I wonder how I would describe in writing what I see while standing in this tall grass on cliff’s edge. The girl below, in the boat, would have a full paragraph devoted to her blonde strands twisting in the wind as she opens her mouth to the sky in laughter while the boy rows. The sea, I would observe, does not suffer from the oars slicing through its waters but instantly heals. The inlet’s calm waters would contrast on the page with the point of land further along the scape, where the sea withdraws before hurtling against the rocks. But I would need to be careful about heavy-handed foreshadowing and so leave out the hint of a storm from the east, possibly unseen by the boy and the girl, or at least by the girl as she faces the boy in the boat.
If I were to write a description of that sky, I would insist on the uneven blue that keeps the clouds from spreading too thin. And I would avoid easy allusions to Constable or Monet and eschew poetic lines by Carroll, unless essential to revealing the character of an observer, an artist, say, who would see it that way.
Yes, if I were writing about this scene, I would narrate from the point of view of a painter or a poet trying to capture the mood of this view, in which case I might include the hint of that storm. Or from the point of view of a photographer, choosing a moment and an angle to express this great expanse and the small breath of humanity in it—perhaps this very moment when the boy pulls up his oars and drops anchor.
I would give the girl a name, Molly, and an age, 16, and note that she’d come to visit her grandmother by the Irish seaside village where the boy lived year-round and had a boat with which he sometimes fished or challenged the waves. “Go,” I would have the grandmother say, “Go, children, such a pleasant day. Have fun. Come back for tea.”
Or a writer, my observer himself might be, out for a hike, intentionally leaving pen and paper at home so as to clear his head from a jumbled novel. And now, having seen the boy draw up the oars, he would continue his walk along cliff’s edge, pushing through the breeze and the high grass, gulls crying overhead, the beat of the sea against the rocks, as he heads home, his imagination sparked, new characters in mind.
But those are not characters. I cannot create their lives. They are a girl and a boy in a boat. Or, not a boy, a man, I now see, as he reaches towards her and as she pushes him away. Their lives are right there, right here, not out at sea but in the inlet, close by. And she now screams, if it isn’t a gull, as he pushes her down into the boat.
If I were writing this, I would have the girl still laughing, as the boy, a lad really, sits back and resumes rowing to shore.
But witnessing, I must now act.
© 2020, Gary Lee Kraut
