Lugworms under the mirage
Published in Bog Bodies Press magazine ‘mnemotope 002’ in December 2023. An extract also published in Stranded FM’s magazine ‘Tides: Ebb’
Lugworms were forever a mystery to me. I became aware of the existence of them in my younger years when my parents would take me to Sandymount strand in Dublin. I never saw the creatures themselves; they had the capacity to bury themselves, leaving behind evidence in the form of a coiled cast. It was a natural phenomenon that fascinated me.
The wide strand of Sandymount is sheltered by the peninsula of Poolbeg where there is a pair of defunct power station chimneys. At their base a crescent pier curves out, threading through and splicing the bay in two. At the middle point of the pier, there is the Half Moon swimmers club where bathers dunk beneath the surface of the cold Irish Sea. At the end, there is a bright red lighthouse.
In my mind now there was always sun. When the tide receded, we wandered on the sands, a purgatorial place, a perspective with no end. The tide was etched into the sand and shallow pools reflected the sky into a blurring mirage. At the turning point where the water reaches its greatest ebb, on the precipice of it all flooding back, it seemed you could almost make it out to the red lighthouse. We never did.
I would spend time scrutinizing rocks. I would enjoy the suck of the sand swallowing my sole. I would examine the exposed seabed, combing for mussels, cockles, razor shells, periwinkles, limpets, and whelks. Sometimes, they were hidden beneath, creeping up, cracking under my boots.
Further out, obscure figures with metal detectors, like mechanised extendable limbs, scoured for treasure moving in two dimensions against the horizon, hoping to find something deep in the unknown beneath their feet. Seabirds hovered low over the haze.
And always, the coiled casts of lugworms, tangled in spools, dotted the sodden ground. I would poke them with sticks. I would pick up the coils and spread the wet sand in my palm. There was no worm. There was nothing there but grey sand. Where did they go? I would ask my young self. The gulls were as confused as me, plodding their own feet, they remained patient, always outlasting me on the strand. The tide pursued us as we made our way back to dry land and the mountains rose up in the distance, enveloping the bay.
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Twenty years have passed, I now live in the Netherlands, a flatland of constant horizon, no mountain, no hill, an existence below sea level. And the mystery of the lugworm was still stuck, sucked onto my brain, gnawing like a limpet.
On the North Sea coast, there are the Wadden Islands. The local mnemonic is TVTAS: Texel, Vlieland, Terschelling, Ameland and Schiermonnikoog and they curl in a slight convex arch from the tip of Den Helder all along the Friesland coast. These islands are reached by ferry or depending on the island and time of day you can walk out to them across the mudflats. The Dutch call this wadlopen.
One year ago, I spent a weekend in Vlieland. The island’s highest point, the highest in all the Wadden sea, is called the Vuurboetsduin, 42 metres high. A lighthouse coarsely painted red, remarkably similar to the one at Poolbeg, was right at the top. The climb took a while. I was constantly getting lost through the labyrinth of dunes. Eventually, I reached the top and placed the flat of my palm on the warm lighthouse wall.
Down from the hilltop, along a ridge, nearby there was a kaasbunker, a cheese bunker. We were welcomed in by the cheesemonger, a bespectacled man in a patchwork apron, with a full grin and a peaked cap. The cheesemonger informed us the structure was previously a store for water pumped from the island’s reservoir. The concrete and subterranean layers provided perfect storage facilities for the ripening of cheese. He spoke of seaweed infusion, of cranberries and kelp. I saw him descend and disappear into the depths, worm-like, where looking down through the hole, you could see columns of seemingly endless cheese. I bought some for my parents, infused and flavoured by seaweed and sea lettuce harvested at springtime from the mudflats of Vlieland. The cheesemonger said it contained 25 times more iron than meat. I took his word for it, not wanting to question his authority over the matter.
We descended from the dunes to the town for lunch in an eethuis where I drank a local Fortuna ale, “brewed and bottled on Vlieland with pure, naturally purified dune water, barley, various hops, yeast and a mix of Vlielander fruits.” Peckish, I picked at a bowl of steaming chips. There was a blackbird mucking about, perching on tabletops, causing a ruckus on the terrace. The waiting staff called him Kevin, scolding him like an errant child for flapping too close to diners. At one stage, I held a chip aloft as I was gesticulating during a story. Kevin swooped, I felt feathertips on my ear lobes. The brave blackbird stole the chip from my fingers. He stood with his spindly legs on a nearby bollard. The chip, almost as big as him, pinched in his dark black beak. I realised then that this was not Kevin’s first chip.
After lunch, guided by a kind Vlielander couple, Paul and Marian, we were led out, wadlopen out on the damp mudflats at low tide. They lent us lightweight, impermeable footwear from their garden shed.
Paul had a thick moustache and a wind-battered face from decades spent at sea. He wore a woven jumper with a turtleneck collar that folded just blow his chin. Marian spoke of the island’s history, the fishing trade, and Willem de Vlamingh, a sailor from Oost-Vlieland, who in the late 17th century made it as far as the west coast of Australia and the mouth of the Swan River. He sailed almost all the seas of the world, harpooning for blubber in the Arctic, Greenland, Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen and the Davis Strait. Marian added that Whaling declined with the discovery of petroleum, almost overnight, an industry disappeared. She told us of the forgotten village of West-Vlieland and the great flood of 1736 that washed the place away.
