The Wake of the Atlantic - a brief memoir

 Hello, everyone!

I'm taking a break from the Beach Boys this month to bring you a personal account which does feature both a beach and boys. But days at the beach are not all smiles and sunshine as this little piece of personal memoir will reveal. It's rather a kind of memento mori, if I'm being honest, but not a bad thing for all that. It's actually a happy memory, all things considered. It helps to remember, especially in difficult times, that life goes on even as all things inevitably turn and pass away.

Yours truly,

- DH

The Wake of the Atlantic

My grandfather had recently died, but that's not what this is about. I had chosen to stay behind in Denu while everyone else had piled into a couple of trotros--or minivans--and gone to Afiadenyigba for a funeral. Funerals in Ghana are colorful, festive occasions. Over the last few decades, it had become a popular custom for the deceased to be buried in a "fantasy coffin", which is built in a shape to represent that person's profession in life. My grandfather would have been buried in a commercial airliner had such a custom existed in Texas. As I was Ghana when he passed, however, I wasn't there for the funeral, so I can only imagine that it was the standard, somber, quietly weeping so as not to disturb the solemnity of the occasion kind of affair. You know, dignified and definitely not a party. However, as I was present for neither funeral, I can only imagine what either funeral was actually like.

Instead, I had gone for a walk along the beach with a couple of the local boys, collecting seashells and the like. It was a gray and overcast day in the then unusually quiet fishing village. No fishing today. Not in this weather. But perhaps many of the locals had also gone to the funeral. It was still a party, after all.

Denu was just a short walk down the strand from an old slave trading outpost. We had visited it a few days before. There, under a tree, they kept a small shrine filled with long-rusted chains and shackles, a stark reminder of that inhuman industry. From inside the outpost, they had also brought out a well-polished wooden scepter banded with gilded metal--a superficial token signifying the British kingdom's officially declaring an end to the slave trade. The echoes of that awful business spread far and wide, even into my own past via--cue dramatic musical flourish--my recently deceased grandfather.

It felt like we were the only people left in the world, those boys and I. They did cartwheels down the shore, splashing into the white-capped surf. Abandoned fishing boats haunted the beach. One, abandoned and overturned, bore an inscription running along its port side, carved in block English letters: THE DOWNFALL OF A MAN IS NOT THE END OF HIS LIFE.

The sky began to rain, not heavily but enough for us to want to find shelter. The fishing boat provided it to us. We crawled in through the narrow gap where the boat arched amidships, getting ourselves sandy in the process. Whatever. We were content to be out of the rain.

The rain pattered softly on the worn, wooden hull above our heads. Like the rafters of an old, small town chapel, the hull arched over us, but it was so close and so quiet, so peaceful there, like the inside of a coffin.

We didn't speak much, the boys and I. They only spoke a few phrases of underdeveloped English--education was a luxury many of their families could not afford--and I had only managed to learn a handful of phrases in Ewe. We had already much earlier exhausted our conversational options--if there were any as such--but it didn't matter. They were boys after all, aged maybe 11 or 12, for whom conversation still meant little next to play. I myself was only 21 and had more interest in contemplation than conversation anyway.

They're grown men now, those boys, older than I was then. Maybe, like me, they have families of their own. I don't remember their names, that particular memory long gone to dust in my mind, but I remember sitting with them under that old, abandoned fishing boat, that strange place of solace from an overturned world. I remember being there with them, not saying anything but thinking about my life, about death, and about many hard and heavy things. And I remember being grateful for the lightness of their company, untroubled as they were in their apparent innocence.

*            *            *

The photos were taken by me in the summer of 2001. While I haven't been in touch with any of these kids (now men), I did keep in touch with one of the local kids. He was about 13 at the time but is now in his 30s and we say hi via social media every so often. Back in those days, however, social media and cell phones were not yet a thing. I only found out my grandfather had passed when we drove into town to building that had a phone where we could make international phone calls. How the world has changed ...

Take care and all the best to everyone,

- DH