Two very hot days and two trips to the beach. Different beaches. Both in North Norfolk, but one is a mix of shingle and sand (the sand only at lower tides) and the other is all the soft sand of childhood bucket-&-spade memories.
My beach days depend on so many things: the weather primarily, but also who I’m with, how I feel, what I find, what time I get there, how long I figure on staying. Naturally all of these things play into and out of each other. One of the joys of a beach day is that ‘going to the coast’ is as strong and detailed as the plan can get. The rest simply evolves. It happens. I’ve long since learned to just let it.
Thursday, I figured I’d get up early for my pool swim. The pool had been closed and it seems that not everyone has yet noticed its re-opening. I know it’s a selfish attitude, but it is a deep joy to be able to share the pool with only half a dozen other people. We all get space to swim our own strokes, without worrying about getting in anyone’s way, or whether anyone’s watching. I get to put in the effort when I can, and remind myself to take it slow and steady when it’s starting to feel too much. I get to “tai chi swim” – principles of loosen, empty, push, principles of using only as much energy as is needed to get the job done, learning to focus the mind on the chi and let the chi move the body – in swimming terms this translates into allow the glide, don’t be in too much of a hurry to take the next stroke. That it involves focussing on the breathwork goes without saying.
For me learning to swim ‘better’ is all about focussing on the breathwork and the glide. Learning to swim, is about learning to breathe.
Early swim notwithstanding, I didn’t make it down to my beach hut (by the shingle beach) until about 10 to 2 in the afternoon. I was in the sea about 5 minutes later. This is precisely why I wanted the shack. I tell myself it’s a writing shack, but it hasn’t earned that moniker just yet. Right now, it serves its primary purpose of my being able to dump all my stuff, combo-lock the door and head into the water.
The tide was out. On my beach, that’s almost a pre-requisite for swimming. The shingle banks / sea defences are one thing, but beyond them there is intermittent rockery. I haven’t yet figured out whether this is all exposed bedrock and/or how much of it is ex-town that has long since lemminged over the cliffs that are retreating even as I type. The further out the tide, the fewer ankle-breakers you find.
Even so, my slow tiger-style feeling-my-way into the chill of the north sea ended in a trip and a breath-taking splash. The weather might be hitting 30 degrees C. The water is somewhat lower.
It is true though, that thing that everyone tells you: it is better once you’re in. The deep-intake-of-breath is because of the difference between air & water temperatures and your body’s questioning of which it is you want it to regulate to. Once you’re shoulders-under in, it gets the message.
I’m not yet fully goggles-on, heads-down in the sea. I like to see the waves coming my way. I like to be clear which way the current is pulling me by reference to the landmarks on the beach and the prom. I revert to old-lady-swimmer in these tidal waters. For now. It will change.
In between swims, I took my normal walk along the beach. I should measure it on a map, but I reckon it’s about three miles round trip. Out at the tideline, in the shallows, back along the cliff base in the soft sand.
Usually.
There isn’t a plan.
I’m led by things that catch my eye. The light reflecting on wet sand. The birds. The waves. Things I find along the way. What’s in the rock pools? What’s blooming among the marram or on the cliff side? Are the gulls still nesting in their caves near the cliff-tops?
I can be entranced by a half-buried lobster pot. Or light patterns in the water. Or just how much sky there is.
I love gulls. The sheer self-confidence of them, their colours, their wing-shapes, their elemental “rightness”. I try to capture images of them: sitting on the groynes, confronting the waves, being playful, being focussed, being Gull.
What does that tell you? That I find myself favouring the sea gull above all birds?
This day’s particular joys, however, were found in the rock pool. I’m guessing some species of periwinkle. The sea-snail variety not the wild-flower of the same name. Creatures with such beautiful homes that I want to take those shells home, until I remember that they are still occupied. One picture in particular I find out later catches all of the astonishing colour not only of the shell and the veiny gastropod venturing tentatively outside, but also of the rock it has attached itself to. There is something alien about this image. Artistically, I cannot decide if it is sculptural or impressionist. I know only that I was delighted to see it for real, and am even more so to have the photo as my desk-top backdrop.
I think my favourite of all the modern technological advances, above even the ability to communicate with world-wide audiences and have real-time visual conversations with friends in far-away places, is digital photography. This medium that enables so many of us to do what used to be the preserve of the professionals: to take hundreds of banal shots in the hope of getting the one that would be worth the day out. And to do so with very little technical know-how and virtually no extra-over cost. It has made photography much more readily available as an art form and as a recording medium and as a sheer joy to do. It has empowered me, to capture and share things that excite me and move me and bring me simple delight. I like that. A lot.
