Ascension

Sitting on my warm front wall I’d excitedly point out the Swallows.  They’d drop from their muddy little nests in the eaves over the road to swoop amongst the aerials and phone lines. I remember the disappointment as Mum said ‘those are just House Martins’. 

The closest I’d come to Swallows was Dad’s mate Fred off the Yacht who had one tattooed on each hand.  Through a constant fog of smoke and laughter the bird’s blue outlines bled into tanned skin and unruly arm-hair. Symbolising hope and homecoming, frenetic gestures sent them darting amongst glistening treasures of smooth-worn gold; all hints at the freedom and mystery of a life lived over the horizon.  In their energetic travels the Swallows failed to communicate the unseen nuances of heavy metal poisoning and asbestosis. The losses came home, one after the other.  

The Swifts were also not Swallows but I was less disappointed when they appeared. My island-bound imagination would soar with them, squeeeeing in high arcs among the vapour trails in a sky extending over the roof tops, past the city, beyond the dockyard, and out into the channel.  I still listen out for them, but the air is mute. Grey maintenance-free soffits publicly broadcast the success of local business owners in a street where I can no longer park. There isn’t much for birds to stick to.  

A few years back, as Winter was drawing in, I thought I’d head south to find Swallows. I skitted across the cooling countryside, drawn by sonar to Portland Harbour.  The masts of Rampisham described a 300ft elevation in the distance; a shadow of a shrinking family and a long wave goodbye. Flap, Flap.

Incrementally I was all at sea in an invisible realm, a territory of laws (maritime and natural) and frequencies (cycles measured from milliseconds to aeons) which tracked and shaped the journey. In the cabin the slumbering air was laden with fuel oil and pervasive transmissions. This was a slow clock which marked seconds with engine vibration, minutes with a cabin-mate’s breath, hours with cups of beef tea, days with sundowners.  

The distance covered (calculated by a loosening viscosity of the sea, the fading grey in the blue of the sky and an incremental increase in air temperature) was marked on a cork board at the muster point.  It charted the beat of a sail, the beat of a wing, the thump of a heart, a propellor, a trampled hedge, a stock proof gate, a wait (and a wait).  

The doldrums fuelled disorientation with micropulsations of electrosmog. Lethargic waters inverted the horizon until (like Fred’s hand-Swallows) I reflected myself. Crossing the line, fish made airborne displays and subaquatic birds began their hibernation; oscillating travellers on a mirrored road.

With blurred wings I was drawn, shuddering, through tangled wires into Comfortless Cove.  Parted cables dropped a line home using fiberoptic starscapes which emerged from the white sand.  The beach, its masts populated by rapacious echoes of da Nova, Cook, Dampier and Darwin was washed with sighs from the hundreds of un-named voyagers who remain, self-interred and unmentioned; turtles all the way down. 

Rampisham’s obsolete Antenna fields relayed a final, flagging signal. The rhythm of its message was caught by the web of its warm oceanic double…  ‘those are just House Martins’ it said.

Ringing, hissing, roaring, screeching, sirens, whooshing, static, pulsing, crickets, ocean waves, buzzing, clicking, dial tones, and even music. Tinnitus marked the landfall.

In February 1947, I received a skin of the House Martin (Delichon urbica) from Mr. G. Addison-Williamson. He had secured the bird by hand as it perched, completely exhausted, on a piece of machinery on the dock at Georgetown, Ascension Island. This was on November 2, 1946. A ship had arrived that morning from England, but it is doubtful whether a swallow would find it advantageous to stay with a ship for any length of time. The specimen is now number 343,884 in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History*.

*Chapin, James P. (1954) "House Martin and Swift from Ascension Island," The Auk: Vol. 71: Iss. 1, Article 14. Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/auk/vol71/iss1/14

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