Boats

The boat at O Castro used to be blue, bluer than the sea on a sunny day, bluer than the river it faces, bluer than the sky even. The green that covers it still has a hint of blue in it but resembles the colour of the grass surrounding it, as if it gradually soaked up the colour of the field it is in.
In summer, the apple trees dropped their fruits in the boat, in late autumn, today, spiders catch insects in the webs they spun between the wooden bench and the oars that are forever in the right position to take off.
I sometimes imagine it sailing off on the clouds that cover the valley and the river in the morning. I aim my polaroid camera at it every day, sometimes I take a photo, sometimes I don’t. What am I trying to catch anyway?

I folded a little white boat today and dropped some ink on it. The paper slowly soaked up the colour, pokeberry pink. What if I would put white boats outside and pour a little bit of ink in them? How long would it take for them to change colour? Rain and morning dew would speed it up. What colour would I use? Where would I put them? And why?

You have to be careful with the why. The why comes after the act. First you do something because you feel you have to do it, and if it makes sense you might find the answer to the why. It is in the relation between your action and the elements you can’t predict that meaning is being created.

I folded a big white boat and put it on the floor. I wanted a bigger boat but I already used the biggest sheet I had.

I folded smaller boats out of a 40 year old receipt booklet I found in one of the ruins. It belonged to a man who dealt in fruit and wine.

Once, on a long walk from Barcelona to the Climate Conference in Paris, I walked with the sea in my head and folded little boats out of paper trash I found on my path. Years before that, I filled the floor of a former synagogue in Slovakia with 3.000 paper boats folded out of newspapers from all around Europe, obstructing the entrance to the holiest part of the building where the Torah rolls used to be kept and where from a distance a glimpse of a video was visible, not to be known by anybody but its maker. I hadn’t really thought about this until I started folding boats today.

On a long walk from Amsterdam to the South of France somebody gave me a boat. I had slept in the forest the night before and in the morning I walked through a small village with a small bakery and I stopped to drink coffee and eat a croissant. Two men walked by and sat at the table next to me. We started a conversation. They were friends and they were walking together for a few days, they were planning to make a long walk in the future, walking from the place where one of them was born to the birthplace of the other man. While we talked, the silent one of the two was folding something. Just before they left he gave me a small boat and asked me to carry it with me until I thought it was time to let it go.
I carried the boat with me for many days. It became a temporary vessel for two dead men, a toy for a tiny girl. It was in my mind often when I found myself close to water or when I found myself at places where a boat would be completely out of place.
I thought about leaving it at a mountain top. At a nomadic village. In a fountain with paper airplanes lying on the bottom. in the hands of a new friend. In a tiny village where I worked on the land and was happy.
I thought about carrying it with me forever, I couldn’t decide what was the right moment, how do you know it is the right moment? How do you let things go? Often, after I had left a place where I hadn’t thought about the boat in my bag, I would later on think that that place would have been the perfect location to leave it. But obviously it wasn’t because I hadn’t left it there.
It was a long summer, an amazing summer. I couldn’t believe I had to go back home, go into winter, go into the city, take off my walking shoes, my walking suit.
On the last day before I returned home, November 2d, I took the boat out of my bag. I jumped on board. I threw the boat in the nearest river, the river behind the house I had been staying in. I left.

I guess at some point I have to get in the boat here. But first I’ll fold my own boats and see where they will bring me.