The old wooden oar had been in the water a long time. Its grip was almost rotted through. Little white barnacles had attached to the blade. Its rubber collar was corroded.
It belonged to someone. But it had long ceased to be of use to them. And there it was, washed up on the little beach at the arse-end of the harbour where we walk and swim the dogs. Our daughter claimed the oar with some excitement. This would never happen in land-locked Canberra from where we’d just moved. But this was living by the sea.
We took the oar home. We put it in our backyard. It made us feel nautical.
We are not nautical types, even though we’re surrounded by boats: trailered in the streets and laneways about us; bobbing in the water, some apparently abandoned, off the dog-beach; moored at the nearby marina, ostentatious gin palaces named Deckadence and Angel Eyes, Empty Pockets and Y Worry – black holes, they seem, for money and vanity.
I see the oar every day. Thanks to it, I dream nautically sometimes. I am rowing a tiny dinghy through the Heads. There’s a big storm. From nowhere my dogs are circling the dinghy like sharks. We almost capsize as I drag them aboard. I lose the oar so doing. The dogs are safe. But we are adrift, lost, in the South Pacific Ocean with but one oar. When I use it, the dogs and I go round in circles. That’s when I wake ... and ponder who lost the oar.
More recently the older dog, an ever-hungry Lab, ran past on the beach with a small pink thing in her jaws – a baby’s dummy. I wrestled it from her gob.
As part of my losing war on plastic rubbish in the harbour and on the little beach (from which I always take at least one piece of detritus) I binned the pink dummy. Yet it still, somehow, found an unlikely crevice in my consciousness. I don’t know why it resonated so much. But as I walked each day I wondered: was the baby in a boat when she lost it or spat it? Did the parents have a spare? All of the lost sleep that invariably resulted ...
A different day, on a different nearby harbour beach, it was a glove that caught my attention. Not any glove. But what might well have been (or may still be) called in some circles a lady’s glove – the type of finely hand-stitched kidskin ones my mother would wear to church or to the bank when I was a child in the 1960s.
Naturally I had to ponder where it might have washed in from, who the loser might’ve been. So far the lady’s glove hasn’t made it into my dreams. But it’s driven me to a corner of the bookcase where dwells Seymour “the Swede” Levov, the glove manufacturer in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, a novel about American decline that awed me on first reading but which now holds added poignancy in these later days of America’s decaying polity and global morality.
The Swede’s lament that all the people in the American glove trade were now importers “who don’t know a fourchette from a thumb”, Roth’s painstaking, beautiful detailing of glove-making and of his daughter Merry’s heartbreaking descent, all combine into a parable about the end of the American dream.
“ ‘What’s a fourchette?’ I asked. ‘The part of the glove between the fingers. Those small oblong pieces between the fingers, they’re die-cut along with the thumbs – those are the fourchettes.’ ”
Thanks to Roth I could tell the lady’s glove on my beach was fancy; it had fourchettes. As did the ones belonging to my mother, a woman made for that type of glove.
Daily, meanwhile, with the filling and ebbing of harbour waters, a crust of burnt detritus continues to mark the tideline these many post-bushfire-weeks later. On Friday the tide delivered a face mask of the type the world now clamours for. Blackened with soot, singed at the edges and trapped like a stranded jellyfish amid the carbonised twigs and eucalypt leaves, it felt ominous, portentous of this frightening moment and all of the unknown ahead.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
