新部落
I think, therefore I am. - René Descartes
英國的
The Economist 雜誌，一向以嚴肅著稱，刊登的絕大多數都是有關時事政經之類的艱澀文章，難得看到它輕鬆的一麵。也許是因為節日的緣故，去年最後一期的聖誕專欄，刊登了一組賞心悅目的散文，內容涉及旅遊，曆史，書評等等，讓人耳目一新。尤其是下麵的這篇
The End of The Pier，將棧橋碼頭的曆史，現狀，建築，文化，掌故等等熔於一爐，並用詩意的語言將那些細膩的個人感受傳達出來，
讀來十分動人心弦，是我最喜歡的一篇。昨天清理舊雜誌，突然又翻到這篇文章，想到應該轉來與有興趣的朋友們共享，尤其是那些喜歡碼頭甚至與我一樣有“碼頭情結”的朋友們。
青島的棧橋
提到棧橋碼頭，很自然就想到了青島的棧橋。青島是我最喜歡的城市之一，而對青島的懷念和回憶，大多都與大海以及前海沿的棧橋有關。記得在國內時每次去青島，除了公務以外，第一件事情就是去造訪棧橋。印象最深的一次是傍晚和一位朋友去夜遊棧橋，我們在棧橋上來回的散步，相談甚歡，至深夜而不歸。夕陽西下，海水由淺藍色漸次變成黛綠色，不遠處的小青島也漸漸沒入漆黑的夜色中，唯有小島上的的燈塔在不停的閃爍，似乎在頑強地向黑夜中的大海證明小島的存在，給夜行的航船 送去慰藉。膠州灣上吹來潮濕帶有鹹味的熏軟海風，耳邊充滿了海水拍打棧橋發出的波濤聲。。。。。。
Navy Pier，Chicago
來美國以後，也看過許多的棧橋碼頭，印象比較深刻的是芝加哥的 Navy Pier，還有威斯康星的 Kenosha North Pier。芝加哥的 Navy Pier 是我所見到的最大的棧橋碼頭（據說是世界上最大的），寬接近300英尺，長達3，000英尺。由於麵積過大，給人以尾大不掉的感覺，造型上先少了幾分靈氣；再加上商業化，除了盡頭可以遠眺密歇根湖以外，主要的部分店鋪林立，娛樂場裏人聲噪雜，空氣中充溢著快餐和咖啡的香氣弄得人饑腸轆轆，加上雜耍賣藝的，粉墨登場演唱的；徜徉其間，carnival 的氣氛把人擠壓的沒有了暇想的空間，更缺少那份純淨的”棧橋的感覺“。與其說是遊覽棧橋碼頭，倒不如說更像是走進了一家浸淫在現代商業文化氣氛中的主題公園。
Kenosha North Pier，Wisconsin
與芝加哥的 Navy Pier 相比，威斯康星的 Kenosha North Pier 規模要小多了，但其造型簡潔洗練，增之一分則肥，減之一分則瘦，沒有一點多餘的地方。棧橋的盡頭，矗立著一座拔地而起的血紅色燈塔，在藍天碧水中顯得耀眼奪目。遠遠看去，很像是一副 modernistic 的圖畫，十分有空靈感。可能這就是它得到許多人青睞的一個原因吧。當初人們建造棧橋的初衷，更多的是出於實際功用方麵的考慮，美學上的訴求應該隻是一個附帶的產品。隨著時間的推移，它的經濟功能逐漸消失，棧橋碼頭慢慢成了人們的審美對象。據說，最早建造 Kenosha North Pier 時，燈塔是白色的，隻是後來有人提議才把它漆成了紅色。從白色變成紅色，整個畫麵養眼提神多了，燈塔因此成了整個畫麵的點睛之筆。也許是因為地處偏僻，Kenosha North Pier 一般遊人不多，至少我去的幾次是這樣。我喜歡 Kenosha North Pier，是它帶來的那種遼闊，純靜，遙遠和簡單的感覺，還有紅藍綠白色搭配在一起的畫麵給視覺上帶來的愉悅。如果天氣好有心情的話，Kenosha North Pier 的確是一個周末或節假日跑去出神發呆的好去處。
如果說建築除了其功用和美學上的訴求以外，還同時也是人類表達主觀意向的手段的話。那麽，棧橋所要表達的是什麽呢？我想，棧橋所要表達的應該是人類對浪漫情懷的一種追求，是對遠方的友邦發出的盛情邀請，是陸地向水域的延伸，是人類對征服海洋的向往，是人類從有限向無限不懈的探索。。。。。。
（above photos, in public domain, from Wikipedia & other Internet source)
～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～
The End of The Pier
“‘A COLD night,’ Cubbitt said. The old gentleman swivelled his eyes on him like opera glasses and went on coughing: hack, hack, hack: the vocal chords dry as straw. Somewhere out at sea a violin began to play: it was like a sea beast mourning and stretching towards the shore.”
