Skytrails

By Leonard Yip:

Kruger National Park, South Africa
June 2019

We spend the day in search of lionesses – all afternoon in the jeep, through the golden dust clouds of the Sabi Sands, out onto the low bareness of the bushveldt at the height of its winter. 

Jess, our ranger at the wheel of the jeep, tears off-road across brambles and dirt ditches, stopping every so often where bush gives way to sand. The Shangaan tracker with us, aptly named Advice, dismounts here: tracing the padded footfalls of the big cats in that pliant, wind-dusted earth, ghosting into the acacias and re-appearing again with a new set of directions in which to chase.

We never do see the lionesses that day, but the journey back to the lodge is marked with a quieter wonder. The sun sets and sinks and kisses the earth in fire, composing the leafless branches of fever trees into sharp silhouettes. Dark shapes of elephant herds in the distance move along the horizon line. In between the cold clarity of moonrise and the sun’s final dip beneath the Drakensberg mountains, there is a moment that seems to hang long and suspended in the clear air. Unprepared for the quickness of nightfall in the bush, I crane my neck upwards and the oncoming dark smothers me in its sudden descent: an entire sky dissolving to black.

Staring into its enormity, I lose my sense of perspective as it settles across the ends of the veldt. I sit in mute, fearful mesmerisation, this vast and unknowable thing erasing scale and obliterating our field of vision. Landmarks disappear and the roads before us are swallowed up into an inky chasm. My stomach lurches and I feel like I’m falling, leaping upwards into the infinity of everything I do not know. I reach reflexively for the guardrails of the jeep.

This uncanny, reversed vertigo clears only when the stars wink themselves into existence. The shapes of the veldt resolve themselves again faintly by the pinpricks of light. Cloud-like, the galaxy begins to pattern itself across the sky, looking for all the world like a rippling reflection of the road below us. Jess slows the jeep and leaves the lights dead. She and Advice teach us to navigate by the stars, locating the Southern Cross, mapping a southward bearing from where its lines bisect along the axis. They tell us the stories and folktales of the Shangaan bushmen – that the Milky Way is thought to be the trail walked by the spirits of their ancestors, and how a girl once threw the sparks from an ember’s core deep into the night sky, where they gathered into the constellations that guide the sojourner and the wayfarer home. 

Sat there listening, I am amazed at how acts of imagination become so closely tied to acts of pathfinding. I think of how writers and etymologists have followed the origins of the word ‘learn’ to the Old English ‘leornian’, meaning ‘to get knowledge’. The imprint of its lilting consonants and rolling vowels on our tongues trails even further back to the Proto-Germanic ‘liznojan’; to find a track. Learning, then, carries the same sense as following a track, making known the unknown through the tracing of one sand-swept footprint at a time. Even across cultures, how we make meaning of the world so often finds its way back to the very act of finding a way – galaxies becoming ground, stars turning to soil, walking and tracking as learning and understanding. Garnette Cardogan once wrote that ‘walking is, after all, interrupted falling.’ His words spring back to my mind as Jess and Advice map out the night sky for me, the resonance of trailblazing disrupting my sensation of upwards descent.

Advice turns on the searchlight, and the beam lances hot and bright ahead of us. The jeep trundles along the trail home. The air goes wild with the noise of the bush coming to life, and hyenas navigate by lone stars rising to their shadowed kills. Somewhere, lions roar into the night.

***

Leonard Yip is a Singaporean writer with an interest in landscape, people, place and faith - and often the intersections where these meet. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, and his work can be found at leonardywy.wordpress.com. 

The Beautiful Abandoned: Andrew Emond’s photography of urban decay

Photo: Andrew Emond

By William Carroll: 

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page feels like the visual diary of an apocalypse, a compendium of photographs that chart a beautiful, devastating collapse. The gutted maws of baroque fireplaces leer out at empty rooms, with dusty tchotchkes and ripped hardcovers gathering about the mantelpieces. Old staircases, their bannisters splintered and broken, lead up and down invariably to darker unknowns. In one photograph, uploaded on April 28th 2020, a disordered back office is punctuated by an old CTR television set, showing static. A piece of stock art, parodying the halcyon days of the Hudson River School, dangles limply above it. Elsewhere, in a photograph taken in an old office complex, a prosthetic CPR mannequin sits upright among a pile of assorted metal debris. “Everything’s Fine,” Emond’s caption reads. 