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Friday was even hotter. And plans were even more fluid. I’d made up salads with a view that we could eat in the garden and then go to the beach when the weather was past the midday heat, or we could take the food with us and picnic. He had other ideas and arrived with a veggie sauce and a request for pasta. A light lunch, turned into anything but. We ended on carrot cake and coffee and discussing the obscenities of power-generation & electricity pricing in this country.
Eventually we figured: it’s a beautiful day and we can’t fix any of that – should we go to the beach?
On a whim, we ended up on a different beach, met up with friends, played games, and swam. One friend has mobility limitations so long walks on the beach were not to be had, but swimming was. On days like this, you have to swim.
Along the beach we’d already spotted what looked like peeled grapes. Translucent little ovaloids. Grape-sized, pearlescent. Strangely beautiful. The first one was a treasure-find, but then we discovered how many there were. We heard the words Jelly Fish.
Oh.
Two young girls (seven- or eight-year-olds at a guess) were collecting them very gently in their palms and placing them back in the sand-bank pools to await the incoming tide. We’re rescuing as many as we can, one of them said.
It made me think about that parable of the man rescuing star fish after the storm. On being told he couldn’t save them all and his efforts wouldn’t make any difference, he picked up one more to throw back into the sea and said: it makes a difference to that one. I wonder if the little girls’ efforts made a difference to the survival chances of any of those Moon Jelly Fish babes that they were so gently aiding. I hope so.
I also think that maybe that doesn’t matter so much as the very fact that they had been brought up in whatever way they had, that meant they had a sensibility that made them want to try, to do it anyway. I hope they grow up to be whatever they want to be, but I also hope that it has to do with the natural sciences, the eco-sciences, the humanities, anything which requires the empathy that they showed on the beach one day in June 2022.
This is where I need to confess that I am from a more squeamish generation. I am from the euugghh, DON’t!!! reacting generation, when a sibling threatening to throw seaweed at one was enough to provoke outright panic.
I have got over that. I have reconciled my ability to walk barefoot on the grass, with the fact that seaweed is just underwater grass. I look at it closely. Touch it. Seek to understand it. I prefer my swimming patch to be relatively weed free, but can cope when it isn’t. Jelly Fish though…hmmm. That’s something else.
Something that maybe I was feeling as I took my second swim. Jay had wandered off to connect with the friends we were meeting, and I’d taken another dip on my own. Weirdness. The sensation of something… something “felt” against the palms. I wasn’t sure I liked this.
Wading back ashore I saw the adult of the species. Probably struggling, or already expired. It was a sighting that did two things. Later it enabled me to look up what we were dealing with and identify it as Moon Jelly Fish, and find the reassuring information that they do not sting humans. At the time though, it was less than reassuring because it meant that all these babies had not been randomly
washed up from some spawning a lot further out, there were adults around here as well.
That spooked me slightly.
But not enough to keep me out of the water. It was hot. We were at the beach. We’d all won at least one round of Boules. It was time for another swim.
We were further along the beach now, and contact with these tiny aliens was made with every stroke of the palms through the water. Something reminiscent of bath pearls, or cod liver oil capsules. Softish but firm. Is squishy the word I’m looking for? One or two would have been a moment, or two, of oh?! But here we were swimming in a swarm of them – or is it a bloom? Every stroke was an encounter. Every movement of the hands through the water touched one or more of them.
It remained strange, weird, ever so slightly uncomfortable. I wonder if I will be more comfortable next time, now I know for sure that they are common and harmless.
In the meantime, I wonder what they made of it. There were quite a few people in the water. How conscious are these creatures of the world around them and the species they share it with.
By any “anthropocentric” view of the world, they don’t even have brains, or anything else we would
recognise as being sentient or capable of emotion, but our inability to recognise it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I wonder what we were to them. Just some other aspect of sea-ness that they had to negotiate, like underwater weeds or rocks or movement of the tides? Or did they see us as a threat? Or as playmates? Were they caressing us as we swam amongst them, or were they hurrying to try to evade us, or were they blissfully ignorant of our presence?
I wonder what it is like to be a Moon Jelly Fish and swim with humans. I’m still not sure what it is like to be this particular human and swim with them.
I do know that the experience I will take away from this month, this 30 Days Wild month of June 2022 is swimming in the sea, looking in the rock pools, and finding strange beauty. I feel myself shifting slightly in response.
And I think that can only be a good thing.
