by Joe Minihane
As I had done in the months before I took up my quest to follow Roger, I slid into a downward spiral of misery and spent days doing nothing but trawling social media, wasting hours on the internet, waiting for Keeley to get in, eating dinner and going to bed early. Without my swimming trip to help me, things felt hopeless. The lifebuoy I had been clinging to had been lost in the storm. I felt so low. I did not like myself very much. My self-loathing, from telling myself my broken wrist was my fault to claiming that I had failed in my career and by extension my life, scared me enough to realise that something needed to be done.
Speaking openly about anxiety and depression was not easy for me. It’s hard not to believe that ‘it’s all in your head’ because the simple fact is that that’s the truth. For so long it felt much easier to bottle up these feelings of inadequacy and professional failure. In my mind, I had created these problems, therefore the onus was on me to fix them.
When I had suffered from bouts such as this in the past, such as the one that had convinced me to undertake my Waterlog odyssey in the first place, I had let it simmer and fester before eventually confessing my feelings to Keeley, ashamed that I had made myself this way. Her understanding, her willingness to listen, her gentle urgings to seek professional help to fix a problem she knew could be fixed with the right guidance, were always welcome and always helpful. They helped patch me up and change my perspective. They made me stop judging myself so harshly by the high standards I believed everyone must live up to. She made things easier and rounded my edges. I experienced a greater clarity, an unburdening. I didn’t see the need to seek the help of a therapist or doctor.
But in truth, these conversations were like the swims I had enjoyed over the past twelve months. Always helpful, but never definitive in helping me discover what was wrong and how I could make it right once and for all. No amount of swimming or gentle, loving persuasion was going to make me seek out the help I needed. I needed to find that urge within myself.
I realised this as my wrist was carefully placed into a royal-blue plaster cast a week after the incident. Speaking up when things finally overwhelmed me was not enough. Neither, I saw, was using my Waterlog journey to make things better. I was going to have to find a proper cure, one which could teach me how to access that lightness, that sense of ease, which I had found in the times when I had told Keeley how low and anxious I felt or when I had pulled myself free from a cold river on a hot summer afternoon.
So it was that I finally found the courage to contact a therapist, someone who might be able to throw some light on my problems. I set an appointment and marked it in my online calendar, just a couple of days after the next swim I had slated, a dip in the secret River Wissey, the one Tim and I had failed to find after our jaunt down the Little Ouse in Santon Downham.
At the fracture clinic I had been told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t get my cast wet. I was issued with a plastic sleeve which slipped over my right hand, now the size of a heavyweight boxing glove, clamping fast over my upper arm. This was designed to stop things getting soggy when I took a shower. It looked like an ill-fitting condom.
The consultant flicked through my notes and got ready to send me on my way.
‘So, I definitely can’t go swimming?’
She shook her head and stood up, opening the door to her windowless office.
‘You’ve broken your wrist,’ she said. ‘And that cover is only showerproof anyway. I’d stay out of the water until it comes off, maybe longer.’
I knew that already. My Google search history had become a growing list of specious articles about how to swim with a plaster cast. None of them offered any proof that it could done, and plenty served up scare stories about bones not setting and casts having to be cut off.
Not only had I planned a swim in the Wissey, with half a dozen cohorts in tow, I had also booked a trip up to Jura, that magical island in the Inner Hebrides of which I’d dreamt as a teenager longing for adventure far from home. I couldn’t swim in its bays, lochans and burns, but I couldn’t cancel either. Train tickets had been bought, accommodation booked.
I felt downhearted. I told myself I had failed in my quest and wondered aloud to Keeley whether I should bother going on at all. Roger had already done it anyway, I said, and had made a better fist of it than me. I felt I had turned it into an exercise in trying to recreate Roger’s experience, carefully shading my spreadsheet but not fully experiencing the water and the nature which surrounded it in my own way.
