Authors: Amy Liptrot
There’s an emptiness. I’ve lost booze and I am desperately searching for what I need to fill me up. Is it coffee, sex, writing, love, new clothes or online approval? I read about how these beeps and notifications and vibrations affect and alter our brains, giving small jolts of dopamine, a little adrenaline. Searching for that tiny buzz, I am circling round familiar websites, like a migrating bird following rivers or motorways. The red notification of a message I’ve been waiting for gives a shadow of the sensation of the first sip of beer, of cold water when you’re parched, of a soft bed when you’re exhausted, of giving up swimming when you’re ready to drown.
I have twenty tabs open, each an endless journey, an unfinished thought. I can’t go to sleep yet: there are too many tabs open
in my brain. This thirst feels unquenchable. I read old emails dozens of times, trying to find something that’s not there any more. I’m trying to find the right thing to fill this hole but it always eludes me, just at the brink of my consciousness, the corner of my eye, the thing you went to pick up but then found you couldn’t remember what it was – the island just over the horizon.
In this emptiness, I miss alcohol. I miss drink like I missed my boyfriend. I begin to think that maybe AA is like the fundamentalist Christian camps in the US where gay people try to become straight. Maybe it is cruel and unnatural to force me from my path as an alcoholic. I don’t remember excessive drinking in our house when I was a child, although I know that Dad drank more when he was high. As soon as I started drinking as a teenager, though, I did so with a dangerous urgency. The pieces were already in place for me to be a drinker and now it hurts to be made to do otherwise.
At least alcohol gives a quantifiable answer to the non-specific question: it fills a void. Without it, I am left to figure out what the question was – and that’s where AA suggests that its 12 Step Programme comes in. Step One: ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’ I had done this some time ago, when I went into the treatment centre, but I have been reluctant to undertake the rest.
My time in treatment taught me to recognise feelings and to try to understand what certain types of behaviour are trying to achieve and what they actually will. I take a step back from my blank-minded mouse-clicking and notice how, when my phone
runs out of batteries, I can almost feel I don’t exist, my walk no longer being tracked. I want to be able to use all this technology for its benefits but keep it under control, not be sucked under. I’m aware of my addictive and obsessive tendencies.
I’m using technology to take myself to the centre of something from my spot at the edge of the ocean. I’m trying to make sense of my environment. With my digital devices, the planes and birds and stars seem more quantifiable and trackable. I’m trying to make a connection with the world outside Papay and my old life. I take a photograph of the sun setting over Westray and upload it to Facebook. My sky is converted into zeroes and ones, my personal data beamed to satellites, bounced through fibre-optic cables under the sea, through microwaves and copper wire, over islands, to you.
20
SEA SWIMMING
IN THE FIRST WEEKS OF
our relationship, he was still charmed by the spontaneous, drunken aspects of my character that later drove us apart. Late one night we boosted and pulled each other over the ten-foot walls of the inner London lido near where I lived back then – we found scratches and bruises the next day – and dropped silently onto the tiled poolside. The water was luxuriously warm in the cold night and we swam a couple of lengths, under moonlight and CCTV, naked but for balaclavas. I still have some photos, the flash bright on our pale skin.
I’ve sought the thrill of swimming outdoors once again now I’m back in Orkney. I joined an eccentric group called the Orkney Polar Bears who, every Saturday morning year-round, go swimming in the sea at a different location around the islands.
I prepare by eating porridge and listening to aggressive rap. We make a strange group: undressing car-side into swimming
costumes, woolly hats and goose-bumps. Going sea swimming with a group provides the motivation that is lacking when you’re alone. Everyone has different techniques for getting into the water – some running enthusiastically, others repeatedly edging up to genital level before backing out.
The swims are a way to experience the changing seasons and different parts of Orkney, location decided following analysis of the tides and wind direction. The nature of islands means that even a relatively small place has miles of coastline, often new to me and empty. We’ve swum at a bridge beside the main road, where we were beeped at by passing lorries; at a secluded sandy beach reached by a drive down a long, pot-holed track and climbing over fences, getting stung by nettles; in rockpools; in the harbour.
