Swimming with Seals

by Victoria Whitworth

  Let’s start there.

  Pytheas’s work is lost, but he is quoted by later writers. Like Agricola four hundred years later, Pytheas came from the south of France and is said to have sailed right around Britain. He describes the island as essentially triangular with three promontories, Cantia (which is clearly Kent), Belerium (probably Land’s End) and, the most northerly, Orkas. Pytheas wrote in Greek, as did Diodorus, who picked up his description and passed it on: he too assumes Orkas projects out from northern Scotland. There is no hint here of islands. It’s as though they’re passing on some ancestral memory of the Mesolithic, before melting ice and sea-level rise turned a hilly plain into an archipelago.

  In the first century AD the mental map is redrawn to more accurate specifications. Pliny the Elder, who was killed when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, rewrites our name as a plural, ‘Orcades’, and he tells us for the first time that we are islands, ‘some forty in number’. Pliny and Tacitus were acquainted, and Agricola, to whose daughter Tacitus was married, was stationed in Britain from around AD 70, so we might suspect a vector of information here, though Pliny had been dead for twenty years by the time Tacitus got round to writing Agricola’s biography and describing the subjugation of those Orcades.

  Orcus is a Roman god of the dead. There are no myths attached to him, just a festering aura, a shudder: he feasts on the corpses of evil-doers. He has Greek antecedents: a demon called Horkos, one of the sons of Strife, whose job it is to pursue those who break their promises. Whether or not Pytheas or Pliny intended it, the name they perpetuated for these islands, hovering on the extreme edge of their vision, was one with very sinister associations. Orkas-Orcas-Orkus-Horkos: that echo must have resonated in the minds of their original audiences. One of Horkos’s siblings was Lethe, the goddess of oblivion, who gave her name to one of the five rivers that flow through the underworld kingdom of Hades and stolen Persephone.

  Orca is a generic Latin word for whale; it also means barrel or vase, referring to the animals’ sleek, streamlined rotundity. It delights me that Mousa, one of the Northern Isles matriarchs, is named for the best-preserved broch tower in Shetland: they share their lovely ergonomic curves.

  How can we be sure what the Picts called Orkney, and why? We don’t even know what they called themselves. The likelihood is that they had many different names, community by community, from Shetland down to Fife, and only a very select few would ever have referred to themselves as Pictish. Picti is Latin for the painted people. Like the demon-redolent Orkas, it’s a word that turns up in the works of Mediterranean writers long before we hear the first voices coming directly from these lands about which they were writing. Early medieval elites looked back to the classical world to give authority to their claims to kingship, ethnicity, statehood, some descent from the Roman world. They scoured the works of poets and historians in search of a name that resonated, from whom they could claim succession. Did the kings and clerics of seventh-century eastern Scotland read the Latin poetry that treated of wild Caledonia and the lands beyond the wall, and seize on the name ‘Picti’ as a label that could both unite these disparate tribes, and grant their rulers legitimacy and classical gravitas? There’s an almost indefinable quality that runs like DNA through early medieval identity, this search for Roman-ness, romanitas, a link both to the lost splendours of the Classical world and the Roman Empire, and to their present Rome of the popes and glorious churches. The name Picti tells us very little about the indigenous past of the people of eastern Scotland; it’s much more informative about their aspirations to membership of the European club of Christian kingdoms: a people who had never been forced into the old Roman Empire but wanting to claim a part of it, nonetheless. Maybe they encountered Orkas, Orcades in old texts too.

  The pod of orcas currently feeding in the Flow is a fair few miles round the coast of Mainland from the Sands of Evie, but they could swim those miles in a leisurely hour, and this stretch of water between Evie and Rousay is a good place for seeing them. Not long ago a pod of a dozen was sighted from the ferry that crosses between Rousay and the Mainland harbour of Tingwall, just down the road from here, and the captain turned the helm to follow them along Eynhallow Sound for twenty minutes before going back to his timetable.

