Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Tredwell, real or not, helps me to think about the consolidation of Christianity in Pictish Orkney, the growing integration of our archipelago into a Mediterranean rather than a merely insular world, and the power of bishops and popes. A flourishing of monasteries, sculpture, literacy, through the seventh and eighth centuries and into the ninth. Papa Westray, Papa Stronsay, Papdale – all Norse names that suggest the presence of Pictish priests when the Vikings arrived in about 850.

  But Tredwell also helps me to think about the strength of will necessary to retain integrity. About women’s bodies, balanced between the violence they do to themselves and the violence the world does to them. Tredwell is one of many young women drawn by the dark, sometimes fatal, magic of self-harm when the world makes demands of them that they find intolerable. Get in there first and fast, cut, burn, binge-and-purge. Pre-empt the pain, take control of it, use it as a means of release.

  *

  When I got down to the beach at dawn it was deserted – empty sky, empty sea. Raining: everything grey, except the beach – when the sand is dry it is silver but wet it is gold. Everything very flat: the sand was rain-smoothed, seaweed-free, very few shells; the sea was flat calm except for the little raindrop-craters. It was so still and quiet, apart from a wren singing from the old fishermen’s hut on the shore, and the patter of the rain. But after I started swimming life began emerging. First a solitary male eider, dabbling in the shallows. Then a tern, and a couple of gulls. Two shelducks flew over, and four more unidentifiable ducks bobbing a little further out. Then three seals arrived, swimming fast, popping up and down, one coming closer than he quite liked, and disappearing with a huge splash. All good.

  *

  That early hesitancy overcome, I have gone to the other extreme. I now prefer to swim on my own, before dawn and in the deep dusk, in the bitter cold, in the gale, always without a wetsuit, sometimes without a swimming costume. (And, yes, I know what my mother would have said, not about the nudity but about the risk.) Often, in all but the worst weather, there is an intrepid dog-walker or two on the beach, but if I got into trouble there wouldn’t be much they could do to help, even if they were to notice me struggling. Would they plunge in after me? Ring the lifeboat, the coastguard? The signal for mobile phones is poor out here in Evie.

  And there might well be no struggle, no panicked scream, no arm-waving. That’s not how drowning works. That’s not how hypothermia takes you.

  But I’m not worried, not any more. In part, this is because I know this beach very well. There are no hidden rocks, no turbulent undertow or unexpected cross-currents. The sand shelves gently, and the breakwater provides shelter, a safety net. I grew up swimming in the Indian Ocean, in waters that held Portuguese men-of-war, stingrays, stonefish and cone shells, all potentially deadly. Nothing like that shares the water with me here. The seals swimming in the bay are curious, friendly, even playful, but they keep their distance and I keep mine. They have impressive teeth, but when you hear of someone being bitten it’s usually because they have approached a deceptively adorable new-born pup on the shore. Bull seals battle each other bloodily, but I’ve never heard of a seal biting a human in the sea. As for the apex predators, I tell myself over and over: No wild orca has ever attacked a human being, as though repeating the phrase will transform it into an eternal truth. I suppose I might get my toe nipped by an assertive crab, or my thigh nettle-stung by a moon jelly.

  No: the chief danger to me here, the only real danger, is me.

  After the initial shock of the water has been overcome, the beauty of this place is mesmerizing. (Despite the mer element, mesmerism has nothing to do with the sea: it is named for Franz Mesmer, an eighteenth-century German doctor. But Mesmer developed a theory that the human body was governed by tidal ebb and flow, which he tried to treat, to mesmerize, with magnetism, in an attempt to replicate the effect of the moon on the sea. There is a deeply pleasing coincidence here, rich potential for folk etymology.) One morning the world may be monochrome in the pre-dawn winter half-light: sky, land and sea all the same streaky grey-jade. The next morning the sky will have cleared, the setting moon painfully bright, the east pomegranate red. This beauty takes you out of yourself. Crab-like, I can feel my old shell cracking open, allowing a new self to emerge, gleaming, soft-bodied, and vulnerable for the first time in a long, long while.

