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going backwards

“It’s going backwards!” he cries in confusion. “It’s going backwards!” I try to walk him a wee bit closer but he’s not having it. I suggest we run towards it as goes out then run away from it as it comes in again but he’s not convinced. I’m surprised by his reticence as I thought he’d be keen to go for a wee paddle. Usually he loves water of all kinds – puddles, ponds, baths, burns – and generally delights in making as much of a splash as he can. Admittedly, the sea is a very different prospect to these more contained bodies of water but it’s not as if he hasn’t been to the coast before. Just a few days ago we were on the pebble beach at Ardmair and he was completely unperturbed, merrily pitching pebbles into the sea and eagerly trying to clamber over the last seaweed-covered stones to get closer. We had to hold him back to stop him going in. I’d have thought the sea here would, if anything, be less daunting. Compared to the open sweep of Ardmair, this beach – just north of Achmelvich – is sheltered, enclosed on each side by long rocky headlands with the distant horizon safely contained between them, and the water is clear as glass.

It’s not the water itself that’s unnerving him though – it’s the motion. When we were at Ardmair it was low tide and the sea sat slack and quiet on the stones. There was a bit of a breeze and the water rippled briskly as it received our ineptly skimmed pebbles but there were no real waves. The waves today are small – wavelets really, rolling gently over the pale shell sand at our feet – but there’s an energy to them, and their pronounced back-and-forth movement is evidently unsettling him. We try to explain it to him to put him at ease, telling him how the wind makes the waves and pushes them onto the shore, and about the tide itself and its approach and retreat, but at two-and-a-half he isn’t interested in the abstract. He’s absorbed utterly by what’s in front of him: this line of liquid mysteriously drawing away from him then all of a sudden returning. “It’s going white!” he exclaims as one wave rushes closer and spreads out at our feet in a wide lacy froth.

He clearly doesn’t want to go in so I pick him up and hold him on my hip and reassure him that we’ll just watch. And as we do, standing here quietly together, it strikes me more than ever how much this motion of the sea is like breathing. It seems animated, washing forward in exhalation then sucking back in, its rhythm measured yet capricious, like a great creature breathing. Maybe that’s what he feels too. Or maybe he has no idea of it at all and is simply sensibly wary of something whose nature and action he cannot fathom. I watch him watching, innocent and intent, and it strikes me too how moved I am to be here with him, on this sand in front of this water, witnessing him have this primary and elemental encounter.

I’ve always felt the seashore to be powerful. “A place of revelation,” for the Irish poets of old*; a place of alteration. No matter how familiar the shore has become to me over the years, it’s the one place I can always be freshened, the one place I am reliably renewed. But seeing him meet the sea like this with his young spirit and young eyes stirs something else in me, movements that I too cannot fathom but which rouse in me a profound tenderness… for him? for water? for this endless turning over? I don’t know. And anyway, that’s an abstraction again and this beach is anything but that. It’s “sand!” It’s “waves!” It’s froth and awe – and fun.

I give him a mischievous giggle and, still holding him, run in.

* From the Imacallam in dá Thuarad (Colloquy of the Two Sages, twelfth century Irish manuscript)

Vestey beach, Achmelvich, Assynt, Scotland
19th May 2021

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seizure

The northerlies are tenacious this year, persisting not only throughout April but well into May. It’s hard to believe we’re only five weeks off the solstice when I’m still making fires every evening. The flowers seem to be feeling it too: the lesser celandines and violets which I remember starring the woodland floor as I took my daily walks last April have only recently begun to raise their heads. It feels as if the passage of time has stalled, that the seasons are on pause or running in slow motion. I initially assume this sensation is due to the weather but then I start to wonder how much it’s to do with the prevailing social climate too. I read in the papers online about “brain fog” – the mental listlessness and confusion that many are apparently suffering due to the monotony of life under lockdown – and it seems that the suppression of our natural life is taking its toll as well.

