Then Helen suggests a swim in each of Mainland Orkney’s thirteen parishes. This is an entrancing combination of the ambitious and the easily manageable – even land-locked Harray has its lochs. It’s an adventure with purpose and momentum. I see new corners of coastline, venture into waters that a few months earlier I could not have imagined becoming my territory. We splash in the shallow freshwater Loch of Skaill – we were warned about leeches but never encountered any. We let the rapids whoosh us under the arches of the Brig o’Waithe on an incoming tide rushing through a narrow channel described in 1529 as ‘very dangerous … where many perish’. We take our cars down tracks I didn’t know existed, to swim from shingle, or rocky headlands, or coves studded with red and green sea anemones. Orkney looks so small on the map, but it turns out to be vast; layer upon layer of secret places are folded into that apparently open, treeless, featureless landscape. My confidence grows. The weeks go by. September turns into October. The water is still warm by Orkney standards – thirteen, fourteen degrees Celsius – but I know it won’t be for long.
Someone mentions a rule of thumb they’ve been told by an Australian friend, that you should never swim in open water unless the combined temperature of air and water is above forty degrees Celsius. We laugh, a little envious but mostly self-satisfied, superior: you might achieve that in the south of England, but on the warmest summer day here the aggregate is unlikely to exceed the low thirties. Come the winter, the old hands tell me, even in largely frost-free Orkney, we could easily be swimming in combined temperatures of ten. Eight. Five.
Time to get a wetsuit. The swimming club – now expanded into the Orkney Polar Bears – has people who know the sea much better than I do, serious snorkellers, scuba divers, sea-kayakers, many of whom swim in varying amounts of neoprene all year round and swear by it. I have never so much as fingered a wetsuit, but clearly it’s the new must-have accessory. Already by December the water is down to eleven degrees – the threshold between mere ‘cold-water swimming’ and ‘extreme cold-water swimming’. Not everyone wears a full wetsuit – some keep to their swimming costumes, just adding neoprene socks and gloves; others wear rash vests – but I’m a neophyte, not acclimatized like them.
However, it’s not as straightforward as I thought. The dive shop in Stromness has nothing in stock that will fit me, and I’m reluctant to buy one online. The unwillingness of companies to ship goods of any kind to the Isles is a perennial gripe, and I anticipate a prolonged and wearying back-and-forth as I try to find one that suits me. More importantly, the grotesquely over-long wetsuit that I do try on is terribly uncomfortable. I’m reminded of a comment I once heard from a boyfriend, about how sex when you’re wearing a condom is like trying to pick your nose with rubber gloves on. This is the marine equivalent. Surely the point of swimming in the sea is to be as close as possible to the water. The Lycra of my Speedo is more of a barrier than I would really choose, never mind this clumsy exoskeleton. But this is not mere discomfort – it verges on phobia. I’m shocked by the power of my revulsion. It’s as though some stranger has his hands around my throat, and the wrap-around embrace of the neoprene gives me the shivers, the texture, the way it squidges between my fingers.
Still, it’s going to get cold. It’s going to get really cold. I need to get over my squeamishness and buy one from somewhere.
Just not this week, though the temperature is still dropping.
Nor next week.
Nor the week after.
I keep forcing myself into the water, promising myself that next time it won’t be so hard, that I’ll have one of these magical garments before long, and then I’ll be able to swim through the winter.
But – and almost before I know it – I have done. Saturday after Saturday, I grit my teeth and wade in, and kick off, and it’s never as bad as I think it’s going to be. We’re into March, then April, and I’ve gone on swimming, Saturday after Saturday, and now the water is beginning incrementally, infinitesimally, to warm up again. Seven, then eight, then nine degrees. It’s as though I’ve crossed some invisible border, undergone a rite of passage. I look much the same, but I’ve changed. People start to call me tough and hardy, and I find this very strange: it’s a persona I seem to have sidled into without really noticing. But, unlike the wetsuit, I can wear these words in comfort.