  In the dark quarter of the year, the water is first intolerably cold, then stimulating, then numbing and then – and here’s where I have to be careful – lulling. Last week, just before the gales hit, I went into the water just after early-afternoon sunset. It was rapid, thickening dark, with tide low and the air quiet, but a big, lazy rolling swell which spoke of weather brewing. Everything was very still. There were no seals, and although orcas had been sighted a few miles to the west the previous day nothing was stirring out in the sound. The water felt pleasant if chilly, and for ten minutes or so I swam around in vigorous circles. Then my energy began to mellow. I wallowed in the water for a while, floating on my back, rolling over and watching the headlights of a car over on Rousay as it negotiated the island’s only road. Happy and comfortable, I relaxed to the extent that I almost fell asleep, drifting off like a baby in her mother’s arms. For how long I do not know, but something snapped me alert to find that the swell and gentle current had combined to ferry me a hundred metres eastwards. Parallel to the beach, into the curve of the bay; and I had only been carried a little out of my depth. But it was a warning not to get too complacent.

  *

  Just got back from the sea. Today was thick and dark, neither quite fog, nor mist nor cloud, but lumps of grey visible vapour under a low overcast, shifting and bumping between the hills and the water. Got into the sea well after sunset, stiff easterly whipping the waves into a rough-house, slap-your-face briny exuberance that left me thrilled and gasping. No birds calling, one solitary gull glimpsed against low murk, no seals, no shags. Stayed in until the sea and the sky were almost indistinguishable charcoal-purple. Car-lights came and went across the water on Rousay. Tide high and incoming, wind pushing the water and me towards the Atlantic. Stayed in 25 minutes, didn’t want to leave.

  *

  Inattention leading to hypothermia is one danger. Another is the call of the dark. I have a strong urge to swim out into the black water at dusk, and to keep swimming. If ever I were diagnosed with a terminal condition, untreatable cancer or motor neurone disease, this is what I would do. Every time I go into the sea I am rehearsing that moment; a reassurance, not only that the weapon is in my armoury, but also that it is regularly tested, oiled, primed, even if the safety catch stays on.

  How do we deal with that longing for the dark running like a hidden current below the frothy surface? Early on in his exploration of the human psyche, Freud offered the Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, as an explanatory mechanism for human behaviour: the idea that we all juggle a complex economy of pleasure and pain, that when healthy we are naturally drawn to the former, repelled by the latter.

  Of course we are. But it’s not always easy to decide which is which. And how do we draw the line between them?

  Freud balanced the pleasure principle with the reality principle: delayed gratification, adjusting your expectations of pleasure to the exigencies of the real world. There’s a prim, self-denying snobbery about the reality principle. Forgo the little, easy, cheap kick now in favour of the greater pleasure further down the line. Take it to extremes: forgo all pleasure now in favour of the joys of heaven.

  In introducing the third element of Thanatos, the death drive, to his psychic economy Freud allows for the idea that all organisms crave dissolution. Whereas pleasure and pain are united in intensity, Thanatos pushes us towards what John Donne calls ‘absence, darkness, death; things which are not’. But I’m not sure I can really distinguish readily between pleasure, pain, and oblivion; categorize them in Linnaean fashion as though they are separate species who cannot interbreed. Standing here waist-deep in the winter waters o
f Eynhallow Sound I experience intense sensation, but I could not tell you if it was pleasurable or painful, and in fact I now think it’s irrelevant. It is overwhelming, and that’s what matters. Overwhelm comes from a Middle English word meaning to overturn, there’s no implicit connection with water but the association has been there since the Middle Ages. Overwhelm is a word that seems to go naturally with boats and waves, perhaps because whelm also contains echoes of Old English wylm, meaning that which wells up. The Beowulf poet wrote of ýþum weól, wintres wylm, the waves welling up in the wylm of winter.

