Self-Portrait of City Boy as Exile

Photo by Rolands Varsbergs on Unsplash

By Alton Melvar M Dapanas: 

You wake up to a dream and this time, you are in a bed where you lost your virginity, all the stains of youth, to a closeted boy, a childhood playmate, whose name you choose not to remember. 

But you wish you would have been a colony of ants, or a skein of yellow-bellied sunbirds, negotiating slumber in the moist branches, remnants of rain drops from leaves dripping in their feathers. You wish you would have been little wings of flight, the god-spell flutter of their hearts, all the while living in the tried and tested ways of living, some rituals of disposal: the wet quietude of early September, steam of tuna in coconut milk soup, a lingering squeeze in the arm of an old friend, the call to prayer at dawn of a nearby mosque. 

You think about the escape from previous lives, an essential task to save the self from the city that swarmed on your banishment. Outside your apartment back in college, a man sells colorful balloons to a boy who keeps on clutching his mother’s bosom, a sleepless student nurse in white is on the way to hospital duty, and there, at the cul-de-sac sidewalk, an alley of stalls of street food like caked pig’s blood and unhatched duck embryo. Outside your favorite second hand bookstore, the pharmacy you frequent, a parking lot where you jog, a notorious inn. This was your city and its attendant histories.

But here in this sun-rinsed island town, in your room, by the window, staring at the empty bird cage hanging by a topiary, an absence of breeze, just still air, still life. 

You are asked to live in the now, dear grief-torn heart. 

You are asked to purge the parts you no longer need, to shed the skin you have outgrown. 

You are told the storm is over.  

***

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (them/they) is assistant creative nonfiction editor of London-based Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and Iowa-based Atlas and Alice Literary Magazine, as well as an editorial reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine. They identify as pansexual, nonbinary, and polyamorous. Living off-the-grid since 2019, they have been based in Siargao Island in the Philippine South, in between the Pacific Ocean and a mountain range. 

In splendid isolation – the Loch Hotel

By Kenn Taylor:

Just how far out can you go in mainland Britain in terms of isolation? With a journey many miles down a long, empty, country road, an owl flying low at the windscreen at one point, and a long, single track road before you reach the destination, this place certainly felt like a candidate.

At the end of that private road there’s a luxury hotel. Not for the likes of you and me. I am here not as a real guest, but because a friend had bagged a job there.

Adjacent to a mighty loch, it is as rural a Scotland as you could possibly imagine. Scenery flowing off into the endless distance. Dramatic landscapes in every corner of your vision: mountains, forests, streams filled with huge glacial rocks. Orange highland cows. Even the multi-coloured moss seems dramatic.

In isolation, in a vast landscape, things seem to have greater visual power. A strikingly white solitary house. A lone, worn-out boat. A fallen tree. At this altitude, and with few buildings, the slightest change of light or shift in the clouds that touch the mountain tops is instantly noticeable. 

The hotel itself offers luxury in such seclusion. Old red leather chairs, worn but in the way that loos classy, not knackered. A roaring fire in a grate, the size of a small car, surrounded by dark wood and polished brass. A table lamp in the shape of a stag. The hotel itself looks ancient, but in reality is a fake. A Walter Scott image from the Victorian era.

What’s it like to live out here? I fear that the quiet and lack of stimulation would drive me mad. But there is plenty to do. Walk. Swim. Climb. Build. Read. There’s television and the internet but even then, my friend tells me, you do feel distant from everything. Terrible things happening on the news feel like dark fairy stories from far off lands, rather than things that will reach you here.

This has an allure, like some Arcadian fantasy of times past perhaps. But then this place is predicated on selling that. Charging an astronomical amount for the experience of ‘proper Scotland’. The staff, while they may also appreciate the fresh air and idyllic location, have to labour most of the time while those paying to be here can just enjoy it all. Hike the hills, fly in helicopters, drive fast cars, drink expensive whiskeys. Though labouring here is, my friend assures me, much better than some of the other places we had both laboured.

