10/6/06

ORFORD NESS: STATION OF THE SUN

The barren testament of men who believed they were greater than gods, than nature, 'the destroyers' - pioneers of 'new' warfare, the ultimate 'shock and awe' of the techno-nuclear arsenal: invisible weapons; H-Bombs; offensive microwaves and radar - and the tests and counter-tests to observe and control impact and splashdown; or the results of lethality and vulnerability, of fragmentation and inordinate vibration - and all this at the edge of the world where the land still moves, silting up and changing, aggregating itself, eating itself and spewing itself further; where the sound of the universe comes, settling and attempting to heal history, to redress the balance -

In today's sudden heat, quicksilver appears to rise from the baking horizon and skin burns quickly in the pellucid morning -

I cross to the Ness on the small ferry, the first of the day, from Orford quay - a thin young man, the skin on his face pre-aged from exposure, guides the boat across the Ore, ear bent to his portable radio - in the prow sit twelve passengers, visitors, some wearing hats to ward the sun - one man carries a small grey plastic microphone which he uses to speak, holding it up to his throat and emitting a robot-like sound, clipped and void of tonal variation - His name is Coe Powell and this is his pilgrimage back to the place that robbed him of his voice - He worked on the Ness as an engineer for the AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment) in the 60s and he believes some exposure to radioactive materials caused the throat cancer that beset him a decade and a half later - Now, he says, gazing into the middle distance as we approach the jetty, the current moving faster on this side of the river, he comes here two or three times a year as part of his 'exorcism'; trying to piece together the past (both personal and historical), the place has become an obsession since it was opened to the public in 1993 - as indeed it seems to have engendered in all users since it was acquired by the MOD (or War Department as it was called then) in 1913 - obsession, destruction -

Redshank call in the reclaimed marshes close to the jetty area, up-ending flights, scared and scattered - on the horizon the aerial masts of the BBC World Service are shrouded in a syrupy heat haze in the old 'Cobra Mist' area, facing out to sea like waiting sentinels or servants - sucking in and spewing forth invisible words and reports, mirrors for a changing and violent world whose seeds were sewn here in the not-too-distant past -

Cobra Mist: the top secret 'backscatter radar' project run by the US military through the 60's and into the early 70's when it ceased operation, thwarted by 'severe noise problems of undetermined origin' - myths have since grown surrounding the activities here, even to the point that some say UFOs have landed or were the source of the unidentified sonic 'attacks' - who knows? For now it is still out of bounds to visitors even though, supposedly, it has long since been given over to civilian purposes - yet the squat, grey control building is remains covered in sound-absorbent plates - a patchwork of baffles and sonic disruptors, the sci-fi jargon adopted and relished by the military for their gargantuan, lethal toys -

And how the names spilled from their pens and their pursed stiff upper lips: Blue Danube (Britain's first atomic bomb, built in the 1950s) and Yellow Sun Mark 2 - the sun as icon and symbol - appropriated because the weapons would burn with the power of a million suns and because man believed that overnight he had become the creator, the one universal rule; standing outside time, unanswerable to any natural force - the power to leave behind desert and dust -

I stand before two large 'tumuli' at the southern end of the spit - the Labs - metal constructs and piping 'growing' out of their inland facing edges, wide concrete mouths at the other, screaming out to sea - these lead on to the 'pagoda' buildings, the test chambers (Labs 4 and 5) that look like square mushrooms and are the trademark silhouettes of the Ness - the earth and shingle pitted and undulating as if given way deep beneath during test explosions - stray metal objects, some a livid red in their rusting, are scattered and so twisted, spelling out words in new languages: cuneiforms, ciphers (to the gods of war looking down, waiting for the correct plea to come through?) - the whole spit is so unearthly and desolate, dramatic, surrounded by the sudden horizon line to nothingness - the dry, burning sky above, the harsh scrub and blistered sand and shingle make me lose track of my location, the eye has little to corroborate distance so all distances become one and the same, the pervading sense of being in a desert broken only by the sinister and apocalyptic traces of man -

Then a singing note comes on the wind, rising and falling in odd harmony, a thrumming deep inside the air itself and I am baffled as to its source - sitting in the Bomb Ballistics Building, looking out through the observers window across the striated shingle that runs to the sea - and that song just rises from nowhere, pitch perfect - I suspect it is the force of the wind running through some material in the building itself, the metal struts maybe, vibrating at a magical frequency and becoming a constant hum - or maybe, just maybe, it is the undetermined noise that stopped Cobra Mist? That the earth itself began to sing as defence, protection? Or maybe it is simply the background hum the universe makes which even the US military could not reckon with. I'd like to think so. Here where the view out to bomb impact sites is bleached by the overwhelming daylight, where kine-theodolites recorded the descent of freshly dropped bombs into the ocean - I'd like to think it took nothing more than simple music to stop the arrogant Argonauts of progress -

Up on the roof there is a large, heavy set of viewing glasses mounted on a steel podium - their lenses are tinted and aged now so that when one looks through them they add a kind of puce yellow tint to the view; and gazing at the two 'pagodas' this lends them an added hint of post-apocalyptic nightmare; that the light of the sun has become semi-obscured by risen dust-clouds of atomic explosions and fallout, and all beneath is subsumed by heat and dry dust, of the earth trying to come to terms with its own radical demise and struggling, sick, yellow -

Down on the beach, detritus collects at the high tide mark, a line of blackened seaweed marking the furthest point inland that the water gets and among it a multitude of artifacts brought here by the deep currents out in the North Sea and thrown up onto the land:

faded pink plastic sunscreen and baby oil bottles;
yellow plastic spades;
red 'Prince' cigarette packets with health warnings in Russian or Polish;
yellow hard hats;
shoes, sandals, trainers - always in singles, never in pairs, and totally forlorn, hinting at some watery demise;
wire mesh and netting in all shades of azure blue and stinking of the sea;
and a brown leather glove giving the shoreline the finger -

Lost histories - fresh journeys passing.