Based in Toronto, and using a Samsung Galaxy S8 to take his images, Emond is a photographer to whom urban decay, domestic neglect, and the general collapse of capitalist spaces pose an irresistible lure. Mostly shot in square format, a technique which Emond admitted often confuses people into thinking he’s shooting on film, his images are like dystopian Wes Anderson still frames. Centrally aligned, with often a visual pun substituting the need for a lengthy caption, the images are frequently colourful in spite of all their internal disorder. Armchairs with stuffing foaming their edges are often captured front-and-centre, whilst mirrors (often broken) refract what lies beyond the frame ad infinitum. The sheer ubiquity of these scenes that Emond happens upon – ‘I find 95% of these places myself’ – suggests that the equivalent collapses of public space are happening everywhere simultaneously. For each new unit erected on an industrial estate in record time, all polished metal and girders, there is another hulking wreck a few miles away in which birds roost and wild animals haunt. Emond has no time or interest in the former. 

When I first came across Emond’s photography on Instagram, I was immediately struck by two particularities of his profile. Firstly, his style of so-called ‘Abandoned Porn’ – an aesthetic movement particularly in vogue during this age of ‘dark tourism’ -  was as visually arresting as it was disquieting. Whose front room is this, that lies so unloved and in such squalor? Where is this office complex, with the glass of its dividing walls and conference rooms scattered across the floor like so much snow? These spaces seemed at once anonymous and yet tied inextricably to their recent abandonment. I wanted to know where, when, who. At the same time, I was also strangely afraid of the answers. 

Photo: Andrew Emond

When browsing his catalogue of colourful destruction, I was struck by his profile’s bio, which reads: ‘Messages from the interior. ’I’d heard that before, but couldn’t quite place it. Eventually, something clicked and I reached out to Emond via direct message. 

“Is the bio line a nod to Walker Evans or am I reading too much into that?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s totally a nod. Glad someone noticed,” he replied. 

The tradition of Evans’ style is evident across Emond’s work – so often is he positioned on the threshold of some devastated scene, haunting the doorway of an apartment left to ruin or turning the corner of a long, snaking corridor. His captions, like Evans, are similarly obscure, obtuse, or metatextual, rarely betraying anything beyond the scene’s immediacy. This brevity extends to subject matter, too. Evans believed in the beauty of the quotidian, and his frequent subjects, especially during the Depression, included rustic kitchens, empty chairs, and tenant farmer shacks slowly eroding in the dustbowl winds. Separated by nearly a century, Emond’s modern answer to Evans’ vernacular, documentary style feels distinctly modern and prescient, doubly so in the current pandemic. 

These abandoned spaces have become familiar to many of us over the last 6 months, and the tragic decline of thriving commercial centres and local businesses has become a plague in of itself. When one set of shutters have fallen, all too often have two more followed suit. In spite of this stark and alarming present we inhabit, Emond’s recording of these spaces far before COVID-19 suggests a certain inevitably. The novel coronavirus may have hastened certain violences, certain collapses, but Emond reminds us that these scenes have been around far longer, and will continue their own ironic propagation as generations change, as the global climate passes its own event horizon, and people continue steadfastly in their living and their dying. To have such a public record of that, and to make it so readily available to anyone with a phone, feels both voyeuristic and yet undeniably creative. Emond isn’t the first person to document abandoned scenes through the medium of photography, but his spartan equipment, use of Instagram, and traditional influences mark a unique and appealing documentarian. 

Beyond the simple aesthetics, there are many literary qualities to Emond’s work and a raft of cinematic influences that likewise bleed in. Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and indeed, the film’s own source material of Roadside Picnic (1972) by the Strugatsky brothers, are immediately called to mind in his darker, industrial scenes where refuse lies scattered and discarded as if by some uncaring, unseen monster. In his more colourful domestic scenes, where the detritus of family life has pooled like floodwater, I can’t help think of Grey Gardens (1975) or even modern television programmes centred around ‘hoarders’ and their obsessive inventorying of everyday life. Our own perverse interests in the spectacle of collapse are widely documented, from Freud’s ‘Death Drive’ to Suzi Mirgani’s Spectacles of Terror (2017), and Emond’s images represent all of these interests in neat, square packages that can be consumed individually or en masse. There will always be photographs to take, always rooms that have been locked for years. This is not a finite pursuit. 

