The boat is hauled up onto the beach. The force used on the winch handle, winding the rusted but greased cogs, tensing the cable, ratcheting in the rope, feels like the winding in of time, feels like safety.
Refloating, re-hauling, winding, day after day, week after week year after year, one generation after another until, one day, the sea and the sand have finished with eating away at the wood and caulking and the boat, slave to the both of them, the salt sea and the sharp sand, prisoner to rope and cable and chains, has died sodden and softened, and is at rest, and the tension is lost and it all begins to fall slowly and silently apart.
The shoals of silver fish that quivered in rainbow sheets in and out of the arc lights, under the ominous shadow of the hull, into the nets thrown like disease sown onto the ocean, sown by sun baked brown salted muscle, the shoals of silver fish shimmering were fished out years back.
Salted muscle sits decaying, cancerous and cankerous, on low three legged wooden stools, wrinkled like useless sunburnt leather, hungry, and hungry for the wide open ocean, thirsty, and thirsty for the wide open seas, in myriads of back alley sewers in myriads of modern cities. The same slime the world over, disease sown onto the land. No more nets to be knotted, eyes as dead and opaque to the glassy gazes of wives, sons, daughters, grandchildren, their eyes as dead and opaque as those of the last rotten fish staring them out, gutted then swilled into the gutter in myriads of decomposing back alley sewers the world over.
Photograph used with the kind permission of the photographer Piru Sedano. ©2011, Piru Sedano
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