Morningside/Eveningside
MORNINGSIDE
Dawn at Kilmory Knap. Stacked clouds wait over Jura as the sunrise plays out over the marram grass at my back. As I watch, the vertical wall they form gains depth; becomes sea cliffs and mountains made of water and air. The edges of their forms are picked out in the reflected glow of the rising sun. Soft shades. Muted. Fawn. Purple grey. Expanses of dove.
It is 5:29am.
The sheep have moved from their bed on the sand up onto the machair to start their long day of grazing. The oystercatchers, having announced the arrival of the light over an hour earlier have become quiet. Long fingers of pink stretch their way out into the Atlantic, the sky blooming into colour south and west as the east gives up her fanfare and shares her colours with the rest of the sky. A horizontal chink of light, as if cast through an open door, hits the tower of cloud over Jura’s Paps. Pale blue clouds lie like blankets over the still sleeping lower hills of the island’s coastline.
As the sun climbs the full spectrum of greens reveal themselves, emerging from the samey grey sage of the never-quite-dark nighttime. Mint marram with blonde tips, oak leaf green of summer bracken, the samphire of the machair nearest the water, the darker bottle green leaves of the shrubby, wind-worn trees that hunker down over the contours of the coastline.
Over the water now, the light has hit the hills. The slopes have cast off their blankets. The sun picks out the sprinklings of human intervals in the landscape in white against the mauve of a coastline redacted and smoothed out by haze. Straight overhead the sky is the soft mid-blue of children’s stories with white wisps of cloud that feel close enough to touch.
The breeze at this time of day, on this kind of day, is one of my favourites. Soft enough to be welcoming. Fresh enough to command attention. It has the texture of all the day could be.
It is 6:00am.
The sound of the breakers softens as the night wind concedes to daylight. The oystercatchers return. Six of them; rounding the headland together before a single bird breaks away to circle the water in front of me. A lone seagull glides across the view framed by the tent, wings motionless; tracking across the sky as if on a zip wire.
On the horizon, too far to see clearly, a ship emerges. Distance and vapour hold the others that must be out there; unseen, in a hidden world of open water. The sun rises high enough above the cloud to cast the first shadow of the hill on the sand before me.
The pinks are all but gone. The wind picks up again. Ten geese fly south, silhouetted against a watercolour sky. Each blade of marram grass bends its spine in an identical choreographed curve, leaning back together from the onshore breeze. The sun mixes metal shades into its palette and tops the breakers with white motion, like fingers playing over a piano. The day is becoming blue, greywhite, ivory disguising the peachy glow of its beginnings from all but those who witness the dawn.
It is 6:30am.
Eveningside
It is 21:46pm.
As it does at this time of year and this latitude the suns lingers over its setting for hours. The steely glimmer of its opening sunset act is replaced by a chorus of pastels that slowly converge. As if peaches, silver sand, amethyst hills and the indescribable blue/grey/green/platinum of the sea were all dovetailing towards one another; conspiring to become one single icecream hue that encompasses all the flavours of beach and islands and sea and sky.
Its the time of day when the water glows. Not as a glassy, mirrored reflection but as if from within. As if the clear liquid had been replaced by milk. A saucer, lightly frothing at the edges, thrown, just, into relief by the darkening of the tones around it. The lingering daylight hangs behind a bank of thickening clouds, brightness still showing through the gaps as if daytime is carrying on in a parallel world just one bay over, where the rules of sundown don’t apply.
Meanwhile, the sand hoppers are rioting down by the shoreline. Teeming at the water’s edge where the sand is like damp cement. Frenzied metropolises around the landmark structures of seaweed, feather, crab shell. As the sand gets drier, fading into light ombre of the top of the beach, their presence gets thinner; passing through suburban spaciousness before disappearing altogether where the sand is the colour of bog cotton and rogue dandelion leaves scatter in clutches like islands in a sea of grains.
It is 22:00pm.
Straight ahead, out to sea there is no patch of sky that does not hold pink. It is present, even faintly, in every inch of cloud. The land in shadow begins to darken. The light buoys and houses have yet to start blinking. The time of the night creatures begins. Eroded by the fading light, my ability to locate the noise of the breakers and the wind dissolves. I know by the middle of the night it will surround me; a song of water all around the tent, my nest become a boat, rocked by liquid sound and tricked by the swirling wind.
I watch as a solid mass of cloud comes slowly in to berth over the beach, ever so slightly spinning to offer its broadside to the tideline. It glides, trailing wispy anchors of rain from its meltwater, glacier underbelly. Behind it, it tows a fleet of smaller vessels, that strike out a tiny pinhead percussion of rain against the tent; an echo of the silver sound of scattered handfuls of sand cast by the wind against the drum of the tensile fabric.
A lone seagull patrols the beach as if checking that all those who will not sleep here tonight have left. Bats dance over the marram. The first lighthouse glimmer appears.
It is 22:30pm.