  Spring and summer are the best time for orca-watching, but they are here in every season. A spate of headless seal corpses has been spotted this winter on local beaches, including one just below the Knowe of Stenso, the nearest broch mound to where I am now, visible just a couple of hundred yards along the shoreline to the west. It’s the end of the pupping season for the grey seals, and this is probably the work of rival bull seals, attacking the young who have only recently taken to the water. But orcas could also be responsible: although they’re after their winter food of herring at the moment, seals are the meal of choice of the Scottish–Icelandic orca community, and perhaps they have been concentrating on the nutritious brain and discarding the rest of the carcass. Floppy Fin and another young bull from the Northern Isles pod have been sighted a few times cruising for seals right here, off the Sands of Evie.

  When they catch one the water flowers red.

  Orcas don’t mistake people for seals. They’re very choosy about what they eat. Even if I looked more like a seal than I do, I’d probably still be safe: orcas don’t rely on sight to find their food. Instead, like all toothed cetaceans, orcas use sonar, sending out pulses of sound which they can focus with extraordinary precision, and use to distinguish between very small, and very similar, objects. It sounds like a stick rattling fast along railings. And their sonar doesn’t just bounce off the skin: the sound waves go right though the body, skin and fat, muscle and blood vessel, tendon, ligament and sinew, bone and marrow, heart and brain, describing the shape of every internal organ before returning their multi-layered message to the extraordinarily complex brain that sent out the first transmission. Orcas in the Pacific Northwest distinguish between their favourite food, the fatty Chinook salmon, and the other, similarly sized varieties of salmon with which the Chinook swim, based on the different echo-patterns of the various species’ swim bladders. The orca that might even now be scoping me out from the sunlit shallows of Eynhallow Sound understands my body in the way that an MRI scanner would: the information it’s garnering about me is the equivalent of thousands of histology slides. The orca already knows me inside out, without having to eat me first.

  Orca brains are huge, both absolutely and relative to their body size. They are deeply convoluted, like ours. The areas associated with speech, hearing and emotion in the human brain are massive in the orca’s, and the limbic brain in particular is much more complex than ours. Observers of wild and captive orcas emphasize their emotional range, their self-awareness, their ability to intuit the physical and emotional experiences of others, their extraordinary capacity for co-ordination. It has been suggested that an orca’s sense of identity lies in the group as much as the individual; that their capacity for emotional complexity, indicated by that limbic lobe, is tied into their echo-locating abilities, that they read each other for information about feelings as well as facts. If the sensation océanique involves a sense of unboundedness and the dissolution of the boundaries between self and other, then orcas are the sensation embodied.

  The orca knows me far, far better than I know myself.

  Back in September I was sitting in the onboard café on the big ferry as it chugged out of Stromness. I was watching the serried houses, tight and narrow, gable-end on to the sea, drop behind us to starboard as we left the harbour, peering idly out of the salt-scratched window at the familiar view, the great igneous lump of Brinkie’s Brae looming above the town. There was a black dot in the water, just off the shingle beach at the Point of Ness, below the campsite and the golf course and the path from which Anouk and I had seen Sule Skerry a couple of weeks earlier. A regular Polar Bear swimming place, though not one I go to very often, as it’s a chilly twenty minutes’ drive back home. It takes a lot to lure me away
from the Sands of Evie.

  The dot was moving fast, and in a straight line, in the shallow waters under the retaining wall of the car park. The current is strong here in Hoy Sound, strong enough to bring smaller boats heading against the tide to a standstill; the dot was too far away to see detail clearly: I assumed it was a seal being borne speedily along by the water. The ferry rounded the Point of Ness and turned west into the sound. There were no seals hauled out on the skerries. A couple of minutes later I saw the dot again, now much closer. I thought, That seal is fairly speeding along. Then, That seal’s head is very pointy. Then, and with a cold shock of revelation, a rib-tightening adrenal gush, It’s not a head, it’s a dorsal fin.

  Now, with a new understanding of what I was seeing, I could make out the rest of the fin beneath the water, and the dark, bullet-shaped cetacean bulk, and the white patches of cheek and saddle. And then I realized there was a second one, just beyond and ahead of the first, zooming along parallel to both ferry and shore, heading in the same direction as we were. I watched, heart pounding although I was high and dry and safe; my mouth hung open. No point in reaching for my camera: that fallible eye would only have perceived dark flyspecks, too far away for interest. But I did gasp, ‘Orca!’ to the elderly Orcadian lady eating her eggs and toast at the adjacent table. She looked up placidly and glanced shoreward. ‘Aye,’ she said, nodding, ‘that’ll be them.’ And she returned to her breakfast.