Of course, we can’t afford to even eat in the hotel. Instead we go over to the nearby inn for a pint, before driving the long way back to the nearest town to truly catch up. Nevertheless, I can see the attraction of this place, of going out to the furthest reaches. If you really have the money, you can pretend the world is not like it is. And forget, perhaps, the role you played in making it that way. 

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. Kenn’s website.

Bitter Meadow – January in Bochum

By Marcel Krueger:

There are many bridges in Bochum. Sadly they never cross any water, but only ever rails, concrete and motorways. 

I've been in the urban sprawl of the Ruhr area since early December. My wife has started a new job here and we've rented a small apartment in the center of the city, planning to divide our time between Ireland and Germany in the coming year. I came here when the last lockdown in Ireland ended, with plans to go back to Ireland in January. But now the renewed lockdowns in both Germany and Ireland have prevented me from returning and spending January in my crooked house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. So for the last weeks I've been strolling around Bochum, which is a completely new place for me. 

As I always do to get a feeling for a place, I sought out destinations that would link me to the past of the city in the 20th century: honorary graves of people who died during the upheavals of the Kapp Putsch and in the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920, disused railway lines, former coal mines all over town. It is almost impossible to walk around Bochum and not encounter leftovers of this former main industry of the city: overgrown slag heaps, ventilation shafts, metal towers and red-brick buildings of former collieries are everywhere, and even if they  have been dismantled the former pits are still indicated by street names, subway stations and memorial plaques.  

But mainly I tried to revisit tragedies of the past. I really couldn't say why I always tend to do this. There is a certain level of escapism and horror, learning more about the terrifying things that humans had inflicted upon them by other humans as a privileged white European with a certain conviction that I'm safe from these horrors. Yet there is also an aspect of comparison to today, always: of how easy it is for totalitarian and populist regimes to lure people in and make them willing collaborators, a thing that is worth constantly reiterating. And it is also always revealing to see what a city choses to remember and honour officially, and what it chooses to forget; like the swastika on the helmet of a statue on a war memorial that had been erected in the central city park in 1935, only toppled by activists in 1983.

Some of these locations and sites I chose deliberately, upon others I just stumbled by coincidence, like the memorial dedicated to the men from the Hamme suburb who went and died in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71 in side street: Carl Hake from Hamme joined the 2nd company of the 53 infantry regiment, marched off towards the south and died fighting the Austrians in the Battle of Königgrätz on the 3rd of July 1866, far from home.    

On another walk I came upon a small park, one that seemed deserted. Paved trails and gravel paths sneaked around small hills on which thorn bushes and small trees grew, under the arms of massive electricity pylons looming overhead and a forlorn, low-hanging grey sky. I came across what looked like a piece of concrete wall topped with a rusted metal bar, and only as I stood close did I realise that there were words embossed in the metal bar. In German, it read: "A strict regime prevailed in the camp. At night people died in their bunks, then in the morning the living got up and went to work." 

During World War II the Saure Wiese, the Bitter Meadow, was one of 15 forced labour camps of the Bochumer Verein, one of the main steel and arms producers of Bochum and the Ruhr area and one of over 100 labour camps for forced labourers in Bochum and neighbouring Wattenscheid, a suburb today but a town in its own right back then. The people incarcerated here were mostly so-called Ostarbeiter, Eastern Workers, deported from the Ukraine and Russia, who had to work in the ironworks across nearby Essener Strasse, still in existence today as the Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe Bochum plant. In 1943, the camp had 765 Ostarbeiter and 290 "various foreigners" according to the records, who had to live here in subhuman conditions: they worked in 12-hours shifts seven days a week, and daily rations mostly consisted of watery turnip soup and 150 grams of bread. Viktor Schmitko was deported as a 16-year-old and brought to Bochum, where he worked from 1942 to 1945 and talked about his experiences 50 years later:

"We went to sleep and woke up only thinking of food. We went to sleep hungry and got up hungry again. That was hard to bear. I worked in the forge at the hot press with hot metal, that was hard work, on Sundays we also had to work, doing repairs, unloading wagons, that was hard too."

