biggest fans.
They witnessed a snake swimming in the water, they witnessed foxes running, millions of birds flying, fighting, pecking, loving. After years of coming, it hit them that their house and its surroundings was not just a topic of many disagreements, but it served as a sanctuary for birds. But then that was the island, not the construction.
That October when corona was making a second wave and all eyes were on the US election, she crossed the lawn in her gummy rain boots, impersonating a character that this city girl never was, and headed towards the calm water on the other side of the house. She kicked the yellow, mauve and green leaves on her path high up into the air, she stopped to ground herself in the mud underneath her, sorted out the poisonous mushrooms from the edible ones with a Mushroom App on her iPhone.
As she walked through the small path leading towards the jetty, she passed by the Havtorn (sea buckthorn) trees, at that moment unaware of their medical properties, she just noticed that this season none of the berries were left on the branches for her family to pick. All she knew was that this sour orange nordic berry delicacy went well with ice cream, a knowledge that she inherited from her mother in law in her own absence of understanding the Swedish way. The jetty stretched right from the trees, so she didn’t linger on giving the trees any more thought. Now, just earlier when she looked through the window taking that first sip of coffee, except for the calmness there was nothing else extraordinary in the view stretching in front of her. What she didn’t see, her view obstructed by the small pier, was that on the other side of the dock lay the body of a dead seal that washed upon the smooth rocks. It was headless and looked more like a big slab of prosciutto.
For years she was told that seals live in the sea in front of the house. For years, she thought that it was just the Swedes trying to make the brown slimy looking Baltic Sea more appealing and interesting to her Mediterranean soul. After all, she has been coming to this same summer house and bay for sixteen years and every time that the usually cold water was warm enough for her face to submerge beneath its surface, the water was greenish brown otherwise empty. Raised on the turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea, she always questioned if the Baltic Sea really was a sea.
As she was measuring the dead body with her eyes, her first reaction was unlike the night when the badger and weasel fought under the house, there was no panic or fear, she just stood there as if she was standing in a witness stand.
A sudden death by propeller.
…. the evidence spoke for itself except that wasn’t what she thought at that moment, it was a conclusion that came later while she waited in the church graveyard across from her son’s school waiting for him to come out. Together with other parents she tried to decipher the seal’s death. Within the walls of the city they nixed the initial idea that the birds poked their bills deep into the carcass and ate the head.
Was it some kind of omen?
… later she would wonder but wasn’t 2020 itself already causing enough pain and suffering to humans. Unlike corona, the seal was visible. Right in your face teaching to embrace uncertainty, not to think not to judge, just to dwell in and see what came up. Some kind of awareness had to come up, no?
But she just stood there oblivious to the house structure that was protecting her back from the neighbours and observed. There was absolutely no feelings in her body, no disgust, no fear, all thoughts and prejudices were emptied from her head -
…. because it was obvious.
Maybe not to her.
But it was obvious that her story finished there, and in fact she was living in another story, a story that goes something like this:
“Once upon a time there was an enchanted island in the year of The Great Pause.
Actually, once upon a time there were some humans nameless to the island who for years tried to conquer it, who fought about who it belonged to, who built it, chopped it down, celebrated all its glory but it was always the island that was going to live happily ever after.”
It took two months for the ebb and flow to swipe the seal off the rocks back into the sea, its skin, thick fat, bones, all gone deep down into the depths of the Baltic.
*stuga - Swedish summer house/cottage
* Löfbergs - a brand of strong Swedish coffee
* ö - Swedish for isle
To check out the whole exhibition “Breaking The Waves” by Daisuke Takeya that ran from Dec. 8, 2016 – Jan. 7, 2017 and hear more about this intriguing project, click on The Christofer Cutts Gallery To see more of Daisuke’s art this month, follow us on Instagram @tarantula_authors_and_art
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What a beautiful story. Was I flying above the island? No, but felt like that