I’m beginning to feel at home, and that’s a strange sensation. Polar Bear dips are wonderful, chaotic, communal experiences. In some ways, we’re a random bunch; in others we’re a distinct demographic. Overwhelmingly female, few under thirty-five, all with a stubborn streak and a sideways take on the world. Some are very fit, runners and rock-climbers; others (like me) chafe at a deskbound life. Everyone brings something different to the party.
I love these Saturday mornings, and yet I find them hard. Like all social situations, it’s full of anxiety. I find banter challenging – yes, English is my mother tongue but though I’m fluent I’m not idiomatic. I went to international schools in Kenya; few of my childhood friends were native speakers; and I’ve never really grasped informal English. A friend who’s a historical linguist finds my command of the language fascinating – no regional accent, and the only slang I use unselfconsciously is the odd bit of 1940s idiom picked up from my mother. Aggers for agony, as in Gosh, my new shoes are aggers. When I first came back to the UK at almost sixteen, to boarding school in Hertfordshire, I found the speech of my age-mates incomprehensible. Can’t be arsed. Can I scab a fag? I skived off maths… Haven’t done that for yonks. I’m left floundering, always a pace behind, trying to read facial expressions for clues to meaning, pretending to laugh at jokes I don’t get.
I feel stupid, wary, always on the edge. There are rules I don’t know, unstated conventions I’ve never learned.
There’s another problem, one I’m barely aware of myself. Being in a failing relationship seals you off from the social world. People ask cheerily, casually, after my husband. How is he? What’s he up to? I gape at them, feeling as though I’m stuffed, under glass. I have no idea how to answer.
But it’s different in the water. There’s not much scope for banter when a choppy wave is smacking you in the face, when you’re gasping for breath, when you’re in a group strung out over a hundred yards of surf. Our common language is the shock of cold; the sting of brine; the reddened skin; the shivering that won’t stop.
Organized sports were torment at all my schools, but in the sea, for the first time, I get an inkling of the non-verbal bonds that are forged between team members. We are linked by our desire for cold water; we’re united against the disbelief or awe or disapproval or mockery that comes from observers. We laugh at ourselves, but secretly we’re proud. It’s intoxicating, being an insider: I can’t remember feeling this way before.
I begin to see my place in the world differently. The week revolves around Saturday mornings: the queries and suggestions that emerge on our Facebook page around Tuesday – Where are we going this week? – and gain traction and definition until consensus is reached: What’s the wind/tide/current doing? Easterly, Force 6 – how about Bay of Skaill? High tide’s at 9 a.m. Does anyone else need a lift from Stromness? Any orcas been spotted? Who’s bringing the cake?
A new world of knowledge is opened up to me: I become acquainted with websites like magicseaweed.com, aimed at surfers but their panoply of information – water temperature, wind, swell – all becomes part of my armoury. I watch with fascination as projected Atlantic depressions mass in a threatening, widening gyre off to the west of Ireland, and learn how to plan swims in response.
And I learn to relate to other sea-creatures, not just the human Polar Bears.
*
Eynhallow Sound this morning was like a lake in a volcanic caldera, a ring of dark hills, topped by equally dark storm clouds, but above the sky was blue, cloudless. Tearing southerly wind blowing straight into breakers coming in on a very high tide, scattering spray back across the swell. Many shags, gulls, plover. I stayed in my depth an
d was still swept off my feet. Looked up one mound of rising wave straight into a seal’s nostrils: they were having as much fun as I was.
*
When I first started swimming in the sea it was always a shock to hear that deep-lunged snort, sometimes only a few feet away; to see the dark head of a seal rise from the water: the huge eyes, alert nostrils, water dripping from whiskers and beading on sleek spotted fur. Seals gaze in a way that suggests intense curiosity. They are predators, with sharp teeth and strong jaws. But I rapidly grow comfortable being with them in the water. They’re in their element, and I’m their guest. I never swim towards them, and although friends who are scuba divers report the seals coming close, mouthing the swimmers’ flippers, allowing – even enjoying – physical contact, my seals are warier. Seals are confident when fully immersed, more cautious when bobbing on the surface, shy and easily spooked when hauled out on the rocks. I’ve never felt any threat, though if one comes too close for its own comfort and dives with a sudden, shocked thrust of its body, the thud of the displaced water is a visceral reminder of their strength and mass. And sometimes, when there are five or six of them, and they’re feeling self-assured, diving and surfacing ever closer, I have to remind myself that they don’t hunt in packs.
