How do writers convey sense of place? Barry Lopez, in his essay “The American Geography” (included in his 1998 collection About This Life), provided this recipe: “It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind.” All three writers in this series are brilliant observers and describers of place.
For example, in The Old Ways, Macfarlane evokes Waking Stairs, where he begins his walk on the great British offshore path called the Broomway, as follows:
The air at Waking Stairs was warm and close; thick like gel in the nose and mouth. The tide had recently turned, and just offshore the exposed Black Grounds were steaming: a brown mudscape of canyons and buttresses, turgid and gleaming, through which streams of riddled. Sandpipers and oystercatchers strutted in search of breakfast. The surface of my body felt porous, absorbent. The creeks and channels bubbled and glistened. Two big gulls pottered the tideline, monitoring us with lackadaisical, violent eyes.
Macfarlane’s descriptions of place are vivid, sensuous. His words call up pictures. Look at the way he evokes Stornoway harbour, where he launches his voyage to the Shiants:
Mid-morning departure, Stornoway Harbour, which is also known as the Hoil: hints of oil, hints of hooley. Sound of boatslip, reek of diesel, Broad Bay’s wake through the harbour – a rugged line the fuel slicks on the water’s surface, our keel slurring petrol-rainbows. Light quibbling on the swell. We nosed through the chowder of harbour water: kelp, oranges, plastic milk bottles, sea gunk.
One more example from The Old Ways – this a wonderful evocation of the little Hebridean peninsula called Aird Bheag, where Macfarlane starts his search for Manus’s path:
The peninsula was a beirgh, or a’ bheirgh, a loan-word from the Norse that designates “a promontory or point with a bare, usually vertical rock-face, and often with a narrow neck.” Its cliffs were pinkish with feldspar. Inland, near Griomabhal, I could see a golden eagle, its primaries extended like delicate fingers, roaming on a late-day hunt. A tern beat upwind: scissory wings, its black head seemingly eyeless, its movement within the air veery and unpredictable as a pitcher’s knuckle-ball. Creamy waves moshed and milked on the beach and rocks, making rafts of floating foam just offshore and sending spray shooting above the level of the tent. Wave-surged infralittoral rock, tide-swept circalittoral rock, micro-terrains of lichen and moss. Far out to sea there were breaches in the cloud through which sun fell.
Roger Deakin, in Waterlog, swims in at least fifty different locations throughout the British Isles. Each is specificly and individually evoked. Here, for example, is Belnahua, one of the Slate Islands, in the Firth of Lorn, Scotland:
Everything on Belnahua was ruined, except its wild beauty. There were two rows of dilapidated slate cottages carpeted in long grass with just their walls and fireplaces left. Holed and half-demolished by the winter storms, what was left of their windows framed dramatic views of the Garvellachs and the distant Paps of Jura across the sea. Bits of derelict machinery lay everywhere: cogs and pulleys, shafts, spindles, wheels, gears, cranes, pitted bollards and rusting fragments of narrow-gauge track. The beaches were all silver, black and grey, with fine black sand and all denominations of the island’s slate coinage, some flecked with a starry night sky of fool’s gold, others striated with the finest random white pencil lines of quartz, the doodling of mermaids. The tides had sorted and screened them by size, stacking them like books end-on in flowing lines and whorls that traced the eddies and turbulence that clamoured over them.
And here is Jaywick Sands, a village on the Essex coast of England, one of Deakin’s favorite places, because “Nobody has spent much money on Jaywick, with the result that you can still feel some of its original atmosphere and character”:
I turned and looked back towards the shore and the curious collection of bungalows that lined the seafront, lit by the dying reflected sunlight, their wooden clapboarding picked out in garish colours. At one end of the little curved sandy bay was the Jaywick Beach Bar, with a fifteen-foot square of concrete jutting out into the water, and beyond it, further off, a Martello tower. A fishing smack rode at anchor, trailing a wake that ploughed the smooth surface of the tide-stream. The bungalows were tiny, with much brightly-coloured picket fencing around them. A light plane flew in over the bay and came in to land behind the houses on a tiny airfield that had a windsock and a board advertising pleasure flights along the coast. The ancient gnarled remains of a groyne heaved out of the sand, the concrete slabs thrown together like dice by storms. The defiantly anachronistic spirit of Jaywick was distilled in a sign on the miniature promenade advertising the pub: NEVER SAY DIE – LIVE ENTERTAINMENT. The promenade was tiny, more of a sea path squeezed in behind the sea wall, and the bungalows, with their stilts and verandas, crammed together facing out to sea like punters at a racecourse trying to get a view. On the skyline of low sand-dunes a horse and rider trotted round and round.