  Intense sensation can itself lead to being overwhelmed and sinking into oblivion, sensation so powerful that it shorts itself out, like shock. Oblivion is a fascinating word: its disputed etymology may come from lividus, giving us a dark, blue-black memory, one that has sunk into night. Or it may come from levis, smooth, like a surface from which the inscription has been chipped away. The word is replete with a masochistic comfort, a forgiveness even, inherent in being forgotten, in falling out of history and memory. The oblivion that comes after pushing the pleasure/pain boundary as far as you can, when the only way of reconciling the two supposed opposites is sleep.

  I think of sinking down through the layers of the sea, through the sunlit zone, the twilight zone, the midnight zone, the abyssal zone, and finally coming to eternal rest in the hadal zone, the underworld, the territory of the winter queen Persephone. All the sea in my viewshed here is sunlit: Eynhallow Sound, carved out a couple of million years ago by a Quaternary glacier, only goes down to around twenty metres. But the island of Eynhallow teeters on the brink. Westward, out in the Atlantic, the water is much deeper and if you keep heading out you will hit the Rockall Trench, which goes down to 3,000 metres, well into the abyssal zone, where there is never any light and the water is close to freezing. The sunlit and twilit zones are comparatively well understood, but below that the sea is still full of mysteries, and the grey seals, which I see almost every day, spend most of their lives unobserved and unobservable, oblivious to my curiosity, in the haaf, the deep sea.

  I have looked for consolatory meaning in work, in marriage, in faith, in poetry and finally here, shivering and almost naked, in my Speedo, in this liminal place, the waves battering me off balance. I take another couple of paces into the water. Pulses of cold go up my ribs; the muscles across my still-dry shoulders twitch and shiver.

  It is one thing to be drawn by the allure of solitude, another to embrace the idea of being forgotten. The sea represents that dark undertow which has always been a gravitational pull in my life, a response to every outward surge. I have often rejected it or left it unacknowledged, hurried past it with my eyes averted as I might some acquaintance rumoured to have committed an unspeakable deed, but it has always been there, like the still stretch of water on a surf beach that alerts us to the presence of a riptide.

  I think about my public, professional, social self, the careful construction of identity, passwords and PINs and photocards: the ephemera which we invest with so much value, the things we would save from a burning building. But in the end they’re nothing but rubbish. When I cleared out my parents’ house I allowed myself to keep two box-files of paper mementoes, one for my father, one for my mother: curling sepia baby photos, yellowing certificates, a wartime diary. The files sit on my shelf like ossuaries: the whole of their long lives reduced to these absurd sheaves of paper.

  Cold-sea swimming is the obliteration of self. The chipping away of carefully inscribed personality, the reduction of all my complexity to a bare, forked animal. This very annihilation is addictive. I cannot tolerate swimming pools any more: the water is dead; the chlorinated air unbreathable; the other swimmers too fast, too slow, always in my way. Pools and changing rooms bring me uncomfortably back to a social persona, a self-consciousness of the worst kind, whether my response to the people with whom I am sharing my space is cringing and apologetic, or brusquely out of my way.

  Even natural or semi-natural fresh water, like the ponds on London’s Hampstead Heath where I used to swim with my mother, or the lovely outdoor pools I visited last summer in St Gallen, in Switzerland, supplied with changing rooms and showers and boardwalks, but also thick with weed and fish and ducks: even these have an inert quality about them. I miss the brine and the buoyancy, the pump and throb of the waves, the tide, the knowledge that I could go into this water, here, and end up anywhere.

  I miss the battle, the day-to-day unpredictability that means one day’s in-driving tide, landward swell and easterly wind make for crazy, choppy cross-waves, and the gulls riding the storm; while the next day is hushed as for a funeral, all silent lull and ebb. Yesterday in the gale the kelp was one continuous mattress across the sand; today it lies in clumps; tomorrow the sand may stretch blank, like an unwritten page.

  I miss the awareness that there are creatures in the water that could eat me, even if they choose not to.