The book is Graham Greene's “Brighton Rock”; the violin is playing, unseen through sea mist, in the concert hall on the West Pier. Both Brighton's piers have starring roles in the story: they are the stages where killings are discussed, threats made, fortunes told. Savage gang warfare is intercut with candy floss and penny-in-the-slot machines. Laughter keeps pace with horror. Life is at its bawdiest and most reckless, but death lurks everywhere. This is the essence of piers.
No construction is more appealing, or more redolent of mortality, than a jetty that sticks out from the shore. It tells men they can walk on water, and suggests they can stroll as far towards infinity as their engineering can take them. Piers symbolise escape from the everyday, from the shore, from work, from life itself. For that purpose, they are more reassuring than a ship: though planked and decked like one, and originally manned with pier-masters in crypto-naval uniforms, most are attached to solid rock. It can come as a sudden, giddying surprise, amid the fairground tat of piers, to see the sea crawling darkly under your feet as you sip your cup of tea, or a seagull flying below you. Early piers were mocked as “disappointed bridges”, fixed at one end but, at the other, yearning towards the void. A man on a pier never quite lets go of the land. But, seeing it from a distance and another angle, he becomes a little disoriented, and much more daring.
A century and a half ago, promoters of piers were surprised at this. They imagined that an entry toll, a penny in the turnstile, would keep the indecorous at bay and ensure that solemn middle-class promenaders could compare their bonnets and parasols in peace. Piers were a marine version of the parkland walks at spas, sedate and quiet. Grand balls, art exhibitions and royal visits took place on them, while the plebs bobbed below on small boats and craned their necks to see.
Yet as soon as working men, too, were given official holidays and allowed to have fun on Sundays, piers ran down-market. At first, the poor man paid his penny to sit and observe the higher classes and to dream he might be like them. Then, gradually, he shed the conventions that restrained him. He could be rude on the pier, gawking at What the Butler Saw or buying saucy postcards in which breasts were confused with blancmange; he could buy chips, candy floss and silly trinkets he would never want at home; he could cram on silly hats, and the girls could wear skirts that whipped well above their knees in the wind. (“Young ladies”, carped Queen in 1900, “give themselves up to abandon on piers.”) Soon the pier managers not only accepted this, but also encouraged it, by getting rid of the turnstiles and tolls that had provided, in the 19th century, 80-90% of takings. They could profit instead from the mob's adventurousness: that sense of being in limbo, neither on sea nor on land, suspended in a state of fantasy.
Pink paint and corrosion
Most piers still encapsulate 19th-century dreams. They are lined with pleasure domes, octagonal kiosks, maharajahs' palaces and Ottoman minarets, their lattice and lacework done in iron instead of shining marble. They offered, from the beginning, the latest proofs of man's prowess: telescopes, the telegraph, radio broadcasting, moving pictures, besides the marvellous ingenuity of their own construction. Eugenius Birch, Britain's greatest pier-builder and the inventor of the screw-pile, was almost as well known in his day as Stephenson or Brunel. The stalking girders of piers subdued the mighty deep, or at least half a mile of it, and their twinkling electric lights crept out bravely from the shore; in Atlantic City, New Jersey, no fewer than 27,000 outlined the Steel Pier against the dark. In Britain pleasure piers grew from every nook of the coast just as the Empire expanded, and the blare of military bands along their decks echoed the triumphal march of colonisers overseas.
But dreams don't last. Look over the rail on any pier, and the rust is inch-thick and flaking from its girders. Green weed and grey barnacles encrust every part under the sea. Within five years, every plank on the deck will need replacing. The annual slaps of paint—sea-green for the railings, bright pink for the doughnut stall—cannot disguise the fact that the layers are plastered round corrosion.
Of 81 piers round the British coast at their zenith, in 1908, 26 have gone. Of dozens in America (though America never knew the craze as Britain did), only seven major piers remain. Occasionally their bones still lie on the shoreline like the remains of behemoths, too costly to demolish and, in their way, a memento mori that people wish to preserve. Atlantic City has the Garden Pier, a warped spine of concrete sprouting grass; in Brighton, the West Pier concert hall where Cubbitt's violin played is now a humped ribcage half-submerged in the sea. Visitors still stand like mourners at a funeral, silent and thoughtful, and pick rust from its girders. The fluted columns that once held glass weather screens, the lampstands with their coiling serpents, the flowering and curling iron balustrades, are stored in heaps under the sea wall. All that proud work is decaying and disappearing, as inevitably as the tides come in and out.
