American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light by Iain Sinclair

unexplained noises and whispers.
    Dogtown, as a habitation for Christians, came into being in 1641. It failed and failed better, faster, more visibly, than the rest. Cellar holes beneath ruined houses, stones spilled over stones, became natural forms among the boulders of the terminal glacial moraine. Woodland, cut back by farmers, returned. The metaphor was the reality, the lumber of fearful minds: swamps, bondage tangles, whipped branches, botched sacrifices. The new town with the new churches, clinging to the shoreline, needed the gravitas of the
granite mass behind it; an impossible thicket of interknitted paths opening on a hulk of split rock known as ‘Whale’s Jaw’.
Dogtown.
The very sound of the word was an onomatopoeic moan of undead animals calling to the moon.
    There were sounds, gunshots. And signs of a work camp: a tractor, a trailer. One man encountered, early on, loped out from the interior: red cap, red tabard over grey waistcoat, mid-thigh boots, shotgun over left shoulder, hound on a leash.
    Dogtown has been worked and worked hard, quarried. The town of Gloucester is made from the bones of the former settlement. In 1967 Briar Swamp was surveyed as a suitable site for a radar emplacement for the Sentinel anti-ballistic missile system. By the 1970s, exploiters and promoters had moved with the fashion: now they proposed a heritage village with windmill and attendant wind farm. As yet, mercifully, there are no legends by Lovecraft carved into glacial erratics, no Innsmouth theme-park caverns with rubber effigies of octopus gods and limited editions of
The Necronomicon.
    Dogtown is the physical manifestation of Lovecraft’s adjectival overlay, ruts into rivulets, sheep into stones. The ancient rocks counter the sexual hysteria the Provincetown tourist experienced when he was pitched against the sea: the slippery, sucking, reeking, rotting mulch of fish docks. The wild women of the fishermen’s bars. The sickly luminescence of marine decay, when suppurating clouds rub against a lurid sunset waterline.
    ‘I have hated fish and feared the sea and everything connected with it since I was two years old,’ Lovecraft said. In his tale ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, an ill-advised visitor, arriving on a clapped-out bus, is drawn towards the inherited traces that repel him most, a corrupted bloodline. Noticing ‘dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls’, he remembers passages from his antiquarian researches. ‘This was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside.’
    The trail known as ‘Dogtown Road’ leads to Granny Day Swamp. The temptation to follow obliterated Indian paths through meadows of juniper and thorn is hard to resist. Low rims of brick and rubble encircle unreadable pits, dwellings that seem as much
unstarted as collapsed. The ground is soft. Recent plantings are spindly-thin, black strings of wood like beads of rain smearing ink sketches.
    When you can no longer hear the rifle range, you don’t hear anything, even your own footfall. The walk absorbs the walker. You must put aside any hope of navigation. The baffle of the trees, the electromagnetic pulse of the rocks, a rising vortex between claustrophobia and agoraphobia, makes for a clammy hour. Hour? Day. Time has no meaning here. It is not the ghosts, but the knowledge that
there are no ghosts.
Beyond yourself, the solitary hiker with the book in his pocket. The overreacher. Trespasser. Scribbler of lies.
    To have a destination, I settled on the clearing where the handsome sailor James Merry fought a young bull, and was gored, tossed, trampled. Self-sacrificed to his own vanity. And drunkenness. An episode of great fascination for Charles Olson, who addresses it in the Dogtown poems of
Maximus.
‘The bios/of nature in this/park of eternal/events.’
    Now, with trails branching off, left and right, I found myself in the place I needed to be. Green-white lichen on a stone beside the path. Letters cut, shallow declivities repainted in