We often swim to shipwrecks, the Second World War block-ships that lie around Orkney’s coast; up close their rusting hulls loom above us. We see the land from a different perspective and have encounters with birds: I once swam right up to a tystie and have had Arctic terns diving nearby.
It’s different from swimming in a heated, chlorinated, right-angled pool. Sometimes curious seals come close and swim with us. A swimmer friend dived under and pulled up a handful of clams that she took home and cooked for lunch. We swim over sand, over pebbles, over seaweed and silt, with the birds and fish, in all weathers.
We swim in windscreen-wipers-on-highest-setting rain when we rush to get into the water where it’s dryer. We’re lifted by the bow waves of passing boats. The water is always different:
sometimes dark and velvety, sometimes perfectly clear, flat and glassy. We swim when sunshine dapples the surface and illuminates bubbles under water.
On 1 May, in celebration of May Day or Beltane, we meet at dawn – five fourteen a.m. – at the most easterly beach on the Orkney Mainland, where we can see the sun rise over the ocean horizon. The sea is black and thick when we walk in, but as the sun rises, it lights our laughing, yelping faces and catches the rippling waves.
We swim on the minute of the summer solstice at the north coast of the Mainland, just after midnight at 12:09 a.m. when it is still light in the grimlins. The next morning I smell of bonfire smoke and taste of sea salt. Following the points of the compass and the turning points of the year, we go to the west coast for sunset on Lammas, an ancient celebration of the first harvest. It’s a misty night with no sunset and it’s spooky in the geo, where we slip on seaweed and my fellow swimmers are half shrouded in the fog. I was on Papay when the group swam after dark on the winter solstice, wearing head torches, guided back to the shore by a light on the beach. It feels ritualistic, this celebration of solstices and equinoxes, following compass points, moon and tide charts and sunrise calendars.
I didn’t realise until I was back in Orkney and more aware of these things, but the day after my last drink – my first day sober – was the spring equinox, 20 March. Since then, each solstice and equinox has marked another quarter-year of sobriety. I enjoy this: it links my small choices and individual behaviour into the patterns of the solar system. The swims are a way to celebrate.
It is always gaspingly cold. The sea temperature gets gradually higher all summer, to an average of a ‘cold’ thirteen degrees in September; then, when the air temperature becomes cooler than the water, it goes down to an ‘extremely cold’ four or so degrees in February. The first time felt like it was burning my skin but each Saturday it gets slightly easier – your body acclimatises – although I am the wimpiest member of the club, back onshore drying myself while the others are still breast-stroking around the pier. It’s a convivial group, heads up, chatting while we swim.
I want to shock myself awake: after central heating and screens, to feel cold, with skin submerged in wild waters, is attractively physical. I want to blast away the frustrations of being stuck on this island and no longer have the outlet of getting drunk. The chilly immersion is addictive, verging on unpleasant at the time, but I find myself craving it, agreeing to go again, planning my next swim, eyeing up lochs, bays or reservoirs. I want to swim in bomb craters.
During each of the first few swims there is a point when my body panics. I picture drowning and, knowing the depth beneath me, my heart rate increases. I need to reach the shore as quickly as possible. When I do pull myself out up the slipway, climbing the ladder onto the pier, or washing up with the waves onto the beach, I feel saved: reborn and very alive.
People claim all sorts of health benefits from wild swimming – better circulation, improved immunity – with the Outdoor Swimming Society pledging to ‘embrace the rejuvenating effects of cold water’ but I mainly do it for the ‘cold-water high’, the exhilaration and endorphins resulting from even a short dip.
Afterwards, I go about my Saturday – first stop the supermarket – with a crazy smile and bright red salty skin. Other Polar Bears report an increase of energy to start the weekend but one member told me she just enjoys that other people think she’s mad. It’s an unconventional hobby and a weekly adventure.
When I move to Papay, I decide to swim on Saturdays at ten a.m., the same time as the Mainland Polar Bears: the club’s solo outpost member. I cycle the five hundred metres down to the bay at North Wick, drop my bike on the sand dunes, strip and run into the morning sun on turquoise water. The sea at North and South Wick is always a vivid aquamarine, due to its clarity, shallowness and the sand underneath, but the tropical colour belies its chill.
