‘Keo, Auk,’ George said, the flattened voice of the man long at sea. Tie is absolutely fine. More than fine. I’ve never seen him better. Wet but fine.’
If I’d ever needed a lesson that the tension and anxiety around death is not experienced by the dying, but by those who are forced to watch, this was it. I had never felt so free. Will sounded and George looked exhausted with the worry. I felt as buoyant as a balloon.
The inflatable remained anchored upside down in the surf. The only way to get it was by land, and so we sailed back into Dale and met the film crew there. Every one of them stared interrogatively into our faces. I babbled like a maniac on speed.
They took us in their bus round to the beach. There was the little red boat riding out in the surf, three or four hundred yards away, bobbing like a duck, but a drowned duck, upside down, the outboard immersed. The surf looked impossible from here, a field of broken water stretching away from us a third of a mile, grey with the sand in it, towering above the beach, one ridge after another driving on to the shore. How could I ever have thought I would cruise in through that? Feckless arrogance subjected to the acid of the sea. No landscape can be as moral as this.
George was worried that, as the tide withdrew, the boat would be beaten to shreds against the sand in the shallows. He is a powerful swimmer, who has rescued people before now. He said, ‘Come on now, let’s do this, I want you with me’, and so we plunged in together. I tried but failed to make any headway against the surf that was beating into us, the walls of water knocking me back. Will, who was standing on the beach, waded in up to his knees and shouted, ‘Adam, Adam, come back. Come back. You can’t. Don’t, just don’t.’
But George was swimming out there, backstroke, through it all. Heaven knows how he did it, beating out through the surf, appearing and disappearing within the ridges of the swell, like an ant crossing a ploughed field. Ben Roy stood on a rock to one side and directed him first one way then another, semaphoring with his arms, which George apparently from time to time could see.
Finally, he reached the boat and climbed on to it, attached a line to one side, stood on the other, and with his weight tipped the thing over. It is what I should have done in the first place. He pulled the anchor up, lay flat in the bow of the boat, and with his arms began to windmill the boat ashore.
We watched the rescue. The crisis was over. A conelusion had been reached. But then I saw - we all saw, the whole crew watching on the beach saw - an enormous wave, far bigger than the others, coming up behind him, steepening above him, climbing to heights where it could no longer remain a wave. It was pushing up the stern of the inflatable, the breaking at the crest spreading and deepening as we watched, and then in a rush and chaos of white water the inflatable was tumbled over. What had happened to me was happening to him.
After it had gone through, the inflatable was there, still the right way up, but George had disappeared. We looked at the grey surf, the succession of smooth-skinned swells beyond it and the empty red boat slowly being pushed in by the wind towards the shore. No sign of a man, no small black dot of a head, or the ant-like motions of a clambering body. He must have been thrown out by the big sea, perhaps sent down as I had been into the tumbled chaos of the broken water. But it was shallower here. Had he been thrown against a rock, knocked out, drowned and gone? Was he gone? Was George gone? The inflatable was moving steadily on towards us. Death and absence had strolled on to the scene. He had been wearing no life jacket. Why not? Because he wasn’t. And now his body was out there somewhere, floating, or pinned and caught. All we were left with was the heartlessness and nothing there.
In one of Wordsworth’s rich, image-potent dreams, in Book 5 of The Prelude, he meets a Bedouin in the desert, but the Bedouin on his camel will not wait for him and rides on - he is always looking back behind, with fear in his eyes and ‘his countenance disturbed’. In his dream, Wordsworth joins the Bedouin, looks back too and sees:
A glittering light, and ask’d him whence it came.
‘It is’, said he, ‘the waters of the deep
Gathering upon us …’
… I call’d after him aloud;
He heeded not and before me full in view
I saw him riding o’er the Desart Sands,
With the fleet waters of the drowning world
In chase of him, whereat I wak’d in terror …
The condition of the sea is murderous. Homer calls it ‘wine-dark’ not because that is its colour, even in the Aegean, but because that is its nature. It is thick with the intoxication of darkness. It is loved, sentimentally, by the ignorant and by romantics because death is the moment for which Romanticism longs, and because, as Homer knew, and as my own panicked crisis now told me, no moment is more vivid than one embraced by death.
That is why death at sea is such a casual affair. Death has no need to approach. It doesn’t need to gird itself up here. It doesn’t come rolling on like a swell, proceeding grandly towards you with its bosom before it and its intentions clear. Death is already there, a few feet away, resting beneath the table, its head on its paws and a smile in its eyes, happy to accept the scraps that fall.
Bleakness on the beach that morning on Marloes Sands. ‘Can you see him?’ I said to Will. ‘Can you see him, Paul? Ben? Luke, can you see him?’ They all shook their heads at me in silence, preserving their roles, even now, behind the camera, maintaining their non-presence even as I was interrogating them, the fiction that I was the only person there. I stared at the sea and at the beach. Ben Roy, doing his job, the camera still rolling, the boom-mike held by Paul above me, said, ‘How do you feel?’
