We drive round the head of the loch to the harbour to see our friend’s new dive boat. The afternoon is cloudy and calm, the loch grey and smooth and, as I climb down the pier ladder and clamber aboard, I suddenly realise how much I miss being on the water. I’ve been dimly aware of this lately but now, as I stroll across the deck and look over to the pontoons where I used to live, I feel it acutely: I’m seasick again, only this time not from the sea but for it.
It’s funny how the subtler senses work. When l lived in Canada, by the end of the long snow and ice-bound winters I would crave greenness. It was like a thirst: a need for deep draughts of green, a desire that needed slaking. You’d think my longing for the sea would be a thirst too but it’s more like a hunger, as if I’m not dry but hollow. Even hunger doesn’t capture it fully though. What I feel now is not an appetite to be satiated – not a craving, not an onward desire – but an awareness of absence. To draw an analogy with the boat I’m standing on, whose fuel tanks have recently been rebuilt, I have an emptiness which wants to be filled.
It’s not that I’m not nourished living on land. I love my caravan and appreciate its greater space and comfort, and its relative stability now the autumn gales are coming in. Living on the water was less comfortable, more restless and raw, and I need to live ashore now. With the various damages from my head injury a year ago not yet resolved, I’m too sensitive to motion to spend another winter aboard. Yet I can’t help feeling insulated, cut off from a primal source. I miss the water and the life of it: the seals and otters, the sea and shore birds, and the sailors and fishermen I used to reliably encounter on the docks. And I find it strange that the view from my window is no longer linked to the phases of the moon. I still tear out the tide table from the Ullapool News and pin it up in the kitchen but without the moving presence of the tide I feel disconnected from it, and from something more fundamental – as if I’m not just out of tide but out of time.
Most of all, I miss the dynamism; the sense, however subtle, of being always in motion. Even on a calm sea, stillness aboard a boat is not the same as stillness on land – something that becomes immediately obvious if the keel even briefly touches the seabed. However static you appear to be, you’re still in a fluid medium, you’re still supported. In contrast, I am now held up by a sheet of plywood and a few breezeblocks. I enjoy the resulting vista – I can see across the loch and glimpse Suilven and Cul Mor through the trees – but I feel unsettled. I’m not sure if I feel ungrounded or too grounded. And so I begin to do what I always did before I took to the sea: I seek the shore.
Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
4th November 2021