Gently, persuasively, she told me that wasn’t the case, that I should think of the happiness I had found in and around the water, get on the train up to East Anglia and meet my friends. They’d be going anyway, she said, and all you’ll do is think about them and feel sad about the fact that you haven’t gone.
She was right. And so, wrist in plaster and my mind still fragile, I called Tim and Molly and told them about what had happened and that I’d be coming along anyway. I packed my shorts just in case and set off on a bright, late-summer morning which burned with promise.
I could feel my pulse beneath the cast, the sweet, rancid smell of unwashed skin emanating from beneath it. My hand was a burnished yellow colour, fading to black as I stared down the opening by my fingers.
The whizz of the frisbee and a shout of ‘catch it’ snapped me out my daydream and I ran across the makeshift grassy car park of St Peter’s church to pick it up and attempt a throw with my weaker left arm.
Molly, Tim and I were waiting for Yanny, Suz and my cousin Megan to arrive. It was a scorching hot day, my skin clammy as I chased after each throw. I was hopeless at playing frisbee, but that was true when I had two fully functioning arms instead of one. It didn’t matter. Being outside with good friends, enjoying the final blast of heat of a long summer, was a happy antidote to the past week of worries, the fug of depression lifting slightly as we chattered.
I realised, while we waited for our fellow swimmers, that these two friends had been with me on my favourite swims of the past year, from the galumphing rollers of Covehithe to the burble of the Waveney. I had spent so many years working for myself, spending time alone, but this project had helped make me more social and brought with it new and rekindled friendships. These people cared about me and I them. They knew that my wrist was in pain, but I knew there and then that I wanted to tell them more, to explain why I’d started swimming on Roger’s trail in the first place, to explain the difficulties I’d been struggling with over the past few years. I knew they would understand about my constant struggles with anxiety and occasionally depression. For the first time ever, I did not feel embarrassed or ashamed by it.
With the others in tow, we set off down a dusty country lane towards the whispering Wissey, in the complete opposite direction to where Tim and I had gone a few months before. It was hot, but I stayed out of the shade, allowing my good arm to toast in the final searing rays of summer sun.
I fell into stride with Molly. She asked about my wrist, despite the fact that I’d already regaled her with the details of how it happened and how long I’d be in plaster in the car on the way here.
Instead I decided to lay it all on the line. I told her the incident had left me feeling low and anxious and that this was nothing new. I’d felt like this for a long time before I got taken out by an irate Range Rover driver. In fact I’d felt like this for the past few years, I told her. Swimming, I said, was the only way I thought I could snap myself out of it.
‘Mate,’ she said. ‘Getting in the water helps me when I feel like that too. It’s something we do to make ourselves better, to feel more human.’
I could feel my burden lighten as we talked through the finer points of my anxiety. The constant worrying about minor details and supposed transgressions, the need to have everything lined up just so, the desperation to find validation through work. How I’d looked to swimming to lighten the load and how I’d found that while it felt good for a moment, it didn’t give me the lasting relief I needed. I told her
I was going to see a therapist to help me navigate a course through it all.
‘It’s going to be great for you,’ she said. ‘Just think about how much better it could make you feel.’
As we spoke, I forgot the inconvenience of my wrist break. Just being around friends when I came on these trips to follow Roger was every bit as good as being in the water itself. They made me feel happy by showing their willingness to join me on my escapades, and now to listen to me talking about my feelings. There was no shame any more. At that point, it felt only like there was possibility.
As we skirted what Roger called ‘the never-never land’ of the MOD firing range in which the Wissey rose, I looked around to see people who were here to have fun, to forget work and daily life for a while. To be friends and to share an experience. It was a direct by-product of a journey I’d embarked on a year previously. I realised I had helped bring everyone together after years of intermittent meet-ups and social media interactions, and that made me feel better. The idea of carrying on my mission, with everyone around me, didn’t seem so daunting any more.
