Authors: Amy Liptrot
Over on North Ronaldsay, more than 2,000 metres of the famous dyke for keeping the native sheep on the shore to graze seaweed were washed away, causing the worst damage in seventy-five years. On Shapinsay, an amazing array of fish – tadpole fish, ling, young cod, saithe, cuckoo wrasse and ballan wrasse – were washed up on a boaty noust, stranded when the tide surged.
Continuing on my walk, at the old kelp store, nestled by the door beside a concrete block, is a seal pup. I stop and we stare at each other for a few moments before it snarls. A couple of adult seals are in the sea nearby and I want them to call to the youngster.
I ring island wildlife expert Tim for advice. It is likely that the pup was washed over here from the nearby uninhabited island of Faray, where grey seals breed, and has been separated from its mother. This may have been its first attempt at swimming. It still has its white baby fur but some sharp teeth too, meaning it might be able to fend for itself in the sea.
The pup is still there the next morning but Tim manages to drag it back into the sea on a sack. It swims off strongly to take its chances in the wild.
A few years ago, I drunkenly got into an argument with someone I shouldn’t have. She retorted by calling me ‘washed-up’. It stung because at that point it was fairly true. I was out of work, living in a tiny room in east London, not getting invited out, heart-broken and drinking alone. My once promising future, for which I’d moved to London, was turning into bitterness and frustration. My options were ever-decreasing and I didn’t know where to turn, desperately seeking comfort in sexual encounters and obsessive memories. My life had become unmanageable.
When I first came back to Orkney I felt like the strandings of jellyfish, laid out on the rocks for all to see. I was washed-up: no longer buoyant, battered and storm-tossed.
I think of the things I have lost: my compass, stolen laptop, two shoes – one in the canal, one out of the door of a moving car – my boyfriend. But I also think of the things I have found from the sea: the fishing boat, the seal, the ‘ambergris’. These things were worn out and washed-up but they were not always useless. They had tales to tell.
One Sunday morning while I am on Papay, a highly unusual animal washes onto the beach on North Ronaldsay: a walrus. These huge sea beasts, north Atlantic walruses, are more usually found in Greenland and north Norway and none had been seen
in Orkney since 1986. Every islander goes out to see it, huge, tusked, posing obligingly on the beach, while wildlife enthusiasts and photographers book themselves on the first plane. By nightfall it has dragged itself back into the water and swum north. A few days later the same animal, distinguishable by its markings, is spotted on the Norwegian coastline.
When beachcombing, I get used to noticing and homing in on anything that looks a bit different among the pebbles, caught in a rockpool or buried in the sand. Usually it’s a piece of plastic – a drink bottle, one flip-flop, a crisps packet from 1993, bits of fish crate. These fragments of junk are so numerous and nonperishable that they are a serious threat to bird and sea life. But the idea of ‘rubbish’ is subjective. Anne uses sea-smoothed broken glass for her jewellery; I burn driftwood.
Today something catches my eye in the tangles. I pick up a tiny – it would fit in a matchbox – headless, handless, footless porcelain figurine: a grisly find. I give it a rinse in a rockpool. It is white and naked with a protruding tummy and bottom.
During a gale in 1868 a ship called the
Lessing
, on its way from Bremerhaven in Germany to New York, drove into the rocks at Klavers Geo on Fair Isle. All 465 passengers, emigrants hoping to start a new life in the United States, and crew were brought safely ashore by the islanders but the ship itself was broken up by the sea and its cargo, including china dolls, dispersed. A figurine from the wreck in the Shetland Museum looks tantalisingly similar in style to my find.
I like to think my figurine, now in my pocket with the Westray Wife, came from the wreck. For years it might have been buried
in the seabed but a perfect combination of time elapsed, stormy seas, east winds and high tides brought it for me to find on this spot on Papay this winter.
There is a cycle. The things we put into the sea come back to us – parts of the crushed car will be washed up again – but because the ocean is downhill from everywhere, they will go back there eventually. I wonder if I might find the shoe I lost in the London canal on an Orkney shore. As my time on Papay comes to an end, I am untethered and free-floating, like the jellyfish. I am wondering what’s next, standing back and allowing the unexpected to wash up at my feet.
