An Hour in Dawlish

Today I went to Dawlish. It's a £2 train ride away, and, according to Lucia Pizzo, there's really good ice cream there. I even think I remember her saying there was an ice cream FACTORY, but I don't know whether I made that up or not. So I put on my Orvis British-looking rhinohide jacket, my Orvis British-looking madras cap, grabbed my Young Person's Railcard and saddled up to catch a train.

It's vital to know that I had £20 pounds to live on the rest of the week - I've got decent food supplies but I could use a re-stock on several key items, like bread and milk. £2 train ride to Dawlish, 18 left.

St. David's station was its usual self, except this time, while walking there, the notion of spring hit me like a ton of bricks. Things have really gone green here, and there are little flowers popping up everywhere. The sun actually DOES come out, and consistently as well! And it really reminded me of how happy I was to be at Exeter, not somewhere in London (sorry, Londoners), because of the sheer amount of life.

Dawlish is the first stop on the train to Paignton - I don't know where that is, but it's apparently further towards Cornwall than Dawlish. It's also one of the few trains that I've taken that goes AWAY from London, and the trip showed me an entirely new part of Exeter, and the countryside. I'd never taken the Paignton line before.

One thing I saw was the ocean. Within 10 minutes. We passed by Topsham, where I'd been, on a train line that crossed the bay and I thought to myself how I'd seen this train from a ferry only 5 months before (see Nanci Griffiths is my Porn), and then we passed by Powderham Castle - even more specifically, I saw the road that I nearly hiked on with Wendy et al. to get to Powderham Castle, I was riding the train that was right next to it. Through a tunnel we went, on the other side, I had a moment where I looked out at the ocean, and the sky was cloud-covered, but light. And since there wasn't enough blue in the sky to make the water blue, it was whitish, and I really had another moment where I couldn't tell where the horizon was, where the sea ended and clouds began. I felt distinctly like I was on the train in Spirited Away.

I got off the train on a sunny day in Dawlish - the station was rusty, since it was right next to the sea (literally). I got off, and there was no crowd, no rush, no hurry. The train itself really resembled more of an ancient transport system used by a fallen technologically advanced civilization in Final Fantasy VIII (Esthers, were they?), or IX (I'm thinking Lindbulm post-getting-the-crap-blown-out-of-it), or VII (Midgar +500 years.). Actually, that's probably in most FF games. Anyway, the point is that Dawlish, from an American standpoint, is an odd mix of the Jersey Shore (sans the complete tourist attraction), a carnival, a small Florida town (sans the warm weather), and with a dash of Wisconsin (in that there's an odd obsession with dairy products). The town center is really more of a town oval, revolving around a park and a stream that runs directly into the ocean (it's about 3 ft. deep, max, and you can literally play in it as it heads out into the sea.), and a big green in the center. Around this oval are a variety of neat stores, and pastel-colored houses, which you only ever seem to find in seaside towns.

The beach at Dawlish is more or less just the space near the ocean. There were the remnants of something nearby the mouth of the stream, but it was really just for kids to play in. The jetties seemed useless as waves never got too big, and the sand is brown and pebbly. No lifeguards, no entrance fees, it's just there. You deal with it. More on that in a moment.

Dawlish does have a love of ice cream. As I said, Lucia Pizzo told me of great ice cream adventures to be had. Mmm, I thought to myself, an ice cream factory. I'll go find it. Either a) Lucia mislead me, or b) I exaggerated in my own mind. Dawlish has no ice cream factory. I stopped in to get a pasty (I'd had nothing to eat that day) and, after paying, tried to pull a suave, Final-Fantasy-esque talk-to-the-non-player-characters-to-garner-information. Either I botched my Charisma role, or I just flat out made myself look stupid, but I walked up to them, suave, and said that someone'd told me there was an ice cream factory around here, and I wondered if they knew where it was. They looked at me funny, as if I'd come in and said "excuse me, can you point the way to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, a magical place of mystery and wonder?" They told me there were ice cream shops, but no factory. And I got the distinct feeling that if I talked to them again, they wouldn't repeat what they were saying over and over again. After recieving my pasty (you recieved "pasty"), I apologized and left.