As I take my clothes off and leave them on the shore, I remember stripping in a stranger’s flat in London. I remember that frustration and anger. This is all I’ve got. This is what you have reduced me to. I am not in so much pain today but I am the same person: naked and raw.
There are things about the sea you find out only by being in it. The waves carry stones, large pebbles suspended in the water, thrown around effortlessly. I watch, from a seal’s-eye perspective, a gull descend and land on the water. It seems not to have noticed me. One morning, the sky is reflected in the flat water and I’m swimming in the clouds.
I miss the encouragement of the group when I swim alone.
One chilly Saturday morning, I cycle down to the beach, look at the waves for a while, take off my breeks and feel the cold north wind, drizzle and sea spray on my legs, but just can’t bring myself to get into the water. I’ve found my limit.
Seals pop up their heads close by when we swim, interested in our human presence, looking at us with familiar eyes. We are mirror images, both at the edge of our worlds, only able to share a small proportion of our territory. On my walks, I’m sure it is the same pair following me around the island. One watches me so intently that it seems the sea takes it by surprise and I watch, through the clear water, its body flail, suspended in a breaking wave.
I’m not the first person to think a seal is my friend. ‘Selkie’ is the Orcadian word for ‘seal’ but it also has links to the tales of seals shifting into human form. Selkies, it is said, slip from their seal skins as beautiful naked people, who dance on beaches under the moon, as described by George Mackay Brown in
Beside the Ocean of Time
: ‘And there on the sand, glimmering, were men and women – strangers – dancing! And the rocks were strewn with seal skins!’ If the seal skin was lost or stolen, the selkies would be unable to transform back. There are stories of men hiding skins and taking a seal-maiden as a wife, but she would always belong in the sea.
Some say the selkie idea was invented by lonely sailors as an excuse for falling for the mournful song of a seal but there were many who believed. In the 1890s a mermaid was seen in Deerness
in the East Mainland ‘with hundreds of eyewitnesses swearing to the validity of their encounters’.
By swimming in the sea I cross the normal boundaries. I’m no longer on land but part of the body of water making up all the oceans of the world, which moves, ebbing and flowing under and around me. Naked on the beach, I am a selkie slipped from its skin.
I have a quote written in my diary but I can’t find the source: ‘Swim naked whenever you can, summer or winter, you’ll never die.’ Swimming has long been prescribed as tonic or cure. After my swims on Papay I get into the shower, balancing the stimulation of cold water with soothing heat. I am performing my own method of hydrotherapy, historically used in the treatment of alcoholics, often against their will. AA founder Bill W was treated with hydrotherapy for alcoholism in the early 1930s. Alcoholic and mentally ill actress Frances Farmer, incarcerated, was put in cages with other madwomen and sprayed with hot and cold water.
Mum’s church performs baptisms on the beaches of Orkney. Two elders walk with the new convert into the cold sea and, holding an arm each, plunge them under the waves, symbolising their new birth as followers of Jesus. They come back smiling and shivering in wet clothes to what they hope is life anew. The cold water is cathartic. It’s refreshing, like the first drink; it offers transformation and escape, like intoxication, like drowning. I am so thirsty and full of desire.
Once after being out all night at a party in a squatted east London warehouse, Gloria and I decided, high and wide-eyed, that what we needed was a dawn swim in Hampstead Heath ladies’ pond. We had grimy rave skin and sleep deprivation and thought the cold water would provide refreshment and even salvation. The sun was coming up and the tube reopening as we made our way north. Down at the pond we met a group of elderly women and one told us that she swims in the outdoor natural pool every morning of the year, that it is her health and happiness.
Lately, I’ve noticed a gradual reprogramming. In the past when I was under stress, my first impulse was to drink, to get into the pub or the off-licence. A house-moving day years ago once ended a month-long attempt at sobriety. Now, sometimes, I’m not just fighting against these urges but have developed new ones. Even back in the summer, set free after a frustrating day in the RSPB office, my first thought was sometimes not a pint but ‘Get in the sea.’ Swimming shakes out my tension and provides refreshment and change. I am finding new priorities and pleasures for my free time. I’ve known this was possible but it takes a while for emotions to catch up with intellect. I am getting stronger.