“Watch out! don’t step on it!” Yes, it is indeed one of these places where you have to make sure not to step on a puppy Fur seal. A place, where you have to make sure its mum doesn’t come and bite your fingers off. Where you have to watch your back for the males and other elephant seals moving like you’re nothing worth changing direction.
The air is full of the smell of ammoniac of the thousands of penguins nearby. A nostalgic smell bringing me back seventeen years ago, my clothes full of it after an evening carrying hugs of Guillemots chicks jumping from a forty meters high cliff. I was bringing them to my colleagues ringing this tiny ones for a scientific program before they could walk free again to the water and hopefully find their father among the thousands screaming their lungs out on the water.
The air is full of the smell of the sea, the salt, the decaying seaweeds. A moving smell conveying every single time and always so suddenly the months I spend on boats and on shores. So unexpectedly when I look back, me the so terrestrial person, anchored on land. This smell has come to shift this certitude.
The air is full of the thick smell of the fur seals perspiration. It is strong, pungent, so animal and maybe it is what feels so comforting about it. It is such an instinctual way to relate to these animals, it almost makes the place familiar. An obvious shared animality, mammality, the sweat in the effort of living a life at its fullest, whatever it has become for us humans, everything it is and can be for them.
In this heart warming olfactory landscape, I am only a few centimetres away, sketching this pup. Oblivious to the world, it is fast asleep, deep deep breathing, even dreaming when spasms run through its body, its shaking lips giving it an angry face.
So much sounds (I could not call it noise), the fur seals, the penguins, the waves. So much smells, so much activity and yet, so much peace in front of this tiny Fur seal. Despite the animal crowds, humans and non-humans ones, this tiny thing lay quietly in the sand, in this late afternoon sunlight, in this remarkable absence of wind.
When you are there, you just live it. Back home like I am now, writing about it, you connect the dots, you add the perspective, you weave it in your story, it takes its place on the shelves of your history. Story telling to myself without loosing sight of the facts, of the truth.
I am at my desk, south western Norway, soft music, raging rain on the lake behind the window, sleeping dog on the couch, but I am smelling the South, I am smelling South Georgia.”
Field sketch, 21 x 30 cm
