The pale young man walked down in shorts, with a small bundle in his hand, stripped off a few things and walked into the water. He did not stay in long, made it look more like a ritual than a pleasure. When I looked along the bay, the two women had also dipped and retreated. We’re halfway through the year and I have not sea-swum yet. Watching the locals is not crying out to me come on in, the water’s lovely.
Another group arrives. Ladies of a certain age. Well-insulated. Swim hats and floats at the ready. They walk in confidently, but even from a distance I can see their shoulders clench.
There is a glass, or rather a cup, of wine at my elbow…reason enough not to be braving the waters …but they keep calling.
I lie back, close my eyes, feel the warmth of sand and stone seep into my spine. The soft breeze is from the north-east. The crystalline skies of morning are misting into noon. The sun is turned moon-like behind a pale veil of grey.
The moon herself, at the half, had been brilliant at 3a.m.
A famous author contended that only men and boys wake at 3 in the morning, that women sleep through the pre-dawn hours. He was wrong. I often see the 3a.m. moon. I often step outside my doors to watch her send her consolation to those who cannot sleep.
Whatever the sea temperature, the ladies have swum so far out that their floats are justified, and the wind is now creating a channel of clear blue sky-water. Waves continue to whisper the goodbyes of the retreating tide.
Eventually I work out that the reason the man’s swim looks like a ritual is because that is precisely what it is. It is an offering of his male body to the waters, to call back the sun. It works. The midday haze is blown away and the golden light returns.
So, of course, I have to make my own offering. I’ve already got one swimsuit dripping in the bathroom after 50 rapid lengths of a short hotel pool, but that is exercise, or meditation at a stretch, this is something else – this is – this is something closer to gratitude, closer to prayer. This is thanks for the sea herself. She must be a she, because she is the womb we came from and yearn to return to, to whom ultimately, whether via earth-worm-rot or fire-smoke or air-flown-feeders, we will return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but all of it eventually washes back down to the sea.
More than that, though, she is the one who calls to us, always, in her whispering, shushing, soothing tongue. She is the one who will always keep us womb-held whenever we choose to walk towards her.
I walk.
The water is not as cold as I recall it. It is not body-temperature welcome-home warm, but nor is it the shock I was expecting. Wim-Hof it, my friend told me. Deep breaths before you go in. To be honest I can’t remember exactly what Wim Hof recommends, but I have worked out my own adaptation. I know that the greatest risk comes from shock, so that it what is to be avoided. I tend to walk in slowly. The same friend says I enter the water like a tiger (of course I do!) – slowly, deliberately, one foot at a time.
I do enter slowly…acclimatising as I go.
I watch the pale man again in the coming days. I swim in the sea each of these days. Look forward to it, postponing the pleasure until the afternoons. I compare his rituals with my own. He places his towel on the sand, close to the water’s edge, piles his removed things on top of it, his shirt, whatever he wears around his neck, his sunglasses, the dry clothes he’s carried down. He keeps his sandals on.
I wear beach shoes on my home patch because we are warned of weaver fish. Here I take the chance to go barefoot. Always I pile everything in a heap, further up the beach, and lay my towel on top of it all – perhaps it’s a flag that I need to keep in sight, perhaps it’s to protect everything else
from the sun, more likely it’s just that it is the first thing I will want to lay my hands on when I emerge, dripping.
He walks into the water the same way I do. Slowly. Deliberately. Breathing consciously. Focus on the out-breath. When we shock the system we tend to hold the in-breath, stop breathing. I have been told always focus on the out breath, the breath will naturally come back in. Does he know this, or does it come naturally to him, to breathe fully out as he steps into the cold?
Like me, he pauses at waist-depth. Sensitive areas submerged, the heart still in the warmth of air. Equalising. Place the hands into the water, the wrists, accustom the flowing blood where it is closest to the skin to the temperature, let it carry that through the body, warn the brain, the heart, there is cold coming.
But then our rituals diverge. He takes a deep in-breath and dives, goes for it, now or never.
I continue my getting-used-to-it routine. I splash water up my arms, over my chest, across my shoulders. I even take a handful to wet my face. Only then do I fall forward into my stroke. I breathe hard into the first few strokes: focus on the out breath. Stroke hard to warm up the muscles.
Then…then slowly I settle into it, into the ‘being’ of being in cold water, slow my strokes, turn on my back to float for a while, spin over to breast-stroke to the end of the bay and back again, float, back-kick, chat in passing to anyone else in the water. Smile. A lot. Giggle, childishly, because there is something childish about this. This is a thing I have done for nearly sixty years – going into the sea in the summer – and wanting to stay there. I never go into the sea without remembering some other time of being in it. Maybe a few days ago, maybe last year, maybe when I was three or when I was fourteen. I am intrigued by which memories we hold and which we do not. They say that the ones we hold are the ones that formed who we have become. I have never lived by the sea, but somehow it is still my default setting when I open the memory bank…it is the colours of the sea and the sky, the feel of sand beneath my feet, the cry of gulls and the wind-and-wave song…
The pale, thin, man does not do any of that. He swims ten, maybe twenty, strokes and then stands up, walks towards the shore, turns and forces himself back to swim depth, another twenty strokes, at most, and then he walks up the beach, picks up his striped towel from underneath all his other stuff, rubs down, dresses, and goes away, his pale, thin body, still unkissed by sea or sunlight.
Me, I eventually plod up the beach to collapse on a towel by the wall and let the salt dry on my skin. I may read, or write, or doze, or eavesdrop on the conversations going on around me. I will idle away an hour or so...maybe more, and then I will walk back down to the water again.
~ ~ ~
Later, after dinner, I have taken to coming back down to the promenade, bringing wine and a note-book. I write random things. Impressions of the day. A story about a pilgrimage thousands of years ago. Poems. Ideas.
When the ideas run out, or the wine does, I pack up my bits and bobs, stick my sandals in the bag and take my camera down to the water’s edge. My last obeisance of the day is to walk the length of the bay in the shallows, trying to catch the light, or the weeds, or the jelly-fish, so that I can come back to them later, and figure out what they mean…because the evening stroll is not a place for thinking, it is a place for absorbing, watching, catching.
Perhaps it is another space in which to become a child again. I remember those long-ago holidays, when we’d been cleaned up from our beaching, washed and scrubbed and fed and put into something resembling proper clothes, and while we weren’t allowed to paddle again at those late hours, somehow we did always end up back within sight of the sea – there might be crazy golf, or ice-creams, or fairgrounds, or trampolines (oh how I loved those tiny trampolines!) or chips, vinegar
never smells as good as it does on someone else’s chips at the beach, the distant lights, the settling quiet, darkness coming in – whatever we did, it was a final expenditure of the day’s energy, and the realising of what a good day it had been and how lucky we were and how happy.
I don't drink Pepsi through a straw watching the lighthouse these days, nor do I play crazy-golf, and I'm too old (and heavy) for those trampolines, but I'm still as quick to take off my shoes, and allow the day to settle slowly into night. I still know how lucky I am, and how happy.