Things are “easing” now socially at least but it’s all so different to last spring. I remember driving to Lochinver ahead of the first lockdown thinking how incongruous it was that just as the natural world was coming into bloom – with sunshine and daffodils fairly bounding along the glens – the human world was closing down. This spring it’s the other way round: we humans are tentatively opening up but winter is stubbornly hanging on – cold, fixed, relentless.

dry ochre oak leaf hanging in front of bare grey tree

Rosehall trails, Sutherland, Scotland
13th May 2021

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no evidence

I scamper off the boat as the white veil sweeps closer, racing ahead of it for the shelter of the woods. It follows behind me like a predatory net curtain, a finely woven mesh of raindrops, whose hem touches down just as I reach the trees. I stand in close to them, watching the rain drumming on the docks and decks and listening to it pelt the fledging birch leaves above me. Within a few minutes it passes and I continue on my walk. When I get back, half an hour or so later, I notice a couple of damp patches in the cockpit and am momentarily confused. It is a confusing day, right enough – one of those squally Scottish spring days: one minute sunshine, the next minute showers, each chasing away the other with fresh abandon as it makes the world anew.

Nonetheless, I wonder how I could forget the rain. I remind myself that my short-term memory isn’t yet fully restored and put it down to that. But then I wonder why I would remember. The sea level is not noticeably higher (at least not from rainfall) and, with the rain having drained from the boat through its various scuppers, the decks are mainly dry. There is no evidence of the rain having passed over. Unlike on land, there are no lingering puddles, no boggy ground, no high rivers or flooding. It’s the same with the wind. It blows and bounces us around endlessly without leaving any markers at all: no uprooted trees, no fallen roof tiles, no scattered outdoor possessions. While the wind can leave waves behind it in the open ocean, in the short fetch of this sea loch, even whitecaps quickly subside. This is one of the differences between living on land and living on the sea. On the sea, the seasons come and go – throughout the day, throughout the year – and the only traces are in our minds.

Lochinver harbour, Assynt, Scotland
4th May 2021

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from the north, clockwise

Foinaven
    Arkle
  Ben Stack
     An Lèan-Chàrn

               Quinag
                    Glas Bheinn

            Canisp

        Suilven

               Cùl Mòr

           Cùl Beag

     Stac Pollaidh
Ben Mor Coigach

A litany of beauty
A snow-struck ring of grace

Cnoc na h-Iolaire, behind Lochinver, Sutherland, Scotland
10th April 2021

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allegiances

It feels like one of the old days of freedom. The tide is high, the loch is wide, rippled and blue, with fat flecks of foam drifting slowly, unrestricted, across its surface. They’re being driven outward by the freshwater currents of the two rivers which run into this loch and by the cool easterly breeze but they look as if they’re being driven by the sun, which rides already high in the east-south-east behind them, backlighting them and seeming to propel them towards me.

It’s the first time we’ve seen the sun in days and, as the foam slides by, it continues its steady rise, presiding over the clear blue waters and skies with confident assurance. And its easy assertion, its potent presence reminds me, in good order, that we are only truly ruled by this sun: by its presence and absence, its warmth and light, and by the dynamic streams of air and water it generates across the Earth – our rotating, fecund Earth, which nourishes us in turn. This is where our allegiances belong: to our star, to our planet, and to our right to roam it, as we long to and as we must.

Lochinver harbour, Assynt, Scotland
1st April 2021

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Balchladich beach in a south-westerly gale

The green wave curls,
the white wave smashes,
the cream banks of foam quiver on the sand
then scatter up into the wind like bursts of hysterical laughter.

The whole foreshore is a seething plain of froth
with gulls drifting high above it,
appearing to just hang in the sky
like the long banks of cloud laid out, unmoving, overhead.

In the south, the mountains, striated with snow,
hold themselves up like a frozen wave –
a suspended crest,
a momentary stoppage –

and I wonder how we can continue,
the sky so still,
the sea so live,
the earth so static.

Balchladich, Assynt, Scotland
23rd March 2021