I’ve been holding my breath. I’ve been clenching my teeth. I’ve been searching the seashore, each day, just looking for a moment when I can feel at ease. I run my tongue over the tooth that’s chipped from opening beer bottles. Although it’s smoother now, the chip will always be there. I rub the scar on the back of my head. Deep in the night, I still think of my ex-boyfriend and how I didn’t change in time to save our relationship. He lives in America now, with his girlfriend, and I heard they have a baby.
People like to tell me I’m looking ‘well’ but there are late hours alone when my heart is an open wound and I wonder if the pain will ever stop brimming fresh. I cannot smooth out the fault line. At these times, drink suggests itself as a solution. ‘Getting sober’ is not a moment after which everything gets better but
an ongoing and slow process of rebuilding with regular setbacks, wobbles and temptations.
One morning after a bad night, walking on the east side of Papay, I see a plastic bottle among the rocks. I pick it up: a Finnish vodka bottle carried from Scandinavia with about a shot’s worth left inside. I open it and take a deep smell. The hollow tang of teenage parties, plastic cups in dark discos and finishing the bottle down an alleyway. An impulse pulling at something deep within me, something strong, tells me to swig it down, all mixed with seawater and sailor spit. Sometimes I think it would just be
funny
to say, ‘Fuck it, fuck all of this.’ A part of me, when I hear that someone has ‘drunk themselves to death’, finds the idea attractive: they did it to themselves, they were free. The vodka smell is making me light-headed. It seems so perfect, this mouthful of oblivion sent from the sea.
But everything I’ve found in the past year is pulling me more strongly: the clear eyes and shooting stars, the fresh mornings when sleep has made me feel better rather than worse. The strength I feel when I end a day without having inebriated myself is true freedom. I screw the cap back on, throw the bottle down and laugh loudly and wildly out into the waves. Is this all you’ve got, North Sea? I can take it. I can take anything you throw at me.
I stride onwards. The plane passes above and to the passengers I am a lone figure in waterproofs walking the coastline, morning after morning, miles from anywhere, at the north of nowhere. But down here, inside myself, I feel powerful and determined. I am saved from the sea, seeing the beauty in the breakers that almost dragged me under, drinking the cold air with gratitude.
28
RENEWABLES
THE OUTRUN IS A BIT
tucked away, lying on the coast over a low hill, not seen from many houses or the road. It is partly for this reason that it has been chosen as the ‘preferred site’ to build a huge substation to serve the tidal- and wave-energy devices proposed to be tethered to the seabed at sites off the West Mainland.
The strong winds, big waves and powerful tides of the islands are a natural resource. Our location between the Atlantic and the North Sea, and the way water moves between islands, means there are strong and fast-flowing currents around Orkney: our waters are potentially energy rich.
There is a history on the islands of harnessing these natural forces for power. Watermills were used for grinding grain in the nineteenth century and before. On Papay, until about 1930, the threshing of grain was done by a ‘windy gear’ when a sail drove the mill. Islanders have made their living from the sea in
different ways over the centuries: fishing and whaling, transport and leisure, the offshore oil industry. This new industry of ‘renewable power’ is another way of using local resources, skills, knowledge and equipment.
The Scottish government has an ambitious target to have renewable sources generating 100 per cent of Scotland’s gross annual electricity consumption by 2020. In a world running out of fossil fuels and trying to emit less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Orkney, hailed as a ‘global centre’ for these technologies, provides hope.
Over the last decade, local councillors, business people and visiting politicians have talked of the economic benefits of renewable energy for Orkney, like those the oil industry and Flotta have provided for the last forty years. The developments will require huge infrastructure changes, and new piers are being built to support the burgeoning industry, allowing large service vessels to come ashore.
Orkney is home to the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), where researchers develop new technologies. Out at sea, off the West Mainland, devices are being tested to harness tidal and wave power. The Pelamis ‘sea snake’ contains oil-filled pumps that convert the motion of waves to create electricity and the Oyster devices use pressurised water to drive generators.
