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15
Last Light
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.
Andrew Marvell
The Garden
I have one more thing to relate, and it is a small one. A few days after
the albacore hunt, I finished work early and took my boat down to
the sea for the last time that year. I had decided that I would leave
Wales. Though the reasons were happy ones, the decision was edged
with sadness.
It was a calmer day, although there was a long swell over the reef. I
thumped through the waves, following distant gannets which dis-
persed long before I reached them, travelling a couple of miles out to
sea before allowing the north wind to push me down the coast. After
two hours without fish, I began to plod back, against both wind and
waves. Were it not for the shipping buoy moving steadily past the dis-
tant houses as I paddled, I could have imagined I was merely stirring
the viscous water. Then, as the sun began to sink, the wind dropped.
At first the sea looked like the broken bottoms of wine bottles, each
wave a conchoidal fracture. Soon, but for a slight residual swell, it fell
flat. Now the boat, as if untethered, cut cleanly through the still water.
A few yards from the shore I wound up my line then sat without
paddling, rocked by the incoming waves, watching the sun go down
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