Above all these converging influences and themes in Emond’s work – [which he alludes to in the interview I conducted with him] -  there is a single lyric that I find myself humming, even singing, when looking through his work. It’s from Sebadoh’s ‘Spoiled’, a song made famous for its use in Larry Clark’s controversial coming-of-age film Kids (1995) – a film in which the grimy underside of New York is not a world away from Emond’s tenement interiors. The lyric captures the lure of Emond’s work and why we, as a race, continue to find beauty in our own destruction:

We will wait for tragedy
And scatter helpless to the fire.

As haunting and pertinent as it may be, I can’t help think Emond would find it a bit too on the nose. Evans would too, no doubt. They’re both probably right.

Andrew Emond’s Instagram page

Sketches of China 01: Arrival, Shanghai

Illustration. Mark Doyle

We are extremely pleased to welcome to Elsewhere a series of illustrations and texts that are the result of a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle:

Stepping out of the airport as night falls, boarding the Golden Dragon as the clouds give way to rain, struck at once by the immensity of life on an unimaginable scale, the bus gathering pace as the mythical beast speeds across the tarmac, entering a world of towering high-rises, their windows unlit, all but a few, the empty shapes of the buildings silhouetted instantaneously by forks of lightning, cleaving the sky asunder as the rain grows heavier, falling in sheets, monotonous, unrelenting, its drops bursting like grapes on the elevated expressway stretching on into the night, keenly aware of a sense of detachment, of separating from home, cast adrift in a landscape of frenetic development, a feeling of unstoppable momentum, the bus unable, despite the distance covered, to break free from a metropolis as dystopian as it is endless, from an aberrance from nature on a monstrous scale, yet savouring all the while the promise of discovery, of adventure, immersed in the moment, looking neither forward nor back.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on instagram @markdoyleartist.

The Loch Insh Osprey

Photo: Duncan MacDonald

By Merryn Glover:

The ospreys have gone. I went away for a week and when I got back, the strath had slipped into autumn and the eyrie above Loch Insh was empty. On the same day, my two sons returned to university. Their courses will be online, but after five months of being back under parental wings they are ready to stretch their own again. They came back to our Highland home at the start of lockdown and two weeks later, the osprey arrived, flouting all restrictions in their 6,700 kilometre journey from west Africa.

The male came first and began to ready the nest, a large twiggy crater the size of a truck tyre. Balanced precariously at the top of a tree on a small island, it has commanding views of the Cairngorms to the south-east, the Monadhliaths to the north-west and the River Spey between. Their arrival always speaks to me of Mark, a wildlife guide friend who first told me their story on these shores five years ago; he was diagnosed the following April with a brain tumour and died in April two years later, leaving a wife and three sons. As he was lowered into the earth of Insh churchyard, the newly returned osprey soared above.

Most osprey pair for life, only coming together during the breeding season when they return to the same place. The female arrives a week or so after her mate and my diary note from April 16th says: ‘Both perched on the nest, looking at each other from time to time and touching beaks.’ As the female adds to the eyrie, the male woos her by delivering trout. One of the few birds of prey to live almost entirely on fish, osprey can see their underwater catch from 40 metres up and have reversible talons that help them grip. Working from home this year, I paid closer attention to my near neighbours. I saw the male perform his sky dance, crying out as he rose in sweeping circles above the nest with a long reed in his talons. The female sat on the spear tip of a dead tree nearby, motionless and haughty as Horus.

By the beginning of May, she had settled down in the nest, presumably won over and incubating eggs, and I watched and waited through the lengthening days and the greening of the strath. At last, in early June, tiny heads appeared above the twigs – one, two… three! A beautiful, bumper brood and the most an osprey is likely to hatch. I caught glimpses of the mother feeding them and the gradual rise of their small, fluttering bodies.

One evening, a large heron flew up the river towards the nest and the male osprey bore down on it with vicious shrieking and flapping of wings. To my astonishment, the heron did not beat a hasty retreat but kept circling, evading the ever-more strident attack. Finally after several minutes of this aerial dogfight, the heron – twice the size of its assailant - made its stately way off down the loch.