  The ferry began its turn towards the open Atlantic. The orcas continued parallel to the shore. I watched until their dark fins were indistinguishable from the jerky black shadows of the restless waves.

  *

  Air temp 2, stiff easterly breeze, ice on the puddles. I swam at 10 a.m. in pale grey-gold light just as the sun was lifting free of hill and cloud. The sea was contradictory, its different energies all playing different games: a very high and running tide, the choppy swell, a fast current that pulled me over the concealed breakwater before I realized it. Chilly and exhilarating, wrestling the waves. No seals, a smattering of rooks, one circling shag.

  *

  The second time I put my head under the water it is just as cold, just as shocking. I surface and gasp, perfectly timed for a rogue wavelet to smack me in the face, dousing eyes, nose and open mouth with brine. My sinuses flood, and I choke and splutter, very glad I am still close to the shore, only just out of my depth. The physiological response to sudden immersion in cold water is very like that of a panic attack, in which your heart pounds, your breath shortens, you are hyper-aware of perceived threat. There are doctors who recommend cold-water swimming as a therapy for patients who present with depression or anxiety. Replicating the symptoms of a panic attack in cold water is a valuable step towards taking back control.

  I can feel the cold brine trickling down the caves, hollows and tunnels that lurk above and behind my palate, deep within my skull. The sea, inside me now as well as outside, gives me a wholly new, three-dimensional awareness of my body. In the sea, I realize how limited an understanding of the human body I have, both in terms of my everyday encounters with other members of my species, and also as a result of my background as a specialist in early medieval death, burial and afterlife. In the first capacity I perceive the human body primarily as skin; in the second as bone. The exterior surfaces of the other people whom I encounter in my own, embodied existence; and the excavated skeletons, always elegant, always beautiful, that I meet through my work.

  I’ve never had much cause to ponder the detail of what lies between skin and bone.

  But over the last four years of sea swimming I have come to a new appreciation of how much there is, in between, and what some of it does. How a few extra pounds of insulation, subcutaneous fat, blubber – bioprene, as cold-water swimmers call it, as opposed to artificial neoprene – can make all the difference to my ability to tolerate, even enjoy, the cold. How the body in cold water instantly reroutes blood to the vital organs. I can feel it ebbing drop by rapid drop as the vessels constrict, retreating first from the expendable hands and feet, then calves and forearms, and then from quadriceps and hamstrings, biceps and triceps, glutes and lats, as though it were mapped out for me on an anatomy model. The way that the shivering starts deep in the core and pulses outward. Sometimes when I leave the water I cannot straighten my hands: the little fingers stick out at an unnatural angle because the deep muscle tissue of my forearms is so contracted with the cold. Will I be safe to drive even the short distance home?

  And yes, I will.

  Or, at least, overconfident with happy-hormones, I believe I will.

  Because at the same time as all this is going on my system is coursing with joy, crackling with energy. I feel every little electrical jolt as my nerves high-five across the synapses. The cold-water plunge brings me so close to the pleasure/pain boundary that my body reacts with the painkillers it keeps stowed away for crisis: dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. Endolphins: more cold-water-swimmer slang, the happiness hormones that the sea engenders. I can visualize my endolphins so clearly, tiny, silver-blue and bottle-nosed, charging exuberantly up vein and down artery.

  Never mind Freud’s Lustprinzip: the word that comes to mind for this sensation is jouissance. Enjoyment, joy, rapture, orgasm. It’s a term from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the card Lacan threw down to counter Freud and the penny-pinching accountancy of his pleasure principle. It gets left in French because there is no English word that takes pleasure so close to the edge of the unbearable.

