§/D



10.30.2023


“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
Susan Sontag


THE HAAR


(a weird kind of wind)




(download audio)

Overture



There’s an old story about the Brocken Specter: a tower of shadow follows melancholy wanderers through the fog, a shining halo of light around its neck. As it’s told, two transient workers in the early part of the century, named Birl and Coop, arrive on the rock of Shetland, a grassy bog of peat slowly sinking into the North Sea.


The transients traveled the coasts and voes of Shetland and made their keep off labor for folks in town. By summer end they were well known. They kept a single diary, leatherbound and passed between them in private moments. It seemed as if they never spoke in public, but only through the diary, and so they were of single mind, in a way that was foreign and sometimes strange to the island setters.


One afternoon during the winter, Coop went walking alone along the blade, wary of the familiar murk of the endless twilight, never quite day nor night, a wrought dusk that hung like a wool blanket, the air stinking of peat salve carved fresh from packed wales. The moon threw coronas and tines below the clouds and illuminated the sand and it was the deep crimson of raddle and blood. In the moonlight, the solitary figure glimpsed the shadow of another along the sand, perched at the edge of the water. Coop turned over into the darkness, chasing after a specter of himself, and never returned.


Left despondent from this loss, Birl remained upon the island known as the rock, his back to the west, away from the red sand beach where his companion disappeared.






One



May


The requested data from Nord Energy Technician Service Log is unavailable. For retrieval assistance, please contact N.E.S Human Resource Management Hub.


June 1


The first ascent is always the most memorable. Like summiting a mountain, the terrain reveals its true color and tone to you when you first make a hub jump. No field of grass anywhere in the world is the same, and I have seen so many shades of green, when I close my eyes it moves so swift, like a bird flying low, scanning the ground for prey between the blades.


I believe I know in my heart there is no power on Earth greater or more terrible than the machinery of humanity, milled and cast and printed in materials that are caustic and smooth as the bowed lines of dreams that revolve in the darkness. Ticking. Humming. Turning over. Turning around. You can walk right up to the edge of the Earth and it will call to you to throw yourself over the edge into the void and you’ll hear yourself on the other side, calling back. If you decide not to jump the world remains in its strangeness, with metal birds and flowers and beasts with iron teeth chewing away at the arctic, intent on getting to the meat beneath the glacial veneer, insects and mammals and men and women all intent on digging up the alkaline soil in the fens and consuming the decomposing liquor in the bogs, our mineral deficient bodies sending signals to the brain. The Earth makes us feel crazy so we puncture it full of holes and the only thing that ever comes out is fire that cannot be extinguished with water or sand.



June 3


In my mind I hear a weird kind of wind. The setters on the rock call it the Haar. Around 1100 we broke for lunch, myself and M clipped into the hub. It was like the great wall approached the land, and then reversed, and it was us who rushed, and then the only thing left was M and I straddling the steel surface of the nacelle, anemometer winking through the mist, a beacon casting crimson shadow puppets, the fossils of ancient fish inscribed on the air.


In the fog I lost sight of my footing. I took the void and my head cracked back. The harness and helmet were heavy, as if soaked in water. I lashed, suddenly aware of the shadow of a man crouching behind me, I swiped his hand as he reached to unclip me from the hub and push me over the edge. M turned and said “what” and I said what?


You must be hungry, said M.




June 5


This Nord Wind Project has five total sites—two “N” fields and two “K” fields on mainland Shetland, and one more sparsely laid out “D” field on the east Dale Voe peninsula. It’s a mix of new Vestas units, Danish made, and refurbished turbines that tend to be a mix of different components recycled by the manufacturer for an overall reduced carbon footprint, typically pairing an older tower with newer, more efficient gearbox mechanism and updated ROCC, these we affectionately refer to as an “exquisite corpse”.


June 6


Nerves have deep roots. I stumbled on the ladder and knocked my helmet against the inner wall, listening to the steel ring in the stark fluorescent light. The climb-assist rope caught me and I dangled over the void. Loose feet held by feathers.


The next four sites that day were rough. Back at HQ, G and Khan swap stories of rock climbing over open ocean in the Hebrides while making grilled cheese for the group. The speaker played “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”


I think about mentioning how I gazed down over the edge and saw the kid standing at the foot of one of the towers, fiddling with the locked door, the mad hunched shoulders of a mischievous trow scraping against a surface he no longe understood, his fingernails long and his clothes covered in blood.


Later, in bed, I think about Coop, his hand at the base of my neck, calming words like bath water down the drain. I repeat after him.


June 7


The day of the accident we watched the haar, cool and ominous, spawned from the horizon by some conjured consort of Bael. I fall like steam off an engine, an athlete, body red and flushed, tense with lactic acid. The sun was low in the sky. The sky was purple after dinner. Sat in the common area, decompressing with the crew. Nomo, Decclan, Siobhan, all Strathclyde grads from the same class, level 1 techs; G and Khan, our rope access specialists; Cam, on-site engineers from Nord; Tamina, blade tech; M and myself, level 2 travel service techs, both background in electric. M will rotate out in September when Coop joins me.


June 8


I’ve retained a physical copy of my diary in case something suspicious happens with the service log files. Room definitely isn’t secure. Until I come up with a solution and can get the log safely transferred to Coop, I plan to hold a hard copy in my tool kit.


June 9


I am called in to review my statement with the site manager, Seamus, whom we all call Doc.


He gestures to a schoolhouse chair with spindly metal legs, and I sit while he fetches an electric kettle from the bottom shelf of a kitchenette, unraveling the black cord and plugging it in and switching on the outlet. He sets the kettle on top of a binder. Every surface in the room is covered in binders. Instead of sitting in the other chair, he moves some binders off the laminate desk and sits on the desk with his hands in his lap.


I don’t drink tea and I don’t see any point in wasting time. So it was myself and the kid, I say.


Asher.


Yeah, Asher. Asher and I did the afternoon run. Before that it was him, M, Decclan, G and I. We took lunch in some campsite park in Nesting and went swimming. It was sunny. We didn’t have any indication a storm was coming in.


The rest got out in time.


I let him go up top, and I was in the nacelle.


M said that you said there was a noise.


When did I say that?


I don’t know. Maybe in the car, on the way back.


I don’t remember telling anyone.


But you did hear a noise? Like an unusual noise?


I thought I heard the generator kick off idle.


Did the gearbox turn over?


I can’t remember. It wasn’t going by the time we got back in the nacelle. 


Is that why you went back inside?


No. I left my kit in the nacelle. I went back down to get it.


Seamus curses. He knocks his knuckles against the table in anxious arrhythmia. You know you were struck by lightning?


The tower…


The whole thing. You both could have been killed.


I just sit there and I don’t say anything.


So…


So?

So. One of your team members lost his life. So…what happened?


So. What happened? There is nothing in my head.


Doc asks me again.


I just see the kid…Asher, I see Asher, he’s at the ladder and he’s clipped in. Or he’s clipping himself in. He’s fiddling with the belay harness, then….whoosh.


He falls?


He just…disappears. Like he was never there in the first place.


June 11


When I close my eyes, I feel the ground move from underneath me.


June 19


Are you vertiginate?


I’m sitting in Doc’s office again. He holds his clipboard with disdain.


I’m like a puppy, I say. Sometimes I bite.


Are you afraid of heights?


No.


Have you ever experienced dizziness when experiencing a high height?


No.


Have you ever felt nervous about descending from a height?


No.



I’m assigning you to vertiginous confluence therapy. Four sessions…


You’re giving me homework?


Sorry. Doc takes a minute to swallow his tone. He says: I’m strongly recommending, as in, acting in my capacity as your supervisor, I think you should take these four sessions.


Talk to a therapist.


It’s different, he says. He hands me a folder with a cross section of a brain printed on the front cover. It looks like an advertisement for drugs.


Doc’s tone has shifted. It’s immersive, he says. You might enjoy it. I shuffle in my chair but Doc motions for me to stay still. He pats a padded leather bag with embossed branding identical to the information packet. Zipped up inside is a headset with white silicone straps, like a pair of expensive ski goggles.


Does this headset satisfy unfulfilled fantasies?


This…is what’s keeping you on-site for now. Seamus and I lock eyes for the first time during this indictment. Go play, he says, finally.


Go play, I say as I exit the office. Decclan is waiting by the van to drive me back.


In my head I’m aware I keep repeating what other people say to me, like I’m becoming an android.


June 23


Today–ran a couple routine checks on blade pitch adjustment in South Nesting, about 15 kilometers north of Lerwick. The contour of the hills runs northeast, in stripes, and rivers form like veins in the valley. In the morning we could see Lerwick in the distance, coming off the coast with its humid smog somewhat friendly and heedless, the sober pitch of its metal roofs and the stoic, nordic chimneys.