Summer swelled and the loch thickened with green rushes and the growing company of birds: curlews, oyster-catchers, martins, geese, ducks and swans, many trailing flotillas of young in their wake. Both my boys were summer babies and these long, light days remind me of that ecstatic, exhausted time. By mid-July the osprey chicks were stalking the rim of the eyrie, stretching their wings and lifting for moments into the air while the parents sat in nearby trees calling. To urge their young to fledge, osprey gradually reduce the fish they deliver, literally starving them off the nest. We have not resorted to such ploys but, like all parents, we know the push and pull of need and independence.

Who can know if they have witnessed the first flight of a bird? I cannot, but I thrilled to see them gradually take to the skies, their voices ringing in the amphitheatre of this hill-bordered loch. Who can hold onto life? It was at this time that our beloved friends, Mark’s family, moved away.

All five osprey were in the nest when I looked in late August, but within two weeks, they were gone. The mother goes first, travelling up to 400 kilometres a day till she is back in Senegal. The father follows and then the young, flying all the way down over the Sahara. They travel alone. No one has fathomed how they know the route or the destination or how, three years later, they know the way back. It is mystery and miracle. All I know is that in the great, thick hush of these five months, when my own dear ones came and left, the osprey’s journey has passed right through my heart.

***

Merryn Glover’s stories and plays have been broadcast on Radio Scotland and Radio 4, her first novel, A House Called Askival, was published in 2014 and a second, set in the Highlands, will be published in 2021. She was the first Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park and is currently writing a non-fiction book in response to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Her features have appeared in The National, BBC Countryfile Magazine, Northwords Now, The Guardian Weekly and The Guardian.

Dawn

By Emily Oldfield: 

My relationship with the dawn. For a long time I have sought the quiet spaces, the unannounced areas, the moments ripe with the tension of possibility. That is the dawn, to me – a place uneasy with potential, strange and malleable edges, inviting experimentation before the day declares itself… and the usual routines and cycles with it.  

I have risen early for as long as I can remember, at least always early enough to still catch the last imprint of dawn like thumbmarks on the morning. But to be in dawn itself is a place altogether; perhaps the inevitable edgeland, twisted in its temporality - a map of furrowed brows in restless beds, the taste of dread deep in the palette, the futile attempts to re-enter dreams in the dead hour before the alarm. The time some wish they could sleep forever. 

When, aged 18, I lived in St Andrews on the Scottish East coast, I would enter dawn each morning with two trainer-strapped feet, an oversized hoodie and leggings. 18: the same  number of degrees the sun is below the horizon at astronomical dawn. At 5.30am, the sea was a sensation, not yet separate from the sky, the air stirred thick with the sting of salt. Light diffused as a kind of colour seepage against the thick black bulk of the sky, the tide all the time turning its rhythms like endless wands of chalk worked down a blackboard. Shhht, shhht, shhht.

I set myself to that rhythm – the surge of the sea and my own ticking compulsion to push… push onwards, beyond. The cold flex of the air flashed through my lungs as I lurched out of Albany Park – the pebble-dashed plot of university accommodation in a peculiar crater by East Sands – and along the shorefront. The blanket of blackness was a comfort, billowing at its edges into a yellowing, almost coppery bruise as the first spools of sunlight fought through. This marked nautical dawn. Here the sun sits at 12 degrees below the horizon, melting like a layer between land and water…and two different bodies are born. 

It is an addictive feeling, running at the edges. Dawn on one side, my own body at the other; underfed and overstretched, burning at the chords of muscle like a candle wick collapsing into itself, light leaching out into the battered bronze of a new day. 

Within five minutes of the run I would come to East Sands harbour, making a note to hold my balance across the wooden footbridge, its slats alternately swollen and withered through the warp of the water, like teeth time-swilled with soda. The stench of gutted fish and engine oil. 

I ran very much as routine and each morning the view would typically be the same on reaching the harbour. On the end of a block of dwellings closest to the water, three men would be hunched in a paraffin-lamp lit garage, looking out to sea… to the red smears settling on water, lights of caution, of warning. Bearded and booted, they regarded my bluster past them with apparent contempt at first, which settled uneasily into a kind of acknowledgement. Outside the garage, various blue-edged ropes spooled across stone like cut-off, dried-out plaits… the hair of some washed-up marine creature, now hard and lashed under salt crust.