Million-dollar dreams
The fates of piers are easily written. They rot, collapse or are eaten by sandworms. Ships crash into them. Gales and high seas remove whole sections of them, shot-blasting them with shingle or sand until they break. The wooden decks, the drying wind and the obsessive, repeated coats of paint feed enormous fires, still the main reason for their demise. Their very frailty, a mere network of girders, is preferred to the reinforced concrete that might make them last. When they die it may be in a peculiarly human way, heaving and shuddering along their whole length before they founder. Yet most pier-deaths are slower. The gates are padlocked; the pier is closed; owners, council and preservationists argue; the elements do their work.
A natural disaster is often the last straw for pier-owners. Piers have to pay for themselves, and few make profits nowadays; even at their peak in the 1860s, they never brought in the promised dividend to investors. They are monuments to 19th-century speculation, to the new delights of limited companies and shareholder security, and to dreams. In the glory days of piers, the middle classes and tradesmen of seaside towns bought shares in them to dip a cautious toe in the stock market, and town corporations saw them as the key to prosperity and the apogee of development. All were eventually disappointed.
Almost no new piers are being built now. To put up such a structure, working largely under sand-filled water, costs three to five times what it would on land for perhaps 50 years of life. Rising sea levels, too, increase the stress caused by the waves. So the old are repaired and recycled according to the swings of fashion, their life a ceaseless struggle against erosion and decline. True, there are success stories, or dreams of success. On Brighton's Palace Pier, where the Noble Organisation has invested in a dazzling array of slot machines and fairground rides, entry is free, as are deckchairs in which to sit and watch the sights of London-by-the-sea. Southwold Pier, in Suffolk, has reinvented itself as a cream-painted string of upmarket boutiques (“Seaweed and Salt”) and ingenious automata, such as a “quantum tunnelling telescope” that preserve the traditional inventiveness of piers. Southend Pier has acquired a new entrance that is all curving steel and glass; Boscombe Pier, next to Bournemouth, hopes to be revived by a £1.4m artificial surf-reef being built beside it; Brighton West's remains may be incorporated into a gigantic viewing tower, the i360, in which people will rise in the air, on a vertical pier, rather than walk on water.
No British pier has gone as far as the Pier Shops at Caesar's in Atlantic City, where, in the shadow of a gigantic Roman-style casino, an enclosed street of glittering boutiques winds over the waves. The pier is in fact part of the casino, a similar gamble. Despite the eternal hope of money from somewhere, even the healthiest specimens seem financially on the edge.
Today's piers have no monopoly on thrills: most of those lurk under the pier, a dark demi-monde of corroded columns, braces and lattice-work where, at low tide, there is just enough sand for the young or the desperate to have sex on. Pier-decks are largely the resort of the old, who sit in cardigans out of the wind and watch the young passing. But they still hold out the possibility of sudden wealth, if the grabber-arm can avoid the giant cuddly toys and instead unlock, in a glittering torrent, the glassed-in trove of silver. The empty gaze of the old into the distance is mirrored in the gaze of the young into slot machines.
Atlantic City once had Young's Million-Dollar Pier, which became Hamid's Million-Dollar Pier: although gambling was never allowed there, the name encapsulated both brassy new entertainment and the off-chance of getting rich. But serious spending, or winning, has seldom been seen on piers. A more reliable living could be made, in the old days, by urchins diving the waters or strolling the sands to pick up pens and watches dropped through the boards by promenaders, or coins tossed through the rails.
Even an empty jetty, like the melancholy Steeplechase Pier at Coney Island in New York, draws Russian and Chinese fishermen eager to net the tiny fish that gleam in silver schools round the piles, for the little fry will catch bigger fish, and the bigger ones (mostly herring) are worth curing and eating. Their bicycles carry industrial-size grab-nets, rice sacks and white plastic buckets in which crabs clamber slowly. On Southend Pier, the world's longest, which ends after 1.34 miles in water so deep that flounder, mackerel, cod and plaice can be caught in it, a grey August day finds knots of anglers at every shelter. Some sit companionably on a seat dedicated to an absent colleague, “Loved by everyone who knew him, except the fish.”
