Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Shift south-eastwards, look back on to Mainland, and your eyes sweep across Aikerness and Gurness, an Iron Age broch with later, Pictish houses and Viking burials inserted into its matrix; up to Hammars Hill, where two hundred ravens nest, to the farm above our house, and to Burgar Hill, where there is a loch frequented by red-throated divers. The whole skyline is ornamented by endlessly turning wind turbines of all sizes from the domestic to the epic. And when your eyes return to Costa, whose dark bulk forms the boundary between Evie and the adjacent parish of Birsay, the panorama is complete. I stand at the heart of a natural amphitheatre of hills and islands, like the Colosseum, and this sandy floor is the arena on which I wage my battles with wind and water. An image comes to mind of the retiarius, the Roman gladiator who fought almost naked, armed only with weighted net and trident, like Neptune, god of the sea.

  The Romans had only a tangential relationship with Orkney, though they claimed its conquest. Late in the first century AD the Roman general Agricola circumnavigated Britain. His son-in-law, Tacitus, who wrote his biography, asserts that Agricola was the first to prove that Britain is an island, and that he both discovered and conquered the ‘Orcades’. Neither of these statements is likely to be true, but he was probably here. Perhaps his fleet came through these very waters of Eynhallow Sound. It’s easy to imagine the people who live in and around those eleven broch towers putting aside plough or sickle, coming down here to my beach and watching – hostile, curious, thrilled or fearful, babies on hips and spindles idle in their hands – as the Roman ships go by, much as I watch the Atlantic-bound fishing boats chug past in the early morning, or the lobstermen checking their creels. And Agricola standing in the bow, with the red sails flapping as his helmsman struggles with the prevailing westerly, his ship fighting the wilful efja, wind and salt stinging his eyes. A man from the tideless Côte d’Azur, gripping the rail and staring thoughtfully at the massive, tapering towers of the brochs, and the little dark figures on the beach: What can I do with you? Are you worth it? Behind his impassive face he does his cost–benefit analysis: tots up men and materiel, the wild waters he has just come through, the hundreds of miles of mountains, the hostile tribes to the south.

  The Roman conquest of Orkney had much the same effect as planting an American flag on the moon. The Orcades were at the end of the earth: subjugating them was a powerful symbol to the Romans, even if the local people never noticed they had come under the yoke. But at the Broch of Gurness, over to my right, two fragments of a Roman amphora were found in 1929. It is of a type that had fallen out of use a generation or more before Agricola sailed through, and it hints at a different and more complex interaction. A gift of wine, perhaps, or olive oil, to soothe these troubled waters.

  Back in the here and now, in the sluggish January dawn, I walk further out into the water. There are conflicting messages battering me from the ebb that draws me onwards and the current that pulls me sideways. My body is flashing urgent signals that it’s too cold, that I’ve already been in too long, gone in too deep: I ignore them all, much as I would a toddler pestering for sweets at the supermarket checkout. Giving in is not an option.

  The frantic, gale-threshed tide of the last few days has churned the seabed and it is much stonier than usual. Normally I am immune to the hi-tech charms of neoprene socks, but today they would have been a welcome protection against this sharp, unstable surface. My bare feet are numbing already, but I keep my awareness in them, spreading my toes, letting my weight settle on the ball, lowering arch and heel, pushing off again from my big toe. Plantigrade: walking flat-footed and upright.

  My hands are down by my sides: it takes another conscious effort to force my fingertips to trail the surface. Like the protagonist in The Wanderer, that poem with which I have an endless tussly love-hate relationship, I am stirring the rime-cold sea with my hands – ‘hreran mid hondum hrim-cealde sæ’. Scholarly editions of the poem will tell you that stirring with hands is a periphrasis for rowing, but that’s not what the words say. It sounds as though he’s getting his skin wet. Knuckles, palms, wrists: the advancing cold sends a shiver up my still-dry arms and across my shoulder blades. Hands and wrists are fine-tuned to temperature, and I theorize that the sooner they’re wet and cold, with their thermoreceptors sending alarm signals via my sensory neurons to the brain, the sooner my whole body will adjust to the sea.