‘How do I feel? How do I feel?’ I said. ‘How do you think I fucking feel?’ Luke put down his camera and Paul brought down his boom, collapsed its telescopic lengths and turned the tape machine off. We stood there looking at the sand, as the stupid boat came rolling in, with the endless waves around it. Will got on the phone to the coastguard and the lifeboat. A helicopter was called. A boat was coming.
How did I feel? Not, as one might imagine, shrieking with horror, but stunned, broken, killed off, feeling as though something had happened outside the normal run of things. As if George dying in front of us was not earthly, not part of how things were. George was dead; George was dead; but everything was the same; George was dead; everything was odd; everything was not right. Where in God’s name was he? Where was his head that should be visible in the sea? Was that his head? Could they see his head? Where was George? Where in Jesus’s name was the man who had gone to get the boat? Where for Christ’s sake was he?
How honest can I be? There are also ignoble thoughts at moments like this. Later, I asked Will what his had been. ‘I was wondering what the terms of the company’s insurance policy were like.’ At the same time I was thinking, mixed in with the gut-hollow of George being dead in the sea in front of us, ‘I wonder how I can take the Auk on without him? What is going to happen to this voyage of ours?’ How, in other words, will this affect me, my wellbeing and my plans? It is a sobering recognition: if there is one thing more ruthless than the sea, it is the self-serving instinct for survival.
George was not dead. He was in the surf, behind the boat, hidden from us by the boat, holding on to it and acting as a drogue in the water, trying to stop it being driven too fast ashore. Within ten minutes of his reappearance he and the inflatable were on the beach. George was full of smiles. And what was our reaction? Not welcome, nor relief, nor comfort for the man who had been in extremis, who had done a brave and capable thing, but anger. I welcomed George, but I didn’t feel like welcoming him. I told him how devastatingly difficult those four or five minutes had been. He said, ‘Come on, come on. Don’t fuss. I was always fine. Really.’ All I could think to say was that it hadn’t been fine on the shore.
George in the sea, and those of us on the beach, had experienced different events. He was now way up on the excitement. I, anyway, felt that somehow I had been wrongly exposed to grief, that I had bee
n made suddenly vulnerable when I shouldn’t have been; that the killing nature of the sea had entered me more deeply in those few minutes than ever before, and certainly far deeper than in my wet adventure of the morning, but on false grounds. I felt angry, I realized, not with George, but with the situation, the facts, perhaps with the sea itself.
Ben said, ‘Let’s go and get drunk’, which we did. All of us. And that night, rocked deep in my bunk in the Auk, I remembered something read long ago: the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation noticed in his vision of the end of time. The most beautiful aspect of the new heaven and the new earth that had been revealed to him was this: ‘there was no more sea’.
6
The Edge
I am 45, too old to be sent to war. I am Odysseus’s age, and Nelson’s during the long blockading campaign that led to Trafalgar. I should have had my war, but, in common with the rest of my generation, I have avoided it. I have lived my life in a pocket of safety, four and a half decades of deciding where to go on holiday and what car to buy, what book to write, what film to see, what journey to embark on. It has been, in other words, a period in which any kind of courage has not been required. Our belts are loose in a way they haven’t been since - when? Regency England? The Restoration? Our fears are the very opposite of those that have stalked people in the past. We are anxious that life is not dangerous enough; that it bores; that it’s stale; that it lacks ‘dynamism’. We are terrified our existence might be inert or dead.
That was the reason I was here. This oceanic threshold was the source of vitality, strangeness, and gripping seriousness that the ordinary life, the life without challenge, or only the boring, deadening form of challenge normality provides, could never have given me. It stood in for my generation’s missing war.
But this is a subtle and layered area. In many ways, perhaps as far back as the Odyssey, the sea has played the role in the western imagination of the dynamic and lyrical margin, the place whose danger is revelatory, and whose challenge summons the deeper virtues. And, particularly for the English, it is the western sea that does that. The east and south are prose; the west and north the poetic and the exposed. The west is like a descant to the land and its sea surge runs through the veins and arteries of the English imagination. In The Enchafed Flood, W. H. Auden’s series of linked essays on the part played by the sea in the European imagination, he quotes one of Edward Lear’s limericks:
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;
But they said - ‘It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!’
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
The desire for the sea sets itself against everything that is represented by Edward Lear’s ‘They’. The angry, smashing, strangeness-destroying They; the dinnerparty They; the decayed, normalising, tight, dreary, hypocritical They: all of that is simply absent out here on the Atlantic waters.
If you hope the world is alive, then you should cast off and open the oceanic door. The chart is what matters. On its eastern side, the land with its exactness and its definitions. On the left, the great waters, the realm of openness. ‘If man remains without possibilities,’ wrote Kierkegaard, also quoted by Auden, ‘it’s as if he lacked air.’ Air and possibilities are what this eternally open, western margin has by the bucketload. In reducing you to a sick, stormbound or storm-tossed bit of flotsam, or allowing the threads of self-reliance to develop in you, or the seeds of grit to harden in your gut, the ocean threshold gives you your freedom. As the Scottish writer Alasdair Maclean wrote in Night Falls on Ardnamurchan, the beautiful and bleak elegy to the end of a form of Scottish west-coast consciousness, ‘The physically deprived are the spiritually deprived.’ It is in some ways just a question of room, of expanse, of a felt largeness to life.