In early years, invalids were restored to health by being wheeled above the sea. With copious lungfuls of that “life-prolonging air” inside them, they would be themselves again. The healthy, besides sea-walking, were offered reading rooms and showers at the shore end. Self-improvement and piers went together. Self-knowledge, too: your picture taken, your voice recorded, as soon as technology allowed it. On Southwold Pier the “Expressive Photo-Booth”, which moves while you're in it, captures “Your True Personality: Thrilled, Exhilarated, Distracted, Weightless”. Pier-strollers still like to read their astral charts, cast by Gypsy Rose Lee or her descendants and printed out on pink slips of paper; they discover “the unique side of you” by obtaining from a lurid kiosk the meaning of their surname, or the details of the day they were born.
Into the unknown
This sense of self-discovery was particularly strong, and is still strongest, at the very end of the pier. Traditionally the pierhead was where steamers would arrive and depart, and where roads ended; Santa Monica Pier, in California, marked the place where Route 66 petered out into the ocean. At the pierhead prudent promenaders, blown to the limit of their endurance, would have to grip their hats and turn back. But in the film “Mona Lisa” the end of Brighton's Palace Pier becomes a horrifying cul-de-sac from which the characters barely escape.
When open-air dancing became the rage, pierheads were the place for its erotic riskiness. The biggest ballroom in the world could be found, from 1904-11, at the end of the Dreamland Pier in Coney Island, before the flames destroyed it. Nude bathing was still allowed from the ends of piers long after it was banned from the beaches. They were the haunt, too, of performing swimmers, who would drink cups of tea, or lie and read the paper, in the sea; above them, “professors of natation” would perform death-defying plunges in chains or into fire. At Bognor, and elsewhere, men did their best to fly from the end of the pier. In Atlantic City the divers were horses, plunging 40 feet into a tank of water with a bareback rider clinging on.
Many piers had theatres at their heads, typically the first parts to close or burn down. The shows put on there—pantomimes, stand-up comedy, mysteries and thrillers—catered for the happily undiscriminating, and plays and actors invalided out of London's West End could limp on there for years. Playing the pier was a particular challenge, from shouting against the elements to struggling along the deck with the flats to putting on costume with the swimmers, in a cubicle among the piles. But it launched careers. An actor who could tread the stage in the middle of the sea, cheekily ad-libbing into the huge darkness, could put up with most reverses—and could catch fish through the planking in the interval.
The end of the pier is the ultimate dare, the part most likely to be cut off by fire or a drifting vessel as the last girders snap. It offers the last laugh, the last reckless, stupid act, in the face of death; in “Brighton Rock”, it is where Pinkie shows Rose the bottle of vitriol that will dissolve him. On the Pier at Caesar's the casual stroller, at the end of the dimly-lit mall that might be anywhere, finds a thunderous neon-lit water show and then suddenly, through huge glass doors, the shock of the silent sea itself. The man-made entertainment is put in its place by the power of nothingness.
Traditionally the end of the pier is the place for suicide, where people feel they can go no farther; recently it has also become a favourite spot for “tombstoning”, leaping into the water for the hell of it. “Think before you jump”, read the posters on Brighton's Palace Pier. “Do you know what's down there?” Of course not; no one does; but the urge to find out may be stronger than any instinct to obey.
The end of the pier is also the place for what is euphemistically called “scattering”, the dispersal of the ashes of the dead. “Good day for a scattering”, they say at Southend, meaning that the wind is south-westerly and won't blow the departed back into the faces of his friends. The train along the pier, the Sir John Betjeman, often acts as a funeral hearse for groups of quiet people in anoraks, or chatty Indian families with plastic bags of marigolds to scatter on the grey North Sea. An hour after high tide is the recommended time; the east slipway of the pierhead is favoured, less because the east symbolises resurrection than because at that point only, between the dreary arms of the Essex coast and the refineries of the Isle of Grain, there is a gap of open sea.
People's feelings on piers are well summed up at Southwold in Suffolk, where the neat and witty restoration of the pier has been financed in part by selling small plaques along the railings. There are 3,000 of them, a few years old but already as worn, out in the salt wind, as medieval brasses. Most are memorials to parents, dogs, friends, nans, or the purchasers themselves. Being where they are, they are cheekier and more intimate than gravestones. “In memory of Ted Smith: It must be Wednesday”. “Alexander Robert Kearton: ‘Just resting my eyes’”. “William Scrivener Waters: Left for London, April 1853”.