Approaching civil dawn – the time when most objects start to become clear, the sun at just 6 degrees below the horizon - sometimes I would have to dodge the lobster pots, their pink-orange cages and little hinged doors turning them into a sparkling series of grottoes. Seaweed was scattered everywhere in its ragged carpeting, pustules of black and grey-green bladderwrack leaking into standing water. The occasional galled cry of a gull would puncture the air. 

I enjoyed the unspoken intimacy of seeing the fishermen each morning, the suspended questions of our occupation, assumptions hanging between us, but also a kind of confirmation; you proceed with your task, I proceed with mine. Rather than uncertainty, it fused a kind of communion - solid and salt webbed and somehow reassuring. I would pass them and then make my way up the side of the ruined cathedral, suspended high on the coast edge like a shell on a spit. The pathway would be peppered with the petroleum-sheen of standing lighting, the cathedral itself once one of the largest buildings in Scotland – consecrated in 1318. Another 18. There was the cartilage of the gable walls and a section of South Transept, the bulk and body of the place flayed away over time into sea foam. It was ransacked in 1559, abandoned by 1561. 

The rasp and slap of the sea simmered to kind of snore as I stumbled up steps, ran past the cathedral and angled towards the town of St Andrews itself, starting at the bottom end of Market Street, the cut of the cobbles blunt on the bottom of my feet.

I ran over West Sands, past the many-starred hotel by the golf links where I worked a couple of shifts as a waitress. Strangers gazes grasping at my ill-fitting uniform, my movements clumsy and awkward. Men with their flourishing gestures and uninvited hands, the view polished and mowed, even the beach opening up in an extended flank of white sand. I staggered with a tray of gourmet desserts… and ran from that. 

I ran to the public swimming baths for a hurried shower when the shared one broke. I ran into other students, their faces closed. I ran even when a childhood friend visited in the middle of winter. After seven hours on an overcrowded coach from Accrington, she shared my single bed whilst we watched Trainspotting on the smeared screen of an old laptop, the type that permanently needs to charge. I felt a little like that as I ran, leaving my friend in bed, picking up friction from the street in a kind of necessary energy. Repeated. 

I ran when the Northern Lights swirled through the sky, a mottled green like that of buds pulsing on the edge of blossom, plucky against the dark.

When people refer to running and places – it is typically in terms of the trajectory of a beginning and end, a start and destination, to and from. For me, running became an attempt of touch; to push myself, not only forwards, but into. The thickening thud of foot through stones, then sand, then surf. I craved to feel the absolution of everything, the timelessness of land-lock. 

I was even preparing my body for it, skimming down to the quick, coaxing the bone’s proximity to skin - and then to surrounds. A closeness created through how strongly limbs felt every lurch and lift, the wind chiselling cheeks and shoulders. As the weather grew colder, I pushed – in childhood shorts and a t-shirt – to take higher and higher routes. This, after all, seemed a place of straight lines, people knew their allegiances: onwards. I could feel my legs filing down precise points, the compass needle caught in the mind’s eye and fixed on N. Nada. Nothing. None.

Running was a place during those months, just as the dawn was - their combined woozy mixture of experimentation, intimacy, release. In lectures, my legs fizzed with friction, my tailbone scoring against the skin of my lower back until it bled beneath carefully-chosen clothes. I felt everything all over. 

It was all over as I aimed for one of the rockiest routes along the east coast path, a tide-bolstered breeze buffeting my knees, dawn still dappling the pelt of the sky approaching 6.30am. It was January and spangles of orange-edged sunlight were starting to cast themselves outwards, catching gorse on one side, sheer cliffs on the other.

Brown fur suddenly stood out against gritty, salt-studded textures. Stretched a little ahead on the rock-scrambled pathway was a young rabbit, laid on its side, back legs coiled like a comma, twitching. Coming closer, its eyes were swollen bulbous in its head like two live insects glistening, fizzing beneath partially open lids. An amber matter pooled beneath, sticky and strange. 

Myxomatosis; the words wondrous and warped on my tongue as I took in the moment, my face then turning back towards the direction of the town in a kind of helplessness. Dawn-darkness still pervading, but so too the dashes of light, the red pinpoints of potential warning – or reassurance – an assemblage at the end of docks, at the tops of buildings. A reminder; here. My tears smeared the light into a lingering red gleam, the gleam of something else against the skyline. 