But there is something wrong with this. Remoteness, or out-of-touchness, is nowadays a choice rather than a condition. What feels, in one sense, like the deepest of engagements with the real world, the actual physical circumstances on a rocky and at times difficult shore, is in another way the most unreal situation you could imagine, a pretend reality, floating on the huge balloon of cash it takes to get a yacht to sea, disconnected from the serious, adult things that matter - politics, geo-finance, the realities of getting on in the real world.
Maybe our holiday-tasting of this other reality is just an exercise in self-delusion. We can put up with the discomforts of an earlier, very physical existence only for a while before returning to the comforts our real lives provide. There is a salutary remark for all holiday fantasists made by the guru Georges Gurdjieff, the early twentieth-century prophet and teacher who began life as a Greek in the Russian Caucasus and ended it, admired if only half understood, in Paris. The story is set a little earlier in Manhattan. Gurdjieff, speaking English, but his accent as thick as the pelt of an Abkhazian bear and his manner both obscure and broken, was meeting some disciples in a Lower East Side cafe. One was a rich young man who had decided to give it all up, to leave the city and everything the city represented, to abandon all that for a life far away, out in the out-of-touch world where, Thoreau-like, he would bury himself in the deep leaf litter of a natural existence. ‘So, Mr Gurdjieff,’ he asked at the end of his speech, ‘do you think that sounds like a good idea? Do you think that’s the way to go?’
Gurdjieff, master of the pause, a miraculous air of authority hanging about him, delayed and delayed before making his deep and grumblingly important reply. ‘It is a good life,’ he said in his beard, pausing again while the American waited for his destiny to be steered and settled by the man he admired more than any other. ‘Yes, it is a good life,’ Gurdjieff repeated, ‘for a dog.’
Of course he was right. There is something incomplete and slightly doggy about those who have gone to live in deep out-of-touch country, abandoning the urban as too unsettling and too unpredictable. Those dogs who have chosen to live in the furthest flung corners of the world seem slightly reduced by it. It is as if, away from urban pressures, they have gone slack. Their whole existence tends to become jowly, like a sail whose sheets have been loosened. They do not appear liberated or energised by their decision, but made dull by it. We’ve all glimpsed them in off-season Cornish or West Cork bars or, later in the year, with a tan so deep they look as though they have been cured in brine for a couple of months and now have no energy left for anything but reaching for the next cigarette and applying the lighter flame to its tip without the elbow even leaving the surface of the table. They’ve given up talking; they’ve given up the social disciplines that cities represent without really adopting the mores of the places they have adopted. All they can do is growl, wag, and whimper when there is the prospect of food or drink in the air. It is surely no way to go.
My year, as you will have gathered, has been spent exploring these confusions. I understand what Gurdji-eff meant, but I don’t believe that the Gurdjieff slump is the inevitable outcome. I don’t see why choosing to live in a more exposed way than the usual should leave one collapsed and effete, the victim of your own self-indulgences. There is surely a more positive outcome than this?
As the broad arms of the lovely Auk, a washerwoman, a mum, took us north to the wild places, we realized, if we got things right, that I could spend the weekend on the great annual pilgrimage to the top of Croagh Patrick, the scree-covered mountain that stands over 2,500 feet high in the far west of County Mayo, overlooking the islands and channels of Clew Bay. The mountain, on the very borders of the Atlantic, is known locally as the Reek - it looks from a distance like one of the old rounded handmade hayricks one still occasionally sees in the small fields of the west of Ireland - and every year, on the last Sunday in July, a mass of pilgrims toils its way up the rough and stony path to the church on the summit.
There were said to be 60,000 people there that Sunday, and from the little village of Murrisk at the foot of the climb you could see the multicoloured ribbon of them, a three-mile-long piece of b
unting, flickering slightly with its own movement, laid out across the long grey stony slopes. The uppermost stretches of the column reached up and disappeared into the mist that clothed the summit, the colours of their clothes absorbed into the grey of the cloud. It was like an image of people ascending to Heaven.
Even that sight, from a distance, was extraordinarily moving: a river of humanity, all ages - grandmothers, four- and five-year-olds; an old man wearing what was clearly his best suit putting one dogged foot in front of another, grindingly slow, holding a thick ashplant and wearing a dairyman’s rubber glove on his hand to protect it from chafing; athletic young men beside him, others clearly past their best, sweating and groaning with the rigours of the climb. At times, particularly when we were enveloped by the mist and rain, and as those descending struggled past those still on their way up, slithering on the loose stones, often haggard with the effort, it felt like a scene from a film of refugee peoples, or a Dantean epic of heaven or hell, vast crowds straining past each other, a broken half-murmur of conversation and encouragement between them, most in silence or near-silence, but some small parties constantly ‘yapping and gobbing’, as one pious woman described it to me. ‘But one must not judge. Even if they are yapping and gobbing, they may still be with the Lord. No, no, one must not judge.’
Atlantic Britain Page 7
