Ben Howard

The romanticization of young wildness and salt-soaked memory

I am overcome with a feeling I cannot bear when I listen to Ben Howard. Nostalgia so heavy it has crossed the tipping point into grief. Melancholy soaked in bliss, like the way heavy late summer rains stir the sea to just the right color. The leaden blue gray that signals the end of another summer. The wind down of the frenzied, fast harvest. The collecting of wild salmon, berries, and beer-tinged memories. When my hair smelled like woodsmoke and weedsmoke and smoked salmon. But now I must wash it and prepare for winter. It is the end, yes, but it is the natural way of things, the cyclical turning of seasons.

It is a satisfying, holy kind of pain.

This kind of remembering feels like way you keep rocking with the waves long after you’ve made landfall and left the boat, it’s more physical than conscious. Lying in your bed on dry land you rock and sway, your body’s somatic memories of motion coloring your very perception of stability, of reality. Blending the sea and your own blood until you cannot decipher a difference. Drifting halfway between where you were and where you are. The boat’s moored in the harbor, but you haven’t yet arrived home.

This is how Ben Howard feels now, a decade later. I am transported back to those formative years, that formative place. My body cannot tell where it is, whether it is on land or at sea. I lose touch with this reality and return to rain-streaked windows, wind so strong it’s visible, and the resonant hum of diesel boat engines that I can feel in my chest more than hear.

I am waiting at the breakwater again, watching for my friends’ boats, eager to see their safe return from distant fishing grounds. I am in loose rain gear, speckled in salmon scales and streaks of slime, working in the nauseatingly early hours of the morning as ocean bright fish flash silver and slick in the storm rain.

I am drinking cheap beer in the galley of a 1988 50’ Ledford Marine and I am laughing at my friends’ stories until I am crying, as the long sunset of summer has turned into the sunrise behind the mountains looming over the harbor.

I am in my parents’ kitchen watching orcas breach and spy-hop in the inlet beyond the windows, and I’m pulling on boots and sprinting wild to the shore to greet them, chasing after them in their seaward swim.

That young feral woman listened to a lot of Ben Howard. She dreamed of a thousand different lives and never thought she’d be living one of them now, haunted by the one she had. Called home to the sea relentlessly. Visited by those same orcas in her dreams again and again.

Maybe I am no longer that woman, but she did not die. She didn’t leave. She sunk deeper into my body, into my bones, and she wrings my old memories in her strong hands. When she twists, saltwater runs over her fingers, and I am crying in my kitchen a thousand miles away and ten years later for no reason other than this nameless, fathomless longing that I cannot hold within this physical body any longer.

The northern sea still holds my heart with a phantom hand, and sometimes, when I hear Ben Howard, it squeezes too tight.

And it aches with a knowing that I can’t go back, but I am grateful that I was ever there at all.