We managed to cover 24 towers from N110 to N132. The Nords installed the towers in four stages over three years. The big ones are V150s, 4 megawatt output and about 150 meters tall, and then about 40% of the mix is smaller, 2 megawatt towers, the V110, which are under 100 meters tall. Wind farm construction largely depends on turbulence, since air displacement from the rotor can cause disruption to other turbines. Maximizing efficiency depends on adequate spacing. Up to a kilometer between larger towers is preferable, and reduces the natural degradation of the tower structure through vibration and stress. The rule of thumb is 15 times the blade diameter, which is around 80m for a V150. Sort of like in a forest, larger towers can protect smaller infield towers.


Of course, just like cars, washing machines, and laptops, turbine companies cut corners where they can–or where they have to. After all, what is a clean energy project if it’s ignorant to environmental sensitivities?



June 26


It’s Friday and the team is meeting at the Arms in Lerwick for pints. I look out over the water and there is no traffic coming either way along the highway except for a group of cyclists splattered with mud.


Lerwick is the big town on the mainland. The ferry leaves for Aberdeen twice a day, and fishing boats line the harbor, which is cobbled with shattered remnants of shells cast down by gulls, who conduct their rites overhead. The mainland of Shetland is small.The rock is what they call it–shaped a bit like a gecko, with bulbous, fractal blooms of land that curl around the ocean in loose nests of rock, connected by isthmi, so that the edges of the land seem at all times to be at risk of disappearing under the waves.


There was an airport but it closed, I’m told. It must have been a bad omen, to have an airport shut down. Meanwhile the turbines loom, a source of prosperity and economic hope for some, an eyesore and hazard for others. Rumors abound that there is opposition to the turbines on the island, but there is no graffiti on the bathroom door, and no one is confrontational about our work.


Around the time the bell rang for last call, some fancy sot in a waxed hunting jacket and argyle had been circling us. You can sit if you like, I said.


You’re visiting? He asked.


Yes.


Tourists?


He feigns ignorance. No, I say. We work for the Nords. He wants to know about the work, if we’re paid well, if we get enough breaks, days off. If there are accidents on the site. He sounds like a journalist. It’s all good, I say. It’s good work. You get the world waking up.


Except the sun never leaves, he says.


Yes, the sun never leaves. It’s always at our back. I open up the door to the exterior nacelle and the air comes through and it’s like climbing onto the deck of a space shuttle. You can look down on Earth and the creatures swirl in collections of white and black dots on the green surface.


What about in the winter?


We’ll see about the winter.


You don’t know the rock if you don’t know it’s darkness, he says.


July 1


I have to go to therapy. Because I’m messed up in the head? No, because for the last week, I’ve downed a pint of gin standing by myself at the foot of the tower so that when I make the hub jump I 


I’ve been vomiting as well. No doubt others have noticed. Nobody has said anything.


July 8


It’s a hot day and we’re sitting in a field watching gulls fly by overhead. The water comes up to the shore and it has long, thin lips. Lips like oysters. The sand is blood red. I’ve never seen sand like it before. It’s Tamina and M and Siobhan and I. Tamina comes up and sits down and says I was just on the satellite phone with Doc. He’s pissed.


He should lay off the sauce, then.


Did you tell him about you and Asher?

I told him what happened.


Did you tell him everything?


I look over at Tamina. She reminds me of a seal. Cute, but potentially vicious. They have seals all along the shore here


I couldn’t understand what difference that made. But it made all the difference apparently–the boys body never left the tube. He was sealed inside of it, the tomb bolted to the surface of the sinking island. Was he still in there? Did they pull him out? Was there anything left?


July 11


In my free time, I’ve begun taking long walks on my own, since the sun lingers long into the late hours, and even when it sets, dusk hardly falls before birds seem to awaken again, and the small wildflowers remain alert.

This evening I followed what feels like an ancient path. When I looked down, I saw impressions in the mud, of hoofs but also of work boots. The turbines were silent in the distance and I knelt down to knot the laces on my boots that had become wet from just the air. Alone, I looked over my shoulder at the slightest noise. I looked back and the turbines to the southeast were now almost obscured by the Haar that moved smoothly. It is never like a curtain, but rather a memory, or a nightmare, and I feel my heart rate increase as it looms overhead. If I had a large enough fan, I would blow it all away. The turbines disappear appear one by one as the fog consumes everything, and I am alone.


July 14


I put the goggles on over my head and adjust the straps. The system confirms my theta rhythm signature. A sequence of tones play, and the walls of the room dissolve to reveal I am outside of the extended stay. I am prompted to walk to a nearby hill. I push my body forward like a weighted balloon–the sensation is similar to the reverse physics of falling upwards in a dream–and I find it takes no physical exertion to quickly reach the top of the hill. I begin to hear the mantra. The words are silent, and are felt with a pleasant warmth in the back of my skull.


Repeat after me.


Here I am.


I am continually engaged in a productive dialogue with myself.


I am relinquishing intrusive thoughts that do not have any agency over me.


I am simply being, and the byproduct of this being is a consciousness of which I am aware but do not possess complete control.


I settle into a comfortable seated position in an environment similar to the one I just left, but presented to me with new eyes. There is a valley of emerald sedge and orange grass- that descends to a lake of black water. The grass responds passively to the breeze.


I see that the world is a harmonious, unbroken pattern comprising intersections of electromagnetic fields, waves, and solid matter.


The waves and fields collapse in front of my eyes, and the only thing I see is a expansion of colorless, dimensionless aether that radiates within my body until I am myself so vast that I can no longer perceive the limits of myself.


I am aware that I am floating so far above the plane of physical space that I can no longer perceive the ground and its physical limits, but I am not concerned or afraid. If I choose to fall I can do so at any speed, at any time, and there will be no catastrophe.


I acknowledge the call of the void.


2



There’s a well-known story, a tragedy about two lovers, separated by the Haar upon a rock that slowly sinks back into the sea. They were always seen together, stoking the fire in the endless twilight of the long spring. What should the people make of this? Magicians, strange men with strange habits, who laughed in ways they couldn’t understand, and who spoke their language, but just barely, like colorful birds from a distant land, who remained awake while the rest of them slept, a column of smoke visible from the foreigners’ chimney like a ladder climbing back around the world to their distant home.


In the winter, the two lovers absconded to a cabin near the town of Brae. The Brae setters were convinced they would return early, seeking the warmth of the community, for what could be the aim of these curious figures who strayed so close to the edge of the world? It was a mistake, in their thinking, to seek peace and solitude in a place free of people, for solitude was a state of communion among people, this was how the Brae setters thought.


When only one of them returned, the setters grew suspicious. Two weeks past, and still Birl sat alone by candlelight, seemingly unbothered. The locals suspected foul play. One night, the Brae setters confronted Birl in the cabin in Trondavoe, where they had lodged the strange visitor. Birl fled in fear, and they pursued him through the fog until they came to the edge of a steep embankment that plunged into the voe. The Brae setters searched into the morning, the conic dispersal of torchlight intersecting like rotating blades in the flatness of the winter fog. With daybreak still hours away, they lost one another in the dense Haar.


Alone by the roadside, a figure watches this interplay of torchlight. For just as Burl said, Coop returns traversing the hill towards the voe, although he is too late to save his friend.


July 18


In the dim light of the Arms, the local activist hung onto my shoulder. His breath smelled like vinegar and the blight infected sores as he spoke. Da rock had a ways, yes, da rock would recede into the sea, the whole thing would be swallowed up. For millennia it had risen, and eventually it would fall again as the arctic melted. The Haar would descend, and there would be a blood red sun, and so the sun would shine through the mist and the eyes of the trows and sheep would see through in glassy grey-white. The unblinking gaze of the fish looking up from ocean would wait for the sea to swallow the land, for the rock was falling into the sea, he said, and it would only happen faster, because of the dire days that we had brought upon them. And what days? For wasn’t it a future we were promising, I said, isn’t the future? No, it could never be, he kept saying, it’ll never be, because the towers have dug up the peat, the soul of the land, and they crushed the slates of the ancient ones like shells underfoot, and the birds fly away east and never return. The grass recedes. The yarrow, the sorrel and silverweed will die, the rushes, highland and woodrush, once sparkling in the water will wither to fossilized coughs, scores of green replaced with barren rock, he went on and on, talking about plants as I gathered, so would be the thrift, the sea pink, the pea flowers of the vetch drooping purple bells like the horns of the rapacious and brilliant reckoner, stonecrop with its swollen knuckles wiped from the naked rock. He was saying that a winter would come where the darkness would be permanent, and a wind would reign with a terrible, final revenge, and rip every tower off the rock and fling them into the sea, and that people like me would have to go out and boats and pick them back up.