Red lights remind us of our capacity to go too far. How we struggle to face up to the land beneath … and yet need to. 

It is now five years since those dawn runs in St Andrews, and I have written this, the words somehow leeching out during the Covid-19 lockdown, lines unfolding in a room of a shared house in Hulme. Inner city Manchester stirs. 

Here I sit and stare out of the window, facing the news that I need to stop running again, the old ghost at the edge of my mind with its grey fingers. The buildings burr with construction, expansion, bulk. 

And at the tops of the cranes there are red lights. 

***

Emily Oldfield is a writer especially drawn to exploring landscape, the feel of place and relationships to it within her work. She is the Editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Metropolitan University, explored Winter Hill for the Edgelandia project, and now is probably wandering somewhere in the South Pennines. Grit is her first poetry pamphlet - published by Poetry Salzburg (March 2020) - delving into histories of the Rossendale Valley and The River Irwell, which has continued its thread throughout her life. 

Libre

By Kenn Taylor:

Those 1950s American cars are a key symbol of Cuba under Communism, giving a bit of old glamour to all those Lonely Planet images and travel documentaries. They’re real enough, seen all over Havana. Many however are like ‘Trigger’s Broom’ - having had so many parts replaced they’re more new than old. There’s no denying though that they’re still cool. In Cuba, they are a key part of that desire for ‘difference’ that attracts people to a place. And their owners are only too keen to earn some extra cash taking visitors for a ride along the sea drive, the Malecon, under the sun and close to the spray of waves.

Less well photographed though are the Ladas. The reason the old American cars are still there of course, has largely been the lack of something to replace them, due to the ongoing economic blockade. Though now they’re so famous they are likely to always remain, as visitors will always want something of the past that meets their expectations. The Ladas from Mother Russia though, were the main replacement car for all those decades after the Revolution. They were popular locally for their ruggedness and relative modernity, though of course the Ladas themselves are now also ancient. While less well known as a symbol of Cuba, Ladas are a big part of the modest traffic that runs around Havana, in particular being used heavily as taxis.

I had little naivety about Cuba’s ‘alternative’ system. While there’s a general lack of the hunger and homelessness that marks much of the UK, in turn you are faced with a Government which tolerates no alternative political parties or dissent and heavily restricts its citizens. While basic needs are generally met, the standard of living is also low. Those old cars may have a certain romance and now a tourist income for their owners, but having to constantly repair a forty year old refrigerator has less allure.

The famous free education in Cuba also doesn’t always translate into liberation. In my final Lada taxi to the airport I spoke at length with the driver. He had a master’s degree in IT but saw little point in using it in Cuba when he could make more money by driving. As well as have more freedom, not having to work for the state. He talked about how he felt his education was wasted and how, like many, he wanted to leave. In turn he asked me about IT work in the UK. I said as far as I knew, it was well paid, but highly competitive. And that a lot of IT jobs were now being ‘offshored’ to other countries where labour was cheaper. He was aware also that we had to pay for university and asked how much it would cost to study for an IT masters. It took me a bit of time to work out the maths and then convert it into to Cuban currency. He was aghast at the expense. “Yes, it’s a real problem,” I said. “Especially if you’re from a poor background.” 

We were pretty quiet after that as we did the final leg towards the airport, pondering the madness of our two systems. Neither of which anyone really believes in anymore, both slowly falling apart. 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com 

On the tourist trail...

By Paul Scraton:

From dawn until late into the evening, long after dusk, they gather on the street beneath our hotel room window. They come for the famous view, the one that adorns the front covers of guidebooks sold in a multitude of languages in the town’s souvenir shops; the one that features on postcards of the town in spring sunshine and winter snows; the one that provides the backdrop for an early 1990s computer game. It’s the view of the town that appears at the top of the town’s Wikipedia page and is the number one sight on Tripadvisor. 

It is also the title picture for this piece. To the outside world, this view is Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and beneath our window visitors to the town gather, waiting patiently for their turn at a safe social distance, to take their own version home with them. Only, as our hotel receptionist could tell us, this summer there are far fewer amateur photographers than there might normally be. 