  *

  SUCH a good swim this evening. 20 minutes – cold and grey, air only 4 C so sea warmer than air. Lots of seals, bright-eyed and curious and curiouser and coming right into the shallows, and a raft of eider ducks, and two swans.

  *

  When I had been sea swimming in Orkney for nearly three years, I finally had the chance to visit St Columba’s island, Iona. The first thing I packed was my swimming costume.

  I was there for a week in late spring, teaching a course about Columba to a group of international mature students. At least half of them were ordained ministers in one church or another, and it was an exhilarating change to have a class who already understood the tenets of Christianity. There’s no need to try to explain who Jesus was to this lot, before we get stuck into the minutiae of the Book of Kells. No need to clarify that the Book is written in Latin, to students who can also read Greek and Hebrew. The weather was alternately battering and luminous. Corncrakes grated from every clump of reeds, and the island was swarming with bird-watchers.

  We were staying in the abbey, as the course was hosted by the Iona community. Everyone was expected to do their bit with the cooking and the housework: I didn’t mind the tasks but I found the mass socializing claustrophobic and escaped whenever I could. A new friend and I curled up in her sitting room with glasses of wine as she told me the gory details of her divorce and how, for all the trauma, her husband dumping her was turning out to be the gateway to adventure. I sat for hours in the abbey’s little museum, watching the artificial light of the son et lumière playing over the great stone crosses, and then outside, contemplating cloud-filtered sunlight and spatters of rain on St Martin’s cross, still in its original socket after twelve centuries. Long walks – or as long as can be managed on that tiny island – over rough tussocky grass to tiny coves. Lots of time for thinking about what was going horribly wrong at home, but at that point I still had my hands over my ears, shouting shut up, I can’t hear you! at the doom-laden voices in my head.

  I asked at the abbey about swimming, and they said to go north, about fifteen–twenty minutes’ walk, up to Traigh Ban nam Manach, the White Strand of the Monks. Where the Viking massacre was.

  White sand, polished granite shingle, the green tufts of the machair, views over the sound to Mull in one direction, Coll and Tiree in the other.

  The first time I went for a dip, and the second, I coincided with another new friend, a member of the Iona community who had been swimming at this beach for twenty years. The tide was coming in across flat sands punctuated by outcrops of rock resembling prostrate dragons turned to stone in their sleep. So unlike Orkney, with its flat-bed sedimentary sandstone. Most of Orkney is four hundred million years old, although the metamorphic outcrop in which Stromness nestles is a billion or so years older than that, once a granite island in Lake Orcadie, lying a little further south of the equator than Nairobi does today. These Iona stones are a billion years older again than the Stromness granite, more than half as old as the planet. The sea was fierce at Traigh Ban nam Manach, pinched between the northernmost tip of Iona and an off-shore islet, Eilean Annraidh. The water between is the Caolas Annraidh. The names mean the Island of Storm, and the Strait or Kyle of Storm. Gaelic names are enchantingly exotic to someone used to Norse Orkney.

  I am looking at that beach now on Google Earth, marvelling at my own stupidity. Those first two times, I could feel the cross-cutting waves coming in from either side. I could see the rocks. But I could also see David, merrily splashing about. I followed him. The sea was wild and glorious.

  The third time I went, I was alone. I’d woken
up at dawn feeling heartbroken and numb and the sea was the drug I needed. There were long hours before breakfast, the sky was barely light, and the sea was full, the sands largely hidden. I had dutifully signed myself out in the abbey guest-book – name, time, destination – jibbing a little, reminded of being back at boarding school. The heavens were clear, the air cold. I left my towel and robe above the high-tide line and padded towards the water. I could see the big swell, the waves driving in from both left and right. They didn’t put me off. I’d been here the previous day, and the one before that. I was feeling better already, distracted by wind and the promise of sunshine in the paling sky, thrilled all over again by being on Columba’s island.