Being where they are, too, some plaques become philosophical. “To infinity and beyond”. “We flew our kite and lost it here”. “For Robin: Gone into the mystic”. “Bethan and Benedict Evans: So you found it then.” And, perhaps inevitably, those lines from e.e.cummings:
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always ourselves we find in the sea
(above photos from the website of The Economist)
“一夜情”這個詞，隻有在你的這個留言裏聽著順耳且別有韻味;-)
我對大海的“一夜情”在南戴河，那夜的大海讓我有撲進他懷裏一探究裏的感覺;-)
剛剛去看了你的照片，照得很好。夕陽下的棧橋，應該是最能傳達那一份繾綣之情了。
謝謝！
美麗的文字。。。http://i13.tinypic.com/6stcpig.jpg
Sunrise in Cocco Beach
網上棧橋是一個很好的聯想！ 你說對了，我的ID是 an e drifter。我們都是世界公民啊，在不同的文化部落裏漂流，無根的漂流。。。。這個課題可以弄一篇專門的文章來談談了。：））
祝好！
謝謝落梅天朋友的分享！落梅天，很有詩意的ID。
巧得恨，我和大海的“初戀”也是在青島，但“一夜情”卻是在煙台。：）
再次謝謝，常來！
edrifter是什麽意思？ an e drifter? 這是一個 e 世紀，不能一天無e，而且很有些網上棧橋的意思，哈哈哈。。。
你說的對，生活的境界不在於占有多少，而在於如何去感受、去體驗。所以，與其說我們擁有生活，不如說生活擁有我們，而我想做的，就是如何將更多自己讓生活去擁有。
很高興認識你。
順向落梅天姑娘問好！
謝謝蘇鄉門地朋友的留言。很高興你喜歡！聖比茲堡的棧橋，我還沒有見過，有機會一定去看。
喜歡你的ID，幽默風趣盡在不言之中。 ：））
謝謝罷了朋友的留言分享這些精致的心理感受！十分喜歡。
斷橋，殘雪，寂寞，孤舟，古道，小橋，漁村，幽徑，孤煙，暮雲。。。。。讀著你的這些文字，我突然想到一個不相關的問題：人生真正的財富是什麽？人生在世，物質的東西固不可少， 但假如沒有一顆敏感，細致的心靈去觸摸，感知世界，再好的東西也不過是身外之物。生活的最高境界不在於你占有多少， 而在於你如何去占有。
與你一樣，我也是愛屋及烏因為喜歡大海而喜歡棧橋，對海喜歡到了癡迷的程度。你說得很對，大海的確是能夠在人的“生命深處喚起一種與天相融的神聖感”。有空常來，大家多交流。
昨晚看過，又回來重讀，真是賞心悅耳得好文。
最後一次看過走過的一個棧橋，是坦帕下麵聖比茲堡市的那個，很美麗，但好像隻能看倒日落。 謝謝分享。
讀著動人的文字，看著一座又一座美麗的棧橋，行趟在善感的音樂中，我腦海中不由閃過冷清的西湖“斷橋殘雪”，閃過驛外斷橋邊、在風和雨中寂寞搖曳著的小花，閃過從春雨斷橋人不渡的柳陰中撐出水麵來的孤單的小舟，閃過古道西風中走過小橋流水人家疲憊的瘦馬，閃過隱隱漁村、斷橋幽徑中向晚的落寞孤煙。。。內心不由自主生出一股“暮雲過了，秋光老盡，故人千裏”的悲秋遲暮之感與客處異鄉的傷別意緒。。。（說好不酸的又酸了，哈哈哈。。。）
西雅圖靠海，靠海的地方有不少棧橋，我常喜歡在夏天帶外州來訪的朋友們到附近的Kirkland Beach走走，那裏有一個靠Beach的飯店，我很喜歡一邊吃著法國點心、喝著咖啡，一邊聆聽著腳下的流水拍打岸石的聲音；我還喜歡看著遠方的棧橋，喜歡看棧橋上牽著手的情侶們和歡快奔走的孩子們，喜歡任憑一股溫馨感動的暖流蕩漾全身。。。
我喜歡一切和水有關的東西，我喜歡西雅圖的雨，我喜歡西雅圖的棧橋，我喜歡西雅圖的Beach，我更喜歡那個能看到太平洋的西港。我對大海有一種與生俱來的鍾愛，我曾在一篇網友寫海的文章後寫道：“我從小就喜歡海，以前每次坐海輪去探望父母時，我內心總會湧動著一種期待的激動。我喜歡站在海輪上看日出，喜歡看日出瞬間，那片讓人無法逼視，整個水麵散發出的燦爛耀眼的光芒。在那一刻，我心中空無一物，但卻又深切地感覺到一種美的極致，雖然那燦爛的瞬間短得不能再短，但足夠讓我用長長的一天去回味，而那份極致的、令人屏息的美，在我生命深處喚起了一種與天地相融的神聖感，一種深沉、美麗、憂傷的感動，這種神聖感與感動，值得用我的一生去追行與回溯。。。”
感謝樓主貼出此文與大家分享。