  Warm salt water doesn’t do it for me either. The tideless Mediterranean is like tepid soup – a playground, not a battlefield. Here in cold Eynhallow Sound, where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean reach their long wild fingers out to each other as though taking partners in a country dance, my awareness of self is profoundly altered, at once diffusing and contracting. It extends beyond my body, stretching out into wind and tide, my consciousness flowing and tugging this way and that. But my sense of who I am also withdraws deep into the core of my body as my blood leaves first my hands and feet, then my arms and my legs, the heart beating the retreat, commanding a strategic falling-back of the troops to protect my brain and spinal cord, my vital organs.

  In the water, there is only Now.

  *

  Magical swim. Wind brisk and mild, patchy cloud. In the water just before sunrise. To the west a rainbow arching from the wind turbines on Burgar Hill across to Eynhallow – an arch framing the gateway to the Atlantic. It started pink against pink clouds, took on the full spectrum as the sun lifted free of Arwick in a froth of golden cloud. Very active water: tide ebbing westerly, wind southerly, still a big swell from yesterday’s gale. A couple of hundred rooks filling the air with their zap-gun calls. Many plover flying low just above the water, sunrise in their wings.

  *

  Evie is a dispersed community of under a thousand people, in a few hundred houses, loosely strung out around the main road that snakes parallel to the coast. It is a triangular wedge of land running from the top of the peat-hill to the bottom of the ebb. The primary school has about fifty children. There is an old church, now being converted to holiday apartments, and a new church, and a shop. Evie, like the rest of mainland Orkney’s thirteen parishes, was probably laid out in its present form in the twelfth century, to provide maintenance for the new cathedral in Kirkwall and its canons. Evie is subdivided into townships composed of clusters of old farms; I live in Redland, triangulated by the farms of Flaws, Niggly and Quoys.

  The Evie coastline runs north-west to south-east interrupted by the promontory of Aikerness, which points north, curving up to the right of the Sands of Evie. In the late sixteenth century it was noted that Evie is a parish ‘where whales enter freely’. Apart from my beach, the coastline is formed of exposed slabs of Old Red Sandstone, laid down four hundred million years ago, just as the first lungfish were emerging on to the land.

  Evie, like every other old name in Orkney except for Orkney itself, is a Norse word, efja, meaning eddy, backwater, swirl. There’s another Evie parish – Evje – in Setesdal, in southern Norway. Our local efja is that turbulent rost, the tidal stream that divides to pass either side of Eynhallow, where the tide pours in from the Atlantic, compressed by Westness, over there on Rousay, and Costa, here on Mainland, whose cliffs drop over a hundred metres into the sea.

  Demographics. Geography. History. Geology. Toponymy. I hold up each of these lenses in turn and scry the view from my beach, seeking for better understanding. Am I so aware of Now in the sea because the landscape is so crammed with Then?

  The
first experimental big wind turbine to be connected to the UK grid was raised on Costa, back in 1951.

  It blew away.

  West beyond Costa there is the open Atlantic, nothing but distant, invisible and uninhabited Sule Skerry between us and Canada. But to the right of Costa’s dark hump, the island of Eynhallow blocks the view of the open ocean: no one lives there, either, but they used to. According to local lore Eynhallow used to be part of Hildaland, the hidden land, the territory of the otherworldly Fin-folk; some people say it was invisible then, others that it came and went, but all versions of the story agree that it was an Evie farmer, from Thorodale, who first staked a human claim to it, with salt, some say, or the sign of the cross, and fixed it where it is now.

  North beyond Eynhallow looms the dark bulk of Rousay – or Hrólfsey, named for an otherwise forgotten Norse colonist. The stretch of Rousay’s south-west coastline that I can see from here has perhaps the densest multi-period archaeological remains of anywhere in the British Isles. Shifting the gaze to the right along the Rousay shore, the view out eastwards along the sound is blocked by overlapping islands. Spearhead-shaped Wyre. There’s Egilsay, where St Magnus was butchered. And just a glimpse, over Egilsay’s shoulder, of Eday, where the pier was so damaged by last week’s gales that the population of around 150 is effectively cut off for the time being.