I looked out over the sea and thought about fisherman then, much like a technician like myself, anchored to a bolt of steel up in the air, blue sky blue sea, trembling eyes tickled by pink wind, watching the sun rise. I thought about drawing ramshackle and battered turbines out of the depths with a crane arm.


Birl, says Nomo to me, waving a glove in my face. The tower moves back and forth ever so slightly, tilting in the wind. I can see the tower curving over the edge of the nacelle, me clinging onto the surface of it, the ropes tight against my harness keeping me flush on the cold exterior. Birl, says Nomo again.


I snap out of it. What?


Look at that.


I look where his finger points. Out over the sea, a necklace of black tears dance in a gyre, a roiling worm lashes the ocean surface, the rough shag of the north sea all leaning in one direction, and this tempest upwind bubbles now in furious red, a swarm of agitated gulls like black flies above it, the whole scene illuminated by shafts of light cast through fissures shattered like fist holes between clouds. A pod of orcas feasts, moving in a circle to prevent its prey from escaping, tails kicking up turbulence and the gulls above dive-bombing and screeching. I wiped my eyes as the smell enveloped us, as all things invisible and suspended in the void will diffuse throughout the sky, awakening the bloodthirst of animals, and this is something you understood from such a high vantage point–that the world is constantly watching, taking in the scent, if only just for the sheer joy and terror of the experience of death, the sea’s veneer oleaginous with blood.


July 20


We rotated north on Monday, and I went with M and Cam up to run spot checks on all of the turbines at the D-site, which was in the north mainland along a track of peatland hills shaped like a kidney. About twenty kilometers of dirt access road connecting the turbines between Burravoe and Graven. We stayed at the Sella Ness lodging in a small bay where a ferry ran nonstop between the inter-islands. The accommodation was spartan, and it felt like what it was: a worker’s camp at the end of the world. Most of the other laborers were up at the oil field, which sat in the bay facing the ferry dock, rows of concrete silos like the drums of an ancient war god. The oil workers were good company and the weather was nice, “tops off” as the Scots say.


That first night we grilled chickens on an outdoor barbecue, overseen by this Aussie named Sturgeon, who provided a fiery spice rub. They had a portable solar powered stereo with a built-in sub that changed color with the music. To accompany the endless supply of beer, the oil workers preferred equally endless throbbing trance music, occasionally interspersed with Italo and America disco tunes by Donna Summer and Grace Jones. Pissing in a green field at the edge of the rock, the bass reflected as the neep rose above the shore below where waves broke above the shattered cliffs and blew voluminous sea spray high into the circling midnight sun, the kick drum slightly delayed and flattened, like a sonar beacon.


The oil workers told horror stories of things that took place in this country in the winter. Women who lured men away from the pub with keenly cooed word only to later drown them in the tub, or slice their necks open with a shaving razor. Bodies of disappeared children appear on the beach or at the bottom of a shallow lake, discovered by trout fishermen and local shepherds. Dogs turned inside out and thrown against the locked doors of terrified townsfolk. Little trows that look like children from afar, but have hideous faces and long fingernails, and trick people into sleeping for thousands of years, only to awaken and find the world completely changed. And grøleks, ordinary children possessed by the spirit of the dead sun, who disguise themselves with radial costumes made of straw and wander the towns and fields in large groups, muttering strange incantations in hoarse whispers. But what is it about these stories that ignite our imagination? For me, it’s simple–there is just so much I don’t understand.


July 22


On the way back to HQ in the van, I fell asleep and dreamed I was standing in a field in the depths of the Haar, naked except for my socks, and when I looked down they were not socks, but some sort of organ into which my feet had been encased, a warm flesh coated in slime. I covered myself and tried to walk, but I found the flesh socks were attached to the ground, as if they were part of a larger organism. I reached down and parted the grass and underneath the dirt and richly scented peat, I found not just the eyes of the conscious field, but the entire island was an organism. As it breathed, little gnarled and delicate pods grew up from the surface like mushrooms, and they extended pink, radial membranes supported by ribbed gussets, and as they began to rotate these blades, spores ascended and drifted away, little gray turbines sewing the Earth. I reached down to pluck one and felt the sting of a cut, and I saw in my hand the curved and bloody shape of my own manhood, severed from between my legs. I panicked and began to run through the fog until the ground gave way beneath me and I slid down as steep embankment, slowly coming to the realization that I was not in danger, but I was in fact being born, and that at the bottom of the embankment was the realm of endless spawn and rebirth that would disassemble by body and recycle me into something else. The mud and rock ended in a vertical drop and as I fell through the fog I kicked my leg awake. M drove. Cam beside me in the bucket seat, snoring. The radio played Robby Basho, “Eagle Sails The Blue Diamond Waters”.   


July 24


Coop and I have done on-shore jobs for eight years together, some at home in the United States, others in Norway, the Netherlands, Clyde Farm in Scotland. We came up with the rodeo rope crews in the midwest, back when hub jumping still had something of a cowboy attitude about it, before the primacy of clean energy was cemented, and the industries all gradually began to professionalize. We had seen everything in the world together. In California we camped out together on an open plain and woke up to a mountain lion sniffing at the remnants of our fire from the night before. In the small border towns of South Africa we fought off bandits armed with AK-47s. The dream of the cowboy cannot last for long.


Hard to believe, but this was before they invented the technology for direct neural-theta rhythm interface to create automatic service logs–site safety relied on old-fashioned human storytelling and memory. For memories from those days, the ones I haven’t encoded externally, I worry that soon they will only exist in those strange, unwelcome dreams that cause fitful nights, where you have no control over yourself, and you submit to something you’ve wanted so badly for so long, only to wake up with a lingering image, like the desire lines abraded by solemn deer and predators in pursuit.


When Coop announced to me he was getting married, I told myself I was happy for him. If that is what it takes for someone to make some sense of their life, then I support it. For years we were driven solely by our desires–to make money, to have adventures, to have the whole world and to hide from it. Recently, as he travels less frequently, I’ve become aware that I’m often at the perimeter, looking in on those around me, wondering about their own motivations and desires in life, but never quite having the courage to ask.


July 27


A minor setback – two towers reported faulty yaw mechanisms. Both cases: exquisite corpses. Seems that different year-model parts are having difficulty communicating with one another. The body and head of two different animals, a chimera in combat with its own psyche. It’s good we caught this in the summer. Aside from the almost daily visit from the Haar, the weather here is surprisingly mild, despite the extreme arctic latitude.


On a few occasions, the wind has picked up faster than we’ve been able to predict or respond to, and the implication is a greater onsite presence, since excessive wind speeds cause a litany of problems if the towers are unprepared.


Engine burn out due to excessive wind is the most common cause of flame outs: engine or generator fires, catastrophic rotor failure, excessive torsion causing the blade to sheer off. Turbines have cut-off speeds where the ROCC stops rotation via blade feathering, and fixes the direction and angle of the hub into the wind. Vestas towers can handle up to 20-30 m/s before they cut out, which, at any rate, is practically a hurricane. According to the debrief, the highest wind speed claimed to be ever recorded on the island was 80 meters per second, which seems like a tall tale. At that velocity, a anything above the surface is at risk of becoming confetti.


That being said, things grow low to the ground on this rock, as if they are aware of how fragile and exposed they are. There are no trees to speak of, and most buildings on the island are built well inland out of solid concrete. The turbines are, in this sense, like the long slender necks of dandelions, ready to be clefted and flung into orbit.


July 29


On a narrow isthmus, a strip of glimmering sand bridges the mainland to the basalt volcanic plug of Mavis Grind. I clamber down the sculpted, ochre cairns below the road and cross the sand towards the water. The animal is still breathing, it’s massive flank rising and falling, the black and white pattern along its side meant to act as camouflage in the binary altitudes of the ocean. Behind the orca is four more, all of them beached on the sand. The whales are each so large, the only comparison could be to a machine, a vulgar thing we created to destroy the very land that these beasts inhabit. The thing is as completely awesome as a train car. Or a rocket ship. Or a turbine nacelle. Or a surface to air missile. But then it is like none of those things, because it exists in a greater consciousness to the inert machinery of man, and it’s so clear looking upon it now, its skin is so perfectly wefted, even though it doesn’t matter, because the whale has beached on the shore, and there is nothing I can do.  


August 1


M and I sit in the van, watching the storm roll past.


I think I’m starting to question my sanity, I say. Maybe I’ve always been crazy and I just lapse in and out of awareness.


Self-awareness is a good indication to the contrary.


That’s the thing: as long as you worry about it, you’re fine. But once somebody else worries you’re crazy, that’s when the trouble starts.


Are you practicing to give a speech?


I thought I was going to fall over getting out of bed this morning.


This might not be what you want to hear, but I think people, or animals, are innately wired to rout out and dispel madness from the ingroup. I don’t necessarily blame them. I don’t need my partner seeing spectors when we’re 500 feet up.


I don’t know. I’ve never been afraid of anything. Never even thought twice about it. Maybe I’ve excelled at pretending to have a typical brain.


Fear is the instinctual expression of a typical brain. It’s how you respond to it that matters.


I keep imaging a hand coming out of the fog and pointing me towards the edge. It says to me: jump!


Well so do I. People say we’re crazy because we climb these towers for a living. But being crazy can have its advantages. Have you heard of neuropolarity theory? It’s the idea that much of society is governed by the will and whim of people at the farthest poles of cognitive function—the two exceptions to the rule of civilized life, which are psychopaths and schizophrenics. We’ve diagnosed both of these groups as having a disorder, because, from a societal perspective, there is something worng with them: They never conform because they’re biologically incapable. And because of this, to a large extent, they run the entire world. 


In other forms of society, pre-capitalist society, different modes of thinking were revered, and we would defer to people that we would now call schizophrenic for advice: people who in some ways are geniuses–extraordinary abstract reasoning and creativity, pattern recognition–but in other ways are unfit for general society. They’re prone to paranoid delusions that can take over their lives. Nevertheless, These people are the oracles, the jesters, the fools–they were able to penetrate through the fog of politics and insipid, petty social structures and tell inconvenient truths. They could see the future. Not because they had magic powers, but because they understood the recursive, fractal nature of time, even if they can never escape it themselves.


A psychopath occupies the other pole of this socio-cognitive spectrum. They possess complete awareness of their lack of empathy, and are singularly dedicated to hiding, because being found out as a psychopath means certain ostracization. This isn’t hard in practice, though. The rest of us are easily tricked, because we’re biologically wired to conform. We yearn for a master who will protect us from the enemy. Someone who has delusional confidence and authority.


One hides, the other seeks?


I think it’s more like, one obfuscates, assembles the landscape of deception, and the other tramples over it, releasing the angry ants in a panic, destroying the citadel, the sand castle collapsing back into the sea.


What do you do when your brain says to throw yourself over the edge?


Same as everybody else.


Which is?


I start to question my sanity.


August 8


Out on the D field on a foggy day, we complete the last inspection for the season and are running through a final checklist outside the van, the weather is warm and humid and a light breeze blows. Distracted and chilled despite the sun shining through the soupy mist, I spy the figure moving in the Haar, heading towards the D34 turbine. I call the rest of the group but they cannot hear, and I abandon my post. The fog parts and the figure disappears. It was the pattern of red and brown lacing their back, the argyle jacket was the same as the one worn by the activist at the King’s Arms tavern. He has gone inside the turbine and I move quickly to confront him before he can injure himself.


I reach the tower and he has closed and locked the door behind him. My hands shake as a fiddle with the keys. I go into the tower and sweep the room but don’t see any sign of the activist. If they were planning to hang a banner over the nacelle, possibly an environmentalist message, or a call to action, to burn down and deconstruct the field? Or if they intended to commit direct sabotage by destroying the gear box, the entire tower could come down and kill us both in the process. I check the lockers to see if they confiscated any tools or harnesses. I clip into the ladder and start to climb in pursuit, stopping to crane my head for a view of the activist, but I see nothing ahead of me. I reach the first platform and I look up and catch a glimpse of the foot disappearing over the edge of the next platform. It’s critical that I increase my rate in order to catch up. Muscles in my arms begin to burn. I breathe and try to calm myself down. If he is waiting to surprise me, to hit me with a wrench, I don’t want to cause harm in retaliation. I reach the top of the tower and open the trap door to the nacelle. Aware that I could be ambushed, I reach behind me and remove the utility knife from the exterior pocket on my tool bag and clip it to the inside of my shirt cuff. The roof hatch is open and wisps of fog fill the nacelle. The main shaft, as large in circumference as a tree trunk, rotates. The tower is fully powered on–I forgot to idle the blade when I was downstairs at the base, and the blades are likely moving at full speed. I carefully clamber onto the gearbox and reach up to lift myself out onto the roof of the turbine, where the activist has likely hidden. I feel a tug on my foot and I panic and turn around, expecting to see him hit me from behind, but it’s my shoelace caught around the main shaft, slowly sucking me into the gearbox. The shaft is a solid steel tube and rotates with thousands of pounds of torque, impossible to fight against. It will crush my leg and possible sever it. If my clothing gets caught I could be sucked inside and ground down. My hands sweat and I lose my grip on the roof and fall backwards, my helmet colliding against something behind me and dislodging to the front of my head, obscuring my vision. I wrestle with my leg and try to wrench my foot out of the boot, but the shaft has cinched the laces so tight I lose all feeling in my foot. It slowly rolls me underneath the shaft, pulling my foot towards a space only a couple inches wide. I lunge forward and pull the knife from my cuff and whip it open, slicing my palm, and I jam the short blade into the tongue of the boot and cut outwards, severing the laces and pulling my foot free. The boot gets sucked underneath. I climb back up and hoist myself onto the roof. Outside, there is only mist. The turbine blades are visible by the blinking lights running along their outside edge, reduced to a blurry smudge by the Haar, the turbine is like an airplane over an alien planet. I move to the edge, dropping to my knees from the wind, careful as I don’t have a rope to clip myself onto the nacelle and prevent a sudden gust from throwing me over the edge. I crawl towards the hub at the front of the turbine and the massive blades sweep past with incredible power. Where is the activist? Has he thrown himself over the edge? The sound of metal violently grinding and the entire nacelle shudders, and I lie down against it. Smoke begins to pour out of the open hatch. My boot must have jammed the gears and caused a fire. I try to drag myself towards the hatch. There is a fire blanket and an hand held extinguisher in my tool bag. The entire tower shudders again and the blades jerk forward and for a second I think the sudden torque could bend the entire structure and cause its collapse. I get close to the edge and I feel the heat now. The gearbox will go into emergency shut down and prevent further damage, but soon the fire will be impossible to contain on my own. I have no radio and no ropes to emergency rappel down. By now the group will have undoubtedly noticed the smoke above them despite the fog. I take out the fire extinguisher and remove the pin and stick my arm into the nacelle, spraying in wide patterns. The foam covers the entire interior of the nacelle like a blanket of snow, and the smoke still comes but I can’t feel or see any flame, and I lower myself headfirst and drop down into the nacelle, the steel surface walls white hot and burn my skin beneath my clothes as and wrench the trapdoor open with my free hand, spitting out fire retardant foam and soot, violently choking and spitting out the fumes of melted plastic and carbon. The heat from the metal ignites the leg of my pants and I kick it against the wall, the floor, rolling over until it goes out.


I shiver and quake from adrenaline, lying on my back on the platform grate. I hear the echo of voices down below. The team has entered the tower. I watch foam drip from the open trap door above and I hear the clink of metal on metal as someone locks into the climb assist at the bottom of the ladder. I lie on the smoldering platform like a corpse upon the tower of silence, awaiting excarnation.


August 11


Woke up to sounds in my room. I remove the sleep mask and there is torchlight in my eyes. Someone with the key. I can’t see but all they say is “sorry” and I know it’s Seamus. I got dressed and we head outside–must have been 5AM. Over the last few days the night has slowly crept in, slowly but surely, the endless day draws to a close. It makes no difference. Doc tells me I’m being put on indefinite leave. He hands me an envelope, the remainder of my pay. I’m not allowed to leave the island, he says. The power company has yet to decide whether to pursue an investigation into the death of Asher Langley, age 19, brown hair, green eyes, 184 centimeters tall, 76 kilos. I ask if I’m being persecuted. He says no. None of us are allowed to leave. He’s doing this to help me, he says. I need to get out of the field and out of sight for a while, at least until the investigation reaches their conclusion.


I ask if I can get my gear out of the locker and Seamus tells me they confiscated it. I feign surprise. I have my diary. I have my clothes and all my possessions in a single duffel bag. I cannot talk to anyone. I cannot say goodbye. So without ceremony, I’m excommunicated, and bound to this island, like a dog chained to a tree. And the turbines here are my trees, this field of sentinels, capturing my thoughts with the sweep of a long blade. We’re in the business of creating a better future.


August 20


I’m fully out now. I’ve stepped outside of the Haar. From where I am, with a 10,000 foot view, everything is so much clearer. I crouch low in the grass and tend to the kindling, watching the fire grow before my eyes. I dip the diary corner first into the flame. There was a time where I wanted to have my thoughts recorded, my mind understood. But now I see that there’s freedom in existing beyond comprehension, without a mind, or even a body. As I watch the diary burn, I also watch the memories of Coop. I say a few words and I wonder if he is somewhere repeating them.


August 28


I speak and in return, I listen to myself.


I practice strength in the face of existential uncertainty.


I settle into a comfortable seated position in an environment similar to the one I just left, but presented to me with new eyes. There is a valley of emerald sedge and orange grass- that descends to a lake of black water. The grass responds passively to the breeze.


I see that the world is a harmonious, unbroken pattern comprising intersections of electromagnetic fields, waves, and solid matter.


The waves and fields collapse in front of my eyes, and the only thing I see is an expansion of colorless, dimensionless aether that radiates within my body until I am myself so vast that I can no longer perceive the limits of myself.


I understand that the world is total and bereft of identifiable content. I accept the innate tendency to interpret and assign value to events and occurrences.


I answer the call of the void.


3



Many a time, round fires hanging dim and rough halo in the circles of stone, the folk repeat a story of two lost souls, who circle after one another, chasing the Brocken Specter, unaware that they have lost sight of one another until it is too late. As the story goes, Birl and Coop came by boat towards the peak of the summer, alone, and they were greeted by the maypoles and processions of Beltane, where the local folk wove baskets and head dresses adorned with flowers, and parades dedicated to the celebration of fire marked the roads that traveled deep into the mainland where the sparkling sea air was replaced by the rank funk of peat and blanket bog, the rows of torches bright against the day, a day that seemed for them to never wane, but reigned in a halo of twilight into the misty hours of the morning, the sun circling the island like a watchful eye.


They were electricians by trade, and so their handicraft with metal and magnets came to be associated with ingenious, clever methods of patching dead air and exorcizing spirits from malignant radios, often in exchange for whiskey and boarding. In some cases, their hosts stayed up late in silence, suddenly suspicious that they were harboring magicians.


They left messages for one another, to be discovered upon the other’s return. Dirty jokes, poems of love and adventure, and questions about the nature of life. Towards the end of the light half of the year, Birl and Coop ventured to the fishing town of Brae, inquiring about a böd near Ronas Hill, a seasonal house for storing fishing gear beneath the crest of the hill, uninhabited during the winter months. The winter was harsh in this Baltic land. The sun retreated for months at a time, and a strange light replaced it, one that had no known source, as if the island itself had arteries of hot blood beneath its cruel surface.


September 10


Tails never fails, all things considered.


September 16


Arrive on-site. Debriefed by M, whom I’m supposed to be replacing. Not so. The Level 1s have all left to take new jobs, and most of the exterior work was completed during the summer, so it’s just myself, M, Tamina, and Cam. They cook fried rice in the common area, one veggie and one with chicken. Now it’s me and M, no Birl. So, where’s Birl?


No answer. Empty hallway. Later on, I see a shadow pass by underneath the crack of the door. But when I go to take a look, all there is the microwave blinking–wrong time. The power must have gone out at some point while I was asleep.


September 18


Birl is on leave, says M.


On leave.


Doctor’s orders, says M.


What happened?


M makes a face, like a horse appearing at the end of a torch beam cast in total darkness. Since you asked. Pretty much immediately upon arrival we started running into electrical faults. In the tower itself–the hubs and gearbox are brand new and run pretty well. But maybe fifteen to twenty percent of the towers were rehabs, pieces cobbled together from here and there, kind of at the whim of the purchaser. We called them “exquisite corpses.”


No out loud, I hope.


So I did a little digging, and some of these rehabs were purchased from this GE recycling facility in California, sitting out in the open for some time. The connections on the cables within these towers were brittle due to the change in humidity. Some of them would just come apart in your hand. You’d get wire faults that took forever to locate. Meanwhile the lights would go out, elevator would jam, door lock would override and you’d be stuck there thinking a ghost was playing a prank on you. Birl and I had to take care of all of this. You know rookies these days are no good if it’s not in the textbook. And on top of that, he felt he was being toyed with. He…hold on, let’s go outside.


We leave the extended stay and walk out into tall grass. I follow M and the land slopes upwards. Beyond the paltry lights of the concrete building and its roadway snaking off towards Lerwick, there is nothing except patches of stars obscured by the obsidian forms of stealthy clouds moving quickly overhead. My eyes adjust to the darkness and eerie wisps of green light dance in the distance, somewhere close to the horizon line, beyond which the sea slows and slushes, dominated by the angular unreality of ice floes that will someday soon disappear, and the farthest reaches of the arctic will become like all the rest of the world’s oceans–a mire iridescent with effluent and oil, our plastic lives. For now, the green light remains like the electric discharge from an alien metal being forged in starlight, and M pulls the collar of her hood up and speaks into the wind.


Birl was pretty pissed from day one. No idea what about. Some of his frustration came from his assigned partner–I guess because you weren’t here–they paired him up with this kid finishing his on-site training. Name was…


Oh.


Yeah.


Asher, right?


So you know.


I look at M and then I look past M to where the electric light parade has touched the Earth, igniting the grass, the grass browning in the late season so that it becomes transparent, like glass in a greenhouse, revealing the contour of the wind that plies its stalks.


Birl was out there with him, says M. The Haar came in, we were used to it by now, but then a thunderstorm surprised us some time after lunch. I was hanging off the side with Tamina while she tightened the flange on the blade pitch control. I was free floating in my harness and the wind picked up and kind of pushed me around the side of the tower. I looked out and saw lightning strike. We rappelled down the exterior and got out of there pretty quick, and we radioed the other teams to check on them. All confirmed exits except for one. Birl and Asher were on the same site, maybe a quarter mile up the road. We could see their tower get hit through the fog. Kid falls probably 500 feet. Birl has to come down after him.


I just nod.


He didn’t help himself out either. He gave the Doc a totally different story. Like he just made something up. Who knows. I guess he panicked.


Once I found out he was missing, I say to M, I tried to pull his service log. The whole month of May was missing.


She asks about how I got his access code.


We look out for each other.


Well, you could get the log data from the tower.


It’s way too late for that. Technician feeds are stored locally, but they’re written over after 90 days.


But the lightning strike. If there’s a catastrophic weather event, the computer dumps the feed to a hard disk that lives in a black box.


Where at the site?


I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. But it’ll only have one wire, and no receiver. No transmission. Unscrew the lid and it should look like any other hard drive on the inside.


I stand there, under the northern lights. Our bodies silently adjust to the immensity of the continent. M points to the northeast, where rows of red dots are visible along the hillside. Over there. N140. Next to Black Water.


I turn to go back indoors. M follows. He didn’t say anything about where he might have gone?


I think we should hope he took a boat to the mainland and flew home. None of this is a good sign, by the way.


For Birl?


No, for Nord. If they sequester log data they’re probably worried about an investigation and want to cover their tracks. Maybe a wrongful death lawsuit.


I’m going to talk to the Doc.


Tell him I want a raise.


September 19


No sign of Doc for a few days. The site office blinds are drawn.


September 21


Don’t they say the sea is swallowing the land back up? Reclaiming it?


September 22


The nice woman at the post office believes me when I tell her I’m making a wellness call.


September 24


Night time comes early and halos float in the dark, sources unknown. Doc lives close to the water. The lights are on. I walk up to the window, practically touching it, certain that the darkness will conceal me. He is inside cooking dinner, a black shepherd dog wags and waddles throughout the kitchen. He goes into the fridge and takes out a can of beer, pours it into a glass, lets the foam settle as he checks on something boiling in a cast iron pot. Onion peels and carrot stems on the cutting board. He turns towards me and looks into the black mirror of the window and we make eye contact. He looks right through me and turns back to his cooking.


I walk through the yard down to the shore, moon illuminating the sand like rough copper. Boats passing in the water, their lassitude has a calming effect. I go down to the beach and listen to the shore absorbing the surf, letting the waves fall deep through the nested rocks below, into some subterranean pool of accumulation that has filtered all the water on Earth three times over. During the day there have been terrifying waves that blow a column of spray over the cliffside and seem to transform into clouds, floating across the landscape in the frigid, tormented paroxysm of the poltergeist. Now the calmness seems to predict future storms. Far off whines and roars, the sounds of terrible engines burning fuel. The sound of the whole world burning. I hear a whine and I turn and the shepherd dog is at my heels. The dog wags its tail and sniffs at my shoes and I give it a nice scratch and run my hands through its long, dense fur. I hear a whistle and I turn back to the house, to Doc Seamus’ small figure obscuring the light from the door. The dog runs to him. Perhaps we’re so far away that he can’t see me? Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Such a place as this, all of us strapped to this rock hurtling through space. Who is the stranger in the darkness but a neighbor? The door closes behind them and I make my way along the shore until it meets the road. It takes close to an hour to get home, and during my walk, the silence is so immense it feels as if I’m inside the nucleus of an atom, the orbiting fury of electrons are distant stars to me, inert and dormant, and here and now I’m an iota in a featureless expanse reaching to grasp the nothingness.


October 9


I walk to the site office. It’s early afternoon and the day is fading. Seamus is visible through the plastic blinds, sitting at a desk under lamplight. We talk about Birl. They haven’t heard anything.


I haven’t heard anything for a month. Two weeks. I keep repeating what other people say to me, like an android. Two weeks. What did he say?


Is that not concerning?


It’s concerning. The log entries have dropped off. But we still get occasional GPS updates from the system, though.


So you placed a traveling contractor on leave, presumably with pay, right, because you’re not in the business of just abandoning people on an arctic island…but you’re still tracking their theta rhythm signature.


We have a GPS feed that checks in. It’s not a channel the company actively monitors.


So you do know where Birl is?


You are also a traveling contractor for the Nord Energy/SEC joint partnership so I’m not able to disclose that. Even though I know you and Birl are very close with one another.


What if I volunteered to perform a wellness check? This is a person whose still subject to investigation—at least that’s what I hear. What’s the status on that?


I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.


So you just sit in your big metal shoe box and drink scotch and play solitaire while we run around tilting at windmills…


I am fully aware that Birl and yourself have a reputable, thorough working history together. I’m not throwing up a smokescreen.


You’re right. You’re pissing into the wind.


October 19


It’s a fog that weaves through the air like a cataract, the blowing web of memory white as milk. The Haar preserves within itself a memory of the primal dread of creation, something that instills dread. Overseeing repairs today near the D field, we lost each other in the swirling mist, the wind picking up coiled surges of cold air and lifting them, revealing scenes, men and women hooded on the scorched ground, the jade greens of summer evaporating to reveal the ground beneath. I try to relay with the crew up in the nacelle, but all I get is wind ripping through the radio speaker–a squall like a scream.


I look towards where the sun reflects off the water. Giant arches like upturned boats line the shore, black fabric hanging from them and snapping in the wind, the sand drawing patterns as it races between the ivory posts half buried along the shore. As the Haar reveals it’s dark patterns, I see they are skeletons, the hulking ribs of fish, each one taller than myself, picked clean by sea birds.



October 20


The grøleks have come out skekling, an old local tradition on the rock, sort of like trick or treating. The whole crew was at the Arms when they arrived–M, Tamina, Cam, and I, sharing pints and old war stories. The group of skeklers wandered inside, the pub goers shuffling to accommodate their garb, these large costumes like skirts of thorned straw, with conical hats and sheer cloth draped over their faces to disguise them. The children go from table to table, muttering unknowable phrases in a fearsome whisper, and the drinkers at the Arms are happy to oblige them, giving beer, coins, little trinkets, a quail feather from a hat, a tartan scarf. Eventually, the manager comes from around the back of the bar with a broom and shoos them away, poking their heads with the bristled bottom, and the skeklers break out into song. Through the window, I watch them light a fire in the trashbin before running down the street, and the bar tender goes out with a mop bucket to douse it.



November 3


Today coming back from the grocery I took a shortcut through an alley between the stone walls that bowed outwards like pregnant bellies, the lamplight at that end revealing a steep staircase that snakes through a garden close towards the main road. Lerwick has thin lanes designed as shields from the frequent storms, and you can hear the wind whine overhead, a conversational lament understood by crows and crying dogs, like the grave murmur of a funeral reception.


I make it to the bottom of the stairs and I look up to see a small man, a child even, wearing a paper-mache mask that makes his head appear enormous, at least twice the size of his body. He is wearing a disheveled suit and smells rank, like horse manure. As I move to pass him on the stairs


It seems the supernatural setters decided to stay in town for a while.


November 17


Snow fell. We put our heads down late in the afternoon, the darkness consumed us. When I looked out again, everything was transformed by blankets of white. I sat outside and sipped tea while blizzard dampened the world. The northern lights cut across the night sky which was purple and white from the moon. In the distance, a procession wearing long, flowing cloaks walked in synchronized steps, leaving a trail behind them in the snow. I watched them walk until they disappeared over the next hill, one my one, like a hole in the Earth had swallowed them up. A faint song reached me ears, although I could not remember the melody when I returned to my bed, and now I even question whether I imagined it in the first place.


November 18


I had a plan to try and retrieve Birl’s log backup from the N140 tower tonight, but a serious setback intervened.


Around 1800 the wind prediction for the following night was upped and a warning issued by the weather service, so the call came out from HQ to set all the towers to idle so that the turbine blades face into the wind, reducing the chance of damage. Normally a remote terminal can reset the entire field at once, but water runoff from the previous day’s rain had damaged the underground power lines and a whole row of a maybe a dozen towers near the east shore were cut off in manual lockdown, meaning the angle and pitch of the turbine blades were stuck in whatever position they were in when the power was cut. These each needed to be reset manually from inside the tower.


We discussed the relative danger of being out there with electrical and potential storm surge, but by 1900 wind predictions hadn’t changed and myself, M, and Cam got in the van and drove out there. The snow hadn’t been cleared from the road yet and the warm current from the storm turned most of it to slush. We had to stay in low gear to avoid spinning out.


By 1945 wind speeds had increased by 8 m/s and it was now difficult to stand up straight. A combination of rain and sleet blew sideways across the field and traced stripes in the headlights that looked out onto pale yellow, unblemished snow like the skin of a naked giant asleep in the north sea. A gust nudged the van into a rut hidden by snowfall as we crested a hill on the dirt access road, and Cam was unable to reverse, so we got out and started to try and push the van back on the road.


Doc calls on the satellite phone and I get it off the dashboard.


Heads up, he says. A farmer out your way just told me one of the towers is on fire.


Really? I can’t see it. I spin around. Lightning flashes and the entire countryside is illuminated, shore to shore, the whole island like a jade jewel in a fishbowl. I turn back around and then I see the pearl of flame dancing in the air, small as an ember. I see it now, I say.


Okay. Stay away from there. There’s nothing we can do until the storm passes.


I watch the ball of fire cut into pieces. It flickers on and off. Like something was waving in front of it. The blades are still going, I say. Wind caused the motor to burn out and start an electrical fire in the generator.


Will it go out on its own?


No way. It’s going to keep burning. Once the nacelle catches the blades will go as well. I’m going to check on the other towers in the field.


I leave the others with the van to manually reset the N80-N90 field and I start walking north, running, the light snowpack crunches beneath my feet. With my insulated clothes work boots and forty pound tool bag, I tired quickly. My face flushes and I can my breath in blooms, the darkness is nearly total out away from the artificial light of the turbine substation. I stand in the field and look towards the tower where a fire rages, a red flower blossoming in the night, the flames climbing down the blades that spin out of control, throwing flaming pieces of fiberglass and wooden support structure as the blades slowly break apart, a spiral trail of black smoke marking the path of the turbine’s disintegration.


Walking now, my labored steps sinking deep in the snowpack now, I see the tower like the only signal in a white wasteland–the bleakest of revelations, the land reclaims its dominion over the toy projects of mankind. Fire rains down and is carried by the wind. Pieces of flaming plastic and fiberglass grow in size as they approach the ground from such a height. With nothing to serve as a frame of reference, what appear initially to be mere petals grow to be billboard-sized sections of the turbine hub, landing in the snow and leaving a trail of burning refuse along the hillside. The tower shudders and the entire nacelle begins to collapse, each of the three blades fully consumed by flame and now dispersed into the wind in blackened flakes of its skeleton frame.


It is midnight. In the flaming wreckage of the turbine I see a lake and I realize I’m near to Black Water. The rest of the group is preoccupied shutting down the towers.


I take the map out of my tool bag and lay it on the snow, using the flashlight from my phone to identify the nearest landmark. The wind whips the map out of my hands and I have to chase it down. The tower that just fell must have been N149, near the substation where the van dropped us off. N140 is in North Nesting, maybe two kilometers northwest from where I stand. If I skirt around the top of the hill, there is a dirt road down in the braid that could take me there, 20 minutes at most. I turn off my phone and radio and begin to run in the darkness.


November 19


The access door has been padlocked. The welding was hasty and rough. I go into my tool kit and take out an angle grinder and set to work severing the hinge. Sparks fly out. The steel wall of the tower is broader than the greatest tree. I’m like a mite living on human skin, crawling between hairs that extend beyond perception. The padlock falls away and I try the door key. It still works and I click the torch on and step inside the tower, keenly aware I’m entering a tomb.


I scan the floor, half expecting a crime scene: dried blood, maybe? I don’t know. I don’t know what it looks like. On-site incidents are practically mythic. Even this one has a spooky aura surrounding its circumstance. Lightning, fall, partner goes missing. Did any of it really happen? I start scanning the tower base without knowing what I’m looking for. The remote access and diagnostic computer lives in a cabinet along the wall, along with a storage locker containing PPE and additional harnesses. I take everything off the shelves and inspect it all, feeling a little silly and manic, even sticking my fingers inside gloves and trying on glasses, like a lab experiment cut loose, attempting to decipher humanity. I start to pad the edges of all the lock boxes, looking for a false wall. Then it hits me that the drive is probably kept in the insulated electric cabinet behind the gear box, up in the nacelle.