  Iona is such a mythologized place, one I had visited in my imagination so many times, that it was hard, in that silvery pre-dawn light, to believe I was really there. The complicated journey from Orkney had been a pilgrimage (fly to Inverness, drive down the Great Glen, ferry from Oban to Mull, bus across Mull, ferry from Fionnphort to Iona) and the fulfilment of a desire which had been brewing for decades. Back at home I had been writing a book chapter about the relics of St Columba, their importance in England as well as Scotland and Ireland, and why I think a stone cross from tenth-century York alludes to his cult.

  Columba’s bones were lost from here long ago, whether to the Vikings or to the Reformation, or to other churches: there is just a hollow space at the heart of Iona now, beneath a rebuilt chapel where his shrine once stood. I have been struggling for years to understand the iconography of his main relic, the Book of Kells. Holding intense late-night online conversations with like-minded obsessives about the meaning of a single tiny purple cat in the margin. Poring over the digital version of Kells at ever greater magnification, seeing it in pixelated detail that its makers could never have imagined, getting lost in that rabbit hole, that outlandish, carnivalesque vortex. No other manuscript even comes close.

  This is the clutter at the forefront of my mind, this May morning on Traigh Ban nam Manach; these are the things that seem so terribly important. Being on Iona at last feels like being in Narnia, Middle-earth, some fantasy made virtual reality. This is not the solid world of pain and death. Bad things can’t happen.

  The water is cold, but not shockingly so. I wade in confidently, midway between two of the dragon stones, the sand firm, the waves powerful, rocking me back on my heels. Knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep, and I start swimming, still well within my depth. I strike out a little, trying to keep to the mid-point between those jagged rocky outcrops. I’m struggling to remember what the beach looked like at low tide: whether there were other rocks which now lurk concealed.

  The water is powerful. I have been distracted by the surface movement: the waves coming from two directions, the Caolas Annraidh and the Sound of Mull, interleaving each other like a pack of cards shuffled by a casino croupier; the swell which looks mountainous now I am in the water. I hadn’t realized the force of the undertow.

  And I should have. I could plead self-indulgent misery, or poncy scholarly musings, or schoolgirl excitement, but there is simply no excuse. Given the bulk of water visibly moving inwards I knew perfectly well as I walked down the beach that the same quantity would have to be moving out again. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I had seen the swell beginning to shoal as it entered the shallower, narrower space between the rocks. Confinement forces the incoming waves to slow down, and their dynamism has to go somewhere. A wave compensates by getting both higher and deeper before it breaks, its energy cresting and plunging downward in wild kinesis, dragging and swirling the stones, sand and shells on the seabed, and then pouring back out the way it came, forced down by the next wave coming in on top. The science of describing the behaviour of incoming waves is problematic enough, trying to force their complex, non-linear patterns into neat categories – they spill, or surge, or collapse – but the turbulent eddy after the wave has broken is truly chaotic, and scientific language also breaks down. My brain had been processing all this without giving it enough conscious attention. Time to wake up.

  Waves are cascading across me from two directions, but the combined force of the water is flowing back out in one direction only, the one in which I am swimming, midway between the rocks. An undertow – even the most powerful – can only last as long as the next incoming wave, but this is a steady hauling, and even though I am still in my depth I can’t keep my footing. I am falling, tumbling, being buffeted, smacked in the face, choked by brine, being pulled mercilessly away from the beach.

  This isn’t just the familiar shove and tug of undertow. It’s a rip current.

  And suddenly I am really frightened.

  I can’t swim against this; it’s too strong. Oh, I know the theory: swim to the side of the rip, they’re usually narrow. But the rocks are there.

  Or let the rip carry you until its force has dissipated, then swim out of it and find a different way back to the beach. But allowing myself to go with the flow would mean being carried into even less familiar water, out towards Staffa and Ulva. I don’t know what currents there might be beyond the rocks; there’s no one else around; the sun hasn’t risen yet.

  Maybe I’m not as much in love with oblivion as I thought.

  I fight diagonally in a gasping front crawl, my arms ploughing the resistant water. I am making headway, all my attention focused on regaining the sand.

  And a lateral wave slams me into the rocky outcrop on the right-hand side of the beach.

  I never saw it coming.

