Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  The blending cadence of waves and thoughts. It sounded so much like some of the sensations I had experienced. But in this trance the lookout misses the whale he had been watching for. The crew curse him. And I missed the turn-off for my campsite. I drove ten kilometres too far and had to turn back.

  ‘What’s that doing in the car?’ was the first thing Andy said. My guide turned out to be a gangly Yorkshireman. I have a lazy habit of just folding down the back seat of the car and sliding in my kayak.

  ‘Break hard and it’ll go shooting through the windscreen, if it doesn’t take your head off first,’ he protested. ‘Strap it on the roof!’

  It seems I’m always thinking, but never paying attention.

  The following morning, after we’d run our first river together, Andy told me, ‘Well, I’m glad you can paddle. I was worried yesterday when you got out of the car and I saw that miserable stoop you have.’

  The Scafell Syndrome

  PATIENTS WITH A pelvic pain condition, remarks Dr Wise, will also tend to suffer from irritable bowel syndrome. It was one of the observations in A Headache in the Pelvis that convinced me its authors knew a thing or two more than your average urologist whose thoughts never stray beyond the urinary tract. I had been afflicted by this bowel syndrome myself from time to time. But never more so than on kayaking trips. You get up around six, knowing you’re going to be doing a serious river, and at once you need a dump. You need two dumps, three, even four. Not the runs, real dumps. Around seven thirty, satisfied that you can have no more to give, you laugh and joke as you strap the kayaks on the roof-rack, only to find, as the river comes into view, roaring over a steep rapid, that you absolutely must dump again!

  This is a serious problem if you’ve already put your wetsuit on.

  And your dry cag.

  And your spray deck.

  Andy keeps a small plastic beach spade in his van. ‘Bury your business and burn the loo paper, mate,’ he sniffs grimly, handing me a lighter as well. He is concerned that river approaches are becoming minefields of human shit. Germans are the worst, he assures me. ‘They lay their cables right at the launch spot.’ I adventure into the bushes and invariably find that others have been before me. Without the spade and lighter.

  Is this fear pure and simple, this repeated urge to go? There are so many things I am genuinely afraid of: mountain climbing, sky diving, hang gliding, bungee jumping, anything to do with heights. Nor would you ever catch me potholing. But however many dumps I may need before a river run, I am always eager to be on the water. If I’m afraid of anything, it’s that I’ll make a fool of myself.

  On the second day we headed up to Switzerland to do Scuol gorge, one of the higher sections of the Inn. It had been raining all night and the river would be swollen. I was curious to see whether, by waking early and fitting in an hour’s paradoxical relaxation before the drive, I might overcome this bowel-syndrome embarrassment, which I now suspected was another manifestation of the whole tension/adrenalin problem.

  The plan worked. After forty-eight hours away from family, university, newspapers, books, text messages and email, it was already easier to focus on physical sensation and keep words at bay. Waking at six, sorting myself out in the tent with a cylindrical kit bag under my knees, I found I was breathing deeply and steadily almost at once. The various tensions – face, forearms, thighs – rose like prompt pupils to the register. I ticked them off one by one, had my breakfast, made my normal bathroom trip, then . . . nothing. There were the usual pains, of course, but in the background, subdued. I felt fine.

  Until we saw the river.

  More than any guide I’d been with, Andy was making sure we inspected each tough stretch of water from the bank before we started. He knew all the paths and tracks to vantage points whence you could see the river swirling in an S through walls and rocks, or plunging between boulders into a gorge. At the bottom of Scuol, just before the get-out, the river tilts and slides to the left, crashing against a high cliff, so that for twenty metres or so the only passage takes the form of a furious wave boiling back at you from the rock wall.

  Something shifted in my intestines.

  There are three tough rapids on Scuol. Naturally one inspects from the bottom up as one drives up river to the launch spot. The first rapid, which we thus inspected last, has to be faced just a couple of minutes into the run. Too soon. The river narrows from the left to pour over a step of about a metre while a spur of rock jutting from the cliff on the right adds a cushion wave that you have to miss. As you go down into the rough stuff beneath the step – and you must hit it at the exact spot – you have an undercut rock wall to your right that you don’t want to be anywhere near. To make it trickier, just before you can get to the rapid you have to punch through two standing waves, rather like permanent sea breakers, with the result that, even if you’ve seen it properly, your chances of being on course for that sweet spot are not good.

  No sooner were we in the water than I screwed up. My mind was super-concentrated, but my body seemed stiff, resentful almost of this excited preparation and hyperawareness. The arms were reluctant. Hips and thighs were on strike. As the roar of the rapid approached, I knew what was going to happen. The standing waves knocked me off course. The cushion wave flipped me. I was flushed through the rapid upside down, caught my head on Andy’s boat as I tried to roll up – he was desperately trying to grab me – then took a nasty swim full of knocks and scrapes that tore chunks out of my knuckles. It was disappointing. I was breathing heavily.

  ‘Let’s do it again,’ I said.

