Lost Horizon

I grew up along the eastern coastal plain, where the sea licked at the beach outside my gate. My grandfather owned a boat, and an ancient salt-corroded binocular telescope from which you could see the ships. Below the viewing platform was a scrubby lawn which somehow repelled the salinity enough to allow my grandmother to grow all kinds of plants nearer the house, including those sweet peas whose purple flowers she used to dry and grind up to make food colouring for dumplings.

I remember when they began the piling works for the conquest of the sea. My mother, resting in the afternoons; her legs twitching and the house shaking each time the huge steel logs hammered the girders into the ground; it was a cacophony that never ended, but just drifted further seaward. As did the sea itself.

I watched the sea as they took it away, the daily dumpings of stone and sand, the concrete, the piling, the slow removal of the tide which went out and never came back. They 'reclaimed' the land from the sea, and when I was small, I hoped the sea would reclaim it back. Now I'm much older, and people are beginning to think of defences against the sea because of global warming. But everyone forgets where the huge limestone caves in the region came from, which show the tide levels a few centuries ago were as much as 10 metres higher than they are now.

There was a port way up in the north before it silted up. There were deeper harbours further south. The sea has fallen away. Proud humans have built entire high-rise complexes like a girdle around the land, a fence to keep the sea at bay, a new coast road, a barrage, a marina, an array of manmade fortifications, even an airport. But the sea is still there, twinkling, waiting.

Some day, the fish may swim through the gutted hollows of the tall towers. Some day, humans will go back to the boats and not the steel ships. I will be old by then, but I will also be a young boy, watching the tide at my back gate as the sun sets and the wild water rushes in.