The seals are everywhere along the Orkney coast, sunning themselves on the rocks, or sleeping nose up in the shallows, or swimming along, following you as you walk by the shore. The best way to summon them is to take a dog down to the beach: the German word for common seal is Seehund, sea-hound, and the seals seem to recognize the affinity, popping up from the water, coming into the shallows, their eyes wide and fascinated. The two indigenous species are the common or harbour seals, and the grey seals, although occasionally exotic visitors like bearded seals come down from the Arctic. The grey and common seals haul out on the rocks together: from a distance it is hard to tell one from the other, and it’s often said that grey seals are common and common seals are grey. But the more time you spend with them, the easier it is to tell them apart, even from a glimpse. The common seals are cuter, smaller, snub-nosed. Their nostrils converge, in a heart shape. When they lie on the rocks in the sun they lift their heads and tails at the same time, as though doing V-sits in the gym, working on their formidable abdominals.
The grey seals are much larger and more dignified. They have ponderous Roman profiles and haunted eyes. It is the grey seals who give rise to the selkie stories. It is they who are the haaf fish, creatures of the deep sea. They have souls. The common seals are ‘only’ animals, the tang fish, creatures without souls, named for the shallow-water weed among which they hunt crabs. Common seals can dive down as far as fifty metres, and keep under for ten minutes at a time. They stay in the sunlit zone, which extends to about 180 metres, but grey seals have been recorded diving to 400 metres, well into the gloom, cold and pressure of the twilight zone. They can remain submerged for an hour. Common seals forage up to sixty kilometres from the beaches on which they haul out; grey seals have been recorded 145 kilometres away from the shore.
Common seals are impressive enough. Grey seals are hard-core.
Seals are not the apex predators in these waters, not by a long way. That honour goes to the orca, and orcas, unlike seals, definitely hunt in packs. No matter how often we Polar Bears reassure each other that no wild orca has ever attacked a human being, if I were to spot a dorsal fin in the distance I’d be leaving the water as fast as I could flounder. An orca’s open mouth is a metre across, its teeth up to five centimetres long.
A Shetland sea-swimmer shared a story recently; she’d been swimming in her usual patch when she noticed a crowd of people on the shore, pointing at her, waving. I swim here every day, she thought, what are they fussing about? They’d spotted what she had somehow missed: the dorsal fin of a male orca – as high as a tall man – speeding fast in her direction. He dived, only a stone’s throw from her, and the onlookers were convinced that she would be eaten. She didn’t realize what was going on until a pulse of energy in the water made her look down. The orca was only a few feet below her, sussing her out. Before she could react, he swam away.
Still, despite the heart-race, the throat-lump, the adrenalin-rush, I can’t help thinking, even here and now wading into their territory, that there are many worse ways to die than in an orca’s jaws. No doctor, no drugs, no long slow decline of power or personality. Observers of big cats hunting down gazelle in the Kenyan savannah have noted how, despite the fury of the chase, in the last moments the prey animal appears resigned, calm, just as a kitten stops fighting when its mother picks it up by the scruff, or a sheep enters a quasi-catatonic state when the shearer pulls her into a sitting position, or a shark turned over on its back goes into tonic immobility. Human survivors of attacks by wild animals have reported something similar: in the jaws of the beast there is no panic, no struggle, only an eerie calm. Shock, perhaps. But I imagine also that Freudian Thanatos, the death wish, comes into play. All our lives we fear the thing under the bed, the shape behind the door, the spider that scuttles out from the skirting board, the creature that lurks in deep water, the vengeful god.
Thanatos, the joy of consummation: Here it is at last.
