The thing about acting on one's whims is that, often enough, they don't turn out quite the way one imagines. For example: earlier this afternoon,[*] I was struck by the thought that it might be nice to go down to St Kilda and sit out on the beach for a while, gazing at the ocean and being pensive, and maybe writing a little. (Obviously, I wasn't at all put off by the grey skies and generally austere tone of the weather; in fact, all of that played a large part in getting me in the mood in the first place.)
So I got down there and decided to go for a walk along the pier first, enjoying the wind and the spray and the water (deep blue and increasingly choppy, foam dancing on the surface) and the horizon (seemingly endless, as horizons tend to be), not to mention the sense of isolatedness - as to that last, isolatedness amongst a crowd while walking along the pier proper, and then isolatedness amidst the elements once on to the rocky promontory section that no one else was daring at the time, the wind being a pretty serious proposition by that point - and it all put me into that particularly self-contained, airy kind of mood that I always enjoy inhabiting.
In retrospect, though, I probably ought to've paid more attention to the weather forecast (or, for that matter, to what the skies had been telling me all day). I'd come prepared for cold - scarf, overcoat and all - but of course, when the skies opened and the rain hit in earnest, none of that stopped me from getting drenched on my way back to the foreshore, and from there to the car, where I sat and dried off for a good quarter of an hour (if not longer), not regrouping so much as reaccustoming myself to the idea of being inside, figuratively as well as literally.
So a good couple of hours out; hopefully, tonight I'll dream of the ocean.
On my way in, I'd been listening to Humming By The Flowered Vine, sitting in the car in mezzanine it was parts of Röyksopp's The Understanding, and going home was In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, but the album which really triggered the whole expedition was the soundtrack to The Horse Whisperer, which I'd been replaying in my room in the morning and early afternoon. Though I've not seen the film, I've had my eyes open for this record for a while now, because it has a Gillian Welch song which, as far as I'm aware, isn't available anywhere else, but the contributors' list is basically a roll-call - and a pretty impressive one - of artists of that certain type: Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Allison Moorer, Iris DeMent...that kind of somewhat 'alt'-but-still-very-much-country, y'know.
So what's happened is that I've got stacks of new music to listen to at the moment and not that much time to listen to it (what with work and all, not to mention that often I'll be in the mood to listen to something more familiar) so I've actually had this cd for a while now without it having been spun much or made much of an impression. And, while it's very nice - the Gillian song, "Leaving Train" is slow and ruminative and just right (albeit not all that memorable), Lucinda's contribution is a gentler version of the Car Wheels cut "Still I Long For Your Kiss", and all of it's good - it's in no sense amazing. But what it does do is, as Robert Redford writes in his slightly mawkish but seemingly heartfelt liner notes, "wistfully echo the spirit of the ranching life of the wide open West", and with that, the whole lost dream, distinctively American but also universal, of endlessly rolling frontiers under wide open skies, and the limitless potential that dream seems to entail. It was around the "Dream River" (the Mavericks) / "Slow Surprise" (Emmylou) part of the record that the idea lodged in my head that I should see the ocean - and so I did.
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[*] Friday (ie, yesterday as I post this).