And here is the Oasis open-air pool in Covent Garden, London, on a cold November evening:
I walked out to the pool across a coconut rug thoughtfully laid across the frosty paving stones. The air was biting, but the water was simmering at eighty-four Fahrenheit, and steaming. A dense cotton-wool mist rose off the surface, diffusing the lights and reflecting off the lifeguard’s glass kiosk. But it was too cold to sit about. He or she (I couldn’t see) paced up and down by the pool muffled in a thick parka with a tracksuit underneath and a bathing costume several layers in, like a Russian doll. All around, London was breathing, clicking and buzzing under an orange sky. Floating on my back in the pool and looking up, I saw the balconies of council flats and bright offices lit up with people at computers in the windows, and, up above, a black starry sky with now and again a jet. As a swimmer, I felt connected to everyday life in a way I never do in an indoor pool. I had ridden here under my own steam, and here I was in the centre of London gazing up at the stars in the utmost luxury of a heated outdoor pool. It seemed the height of civilization. Yet this was no exclusive private pool; with a Leisure Card from Camden Council, you could get in for £1. With Lubetkin’s High Point pool in Highgate, this must be the best cold-weather pool in London. It was exhilarating to swim wild and free in the middle of the big city in November, breathing in the sharp, frosty air, limbs suffused with the warmth of the pool. Other swimmers materialized out of the mist and glided past silently. All you heard was the immediate lapping of the water and the big rumble and hum of the invisible city beyond the ramparts of flats and offices. Just a few yards away through the darkness, other bathers were visible through the glass walls of the indoor pool. It was warm in there, but there is no warmth as satisfying as heated outdoor water on a frosty night. Floating in the surreal space between extremes of hot and cold, it is so different from the physical world you are used to that you are suspended in time.
I love that passage. Deakin puts me squarely there in that splendid outdoor pool. I feel his exhilaration.
Speaking of thereness, Lawrence Osborne, in The Wet and the Dry, evokes bars so vividly he makes you feel you’re right there with him, sipping a gin and tonic or a vodka martini or a glass of arak or whatever he’s having. For example:
In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.
Here’s Time Out in Beirut:
Beirut is the only city where the bar and muezzin cannot dominate each other. From Abdel Wahab, Furn El Hayek runs gently downhill toward Saints Coeurs, past Ottoman houses with their balconies and high arches intact, the gardens dark with hundred-foot trees. Near the bottom, on St. Joseph University Street, stands Time Out, which may be the oldest continuously running bar in Beirut. It is built into three floors of a house that was once a table d’hôte in the late nineteenth century and is now like an English country home with a basement of white stone vaults. Here is that perfect bar: a worn-in room with, at its center, a great wall of bottles in niches, and around it armchairs and oils and shaded lamps and, leaning on said bar, the white-haired and bearded Jacques Tabet, who during the civil war was known cryptically as Beirut Number Three. Tabet is Beirut’s most cantankerous and generous bar owner, and his creation is very like himself: interconnected rooms like salons in a private house, an unlit garden terrace, corners where men can smoke cigars without occidental disapproval. A bar for adults, in other words, and not for screaming children. In New York it would have been closed down long ago for this very reason.
And here is the Windsor in Cairo:
The Windsor is my favorite bar in the Middle East. It is, when you first enter it, still an officer’s mess equipped with all the expected decorations of a male space: dozens of large and small antlers protrude from its walls, some so small they are like bones of tiny extinct species unique to the Sahara. The chandeliers are rings of enmeshed antlers. Antelopes, gazelles, ibex, dark wood, low bookcases, shaded lamps, and bar shelves filled with dusty bottles of Omar Khayyam wine and Stella, the Egyptian national beer. It is a perfect anachronism. It must have been one of the bars of Fermor and Durrell in 1942.... The Windsor sits unnoticed within the backstreets of Cairo’s downtown, the core of the nineteenth-century city that has for decades decayed like compost until it is almost unrecognizable as the downtown that was once magnificent, the city of King Farouk and Omar Sharif and Om Kalthoum. A city of Parisian boulevards and balconied apartment blocks lifted from the Rue Réaumur. The city of the Café Riche and wondrous hotel bars and a life of flaneurs rarely inconvenienced by religion. The Paris of the East, pace Beirut.
Description of bars is one way to evoke place. Another is description of people. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
