Noon. Fermain Bay.
High tide, which means the steep shelf skitters away your weight, that you’re thrown forward into the swim before you’ve registered the chill of the water, that three strong strokes take you to where there is no sea-bed under your feet.
So you keep swimming.
You swim what you call parallel to the beach, but the beach is such a waxing moon crescent that you’re cutting across it. Leastways this should take you back to where feet and semi-solid ground might meet. You roll on to your back, swivel to near-sitting, reach down, one leg, both, and no…still nothing beneath you. You roll back to breast-stroke some more. Head-up in what you think of as ‘old woman swimming’.
You panic less these days when you find you’re out of your depth. You’ve learned that you spend most of your life in that state of being. The only solution is to stay calm and keep slowly moving forward. The waxing crescent will come round to meet you eventually.
High tide, which means you’re swimming in the weedbelt. Sea lettuce and bladderwrack, serrated wrack and thong weed, carrageen and sugar kelp. You think. Maybe some or all of those. Or other things entirely. You will know better one day. You have begun to study such things.
In the meantime, it feels like swimming in a clear vegetable soup.
You remember being a child inexplicably afraid of vegetation in water, as if it were some TV Sci-Fi monster, or maybe your deep ancestors lived by rivers where the long green tresses rising from the deeps really could entangle the unwary swimmer and drag them down.
How can we distinguish between childish fear and race memory?
No matter now. The sea has had its way. It has sculpted the shingle from beneath your feet, dragged you in, over-wave-whelmed you. You have no footing, no option but to float or stroke or switch-back at whim between the two, with pauses to wipe you limbs free of weed knowing, even as you do so, that you will still be washing it out of your hair and crevices later.
Sea weed has an affinity for human skin.
It wants to cling and follow us home. Perhaps that is mere curiosity. Perhaps it does not know that it cannot survive in our arid world. Or perhaps it hears the plaintive whispers from our internal wateriness. Perhaps it is not looking to escape its own world but to comfort us in ours, to remind us whence we came: water and salt under sun and sky.
Perhaps each touch of salt-water growth is meant as a tender caress, a call to remember more deeply, way, way, way back.
Perhaps the sea-world is trying to say: I understand.
These are thoughts you will have later. In the moment, in the water, you only think swim, float, turn, weed, is there land beneath my feet, no, float, turn, swim, weed,wave, swim…
Eventually there will be a shifting something that your feet can grab onto. You will clamber inelegantly out to sit shingle for a while, waiting for the tide, waiting for easier walks into the water, and surer footing within it.
Not to be today.
A squall moves through. In minutes the sky hides clear behind gunmetal. Drizzle that might be ignored, except for the dark slate behind. You contemplate that you’re already wet, and could maybe wait out a shower, but the darkness following suggests that there are showers and showers and how cold do you want to get, on this first full day?
The rain comes on harder. You pack towel and dry clothes into the bag. Pull the already wet t-shirt over the still damp swimsuit and head back to the road.
You’d dilly-dallied on the way down, trying to photograph red admirals – but every time you had one framed, other people trampled through. You wonder (again) if you’re the only person on the planet who pauses when they see someone trying to focus a camera.
Heading back up is a different challenge. With no pole for support, you figure the measure of the year’s progress will be whether you can get to the top without pause – and how you will feel if you do. You know you’ll need to actually check last year’s journals to see if you managed it then, but this time for sure. No hint of a stopping. Maybe the cool and the rain helped.
It continues to rain, seeping and sulking and stropping through the wooded chasm. Trees catching much of it, singing with it, letting it down more gently to kiss your skin.
You’re half-way back to base before you realise that although you weren’t willing to sit it out on the beach, you aren’t shrinking away from it in your walking. You’re simply noticing it. Scenting it. Feeling it. Summer rain. In hair. On skin. Washing away salt and sun-cream.
You start to wonder if rain feels better the fewer clothes we put between us and it.
You’re still smiling. The visit to the beach was short, and time in the sea even shorter, but both happened. You breathed in the depth of the woodland. You sat on the stones. You swam in the water.
You are back on the island.