The world doesn’t need another piece of writing about how strange this summer has been, but on a long trip south from Berlin to the Alps it was actually possible, on the high passes and hanging valleys, on the ridge line and down by the lake, to feel as if nothing was actually happening. Walking in the mountains it was possible to pretend, if only for a while, that the world was as it was before. But in between, in those places that form the highlights of many a grand European tour – Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Rhine Falls – it was clear that this was a summer like no other.

Perhaps in any other summer, right in the middle of school holidays and the peak tourist season, we wouldn’t have even bothered to brave these places. Because of course, like all travellers, we like to think we are different to those crowds of tourists who follow the well-trodden trail through the checklist sights, ticking them off before shuffling back onto the air-conditioned coach. Indeed, these are the places we strive to avoid, even though they have become wildly popular for a reason, whether for their beauty, their location or simply the stories and the place in our culture they hold.

We are tourists too. We travel to escape the everyday and to see new things. This is our chance. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber we walk the city walls and soak up the atmosphere of the old town as a thunderstorm rolls in. At the Rhine Falls we follow a group of Dutch motorcyclists, sweating in their leathers, down the steps to where we can see and feel the power of the water rushing by in front of us. In Neuschwanstein we realise that even a pandemic cannot stop of the lure of this fairytale castle on the hillside, as all the tours are booked up and the only option, the friendly young man in a facemask tells us, is to join the queue at six in the morning and hope for returns.

But the absence of crowds is unsettling too. These are places that live from their visitors. What happens if they don’t come back? We cannot know what travel and tourism will look like in the short to medium term, let alone further into the future, but in Rothenburg ob der Tauber empty shop fronts on the main street tell the story of businesses that haven’t made it out the other side of the pandemic. And what we also can see is that it is not just about coronavirus. The clues were there on higher ground. Beyond the current situation, the climate crisis requires that we rethink all aspects of our lives, including how we travel. In the mountains it was possible to feel like none of this was happening, but it was only if we refused to look closer.

A guesthouse called ‘Glacier View’ has long been a misnomer, as the ice has retreated around the corner. It’s out of sight and will soon disappear entirely. Local newspapers write of dangerous rock falls on the high peaks, of unstable ground caused or at least exacerbated by climate change. And as the cable car carries up higher than our legs or mountaineering skills could ever manage, we can’t help but wonder what a ski season looks like without any snow?

We might have been able to escape the pandemic by climbing ever higher on the trails, but the feeling that up there things were as they ever were is just an illusion. We can’t go back, even if we would like to. The real question is – where do we go from here?

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Paper Ghosts

By Anna Evans:

By the water’s edge, the monument to the immigrant, looking back at the city, looking out across the wide and muddy river. Situated at the point of arrival, the old port of New Orleans, marking the point of embarkation, the journey’s end and the start of crossings and travels, hopes and dreams. A two-sided statue, a decorated figure, like those carved on a ship’s prow looks out to the water; an immigrant family look towards the city. The crescent city lies at a bend in the Mississippi River. A city haunted by its migrants, by their comings and goings, the history of these streets and those who walked them.

I remember our arrival. Crossing the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and losing sight of land, as if the train travels an endless bridge to nowhere. New Orleans is a surprise to me, a last-minute change to our plans, an unexpected part of our trip. And like the surrounding Louisiana swampland, it is like a new language, one I had never learned but feel I should know already. 

We have travelled 1300 miles across the land, thirty hours, half in sleep and half in daydream, and it is as if our souls lag behind. From our arrival at sunset, darkness quickly descends to shroud the streets in mystery. We are hushed and excited on arrival, caught in a tangle of new places and new impressions that makes this place feel curiously flat and enclosed, and we wonder what it will look like when daylight comes.

In the morning the sun is caught behind deep overcast skies, waiting to break through. We spend hours mesmerized in the pattern of the streets and the architecture of the old French Quarter. The city of music leads a dance in circles. The vibrant buildings with their elegant shutters, iron porticoes and ornamented balconies, the graceful sweep of the trees above. There are wooden verandahs and carved iron railings, with intricate patterns that take the solidity of iron and give it a careful fragility. 

In the square a group of musicians assemble, playing of impossible dreams, laying their heads beneath the stars of a thousand nights in a hundred different places, drawn to New Orleans from far and wide. Sleeping under the stars and dreaming of boxcars, of all the miles that went before. Something about this place grips and calls them back, the struggle and the sadness. City of roamers, the restless, or those who never had a home. The place to settle if you don’t wish to settle. 

