January 13th 2008

The sea, at the little boathouse along by the jetty near Aird Tobha, has offered me a plank. It is five feet long & ten inches wide, with, at each end, the remains of three evenly spaced screws, loosened in their holes by the hammering of onshore surf. It’s as well not to refuse what the ocean offers, because it as easily takes away. This plank I welcome. It has clearly been in the sea a long time, heavy with salt, washed about the coast before the currents & recent gale stranded it here. It’s broken along one edge, which I can easily saw to make straight & true again as the tree once reached up. It’s pine. I’m guessing it did not grow in Sunart, though its history is uncertain. Once, is all I know, it was part of a tree; now planked & dressed it has a swaggering air, like any sailor at port. I’ll dry it, use it on my boat, as a part of the small dresser which needs to be built to take the Japanese biscuit barrel, the teacups & saucers, remaining china from my mother’s long-ago wedding. It will be sanded, oiled to show its sweep of grain, with its story of summers & winters past for those who read such things; living again & at home again as part of a boat, since that’s surely where it made its first home as plank. Next to the future dresser is the stove. Aldo Leopold writes that there are two dangers in not owning a farm. The second is of supposing that heat comes from a furnace. The offcuts from this plank will help fire up the stove for the baking of bread or the boiling of the kettle, to bring into play those teacups which will sit on the dresser's dressed plank. The heat of the pine trimmings will momentarily warm me, the teakettle, the water in the boiler & the boat herself.

I’ll be sitting, mind working all this in woodland, wondering if the sawn tree itself is from the Baltic or maybe - & here imagination makes a little leap – from the Scots pine I could not find at Bun Allt Eachain that Alastair Cameron writes of in his Annals. Either way, I’ll glean more than the plank; I’ll guess where the tree grew that works so hard to give a glow in several dimensions.