  Andy advised against. I must be shaken up, he thought. The water was icy. It would be hard work carrying the boats back. Why not warm up on the next section, which was busy enough.

  ‘I want to do it again.’

  We tramped back through rocks and undergrowth, cumbersome boats on our shoulders, paddles in our hands. I hate walking any distance in a wetsuit. Its tight rubber chafes. As we passed the rapid, I asked for more exact instructions. As if that were the problem. We studied the standing waves blocking the approach, the sweet spot between the cushion wave and boulder. It looked clear enough from the bank, but I knew that once back on the water everything would be bigger, more violent, more complex, and, above all, tremendously fast.

  There’s no pause button before a rapid.

  Andy insisted on a few stretching exercises, then we launched. Sure enough, I was disorientated. Waves rose, fell, surged, broke. There were stones invisible from the bank. The river accelerated with ruthless purpose, the noise swelled to a roar. Why do I always feel a temptation, at these moments, to relinquish control, to let the water have its way?

  ‘Paddle!’ Andy yelled. ‘Fucking paddle!’

  My body responded, but as if to Andy, not to my own will. My wrist planted a firm stroke in the second wave. My thigh kicked into it. Suddenly I was present. I’d arrived. I found the sweet spot, held the boat upright through the chaos and ploughed into the calm of the big eddy beyond.

  ‘Did it!’ I yelled. ‘Did it!’

  Andy shook his head. ‘You tense up,’ he said. ‘You stopped paddling.’

  For the rest of the morning I was tensing up for that corkscrew wave along the cliff at the bottom of the run. There is a wonderful spot at the deepest point of Scuol where, with vertical rock walls rising hundreds of feet on both sides, you can beach the boats in a sort of alcove and climb a stone stairway to a café on a terrace perched over the river. The place was very pretty that morning with a beam of sunlight among geraniums on white tablecloths and it felt odd to sit there in our damp kit. Andy, I realised, was trying to get something going with the waitress and found it difficult to pay attention to my questions about how to tackle that last rapid.

  ‘Relax,’ he complained. ‘Check the scenery.’

  Did he mean the mountain landscape, or the handsome curves of the blonde bending to serve? He told her in broad Yorkshire that she was looking very cheerful today. She smiled and said somet
hing about das Wetter. I asked at what angle I should approach the wall.

  ‘You’re so verbal,’ Andy observed when the girl went to another table. ‘Just look hard at the water and go.’

  ‘Please, talk me through it.’

  He sighed and arranged coffee cups, spoons and biscuits to show the various rocks upstream of the feature. I repeated everything carefully.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ he nodded. ‘Still, we’re not there now, are we, mate? We’re here, in the café. Enjoy.’

  Handing him change as we left, the waitress smiled a twinkling aufwiedersehen, but Andy still couldn’t find the courage to ask for her phone number. I couldn’t see his problem. It looked to me like she would have jumped at it.

  To each his own anxieties.

  Before the rapid, we got out and climbed through a scrub of boulders and beech trees to look again. Despite being extremely tense, as if before some crucial exam, I didn’t need a pee, I didn’t need a dump. I was beyond all that. ‘Don’t tell me anything. I’ll just follow you down,’ I told him.

  The wave coming off the wall flipped me on impact. The underwater rush was astonishing. The whole river funnelled through a passage less than two metres wide. As soon as the worst had happened, I relaxed and rolled up easily, hit the wave again and flipped again, then rolled up safe and sound in a deep pool at the bottom.

  ‘Head-ruddering,’ was Andy’s only comment, ‘is always better than swimming.’

  That night was miserable. I had a big plastic bottle with me in the tent to avoid walks through wet grass to the loos. Every half-hour I had to kneel to pee in it. It took concentration. I had hung a torch from the apex of the tent and knelt in its yellow glow. The bottle filled slowly. By four in the morning I had the full array of symptoms. After another day on the river, the last night was even worse.

  This trip has set me back months, I realised, driving away from the campsite at the end of the holiday. So why do I do it? The link between excitement and pain was all too clear now; one way or another, writing or canoeing, I got tense during the day and paid for it at night.

  On the other hand, despite the soreness, bruised knuckles and broken sleep, I did feel refreshed. All the little niggles of home life, the small battles and bureaucracy at the university, the labour and sometimes tedium of writing, had been swept away. On the last day, two tough rivers had been run without a swim. Or a dump! Even Andy had had words of congratulation.

  But shouldn’t I be able to get the benefits of this physical activity without the pains? Andy was at ease on the water. His body responded naturally to every fluid alteration. On one occasion he had paddled down a rapid backwards so he could watch me following. My body in contrast seemed only to be there, really there, intermittently. Sometimes the mental impression I had of the water was so strong that my physical faculties downed tools. Then it was as though the body was a marionette without a puppet-master. I was swept away.

