By way of explaining...

In Shetland, that scattershot of islands at Scotland’s far northern edge, there is in the midst of a midsummer’s night a half-hour span when the day in its dying leaps the horizon, only, in an instant, to change its mind and to shinny again up the cliff face, renewed and ready as ever to gild a dawn. It is a twilit time, neither light nor dark, neither day nor night, a time somewhere between and known to locals as the Simmer Dim.

Back in 1989, back when I was a comparative lad of 38, I was myself in a kind of Simmer Dim, a somewhere-between time that was, admittedly, as much frame of mind, one occasioned by my family’s desire to move back to Ireland, a move stymied then and forever by a house in Vermont that we couldn’t sell, owing to a well contaminated by road salt. Eventually, the problem was remedied; eventually, the house sold, albeit at such a loss that the seed money that would have bankrolled the move and allowed us to sink new roots in the Old Sod had gone, all too literally, down the drain.

It was in that summer of the salted well, with a planned solo jaunt to Ireland providing the excuse to hopscotch Scotland to Shetland, that I visited this Ultima Thule of the ancients, lured largely by a longstanding, but otherwise inexplicable, tug in that direction, and partly by a writer’s more understandable desire to stand entirely alone and at the edge of the world.

In fact, in the course of that visit, I would do exactly that, abandoning a hired car in the car park at the Hermaness Nature Preserve at the northernmost tip of Shetland’s northernmost isle of Unst, striding two miles and more to cliff’s edge, then, with not a soul to be seen or heard, stood staring north, beyond the rocky scarp of Muckle Flugga, to a far and imagined polar cap; east, more or less, to Norway; west, by some compass of the mind, to Greenland. And still, all these years and miles later, how easily I recall myself there again, how comforting once more the solace of all but unbroken sea and all but endless sky.

Think of it…

There I was. Absolutely and utterly alone. My feet having traversed a long length of moor and bracken, my entire being at long last at land’s end. Before me now a ragged edge of earth, grey sky overhead, grey ocean beyond, and, as I drew nearer the brink, gulls and guillemots skimming near rock and farther foam.

Some twenty years later, the mind’s eye all too tauntingly allows me to see my younger self at that particular precipice, not knowing then what I all so well know now. That life would lead me again, back from that latest cliff, back to the relative safety of Vermont, and, later still, after Notre Dame and graduate school, to Iowa and to the edge again, this time, at age 49 and with five kids in tow, in the form of medical school. Graduation meant only another cliff, with the roiling sea of residency beyond, and, still farther and yet finally, to harbor again, not so much as a physician, but as an adult. Indeed, throughout medical school, I had dreamed often of days to come beyond its puerile, boot-camp-like atmosphere, while throughout residency, I had teased myself forward by the unabandoned notion that at its end I would again be the adult I’d been a decade earlier, free once more to chart my days as I wanted to chart them, with nary the shoal of a rotation nor the shelf of some requirement to put to lee, even as I sped then, as I speed now, full sail forward into this, our shared Simmer Dim of unknowing.

(If the spirit proverbially moves, I will tell you more of my decades-long transition from salaried penman to freelancer to physician, but, for now, do permit me passage.)

For those so inclined, here’s a poem from the past, regrettably without its original line breaks (the vagaries of Blogger remain frustratingly vague to me):



In the Simmer Dim



I.

Night falls and catches itself
before hitting bottom,
leaving light enough to still be light,
light enough that
midnight here is only midnight
on the clock, but not out there,
not there where Shetland’s barrowed
isles speedbump the Atlantic
and once-drowned Jarlshof
slumbers again at Sumburgh,
its spectral sentries listening still
to the lapping of ocean, the licking of sea.




II.

Water
ran everywhere that first morning,
running in rivulets on the green sponge
of Stanydale, running tea-brown
across my shoetops and wanting now
only to be boiled into whisky.


Beyond that rise rose a gate,
and beyond the gate gaped a hole
where once a temple stood
and true believers, wetted much
as any field or stone, had cowered
then in the fear of faith.


There is wind here,
there is always wind, the scent of salt,
the spittle of sea and little else. Neither
farm nor farmer. Sheep nor shepherd.
Boat nor boatman. Time circles,
hovers, wings away.




III.

I had come because I had
always wanted to come.
Because a finger traced once
across a map had led me
to this fringe of island fringe.

To Thule, the ancients called it,
to the edge of the world.
And now I’m here. Straddling
past and present. Scanning
the sea of the coming time
and seeing only sea. Lost.
Lost in the simmer dim.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon