Ernest in the wild: Quadra Island, Canada

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from seeking ancient burial mounds in the North York Moors to breaking bread at a Greenlandic kaffemik. Here, photographer Graeme Owsianski reminisces on floating among thousands of moon jellyfish in the Salish Sea

Photos by Graeme Owsianski

We sat in darkness, huddled on benches in a wood-burning sauna at the end of a jetty. Finally, with red flushed faces, we burst out of the door and launched ourselves into the cold, black water. As I broke the surface, blue flecks of bioluminescence exploded around me, illuminating every frantic kick as I scrambled back to the dock. It looked for a moment as if the Northern Lights had fallen into the sea.

For three days, our group bonded closely with the Salish Sea off Quadra Island. In a small bay off Reed Island, the abundance of life reached new levels when we were surrounded by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of moon jellyfish. With every dip of our kayak paddles, we gently swept the jellies as they moved as fluid as the water itself. Seeing a unique opportunity unfold, I pulled on a drysuit and entered the water with my camera. It felt surreal to be encircled by so much life, the jellies’ movements taking on a dream-like quality. It’s an experience I will never forget.

As the cold began to set in, we left the water and traipsed through old growth forest to a stream with another sauna at its edge, where we were rewarded with welcome warmth and the dripping limbs of trees enshrouding a crisp plunge pool. I’ve never felt more connected to water than the three days we shared on Quadra Island.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Ernest in the wild: a Greenlandic kaffemik

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from seeking ancient burial mounds in the North York Moors to floating with jellyfish in the Salish Sea. Here, deputy editor Abigail Whyte reflects on being invited into the home of Qaqortoq’s oldest resident when she visited Greenland for issue four

Photos by Daniel Alford

In 2015, I travelled to southern Greenland, a place I never dreamt I would visit. I realised I was in a country on the cusp of change, with its retreating glaciers revealing tracts of land ripe for agriculture, and an Inuit population adjusting to a future where traditional hunting no longer plays a core role.

One Greenlandic tradition that continues to thrive is kaffemik, where friends, loved ones and strangers gather indoors during the long winter, usually to mark a celebration: a birthday, a baby’s first tooth, a boy’s first caught fish. In Qaqortoq, I was invited to kaffemik by Sophia, the town’s oldest resident, who laid out crowberry cake, angelica flavoured bread and her finest china on crisp, white table linen. As she poured me cup after cup of milky coffee, she explained the kaffemik conventions: that guests come and go throughout the day, that it’s considered impolite to stay too long, and how dried fish, reindeer and muskox are often served alongside the coffee and cake.

Sophia spoke with hope for the future – how the Greenlandic Inuit strive to remain true to their heritage while weathering the inevitable changes still to come. I often think back to that kaffemik, and feel proud that I was able to tell Sophia’s story and highlight the seismic changes being felt by a community on the frontline of climate change.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Ernest in the wild: Mashpi Cloud Forest, Ecuador

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from breaking bread at a Greenlandic kaffemik to floating with jellyfish in the Salish Sea. Here, editor Jo Tinsley reflects on the vibrance, interconnectedness and fragility of an Ecuadorian rainforest she visited for issue six

Photos by Graeme Owsianski

I peer down from the open-air cable car and watch transfixed as an iridescent, cobalt blue butterfly the size of a dinner plate flies languidly below, its alternate blue upper wings and brown underside making it look as though it’s appearing and disappearing.

In the canopy below, clouds condense on humungous leaves and trickle down through the foliage to nourish a host of peculiar plants. There are ‘walking palms’ with stilt-like roots, which some say allow the plant to move in search of light, twisting lianas that form vine bridges for arboreal animals, and strangler figs that lower roots to the ground while surreptitiously smothering their host. Once on the forest floor, we turn leaves to discover translucent glass frogs. A tiny hummingbird flies up to my binoculars and pauses mid-air, blurry in the frame. I’ve never been somewhere so rich with life.

Travelling and writing for Ernest has allowed me to explore many remarkable landscapes, but one stays with me above all others. Mashpi Rainforest Biodiversity Reserve – a 1,300-hectare (3,200-acre) private reserve and conservation project, three hours northwest of Quito, Ecuador – brims with life. More than any other place I’ve visited, I was struck by the interconnectedness of it all.

How one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet results from the mingling of marine currents many miles away – the cold, nutrient-rich Humboldt sweeping northward along the Peruvian coast meeting the warm El Niño and causing moist air from the Pacific to become trapped on the steep slopes of the western Andes. How half of the world’s plant species coexist here, each species nourishing, supporting or spongeing off another. And, in turn, how unique – and fragile – places like the cloud forest are, and how important is it to share their stories.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Ernest in the Wild: the North York Moors

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from breaking bread at a Greenlandic kaffemik to floating with jellyfish in the Salish Sea. Here, writer Joly Braime reminisces on seeking moody landscapes in the misty North York Moors with photographer Daniel Alford for issue six.

Images by Daniel Alford

“This is like the barrow-wights scene out of The Lord of the Rings,” said Daniel with delight as we picked our way through Bronze Age burial mounds rising dimly out of the thick hill fog.

My first job for Ernest was a piece called ‘Yorkshire’s Last Vikings’ in December 2016. Art director Tina wanted to base the artwork around moody shots of the North York Moors, so landscape photographer (and Ernie regular) Daniel Alford gamely boarded a six-hour train from Cardiff with instructions to look for a bespectacled man and a small black poodle on the platform at Scarborough.

As luck would have it, my other article for issue six of Ernest had involved brewing 40 pints of 7.5% Burton ale, so we cracked open a bottle or two that evening as we sat by the fire at my cottage poring over OS maps, my dog snoozing disloyally in Daniel’s lap.

Our dawn shoot at Danby Beacon was wispy and atmospheric, but we spent the rest of the day in a proper pea-souper of a moorland fog. We inched my old Volvo blindly along single-track roads then ditched it in a lay-by and struck out on foot to seek out abandoned buildings, ancient burial sites and exposed ridges where we hoped we might catch the mist swirling in the dales below.

Daniel was the first of several remarkable photographers, illustrators and designers who’ve brought my words to life. There’s such pleasure in watching talented people pick up your ideas and run with them, and the article that lands on my doormat is always more than the sum of its parts.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Concentrates of place

Inspired by a near-death trauma in her 30s, writer Tanya Shadrick has been curating tangible reminders of people and places that are important to her, which she archives in old tobacco and sweet tins

Photos by Tanya Shadrick

Tanya, tell us about your Concentrates of Place.

It’s a practice I began on the 10th anniversary of my near-death from an arterial hemorrhage. I pledged myself to a rest-of-life creative response to that experience, and all the work I’ve made since (as a hospice scribe, a self-proclaimed ‘writer of the outside’ and now as an author) has this purpose: to find and share multi-sensory ways by which we can celebrate our most vivid and intimate moments of being.

What do they mean to you?

They mean the world to me, literally. In what I call my first life – before the hemorrhage – I was a very nervous and self-limiting person, rarely leaving the country or even my adopted hometown on the Sussex Downs. Now, my writing life connects me to people and places far beyond my old comfort zone, and so each tin is a heady reminder of that expansion. And they are just delicious things to open up for the colours, textures and smells they hold: heather, moss, sand, slate…

Do you give any away as gifts?

Yes, only as personal gifts, not commissions. During lockdown it was lovely to walk to nearby Rodmell by the River Ouse – the last stomping ground of Virginia Woolf – and fill a tin with pieces of chalk and flint for a visual artist making an illustrated journey of Woolf’s regular walk to her sister Vanessa Bell’s home at Charleston Farmhouse. As an afterthought, I added a bit of loose bark from the tree that reaches over Woolf’s writing shed.

We’re so used to taking a quick snap on our phones to capture a moment or place – what do you feel is lacking in this?

Spending long periods bed-bound because of the lasting damage from the hemorrhage left me with a passion for bringing all my senses to how I enjoy and record experience. My Concentrates allow me to touch over and over again a walnut shell from a tree in Switzerland or put my fingers into sand from my childhood beach, and share those textures with others. I’ve got photos too, but the tins mean more to me. I use a smartphone of course, but mainly to make one-minute sound recordings – another practice that tries to move beyond our modern over-reliance on the eye.

Do you have a favourite Concentrate?

My mentor is the sculptor David Nash, whose work returns after each exhibition to the Welsh chapel that has been his home and studio for the last 50 years. A chance event brought him and I into orbit, just as I began my second life as a writer, and I now get to stay among his huge carved pieces most summers, which is such a deep pleasure and privilege. And so the tin filled with slate and heather from there is a particular treasure.

Have you always been a collector?

In my memoir The Cure For Sleep, I describe how early childhood loss created in me a tendency to “prize routine and everyday objects more than people. As if by loving a person in pieces, through pieces, to pieces, I could suspend time, stop sorrow.” After the near-death, I began to find a public form for this lifelong instinct to curate, celebrate and commemorate. Something that began with a private hurt has now become a way I share healing perspectives with others.

Add your own Concentrates of Place to the online archive using the hashtag #ConcentratesOfPlace on Twitter or Instagram. Tanya’s memoir The Cure For Sleep is out now, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.