There is no harness or climb assist in the storage cabinet, but there is a helmet, so I put it on and engage the headlamp. Up above, the ladder and the tower converge on a black point, an eye that looks back at me.


I began to climb and I breathe in and out, left foot right foot, three points of contact, counting the breaths and the rungs, my hands coming out of the dark to clutch the featureless aluminum. I reach the first platform and don’t stop, don’t look down at all, even when I begin to hear sounds coming from the bottom, a familiar drone, the scream of a tea kettle, or the whistling wind, or the whisper of a voice besides mine in bed, blowing a gentle breeze to wake me out of a dream. And what if this is a dream, if I’m climbing a ladder through my mind to break out into daylight. If it were a dream, and I let go of the ladder, then nothing bad would happen, I wouldn’t fall, would I? I would just keep drifting up, like a cloud, moving towards the ceiling, my fingers tracing a dandelion stem up the condensation collecting on the curved steel. Now I keep climbing. Past the second platform. I think that no matter if this is a dream or is real, no matter if I slip, like perhaps what happened to Asher, and my corpse is discovered, whatever comes next will be bliss, like climbing out of a machine, like exiting a cave and tasting water from a spring. As I reach the top of tower and catch my breath, I start to reassure myself, saying sweet nothings, saying words I heard once but can’t remember where, just something I know to calm me down…


I listen to myself.


I practice strength in the face of uncertainty.


Whenever I need to, I can close my eyes and return to an environment I know well, but each time presented to me with new eyes. There is a valley of emerald sedge and orange grass- that descends to a lake of black water. The grass responds passively to the breeze.


I see that the world is a harmonious, unbroken pattern comprising intersections of electromagnetic fields, waves, and solid matter.


The waves and fields collapse in front of my eyes, and the only thing I see is an expansion of colorless, dimensionless aether that radiates within my body until I am myself so vast that I can no longer perceive the limits of myself.


I understand that the world is total and that there is no beginning, no end, and no perceptible change in state, and that all of experience is an illusion.


I recognize the call of the void. The call of the void comes to us all. I recognize I have the power to choose.


4



From the digital texture of fog comes a rumor, a story, a description of two marks of charcoal and peat rubbed into soil and gently marked away until only the violent movements, the desperate gesture—here in the hanging debris of phosphorescent beads of blue vapor these Shetland ghosts remain.


Birl and Coop–one turns over, the other turns around–two spectors looking for one another in the Haar that rolls over the rock. In the darkness, the trows dance by the fire, playing tunes and singing songs, the fiddle whines and wine flows. By daybreak, though, the merrymakers have turned to stone. So the living tread on, tread over the loved and lost that sink below the fen and become a reluctant part of the rock, these bodies decomposed and sealed in oil until the curiosity of nature conjures them back to the surface, the Earth displaced and awakened, the wanderers in a sea of fog, reborn in the joyous requiem of Spring.



Recovered file – April 19


We flipped a coin. Heads–I win the summer maintenance shift. May to September. 12 weeks. 22 hours of daylight at the peak of the summer solstice.


April 22


Group convened at a McDonalds constructed in the ruins of an old granite fortress, pillars holding up a portico that framed the rain battering the cemetery across the street. We head out tomorrow on the ferry from Aberdeen to mainland Shetland. Coop elected to take leave to spend time with Christine. He sent me a long text explaining his reasoning, but I am not upset with him. I am invigorated by the work, and excited to get started.


May 1


After a week at the field, our schedule is slightly interrupted by Beltane. This morning in the rental van stuck the A970. Traffic stopped by men and women in long cloaks, embroidered with flowers, crowns and paper streamers mottle the landscape and disintegrate on the wet street. A herd of sheep spray-painted with pastel designs starts threading through the stopped traffic, led by a man holding a staff adorned with brass bells. He speaks with a heavy brogue and his voice carries far. When he finally passes by our van I notice his eyes are bright and furious, captivating, and one by one we get out of the car. We


May 17


First exposure to the Haar—I went out with my assignee, a kid named Asher still in training, and we ended up straddling the nacelle as a powerful fog seemed to grip us from underneath, rising like steam, until it was like we were seated on a boat over an ocean of clouds, thick silver clouds, with streaks of blue and red, and there was sunlight coming down like rain, so that everything glittered. The scene was strange and almost frightening, and the kid and I stopped work and bore witness for those few moments that seemed to stretch for hours. 



May 22


Behind me were thirty white towers, cast blue in the bright light, moving in irregular synchronicity, like metronomes, steel flowers signaling a code. Early in the afternoon we broke for lunch and wandered down to a small lake fed by an inland stream–M, Cam, G, Khan, Nomo, and the Kid. The kid strips down jumps in. One by one, we all follow. The water is clean and clear, and the cold braces. Fish come close around my ankles when I stand still in the shallows, inspecting my pasty skin.


I lock-out tag-out by the ROCC terminal and the kid started running diagnostics. I clipped into my harness and lay the tool across my waist on an S-biner. I slipped the knee pads up from my ankles and began to climb, the assist gently tugging at my belt. The hum of the turbiner from within the tower has the calmness of a simple geometry, some sort of alien intelligence, as if they were discovered, instead of erected from ordinary tools. I didn’t look down as I climbed. I never look down. There’s climbing fences and climbing trees and climbing mountains—climbing a turbine tower is a single ladder, an ascent that occurs within one’s own mind, and ends when you puncture the sky.


At each intermediate platform I clipped out and checked the cables for environmental damage. One of the first things we noticed is some of the refurb towers seem to have buckling where the tubular steel meets the flange, possibly due to high wind speed at a previous installation site, or damage to the corrosion coating in transition from low humidity. The Kid radioed: check for uneven wear on the bearings in the gearbox. I climbed through the hatch into the nacelle and set my tool bag on the bench and popped the hood to get some fresh air moving. Overhead was just blue sky. I took off the gear box case and lubricated the main bearing and sat there with the wind moving overhead and watched the gears rotate, looking for abrasion and wear on the teeth. I radioed back down to the kid. No answer. I climbed out onto the roof of the nacelle. The blade swept over the top, slowly, like the minute hand of an enormous clock. The storm is rolling in from far off. Lightning is visible, igniting the clouds out to the west over the sea.


I radio again and the Kid answers.


Storm incoming.


I see it.

Come up and help me rewire these generator paths.


Not enough time, says the Kid. We have to be at least a kilometer away from the tower for an oncoming lightning storm.


Come up and help me finish and we’ll be out of here. 15 minutes. We got plenty of time.


I think we should wait it out.


Screw it, we could be here all day.


Silence on the other end, and then the kid double clicks confirmation. I drop down to wait in the Nacelle. The generator fuse box is sealed and I remove the cover, testing each connection point. There’s only a few that need to be swapped out, and I lay each wire flat on the floor of the nacelle with the lead pointing to its origin in the generator.


The kid pokes his head through the trap door as I’m lining up the new wires with the old ones. I think the stress reading we got downstairs isn’t from faulty wires, he says. I think the wind vane is blocked.


What makes you think that? Did the computer register it?


No, it’s just something I read. They’re pretty finicky. Ice or animal interference.


Nah, I’ve seen this before. It’s a pretty normal issue with these towers. The box is poorly ventilated and can’t cool down over sustained periods of high wind.


I want to check.


Hold on, I’ll do it. Come out with me.


We climb back up onto the nacelle. Charged white rain is coming down sideways, and the storm is practically right on top of us. I clip us both in and hand the kid the rope to hold while I move out towards the back of the roof. The wind vane and the anemometer are both propped onto stalks about six feet high, hanging right off the edge of the back of the tower. I grab the stalk to steady myself. Because it juts out, I have to keep one foot on the back of the turbine nacelle, one foot suspended in the air. If I fall, the rope will catch me, but it’s still a risk to bump a knee or an elbow. I can’t quite see the wind vane so I curl my arm around the top and feel around. There’s something up there, but I can’t quite tell what it is. I wrap my arm around the stalk to hold myself fast to it, the wind whipping by, and take off my glove with my teeth, sticking my hand back up there. Tufts of straw and bird feathers come down. I look back to see if the kid is giving me the o.k signal and I see he’s messing with the carabiner anchoring me to the nacelle, wrenching it to the side, trying to clip me loose. I panic and drop the glove and it sails away in the wind. I look down and through the rain I see the tower rocking gently back and forth, the brown Earth scarred and riven with streams of water rolling downhill. I push myself off the stalk and land hard on the roof. Lunging forward, I shove the kid off the anchor and he slides on the slippery steel, catching the rope and leaning back.