On land, one of the biggest changes I noticed when I returned to Orkney from London was the wind turbines now dotted across the islands. Orkney now has 25 per cent of the UK’s small wind turbines and most farms have one. The structures are our modern-day standing stones, cutting vertically across Orkney’s
horizontal landscape, painted a specific shade of grey developed to be most unobtrusive in bleak Scottish skies.
Scores of representatives from energy companies have visited Dad in his caravan and walked up to the Outrun, carrying out geological, environmental and engineering surveys. They show Dad maps and, with the suggestion of large sums of money floating in the air, explain their plans.
The seabed around Orkney belongs to the Crown Estate and, after a tender process, areas have been leased to different energy companies. The Crown Estate has set developers the target of generating 1.2 gigawatts of electricity by 2020 – sufficient for around 750,000 homes. In thirteen seabed sites off the West Mainland, scores of wave-top power devices are proposed to be tethered.
Huge cables will, they suggest, be drilled through the cliff, coming out just below sea level, joining the substation to the devices. The substation will gather the energy before passing it on to the National Grid, as well as providing access to construct, install and service the machines.
In mid-January, on the shore just beyond the farm, by the rock-pools where we swim, an enormous metal octagon weighing several tonnes was found by a neighbour, wedged in some rocks.
It is one of the ‘doughnuts’ made and installed by a renewable-energy company, designed to float on top of the water, tethered to a foundation on the seabed. The floats move up and down, converting wave motion into pressurised water, which is pumped ashore to drive hydroelectric turbines to produce electricity.
The tethers were designed to withstand great force but something was rubbing up against them, causing them to snap – and the doughnuts were carried away by the sea.
The big problem is that the developers still haven’t made test devices that work over a sustained period. These multi-million-pound contraptions keep breaking up, smashed and twisted by the ocean. Orcadians are unsurprised. I have seen that the sea has enough power to throw a seal over a fence and to change the appearance of a mile-long beach over a weekend’s storm.
Onshore, the concern is that the parts of wind turbines will rust and break, not withstand the power of the wind and corrosion that have always plagued these islands, and have to be replaced before they have earned their projected profits or even before they’ve paid for their own construction. On Papay the community-owned wind turbine was, ironically, blown down.
These huge experimental feats of engineering, worked on by the top minds in science, were overcome by the very tugs and flows of the waves, currents and winds they were meant to harness. Tonnes of sea junk were washed back onto the land they came from, bashed up and sorry-looking.
The same strong seas that are proclaimed as the reason why Orkney is a good location for wave and tidal energy are also the forces that make it difficult. The date for improving the cable
links to take power to the National Grid keeps being pushed back, and the future of marine energy in Orkney for anything but testing is uncertain.
I grew up in some extremes and later sought them for myself, unconsciously emulating unremembered experiences. Now, I still pursue heightened states but do so with greater self-knowledge. I want to have a story but I have to do it sober. I am choosing strength and beauty and creation. Like the electricity devices, I’m trying to find the right way to harness the powers and to achieve my aims without being destroyed by the very energy I desire.
One reason alcohol is addictive is that it doesn’t quite work. It’s difficult to get enough of something that almost works. It temporarily gave some relief so I chased it, again and again, my Fata Morgana, and it made me feel worse. For me, alcohol had become a mirage. It wasn’t a solution but I hoped it was going to be and kept returning to it, desperately.
When I am experiencing the impulse to drink, I try to examine it further, that false promise. I am experiencing discomfort and want something to provide flow and easiness. I want something to take the edge off. But I’m realising that times of anxiety are necessary and unavoidable and, in any case, I like the edge: it’s where I get my best ideas. The edge is where I’m from. It’s my home.
Drinking solves nothing. Afterwards, the problems are still
there. In London, I was hiding from my life and family in Orkney, breaking up, and trying to escape. By coming back I faced it and now Orkney is trying to keep me. People are kind and offer opportunities. There are geos and headlands and islands I haven’t visited yet. The music and voices of the isles simultaneously make my heart swell and make me want to take the next ferry out.