  Joining the autobahn near Innsbruck, I slotted in the Moby-Dick cassette but couldn’t listen. The question demanded an answer: Why do I do this dangerous sport? I ejected the tape and repeated the question out loud. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re so verbal,’ Andy had said. ‘Just look and go.’ On the last day, when I hit a hole that we had planned to avoid, he told me I should try contact lenses. ‘You wear glasses, normally, don’t you?’ He had the impression I didn’t really see the river properly. ‘You have to really see it,’ he said. ‘You’re not seeing. You just listen to me describing it.’

  Was it an eyesight problem? When my body did click in, it was wonderful, like finding the accelerator on some powerful machine. About half an hour into a run my hips and back would suddenly be there, intensely present, moving with a sure, flexible, intuitive knowledge. They took command. The conscious mind gave way to a sensation of pure focus. Then I could do anything.

  It wasn’t an eyesight problem.

  I drove in silence, up to the Brenner Pass, then down into Italy, the Dolomites elegantly lofty in the haze to my left. Looking at the high slopes, I began to feel the pressure of some fact, or idea, that was trying to join the debate. A few years ago, working with a thesis student who was translating nineteenth-century accounts of mountaineering, I had come across Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of his bizarre descent of Scafell in the Lake District in 1802, supposedly the earliest written account of recreational rock climbing.

  Coleridge, I remembered, had been my first really literary love when I was around fifteen, though of course our schoolteachers had not told us about Scafell. The first literary essay I wrote, in an exercise book on lined paper, was about his poem ‘Frost at Midnight’.

  So why was this relevant? In the car, I tried to summon up the details. Coleridge, an intellectual, almost always in poor health, an overweight dreamer, ‘indisposed to all bodily activity’, boasted that when walking in the mountains he liked to do a climb or descent without bothering to follow a path. Up or down, he just went for it. On Scafell this got him into trouble.

  I shook my head. If there was a reason why I was remembering this, I couldn’t see it.

  Back in Verona, I Googled the story. Coleridge had felt constricted at his cottage home with wife and child and went walking to get relief. He wrote about his adventures in a letter to the woman he was really in love with, Sara Hutchinson. He liked dangerous walks, he told her, by rivers and waterfalls, on stormy days under heavy rain. ‘I have always found this stretched and anxious state of mind favourable,’ he says, ‘to depth of pleasurable impression.’

  At school, of course, they had taught us about the sublime and the cult of feeling. But reading these intimate words, the grand categories didn’t seem important. Rather one wondered, what exactly was the mental condition that Coleridge was eager to replace with this ‘stretched and anxious’ state of mind? Certainly I had been stretched to the anxious limit on Scuol gorge. But why did I need that?

  Then he describes a river. I hadn’t expected this. I had only remembered the climbing incident.

  it is a great torrent from the top of the mountain to the bottom . . . the mad water rushes through its sinuous bed, or rather prison of rock, with such rapid curves, as if it turned the corners not from the mechanic force, but with foreknowledge, like a fierce & skilful driver. Great masses of water, one after the other, that in twilight one might have feelingly compared them to a vast crowd of huge white bears, rushing, one over the other, against the wind – their long white hair shattering abroad in the wind.

  It’s odd stuff. No river ever made me think of white bears, though I know very well that impression of waters tumbling over one another as they crowd into a narrowing space. And what a strange mix of references: the water is ‘mad’ and in ‘prison’ (a mental hospital?). It is personified as struggling to get away, like Coleridge from home, with foreknowledge, ‘a fierce and skilful driver’. Of what in 1802? A horse and cart? Then these bears with their ‘hair shattering abroad’. Do bears have long hair? Does hair shatter? Abroad? Had these three words ever been put together before? What was shattering here was standard usage, even common sense. I remembered when I had written my novel on kayaking, Rapids, the tremendous challenge of describing mountain rivers. Perhaps Coleridge came to places like this because they stretched to the limit his ability to put the world in words.

  I hunted out my old school edition of his selected poems and discovered that ‘Dejection: an Ode’ had been written just a few months before this adventure. There he laments his dire psychological condition and the way his many ‘afflictions’ have prompted him to separate thought and feeling, mind and body, with the hope that ‘abstruse research’ might ‘steal from my own nature all the natural man’. Insomniac, he looks forward to a storm so violent it will force him to move beyond his troubles. Here was a man full of blocked vata just waiting to be blown away.

  Scafell did it for him.

  Now I came to a smooth perpendicular rock about 7 feet high – this was nothing – I put my hand
s on the ledge and dropped down – in a few yards came just such another – I dropped that too, and yet another, seemed not higher – I would not stand for a trifle so I dropped that too – but the stretching of the muscles of my hands and arms, and the jolt of the Fall on my Feet, put my whole Limbs in a Tremble, and I paused, and looking down, saw that I had little else to encounter but a succession of these little Precipices – it was in truth a Path that in a very hard Rain is, no doubt, the channel of a most splendid Waterfall.

  So now Coleridge is where the water should be. On the stones of a waterfall. Very soon he’s describing himself as mad, as the water was mad in the earlier description. He has reached a place from whence he can’t climb back up, but where the next ledge below is so far away that:

  . . . if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself. My Limbs were all in a tremble – I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight – and blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!