When Allied troops approached Bochum in spring 1945, the camps were dissolved and the surviving workers taken away in death marches and rail transports. The Gestapo shot 20 forced labourers in their headquarters, a confiscated villa at Bergstraße 76, just a few hours before US troops marched in, and buried their bodies in bomb craters in the city park.

Reconciliation with the fate of the Ostarbeiter and the camp at Saure Wiese did not happen immediately. First the remaining barracks were used for people whose houses had been destroyed in bombing raids, or German refugees from the eastern provinces. And then the area was buried under poison. The site had been used as landfill already before the war, but with the increased reconstruction and industrial output of Bochum after 1945 it was again used as a dumping ground for industrial waste. This continued until 1973, when it became clear that heavy metals and cyanides had reached the groundwater and almost completely polluted and killed nearby Ahbach creek.

The site remained a wasteland for the next decades, and only in 2007 was remediation work carried out. 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil were replaced, and at the same time the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime approached the city of Bochum and informed them of the history of the site. It was then decided to turn it into a memorial park that commemorates the camp and the fate of the forced labourers, but also invites visitors to actively engage with the fascist history of the area.

In 2012 the park I first discovered was opened: 10,000 plants and trees had been planted and a park of 65,000 square metres created. The ground plan of a barrack is reconstructed by stone blocks and several information boards document the history of the site; dotted around the park are parts of the artwork entitled "Laute Stille", Loud Silence, created by Bochum artist Marcus Kiel: the pieces of concrete and metal I encountered. Quotes from former forced labourers are cut into rusty steel strips, the harsh quotes intentionally contrasting with the quiet landscape.

When I visited it, the site of the former camp seemed eerily misplaced. Even though I found myself in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, surrounded by millions of people and with one of the largest steel plants of the state just across the road, under the grey winter sky filled with sleet that crackled on the lines between the electricity pylons it felt like a much more remote site, like a former camp of the Moorsoldaten on the heath in Lower Saxony or place of long-lost tragedy somewhere in rural Brandenburg.  

I came to be immediately fascinated by the site, and have returned there a few times now, always discovering new paths, new leftovers of history: half-buried tracks leading nowhere, blackened and cracked concrete foundations in the undergrowth.  Maybe I return here because the setting and the emotions I project the former inmates to have left here correspond to my mood these days, constantly slightly on edge, constantly mistrusting my fellow man. But then I also discovered that the park is never really deserted, and encountered dog walkers, joggers and mothers pushing buggies through the gloom, all keeping their social distance while doing the same thing as I do, exercising outdoors. I wonder what the park looks like in summer: it is surely not shunned by the people from the nearby estates, and even if they bring blankets and beer and sandwiches, and play frisbee on the largest of the hills on a summer weekend it would not be disrespectful but appropriate.    

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Winter in Den Wood

By Ian Grosz:

There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies. 

The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands. 

The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel. 

We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches. 

The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us. 

‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’ 

He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.

In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that: 

There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]  

This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring. 

We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was. 

Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away. 

Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.

As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

Notes:

[1]  Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10

Five Questions for... Alison Pouliot

By Sara Bellini

I first came across Alison Pouliot in the pages of Mervin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, published just a few months ago. Sheldrake introduces us to the world of fungi and their complexity: They can digest plastic and crude oil, they give us bread and medicines, and they connect plants in an underworld network. They are much more underrated than plants and animals, and yet they are extremely fascinating, if only we give them a chance to shine. 

This is exactly what Alison Pouliot has been doing in her photography. With a scientific background as an ecology historian, Alison focuses on the more mysterious woodland creatures, like fungi, as well as on abandoned places bearing the traces of human disregard. 

While admiring her photo essays, it occurs to me that we don’t simply occupy the planet, we are part of it, and yet there is so much we don’t know about it. I think about how, in order to build a more sustainable relationship with nature, it’s necessary to slow down and look closely at the other part in this equation. How deeply do we understand how the environment works, what it needs, which human behaviours are helpful and which ones are destructive? It’s this attentive and caring gaze that allows Alison to capture the diversity of fungi: soft-textured geometric patterns, ghostly shapes that could be the stunning guardians of the Underworld and alien-looking mushrooms with a glam aesthetic. 