He curses. What the hell is wrong with you. I’ve got him by his collar now. I pull him in close so he can see the fury in my eyes. His breath forms clouds pouring from his nostrils. I can see he is young and has hardly a wrinkle on his freckled face.


I was untangling the lines, he said. The lines were crossed. We stand there in the rain and thunder rumbles and shakes the entire nacelle, the punched steel humming like a drum. I drop the kid and he scrambles through the hatch into the nacelle. Everything is covered in water.


Help me clean this stuff up, I say. We need to scram. The kid doesn’t answer. I turn and he’s got his harness on, heading down the ladder to the platform at the top of the tower. Hey look, I say, I’m sorry about earlier. I panicked. I lost my footing and I thought it was over.


The kid looks back up at me and points his fist. You’re done, he says.


Come on, kid…I’m starting to get pissed off. I move to the step ladder. I said I was sorry. I turn my head to look behind me as I’m descending the steps and he’s at the top of the ladder. Hey! I call out, but my voice is drowned out by thunder, thunder that rocks the ladder and the whole tower and the lights running the length of the ladder flickers and then the entire room goes white, brighter than any light I’ve ever seen, like the world was just split open and behind the curtain of reality is just sheer energy, and I’m certain that I’m dead, I’m certain beyond any doubt in the world that I just died. I drop to my knees and cover my eyes and it takes a second or two to reassemble the scene, because the world bleeds back in slowly, in full color, everything in the room replacing the white that shined like the full brilliance of the Haar.


When I can finally see again, I look around and I’m alone. I clip my harness into the anchor at the base of the platform and I go to the edge of the ladder, peering over the edge into the void.



November 28


Been fiddling with the black box for a few days. Lucky discovery, almost by accident, cooped up in my room on an off-day riding out the storm delay. A text document containing the metadata from the log image noted down both of the technicians theta rhythm signatures – a 12-digit key, like an IP address, unique to the user. Doc mentioned these signatures would ping the GPS receiver every couple days.  


December 1


Days have been monotonous up until now. It seems like this breakthrough has thrown me out of the void. I booked a weekend away on the pretense of personal necessity and went full blackout on all devices. Rented a car in Brae, paid in cash, a Skoda hatchback from the early 2000s. No bluetooth—AM fixture had me listening to some kind of distorted, lilting folk ballad, possibly drifting across the ocean from Bergen, the voice of the singer warning of figures peering through the window in the dead of night. In the next town I find a used electronics store where I buy a simple handheld GPS. I set the chunky unit in the passenger seat of the car and go through the user manual, working out how to manually enter both theta rhythm keys, the screen blinking at me stupidly, so long has it sat on the shelf in a fugue state of digital undeath that it needs time to acclimate to my modern impatience.


I have no idea how far the range or if Birl is aware he’s transmitting his location, so I elect to drive around the entire circumference of the mainland, which could only take a day at most. I recline the seat and sleep in the car.


December 2


When I wake up, the land is shrouded in fog. It is dark, and the digital car clock reads 0600. A bundle of straw taps at my window. I wipe away the condensation and look into brown eyes behind a skeklers mask of oat sheaf bundled into a cone, the straw boy framed by two others standing on either side, the solemn figures like scarecrows come alive, they look into the car at me and gently rap the glass.


I roll down the window with the old hand crank. This kid leans his head into the car, the pointed apex of his mask scraping the roof. He whispers something I can’t hear. His voice is hoarse and disguised–he speaks as he inhales, a reversal of tongue thaat makes his small throat rattle. I look up at them from where I’m lying, dazed and possessed by some mystic force that emanates from the Haar. I lean closer to the boy. Buns and bales, or beer, or brains, or horrors that take your best years to mend, he says.


Go on. I take pound coins from the cup holder and wave the kids away. The harvest tricksters vanish, their costumes bobbing like strange conical lanterns, they move the way a copse of pine trees might crawl up a hill when nobody is paying attention, to seek higher ground in the depths of a flood.



December 3


Reached the end of the road at North Roe and turned around to stop in Voe for the night. Stopped in a pub and sunk into the booth. The decor appears as if from a medieval period before the Vikings contacted the Normans: carved wooden accents on the shoulders of the booth and pictures detailing an extensive history of cultural festivals in this small community. I sit by myself and nurse a Islay scotch with a drop of water and observe the portraits—many in faded sepia—of children wearing costumes of straw,  Around 8’o clock a band arrives. A fiddle, a lap steel player, and a woman with a curious instrument, a kind of percussive field with a bangled end that shimmered as eight strings were plucked, like nothing I had seen before. They spent some time drinking pints and evidently were familiar with the locals.


I wonder if old people like remote places, or if they simply like the wind, or if here I’m among the type of folk that keep moving, slower and slower with each passing year, but moving nonetheless, until they wake up one day to find that they’ve reached the end of the Earth.


At some point, hours after the announcement of closing, possibly in the wee hours of the morning, I strike up a chat with the singer of the group, who introduces herself as Layla Valstaff.


Come outside, she says. We stand in the fog and she smokes. So you’re looking for your friend?


I’m looking for a ghost.


I like ghost stories, she says.


I tell her everything, about Birl and I, our history, our secrets–about my decision to leave it all behind, to get married, whatever that means. I tell her about the accident at the turbine site, about the Haar, about the strange, impossible void that seems to emanate from deep under the surface of this place. Afterwards, Layla invites me back to her place. It’s okay, she laughs. You can sleep on the couch. It’s too cold to sleep in a car tonight, she says. And besides, there are grøleks running around. And worse.


I drive us both. I try to fall asleep in the cramped living room,


December 4


A strange town in the south. I stop to get petrol and I see bonfires twinkling, small fires over and away on the hill. Shapes move back and forth in front of the flame, dancing in a circle. The sky is electric, and veins of lightning explode in acute silence, cracking seams in the black gyre.


I leave the car and walk towards where the music comes from. Small people wearing costumes laugh and dance. Their fingers are long, and they move them close to fire, revealing nails that are covered in dirt. So the diggers are digging, because, yes, they cannot stop. And I don’t recognize the song. But nobody minds me. None of them notice. And soon I find myself singing along, too. There’s a torch procession, now, each of the little folk are taking torches from the fire and holding them aloft, and over on the far hills it seems others are doing them same, all of them in sync and singing, the song carries from one hill to another in woozy echo.


They begin to walk off into the darkness. Grøleks rise up from the grass and join them, twirling in their straw skirts and hats, they seem to float over the grass like taraxacum blowballs. I make to follow the procession but I’m stopped by a blinking light shone through my jacket pocket. The GPS registers, Birl is in the N field, near the site of the accident. I turn and rush back to the car, ignoring the heavy throated incantations of the midnight mass. Grøleks have crowded the vehicle and are decorating it with live frogs and the skeletons of small mammals, laying effigies on the hood and draping seaweed over the rearview mirror. I shoo them away and they run off giggling. I put the car in gear and whip around, honking at the skeklers to get out of the way, the windshield wipers tossing carcasses and moss into the darkness on the side of the road. I turn off the radio and drive in silence, twenty more minutes to the N field.


A second dot appears on the screen. Another theta rhythm key, indicating active brain activity. The GPS doesn’t know. It’s only a computer. Is that myself? Or is it Asher? The boy who disappeared? Out there with Birl, dancing among the metal, blowing in the wind.


Links:


https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/how-wind-turbine-works-text-version


https://www.mixcloud.com/BBCShetland/good-evening-shetland-wednesday-30th-of-september-2020/


Video: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1076366656215798


https://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/assets/files/addendum2010/figures/Figure-A4.1.2-Wind-Farm-Layout-Nesting-and-Kergord.pdf


https://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/assets/files/addendum2010/figures/Figure-A4.1.1-Wind-Farm-Layout-Delting.pdf


https://myshetland.co.uk/haar-haar-haar/


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetland_bus


https://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/assets/files/addendum2010/figures/Figure-A13.28-Hegels-Wheel.pdf


https://www.vikingenergy.co.uk/addendum-2010


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shetland_(TV_series)


Sites:


Broken Spectre – (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brocken_spectre#:~:text=A%20semi%2Dartificial%20Brocken%20spectre,peak%20into%20mist%20or%20fog.)


https://www.shetland.org/invest/sectors/space


https://archive.org/details/shetlandfolklor00spengoog/page/n64/mode/2up?view=theater


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002228362100588X?via%3Dihub


https://costumesociety.org.uk/blog/post/the-last-straw-the-extraordinary-masks-and-costumes-of-shetlands-skeklers



AI voice


https://ciscoprompts.com/?tts_voice=en-US-Wavenet-A&tts_text=Hi+I+need+a+new+prompt#


https://elevenlabs.io/

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