Harbours, Edges, and the Fiction of Return

A harbour looks, to the visitor, like a place of arrival — boats coming in, the calm water, the town gathered comfortably around the shelter it provides. But that is the tourist’s reading, the reading of someone who has never had to stand on the wharf and watch a boat go the other way, and it is exactly backwards. A harbour is not primarily a place of arrival. It is a place of departure, and of the waiting that follows departure, and of the terrible open question that hangs over every departure on the water, which is whether the thing that left will be returned. The harbour is the coast’s great threshold, and like all thresholds it faces two ways, and the direction the tourist doesn’t see — the direction out, the direction of leaving and maybe-not-coming-back — is the one the town has always been organized around.

The edge you leave from

Think about what an edge actually is, to the people who live on one. For an inland place, the horizon is more land — more of the same, continuous, safe, walkable. For a coastal place, the horizon is the end of the world you can stand on, and beyond it is the element that does not support you, that you can only cross in a made thing, and that has, over the generations, taken a statistically appalling number of the people who tried. The edge is where the solid stops. And so the harbour, the one manageable notch in that edge, becomes the single point through which a whole community’s relationship with the beyond is conducted — the going out to fish, the going away for good, the coming home, the not-coming-home — and it accumulates, over centuries, the emotional weight of being the exact place where the people you love cross from the world that holds them into the one that might not give them back.

Every coastal community is built around this and shaped by it, and it produces a specific character, a specific watchfulness. The eyes always going to the water. The knowing, without being told, whose boat is out. The particular quality of a coastal woman’s attention to weather, which is not meteorological interest but something much older and much worse, because the weather is the difference between the boat coming in and the boat not, and she has spent her life on the correct side of an edge that swallows people, watching the point where they will reappear, or won’t.

The fiction of return

And then there is the going-away that is not fishing — the emigration, the leaving for good, the young going down the road to the city or across the water to wherever the work is — and this is where the harbour holds its deepest and most self-deceiving cargo, which is the fiction of return.

Because nobody leaves a place like this saying goodbye. They cannot; the goodbye is unbearable, so it is not said. Instead they say I’ll be back. They say it’s just for a while, just till I get on my feet, just till the work picks up here again. The whole enormous historical hemorrhage of people out of the coastal places — the outports emptying, the young gone, the harbours quieter every year — was conducted, person by person, under the shared necessary fiction that the leaving was temporary, that the door swings both ways, that they would return. And some did. And most did not, because the work did not pick up and the years went by and the city closed around them and the visits got shorter, and the I’ll be back turned out to be, for most of them, the kind thing you say at an edge because the true thing cannot be said, and the harbour they left from kept the fiction long after the person was, in every way that mattered, gone.

That is the melancholy specific to these places, and you can feel it on any coastal wharf if you know to feel for it: the harbour is where a community stores its hope about who returns, and the hope is mostly, historically, disappointed. The edge lets people go and does not, most of the time, bring them back — not the drowned, and not the emigrated, which are two different kinds of not-coming-home that the harbour holds in the same water. The boat that goes down and the son who moves away and dies old in another province are both departures from which there is no real return, and the wharf grieves them both, quietly, in the same posture — the eyes to the water, watching the point where a thing might reappear.

What the wharf is for

So when you stand on a harbour and find it beautiful — and it is beautiful, the calm water, the boats, the shelter — hold the other reading underneath it. This is a threshold, and the community around it has been organized, for its whole existence, around the direction out: the fishing that might not return, the leaving that says it will come back and doesn’t, the permanent watchful grief of a people who live at the exact edge where the ones they love cross into the element that keeps them.

The harbour is not where they come home. It is where they leave from, and where the ones left behind stand and wait, and where a whole coast has stored, generation after generation, the fiction that everyone returns, against the plain water-fact that most of them, one way or another, do not. It is the most hopeful and most sorrowful architecture a coastal place possesses, and its beauty is real, and its beauty is also a kind of held breath, the breath of everyone who ever stood there watching the point where a boat, or a son, was supposed to reappear.