Her photography is now moving from a documentaristic to a more artistic approach: “I am striving to produce work that might just touch someone somewhere and make them feel differently about the world. It’s a time of such radical change and also a time of opportunity to test the waters and do things differently. I guess it’s often times of adversity that bring out the most innovative or creative or inspirational aspects of one’s work.”

Alison’s plans for the new year start with the publication in March of Wild Mushrooming, a book she had been working on for the past five years with mycologist Tom May. The book approaches foraging from the point of view of conservation and ecosystem balance. Alison lives between Australia and Switzerland and we caught up with her after she had just completed a series of six short videos on fungi and was back in Europe for the cold season. 

What does home mean to you?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever really worked that out. It’s certainly not a physical place. I’ve straddled both hemispheres for the last two decades (so that I can have two autumns a year and get myself a double dose of fungi) so I don’t really have a sense of a particular ‘place’ called home. In a sense I feel like I’ve been on the move all my life as we moved around a good bit in my childhood as well. I have few material possessions and find it easy to make a nest and feel comfortable pretty much anywhere, so long as there’s clean air, natural surrounds and little concrete or noise. When people talk about ‘settling’ or ‘settling down’ or getting ‘tenure’ in a job, it makes me shudder.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

Oh wow, that’s a big question. I have a short list of several hundred... Anywhere in the field really, the more remote and less inhabited the better. Of course, as an Australian and having spent many years exploring that continent, I feel incredibly connected to it, especially to the remote and wide open spaces of the interior. The blank spaces on the map, those often ungraspable, indeterminate, shimmering places that can feel so old, so solid, yet like a dream. I can’t get enough of them!

But as I’m writing these words, I’m actually wondering if one can ever really feel ‘connected’ to a place, or do we just feel comfortable or familiar? I mean, of course it’s more palpable than that. Sure we can feel a powerful inexplicable affinity, or something bigger more visceral, a physical bodily sensation, an intensity that we feel in one particular place and not another, an attachment of sorts that can be profound, but is that really ‘connection’? I know when I return to my grandmother’s home in Tasmania, now occupied by new residents, that I feel an overwhelming and inextricably entwined sense of emotion and memory solely linked to that place, but I’m not sure that I’d call it connection.I’ll have to give that some more thought. 

One of the things I love about Australia is its unpredictability, its extremes and its resistance to being controlled and regulated (as one sees, for example, in Europe) although we’re trying out hardest to do so. I love that it’s not ‘comfortable’, that it resists, that it’s so highly changeable. That it’s elusive and often incomprehensible. For me it begs one not to linger too long. It’s unsettling. It’s dis-placing. Perhaps I’m just more comfortable on the move.

What is beyond your front door?

Do you mean the flap of my tent? Wow, a wonderland of textures. A bruising storm front and ever changing light. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I’m not sure that it’s ‘a’ place, a geographically defined place. A particular location. It’s anywhere that sparks my imagination and reverberates in such a way that excites or inspires or makes me feel vertiginous. Or perhaps where there’s something I feel or experience or taste that I’ve not done before. Or likewise, where a sense of intense familiarity can be just as compelling. While going back to loved places can be powerfully nostalgic or reassuring, I also think ‘going back’ can be hard. The world is changing so fast and it’s easy to become attached to the idea of how a place once was, and hence, once can quickly feel disappointed or disenchanted. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to right now? 

I’ve got several books on the go but am utterly engrossed in As we have always done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. An incredible piece of writing. I’m also re-reading some of the work of that amazing Alaskan anthropologist Richard “Nels” Nelson who died just over a year ago.

I’ve always got the radio or a podcast on and have just been listening to Nahlah Ayed’s program called Ideas on CBC (Canada) Radio. Am now listening to Far and Wide on RRR (Melbourne independent radio station). Otherwise everything from Anouar Brahem to Khruangbin to Carbon Based Lifeforms...  As for viewing I’ve been watching some short docos on AeonVideos.

Alison Pouliot's website
Alison's video The Kingdom Fungi