busy harbour

A bustling busy harbour, under a dark sky, industry everywhere; boats of all sizes proceeding in every direction, barely visible to each other through a rolling swell; bridges full of traffic above them and higher up skyscrapers and airplanes. It is a child’s optimistic vision of a city, pure excitement at activity, a tableaux so alive with moving machines. A boy’s vision, possibly a picture in a book originally, some propaganda about the hustle and bustle of the big city, later franked by a trip to North America as a 12-year-old, in which I saw an industrial city at work on just such a dark cloudy day, the sky happily wintry to fit the urban scene, the memory, reality’s vision of that children book, that child’s tourist eyes. Waves and barges and rowboats and speedboats and junky little fishing boats and supertankers and cranes and a bridge, yep. Diesel fumes, floating detritus, docks and piers and corners metres from rushing bows. A framed scene, movement in every direction. It is the kind of image feeling that recurs to me a few times a decade. Perhaps for a week it dominated my mind way back when. The feeling was of excitement at all this human undertaking, all the urgency and industry. It was a good world in which cities bustled like this, I was glad to heading into that world of transport. It all seemed important, all those rushing about people on their boats, trucks, planes. They had things to deliver, places to be, that mattered. It felt like a purposeful world, chaotic but functional, everyone knowing where they had to go.