The road swung west and, as we turned the corner, we came to a deep pool next to a road bridge, the water zipping beneath and emerging white and frothy as it spilled over a weir. A shingle beach slid into the pool, and on the far side a frayed rope swing dangled invitingly from a high willow branch. It was the most perfect of wild-swimming spots, the river scurrying off down a shady green tunnel, much like Roger would have seen on his visit here.
Everyone engaged in a frenzy of pulling off jumpers and trying to protect their modesty with not-quite-large-enough bath towels. I hung back and watched it all. Unabashed joy at my friends and I sharing such a bizarre passion was mixed with envy as one by one they dropped down to the water and slipped in and away with the current.
Meanwhile, I struggled into my shorts one-handed, trying not to flash my river-swimming pals while standing behind a sturdy oak. Togged up, I waded in as far as I could manage, water up to my waist, holding my right hand to the sky as if begging to be asked how I felt about not being able to get in properly. I could feel the cool lap of the Wissey around my shorts and knew that having flowed through the MOD range it would be clean and delicious to swim in, no fertilisers or pollutants running off into its glistening head waters. I peered beneath the arch of the bridge into the forbidden zone. Seen through that lens, the dark shadows threw everything into sharp focus. The trees and bushes looked more verdant, the flowers more vibrant. If my wrist hadn’t been out of action I’d have crawled through and indulged the urge to trespass which I had felt so keenly on the Itchen back at the start of summer, that same feeling of abandon I’d enjoyed when jumping from the window at Fladbury.
While Tim hauled himself out and began swaying wildly on the old rope swing, daring himself to plunge into the deep, fast-flowing water where the Wissey kinked and meandered, I waded out and dried off.
I parked myself on a tree stump and looked around, oblivious to anxiety. I felt as if I was seeing everything with greater clarity and wider eyes after my chat with Molly and my wade in the water. And as I scanned the beach and the riverbanks, I noticed that this wasn’t quite the quintessential bucolic English paradise that Roger made it out to be.
As with most hidden river holes I’d visited, this faraway pool was blighted with litter: burnt cans, empty cigarette packets, floating water bottles, discarded chocolate wrappers. This was something I had been happy to overlook until now, something that annoyed me but which I tried not to take notice of as I attempted to get into Roger’s romantic mindset about the English countryside.
I began thinking about all this rubbish and whether it was a new thing, something that had happened since Roger’s days of swimming all over Britain. I weighed up my recent trips, realising Molly had filled a bag with litter at Mendham and that I had failed to do the same on the Lark just a few weeks previously. It felt like rivers were more prone to this kind of thing, as if people, having finally understood that leaving all manner of tat on a beach was harmful to the environment, still thought doing so on a river bank was fair game.
As I looked around, unable to swim properly and instead keeping a keen eye on my surroundings, I realised that this was far from a modern phenomenon. I remembered the River Stort, near my parents’ home in Essex, was always pockmarked with old litter when I was a kid. The Huddersfield Narrow Canal through Marsden in West Yorkshire, where my uncle had lived for twenty years, was the same.
Roger didn’t seem to mention this problem at all. It seemed odd, this environmentally conscious man, a founder member of Friends of the Earth, not complaining more in Waterlog about morons thinking it was OK to toss rubbish where they saw fit. Did he not think it would fit with the Arcadian, dreamlike quality of his book? Or was he so caught up in the abundant nature he found in virtually every spot, that he simply forgot? This certainly had been my experience in the previous months. And forced to be an observer rather than a participant, I discovered that perhaps I had been romanticising the swimming process a bit too much. Far more needed to be done to clean rivers up and stop people treating them like the local tip.
I realised that having a slight detachment from the scene afforded me the chance to assess and see the water in a new light, through my own prism rather than that of Waterlog. Looking at nature and understanding it on my own terms could make the rest of the trip even more special and worthwhile.