Out on the street the rain comes again as we walk, at a distance from each other so that you are crossing the road while I am standing still staring fitfully, as if the answer could lie in these elegant streets of the French quarter. The rain descends, gallops down from the sky, and we watch from a corner of the street, sheltered by balconies and trees. The skies have darkened, and the rain still comes. For a moment we walk through and it soaks our clothes, water grows in puddles across the streets. The balconies and verandahs make a passageway through and we continue our walk entranced by the rain. Reflected in the pavements, in pools and rippled water forming, are the shadows of the pillars that are everywhere. A place of shadows, the rain brings out the shadows.

The rain in New Orleans. Hurricane season. Rainbow flags and cocktails, and dancing, sprawling tourists, visitors to New Orleans’ spirit of intoxication. Some with a hand on their money, others unguarded, out on the lookout for reckless times. And those elongated souls who look as if they had spent a day too many street wheeling, freewheeling, they forgot where they came from and where they were going.

The French Quarter is like a film set framed in black and white with the tension of a thriller. The restless fans and fire escapes, in all those old detective movies where the private investigator sits late at night in his office, nursing a whisky tumbler. 

We widen and lengthen our walks to the outlying districts, long streets of bright-coloured wooden houses, each one different from the next. It is slow progress as we stop to look at every house, on the way to Frenchmen Street, where the sun has broken through cloud, and shines powerfully through the heat and skies cast over. 

Next to the painted elegance of the dark turquoise green and white house, dark red doors, with its balcony under the sweeping shade of the tree; is a tiny pink house, with a small pointed roof and large windows and doors, green and purple shutters, its steps and iron railings besieged by trailing plants, ivy-covered like something from a story. 

There are pillars with overhanging roofs and lanterns, steps out onto the street. We walk the pavements through trees and plants, depth and shade, and flowers pink and red. Looking down the tree lined street, pillars next to the trees, and shutters purple and green, blue and white, yellow in the streets beyond the French quarter, in Marigny and Bywater. A play of light and shade, shade and light. 

The streets make a poem to the transient. Trees in flower everywhere and hanging baskets with ferns or lanterns decorate the houses, each one taking on new colours and depth, a beautiful façade of permanence claimed back at night by shadow, the deep shadow of darkness that covers the streets when night falls, changing them back. 

Here the pavement is brick and uneven, the roots of the tree below the surface, deep cracks in the road. I always knew the earth was moving but here is the proof spread large. Living on borrowed time, borrowed land, propelled by its legends – the new and the ancient exist side by side - as if this city reveals its faults and its truths like the deep cracks in the road. Life is uncertainty, the roving spirit says it best. The feeling that life is closer here, that it is right at hand, to be lived; the tenuous and unsettled feeling, the one that doesn’t put down roots, or none too deep. For the roots of trees lie just below the surface and erode the stone above as they spread outwards, upwards; as if they might uproot themselves and walk away.

I want to piece it together, to work out if I belong here. So, the saying goes, the legend tells, the city will let you know if you were meant to stay, meant to leave. And I want to be the one the city welcomes, but I know also that there is something here that unsettles, that displaces me deep down.

Under the bridges, the tent cities remain. New Orleans evokes this sense of wandering – for those who choose it, those who don’t. In the faces of those who pace back and forth, day and night, up and down, for a dime, a dollar, a nickel, in the patient, hunted faces of those who lost everything, those who never had it, those who go looking.  

They make paper monuments now to honour all those who were forgotten, unrecorded. You can find them at street corners, down by the water, if you’re looking. From where we cross by boat, to Algiers, on a deserted ferry, to deserted streets between the heavy showers of rain. Heat-steeped, sleepy Algiers, where we trail around, looking for something we never find. 

New Orleans wears its history in layers, like the paper ghosts standing on corners. The city haunted by the spectres of all those who passed through. I float through the map, tracing the streets as I go. I can only write the poem of a stranger to this city, another visitor entering its spell, city of illusion, of powerful emotion. New Orleans you keep on returning to me, keep calling me back. I walk along your streets in shadow. 

I walk along your streets in shadow, watching the changing light, remembering how darkness falls like a cloak, changing the streets, calling them back. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.