Dejected, I found a place on the green to eat my pasty, and was approached by a seagull, that literally emmitted a cooing kind of noise and kind of grovelled. I think it'd learned how to beg. I felt bad giving it a pasty though, which has meat in it, and so I ate the whole thing in front of it and threw away the remnants. Does that get me dark side points?

Resolved to enjoy my time SOMEHOW, I wandered the town oval, deciding to go to anywhere that advertised ice cream. The first was Gay's Creamery, which claimed to have locally produced Devon ice cream, and take away cream tea sets. Yum, think I. But, as it turns out, Gay's Creamery was not really much about the ice cream at all. It was really just a freezer behind the counter and some cones, just barely more advanced than Shaker Maker (see Uncanny/Milkshake). What they did have, though, was large quantities of locally produced sweets, and more. Devon chocolates, Devon toffees, Devon clotted cream fudge, and, of course, Devon cider. In case my Topsham trip went poorly, I bought myself an emergency bottle of Devon cider.

After getting my ice cream cone, my cider, and a tub of clotted cream (YES), I found a little bench by the central stream and ate my ice cream cone. It wasn't that bad, I thought. Yes, I was alone on a day trip while other people, like Ken, were in Paris, and yes, I had yet to find the mythic ice cream that Lucia had mislead me to seek, but I had ice cream. I had clotted cream. Inspired by an option in Gay's creamery, I went to dip the one in the other, but slightly broke the tub of clotted cream trying to open it. Not enough to spill it, the cap was/is just unsecure. But ice cream + clotted cream ended up equalling "okay." Things weren't that bad. Then my cone broke, not sufficiently enough to ruin the ice cream, of course.

I decided, at that moment, that was my trip to Dawlish. It's pretty nice - SNAP.

But, in that, it had its charm. There were the gulls and ducks I kept passing on my frantic search for ice cream. The bush of what I came to call "Sommerset Roses" after the red rose faction from the War of the Roses, that sense that you were actually involved in some kind of cosmic comedy. I kept thinking of the idea of "comic angels" in stories, like It's A Wonderful Life and Love Actually. I finally found the tourist center, and I asked the lady there about ice cream, and she pointed me to a little shop on the sea side of the oval, called "Sticky Fingers," that looked more like a newstand. Except, on the sign above it, was the store's claim to fame: it'd won some nation wide ice cream contest. So I went in, got myself a brownie-cream scoop in a chocolate dipped cone, some clotted cream chocolates, and went out to the beach.

The beach, like I said, is really just where the ocean meets the shore in Dawlish. Maybe there's more attention in the summer. The train is propped up by some cement supports that make it resemble its own little Normandy beach - shrunk down to 50 ft long. The train heads off into another mountain, and if you go out onto the jetty, you can see one of those rock formations you often see in pirate movies, where there's the cliff/mainland, and then a sort of lower-case "n" shape of rock that sticks out into the water.

I went as far as I could go on the jetty, and was alone, and sat there. Me and my ice cream and the gulls and the sea. I came to a series of conclusions:

First: I was missing a variety of things. These include:

- Someone else. I'm still mastering the art of traveling by myself, for myself.
- A camera.
- T.S. Eliot. I couldn't help sitting there and thinking back to lines like

"At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves and the sea.
Quick, now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well..."

Okay, so not the whole thing, but Dawlish requires Eliot. Bits and pieces of that kept bubbling up. It's a very meditative place, the end of a jetty. Think of this bit from The Dry Salvages read aloud on a jetty:

"The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation..."

or

"That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavendar spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back."

or

"... And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil."


T.S. Eliot demands light waves and a jetty.

Second: I was going to have to come back, because I couldn't really accomplish Dawlish without at least one of the three missing things above.

So, with a bit of sorrow at a side-quest uncompleted, I went to go get on the next train home. I had spent about an hour and a half in Dawlish. But before I left, I slid down the seaweed encrusted part of the jetty to get as close to the water as possible. On the train ride back, I kept smelling some fishy, grimy smell. Then I realized it was my shoes. And I was happy.

"Every poem is an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start."

***

I had one of those "oh" moments today. My stomach was sick from the ice cream and the cider, and Stephanie Reiches said something like, "you look so sick. This is what you look like." and she imitated me. And I said to myself, "oh. That's the nature of drama. Right."