We listened to the gentle lap of the water and Paul pointed out to sea, we followed, his hands seemed to be made of wood, rough from rope, seawater and sand. He showed us scattering crabs, kelp and seaweed, holding translucent sea lettuce to the sky, illuminating our faces in shades of green.
It was then I saw them, dotted, tangled, spools, and I was jolted back to Sandymount strand. I pointed, Paul pointed too, een zeepier, he whispered, the coiled casts of lugworms, the black lug, the blow lug, arenicola. We approached. We stopped. Paul, I said, these things, what are these things, they have forever been a mystery to me.
Paul explained in grotesque detail that the lugworms go down into the sand, eating into the seabed, leaving behind in the process their excrement in a small pile. The worms burrow down swallowing sand, sucking up the dead matter like a vacuum cleaner and passing it out as they pulse through the crust.
Paul forced his pitchfork deep and dug up a hole where a thick worm was revealed, brown, undulating, pulsing. He picked up the worm, dangling it aloft, triumphantly, ritualistically, and then placed it gently on his hand. The worm moved slowly along the deep groove in the lifeline of his palm.
I was hypnotised and imagined what this worm must have thought. The displacement out of its burrowed world, the sunlight, the warmth of a human hand, the hyper speed, the spatial uprooting, and then the slow dropping downward to be placed back in its underland realm.
I came back to earth as Paul heaped the wet sand over the worm, and then patted the flat place where the hole had been.
We reached the water line and at our feet were endless oysters stuck, crusted, onto the rocks. The uncovering of mysteries and seabed exploration had made us hungry. We shucked right then and there. From his deep pockets, Paul pulled several lemons, the citrus fruits were turgid from the cold and he sliced them with a pen knife. We squeezed the juice with abandon and sent the oysters down our gullets, spitting out pips and grit. One oyster was the size of an average supermarket chicken fillet. We left that one out for the gulls.
We said our goodbyes and I said to Paul and Marian that they must make it over to Ireland, to walk on the strands there, to shuck to their heart’s content, and to uncover their own mysteries of other sea beds far away.
We waited for the ferry back to Harlingen, under the statue of Willem de Vlamingh, on the dune, protecting the town from the tide. The waters slowly flowed back, the oysters fastened hard to the bed and the coiling casts slowly untangling, the lugworm rising, a blanket of seawater safeguarding them, for now, from the piercing beaks of seabirds.
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As the ferry navigated into the sea toward the port of Harlingen, twilight descended. Out the window, sea foam lit up the evening and I found myself thinking of Kevin, the blackbird, once more. In Ireland, there is a parable involving St. Kevin and the blackbird and it seemed strange to me, coincidental, that the chip thieving bird would be named the same as the Saint. A reversal of roles.
St. Kevin lived as a hermit, cut off from civilization, in Glendalough, county Wicklow. In the sixth century, Kevin sat in a small hut keeping out the elements. One bright morning, wet with dew, he raised his hands in prayer through a thin gap in the rough stone. A small blackbird landed in his hand, stopped and made a nest there. Kevin kept his hands raised towards the sky for the good of the bird and its young. Despite the pain, the goodhearted saint showed compassion to the blackbird. With time, he felt the movement under eggshells, poking, peaking, piercing across the membrane, the warmth of the young hatching in his hand. And once willing, the little birds took flight, and the saintly arms receded into the stone cell, the ache, with hope, easing.
Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet, wrote often of subterranean spaces and hinterlands, about bogs and peat, comparing landscapes to memory, where digging into earth was a descent into a collective and a creative subconscious. Heaney spent many of his years living in Sandymount. I imagine he looked out at the strand, the tide receding, the defunct chimneys, the red lighthouse, distant bathers, hovering seabirds and bleeping metal detectors, perhaps now and again he thought of lugworms. He wrote a poem called ‘St. Kevin and the Blackbird’ published in his 1996 collection ‘The Spirit Level’, the year I was born. When describing the eggs laid in the saintly palms, Heaney imagines Kevin, by the riverbank, the reeds taking on the gentle wind, the slim sand beach mixed with muck soaking up the river, alone, the bird nestling into his lifeline, the saint was, as Heaney writes: “linked into the network of eternal life.”
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The mirage, the crack of razorshells, sucking limpets, the red lighthouse out there, bleeping metal detectors, the gull, a mirror, Vlieland, the spring of dune water, the ripening of the cheese, the steaming bowl of chips, the smooth ale, the blackbird, the black beak, the mudflat appearing, the sailor’s flat palm, the tide receding, subterranean, the air burdened by the smell, sea lettuce turning clouds green, the blubber, the shuck, the coiling cast, the disappeared worm, and yes, there is no antidote to the passage of time, for the boy, the end of all mystery, the pulsing lugworm, a network of eternal life.
End