Packed up, we set off back towards the church and the car park. Listening to Keeley’s advice and choosing to go to the Wissey instead of feeling useless and lonely at home hadn’t just allowed me to see my friends and forget about my wrist for a while. It had made me realise I wanted to share the whole reason for my trip with them and, just as importantly, it gave me the urge to carry on. I didn’t have to get into the water to have a feel for it. After a year on Roger’s trail and two dozen swims, I already carried it with me.
That night I got back to London late. It was wet as I slammed the door of the train shut at Stratford station. I felt melancholy after a day of fun and abandon. My wrist was sore and a surge of hopelessness flowed through me as I dipped my head to the rain, the optimism of earlier in the day ebbing away in the downpour.
Sitting on the Tube, waiting to set off for home, I took out my phone and checked my email. There was a message from Molly.
‘Read this and thought of you’. It was a link to a poem, ‘Where Water Comes Together with Other Water’ by Raymond Carver. It is a striking piece of verse, about loneliness, recovery and water. Its final lines stayed with me as I put my phone away.
It pleases me, loving rivers.
Loving them all the way back
to their source.
Loving everything that increases me.
I smiled at the memory of my non-swim on the Wissey, forgetting the wet weather and the impending cold of autumn and winter. Any lingering doubts about wanting to continue on Roger’s trail evaporated. I had to go on, finding the joy and humanity in every swim and not worrying about shading spreadsheets or ticking boxes. Swimming couldn’t fix my anxiety on its own, but the water was part of me now. I would swim on and follow Roger, not because I wanted to emulate him, not because of any vain hope it might cure me, but because I loved it. As the doors beeped shut and the train pulled out of the station, I knew that it was a good enough reason by itself.
CHAPTER TWO
September
Jura, Scotland
The door to the flat was open. I hung my jacket on the coat rack and shouted a tentative hello as I stepped further inside. Mark’s head appeared around a door at the end of the short corridor.
‘Joe? Please come in.’
Mark’s room, in the small clinic he worked out of in south London, had the air of a university professor’s study. Wipe-clean carpets, a desk with an iMac, copies of Freud on the top shelf of the bookcase. It was mid-afternoon, and though the curtains were open, the lights were on, the windows opening onto bare brick walls which made it
seem darker outside than it was.
‘Please, take a seat.’
I parked myself in an armchair, a glass of water and box of tissues on the small table where I lay my bag. Mark shut the door and sat down opposite me, pushing strands of his white hair out of his eyes and slapping his thighs. I crossed my legs and sat deep into the chair. He offered an encouraging, toothy smile.
‘So then…’
I couldn’t help but feel as if I were in a job interview. I began by giving Mark a potted history of my post-university life. I had worked for five years as a full-time journalist for a variety of magazines and websites, I said, before fulfilling my dream to go freelance four years earlier.
I sighed and looked around and wondered why I was here, whether it was really worth it. I was telling my therapist, a concept which seemed ludicrous to me, nothing that any of my friends and family didn’t know already. I could feel myself burning up. I took off my jumper and rolled up my shirtsleeves.
I took a few deep breaths, imagined I was jumping into a new stretch of unknown wild water, and went for it.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I think that’s when things started to go wrong. I feel like it’s all gone off half-cocked. I was supposed to be a world-beater, writing articles for big newspapers, travelling the globe, spending hours honing highly praised copy. Instead I feel like a nobody, an impostor, a fraud. I hate the work I do, I hate how it doesn’t challenge me and I hate what I’ve become. I feel lonely all day. I get stressed and worried about the smallest things. Going for a walk or seeing a film should be easy, but I prevaricate about doing them because I don’t believe they’re productive, so I stay at home even though I’ve done all my work. I turn every small occurrence into a big deal, worrying myself with things that don’t matter, whether it’s a spilt drink or clothes being left out in the rain. I feel bad for dumping all my worries on my wife. I feel guilty about work not taking longer than I think it should, leaving me feeling as if I’m not up to scratch. I don’t think I work hard enough, I don’t think I’m good enough as a person and I believe that worrying makes things feel important and purposeful, even though deep down I’m well aware that’s ridiculous.’