  It’s rough stuff, this Lewisian gneiss; sedimentary and igneous deposits that have been melted and re-formed so often that their original identities have been lost. Among the oldest rocks on Earth, they are part of the crystalline basement that forms the continental crust but is rarely visible, usually buried deep beneath sedimentary layers. Here on Iona though, they break through: the bones of ancient continents.

  I am already winded. This collision smacks the last breath out of me. It doesn’t hurt, though.

  The wave’s recoil pulls me away from the rocky surface. I flail, and look over my shoulder to see another mountain about to break, its avalanche of bubbles already toppling.

  Slam. The wave picks me up and hurls me against the gneiss, rough as a cheese grater. I am still shocked from the last impact. I slide down the rock with the foaming backwash.

  Just now, I would promise anyone anything. Lord of Heaven, save me. Our Lady Star of the Sea, pray for me. St Columba, hold out your hand. I am caught in an endless vortex like the spirals and interlace of the Book of Kells, and I have a sudden image of the Book where it is now, in Trinity College Dublin Library, in a darkened room, lying in its glass coffin like the body of a saint.

  I am gulped down, sucked into the belly of another great green wave. The swell feels Alpine, Himalayan, as I look up to see it toppling mindlessly down on to me. This time I am dragged along the face of the rock, and I manage to grab, and hang on, my fingers worming frantically into crevices, hauling my bodyweight behind them, a blind survival instinct, Freudian libido in action.

  Hand over hand, I monkey-crawl along the rock and on to the White Strand of the Monks. The sun is just rising in the north-east, flooding sand and rock with pink light. I am shaking. There is blood mixed with salt water dripping pink and red, running from gashes that run from wrist to elbow. Classic defence wounds. Blood drips on to the sand and instantly disappears. The fronts of my thighs are also deeply scraped and bleeding. Later, in the privacy of my little abbey cell, when I finally peel off my swimming costume, I will find my abdomen excoriated and raw, although the Lycra is undamaged. How much blood has the pale sand of Traigh Ban nam Manach swallowed, since Christmas night in 986 when the abbot and fifteen monks were cut down here by Vikings?

  But that’s later.

  Just now I am standing, shuddering, wanting my mother, a friend, some authority figure to put an arm round me, scoop me up and carry me home. In the water I struggled valiantly for what felt, at lea
st, like my very life. I will never forget how utterly helpless I was in that moment when the backlash of one wave grated me over the rock while the next green mountain was already building. How much does a wave weigh? (Too much, is the answer.) Then, I was fighting to stay alive. Now, I want oblivion, I want darkness, the black velvet of general anaesthetic. I want to fall asleep in the back of the car and wake in my own bed, some kindly adult having carried me up the stairs.

  After a few minutes the blood stops flowing so freely. I return to the water’s edge and wash my arms and legs. I put my robe back on, my skin flinching from the roughness of its towelling, and my flip-flops. I stumble the twenty minutes back to the abbey.

  Everyone else is still asleep.

  The next day I return to Traigh Ban nam Manach. Early afternoon, at the lowest point of the tide. It is a beautiful day. There are other people around, young lovers basking on a dragon rock. Dog-walkers. The sands stretch endlessly. The sea is calm, placid even; it looks warm. I go to the other end, the north-western end of the beach where there is a shelving pool, sandy-bottomed, weedy, opening out to the strait. There are gulls bobbing on the water. Salt water stings my scraped skin: agony, like the school nurse putting iodine on a graze. The sea loves me again. I swim to the end of the pool and look at the fast-moving waters of the Caolas Annraidh, only a few feet ahead.

  St Columba, pray for me.

  *

  A dawn of flat grey calm, the silky surface broken only by two distant, indifferent seals cruising past towards Eynhallow. Such clear water: I could stand chest-deep and gaze at the winkles and burnished top shells around my feet. A hermit crab was playing super-safe, wearing a top shell and hiding in a sea-washed Ponds Cold Cream jar.

  *

  I am writing this in the winter, grasping after my memories of summer. An almost impossible task, down here in the abyss, to remember the weeks when you feel as though you’re half made of light, when the sun is warm on wet shoulders and the skies are alive with swallows over the fields, terns over the waves. In winter the cold of the water drives me in on myself: in summer I expand to the kindly horizon.