  *

  I swam soon after 9 in sinister blood-orange light. Air temp 2 C but no wind. Another very high tide. The sea was much quieter than yesterday but there was still a big rolling surf breaking on the beach, strong enough to knock me sideways. The constant cloud of spindrift around Westness and Costa suggests there’s some big Atlantic weather brewing. One snub-nosed common seal showed himself briefly but clearly had business elsewhere. A flock of around 400 curlews streamed low over the waves, giving their swooping cry. I emerged glowing and exhilarated to find all the flooded fields reflecting back the orange light.

  *

  The third time I put my head under the water, there is no brain freeze. I am moving into an altered state, at home in the water. I open my eyes and take in the underwater deepgreen for one, two, three long strokes. The world below the surface is blurry because the refractive power of the vitreous fluid of the human eye is almost identical to that of water, but I can still perceive the kelp and thong-weed swaying just below me, and the murky bulk of the breakwater. My heart-rate has slowed. I am more comfortable. Now that my head is as wet and cold as the rest of me, my body is achieving a new equilibrium: all the receptors in my sensory neurons, top to toe, are taking in the same information. After the third ducking my skin and brain and muscles can make sense of what is happening to me in a different way.

  Now I can start to swim for pleasure, to stretch out, relax, spend more time immersed. Sea and air are quiet enough that I might swim out to the buoys marking the lobster-creels, not far at all but still something I hesitate to do on my own in the winter. It’s swimming out into the bay, rather than entering the water, that often attracts the seals, and I wonder if even now they are watching me, waiting for me to make the first move. ‘No place of habitation,’ Donne called the sea, ‘but a passage to our habitations.’ I disagree. Sure, I can’t call the sea home as a selkie or an orca would, but how else can I describe this sense of release, this oceanic sensation of settling back into a safe and familiar space?

  Familiar, but always capable of surprise.

  One autumn dusk I went for a second swim as the bright day was giving way before an ominous wall of grey from the south-west. As I rounded the corner by the old stone hut I was arrested by a flash of brown movement: an otter, trundling across the sand. It climbed on to the breakwater, loped to the far end and slithered into the water. I followed it, swimming cautiously behind. It swam, surfaced, dived, bobbed up again repeatedly, for about ten minutes, maybe fifteen metres from m
e. Then, a fish flapping silver in its jaws and its head held high, it zoomed for the deserted and darkening beach. I lay prone in the shallows, shivering as my core temperature dropped but unwilling to frighten the otter by emerging, and utterly rapt. The otter ate its fish in neat bites and then groomed itself, lazy and prolonged, lifting its triangular head from time to time to acknowledge me with calm courtesy before finally disappearing into the grass. Not interested in me, not wide-eyed and eager in the manner of a seal, just letting me know that it was aware of me. Probably a young male, recently evicted from the holt and setting out on his own.

  In John Heath-Stubbs’s poem, ‘St Cuthbert and the Otter’, the two creatures, man and otter, embody different kinds of love. Cuthbert stands deep in the cold water, eyes fixed on the stars, chanting his prayers, ignoring the rolling shingle that bruises his feet. Afterwards, Cuthbert’s otter, even friendlier than my one, comes out of the sea to warm his feet. She is among the numerous creatures that bear witness to his sanctity. As with many saints, and centuries before St Francis, community with the natural world is an index of Cuthbert’s sinless condition, like Adam and Eve before the Fall. In Teviotdale an eagle miraculously brings him a fish, and he courteously shares it with her. He chides the ravens who steal the thatch from his Farne hermitage to eke out their nests, and in compensation they bring him a lump of lard with which his guests can dubbin their boots, keeping their feet warm and dry as the otters do for Cuthbert.

  For Cuthbert love is harsh and remote. Love may make the world go round, but he encounters it not in pleasure but in numbness and pain. Whether I’m reading Bede’s eighth-century account or Heath-Stubbs’s twentieth-century version, I get the shivers myself imagining Cuthbert in the cold sea, voicing his wishes for his people. His penitential vigil is a small-scale re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, through which the saint hopes to convert his Northumbrian flock. He wants them to abandon their doomed heroes, like Beowulf, for a hero who can bring them redemption. Cuthbert’s focus is on the silent sky, not the living sea and its creatures.