What She Saw: Fisherman’s Cottage
I love art. I like, really love, art. It doesn’t matter if I am at a small regional museum with a room of 49 pieces or the Met with 49,000. I. Love. Art. Part of this love manifests as me taking pictures of art I found particularly poignant, then leaving those digital files to fester on my phone. Well, no more. This is What She Saw, where I take some of my favorite art from some of my favorite museums and use it as a jumping off point for a story, a poem, a thought. What do you see? Tell me in a comment below!
Harold Sohlberg, Fisherman’s Cottage on view at The Art Institute of Chicago
The clouds held the horizon closely. Almost too closely, Harold realized, as he circled the cottage, looking for the chink in the clapboards. An unearthly wind, an eerie melody that sounded both like a warning and an invitation, seemed to blow through the southerly side of his home every night. There must be a hole, Harold thought logically. There must be someplace, somewhere letting the wind in each evening. Never mind that his grandfather built this house, a man comprised of both infinite strength and an indomitable exactitude, the kind of person who demanded excellence, the type of man who would never stand for such an oversight. Harold had to accept that there was a failing in the physical structure, for to believe anything else would be the stuff of a handmaiden’s fairytale, not the logic of a seafaring gentleman. And yet. He could find no such entry point, no place where even the hint of a breeze could slip through.
Even so, like a sentry set to patrol the outer banks, Harold marched around his cabin, issuing a half-hearted knock to the planks in an attempt to solidify his due diligence surrounding the matter. He felt vaguely satisfied after his third survey of the structure, so with a grimly placid face belied by a single heaving sigh, he walked back into his cabin. Harold did, as he did every night, pause at the front door. The water had an inky quality at this time of night, as though you could dip your quill into the lapping waves and pen an eternal missive. There was no reflective quality to the quiet cove in his front yard. Instead, it was as if the water absorbed what little light was thrown back from the surface of the moon and swallowed it down. Unwelcoming as it was, Harold’s entire heart longed to be on the water, to float on top of an entirely unseen world, happenstance assigning him the role of clumsy, ignorant god to the myriad creatures below. Instead, he sat on the edge of this aquatic oblivion, hoping against all hope that he could find a way back to his real home, the only place he ever felt truly like himself: the sea.
Harold hadn’t been on a boat for over a decade now.
If pressed, he’d tell you he lost count, but in truth he knew, down to the day: this night, as a chill descended upon his tiny cove in the middle of nowhere, marked fifteen years since he had last boarded his fishing boat. It had been fifteen years since he had lost the love of his life and his love for life. Fifteen years since he sat down in his perfect white cottage by the sea and never left again.
It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. Harold desperately wanted to be back on the water. He felt like a different person when he was in his boat. He was real. He was in control. It was funny, he thought. Most people would set sail on the sea and recoil at the thought that they were alone, setting sail atop the abyss. Though that made sense to him rationally, there was also a freedom that came along with being the only thinking being within his line of vision. Without the noise of humanity, Harold could find a way to finally hear himself.
This isn’t to say that his cottage was a bustling hub of activity. If the coal black sea was his front yard, then the acres upon acres of spindly pines were his unkempt back garden, nosy neighbors, and adjoining village wielding pitchforks. The forest had its own forbidding personality, and at night, it seemed to close in from all sides, as if in an attempt to push Harold ever closer to the water’s edge, laughing when he flinched at the thought of touching the water.
Harold never touched that water, not since.
A near gale rattled the hinges on the front door and brought Harold back from the water and into himself. He tugged at the front door and latched it tightly, just as he did every night. As he did so, he noted that once the door was barred, there was no telling that the wind was relentless tonight. The cabin was airtight. If the sea were to rise from its bed and envelop him as he slumbered, he was almost certain it’d be watertight, too. And yet.
Harold removed his thick rubber boots and left them on the mat by the door. He stripped to his long johns and tucked himself under his flannel sheets and his grandfather’s quilts. And then? He bided his time. He noticed that his heart beat faster now, when he laid in bed. He felt his muscles tense, his skin crawl. He couldn’t bear the wait. But it never happened when he was awake, at least, not fully. That’s why Harold held out hope that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t real. It was a figment, a fiction, a fragment of a dream. It was so unearthly, so distressing, that it just couldn’t be real. Despite his body’s protestations, he finally drifted off. For how long, he wasn’t sure. But when he woke up with a start and a gasp, the chill had already descended. The air smelled different—acrid and damp. His heart sunk. Every night, he foolishly believed that maybe tonight, this night, would be different. Maybe it wouldn’t come. Maybe it would let him be. Maybe he could have peace. But the process—the temperature, the smell, the whipping, circuitous wind, and then finally, that sound? It had already begun. And so Harold did what he did every night. He grasped his pillow, placed it over his head, and waited.