Curlew

At times the swan’s song

I took to myself as pleasure,

the gannet’s noise

and the voice of the curlew

instead of the laughter of men

- ‘The Seafarer’, Unknown

‘Shit.’

With one gloved hand on the controls of the Versalift and the other holding a screwdriver, my harness pulls tight as I watch the screw go caroming off the wingmirror of the van below, past the security camera fusebox and into the water. I’m poised above what’s known as the knuckle on the outermost corner of the port. Two quay walls meet below in a reflex angle, the outer edges bombarded by teal waves, white spume rolling there like fine sand. The wind buffets the basket like a sail and I grip tight, already beyond the limits of the equipment. Pea sized beads of rain cataract the lenses of my glasses. My mouth is dry.

A cable tie provides a temporary fix but the rain is driven into the camera’s protective dome by the wind. Through the clear plastic the saltmarsh across the estuary is a warped and bulbous oddity, like a vision in a crystal ball, unfathomable until the protagonist presses the bridge of their nose against it. 

Cur-lee.

I don’t get quite that close, but I welcome the distraction. This snatched moment of solitude; wet, cold, and exhausting as it is will be a tonic to my other duties. A joke of a contract sits on my desk, devious alterations to the small print. A manager steals our lunchboxes from the fridge while we fix his mistakes.

Cur-lee.

I push left on the hydraulic controls, the bright yellow booms dollying me to a clear view of the distant treeline where dark oaks let loose in the howling wind. The truck rocks beneath me. The basket sways. An alarm sounds.

Subdued but untroubled, blackheaded gulls congregate near an outlet pipe. Ropes slacken on the mooring post then tighten again. The port works on. A single crow careens between container stacks. Its wings pivot and contract as it sights a perch across the water, a fast shadow rolling over the mudflats there, all purslane and kale and spartina, thin layers of intertidal strata bared to the weather. I lean forward, eyes fixed. A single, downcurved beak. I ignore the lit screen in my top pocket and the name pulsing there. 

Cur-lee.

The curlew steps around a narrow inlet, its outsized body absorbing the wind without visible effort. The bird lives unhindered by the sheer elementality of this place, its mottled feathers barely shifting at this distance. I watch its bluish legs pick a path along the stained alluvium, through a clump of rotting sedge and reed and driftwood, barely pausing in its patrol of the grey ribbon on the shoreline. A thread of existence in the mud. Sorting through our absentmindedness, our arrogance. 

The voice of another curlew precedes, by seconds, its arrival. Back on the ground I crouch in my boots and overalls, elbows on my knees and a tremor in my hands. I watch as together they probe for worms and shellfish; as together they endure.