As a very small child, before we moved to Kenya, when we still lived in the tall narrow house in North London, I was dreadfully afraid of wolves. My terrors were the wolves of fairy tale, skulking and devious, monsters of teeth and red wet tongue, whose only thought was to devour children. But they were real wolves, too. My father used to take us to Regent’s Park to see the bits of London Zoo which could be viewed from the park without paying. He wasn’t really a cheapskate, he had his moments of flamboyant generosity, but he was always looking for an advantage, some way of beating the system. The wolf enclosure was one of the most accessible: those leggy grey creatures through the wire fence, running among the trees. When I expressed my terror, my mother would ask in frustration whether I really thought the wolves were capable of escaping from the zoo? Would they really make their way to Islington, more specifically into my bedroom, and eat me? Out of all the little girls in the world? To which the only possible answers were yes, yes, and yes. The knowledge was self-evident to me, embedded in some deep part of the hominid brain. My mother thought it was 1970 and London N1, but I might as well have been an Australopithecine child, four million years ago, on the Plio-Pleistocene grasslands of East Africa, knowing full well that the noises in the dark were made by what the palaeontologists call the hypercarnivores: giant lions, leopards and hyenas. This is where the nightmares are born.
Once we’d settled in Nairobi my fear of wolves ebbed in the face of a developing passion for wildlife. I got used to a suburban garden in which the pepper tree by the back door was full of caterpillars with poisonous bristles, the Cape gooseberry bush harboured a boomslang, baboon spiders lurked in tunnels on the lawn, siafu – army ants – marched through the grass in Napoleonic columns. I ignored the caterpillars, and backed cautiously away from the boomslang; my father rushed me to hospital once with a nasty spider-bite, and the mighty-jawed siafu got into my little sister’s hair when she lay down on the lawn, though I was more distressed by their devouring a whole litter of our rabbits’ babies. At school, we were taught two alarm drills: the fire bell, for which we went outside; and the lion bell, for which we came in. We never had a fire, but there were lions on the rounders field once, and the wardens from Nairobi National Park came in a green Land-Rover with a cage on the back to retrieve them. The nightmare that the wolves had once embodied retreated in the face of the waking world and these manageable dangers.
But being eaten by an orca would be to meet that nightmare face to face, to look it in the eye and name it, to say, I know you. Surely there’s virtue in this. I talked it through once with Yvonne, another Polar Bear, a poet, while we were at the Sands of Evie, swimming at a summer-leisurely pace out to the buoys that mark the lobster creels. We further speculated that there would be other advantages to this death. No funeral expenses. Th
e satisfaction of providing a good meal for a species that is threatened, if not yet endangered. We’d make the front page of The Orcadian. A worthwhile contribution to scientific understanding of orca behaviour. Nonetheless, as we rounded the buoy and started our way back, we agreed that we would rather the orcas held off at least until our children had left secondary school. And we were both swimming rather faster, and looking over our shoulders more often.
I knew nothing about orcas when we first moved here. It’s an obsession which has moved in on me gradually, fuelled by that occasional glimpse of a dorsal fin, the arcing back, the flick of flukes, and by the realization that globally we are coming to a better understanding of these extraordinary beings. I track the different communities through the Facebook pages of the scientists studying them – rejoicing to learn that Granny of the Southern Residents J pod is still going strong aged 105 (and grieving to hear of her death, just as this book went to press), swimming up and down the western coasts of North America; delighted when I see that Mousa, one of our local matriarchs, has a new baby; sorrowful to hear that for yet another year the little Hebridean community is calfless. I am beyond intrigued to learn that orcas are not only matriarchal, they are menopausal. The females lose the ability to reproduce aged around fifty, just as we do; but they go on being the power in the nuclear family and the wider pod. Both sons and daughters stay with their mother for life, and young male orcas work as nannies for their younger siblings and cousins.
But – let’s be honest – they are also really, really scary. Writing in the first century AD Pliny describes orcas in the Mediterranean attacking other whales when they are calving. His usually precise language breaks down under the strain: ‘its image cannot be properly represented or described other than as an immense mass of flesh with fierce teeth’. ‘Carnis inmensae dentibus truculentae’ – all hiss and click and the tap of tongue on palate, as though anticipating the monster breaking the surface. Olaus Magnus’s map from the 1530s shows the orcha (sic), looking like a marine triceratops with fangs, attacking a whale, a balena (which also has teeth), just to the west of Orkney.
Swimming with Seals Page 5
