I Am an Island

by Tamsin Calidas

  Stepping outside into the night air always made me gasp. All about, the throb and hum of London living was itself beautiful, traffic rattling past on the far side of the high walls. It felt incredible to be standing on the near side of these bricks, staring into the beautiful, dark, still water. I would put down my towel and dip my toe over the edge. I’d take a few breaths and gather myself, looking at the steam rising into the cold air. And then that summons that impels your toes to grip the edge of the pool, and your legs to tense, springing up in a long, open arch. A fleeting silence. And then the splintering of surface, a glimpse of the sloping tiled floor and a long ripple of water undulating away ahead. I felt a weight unwind with each slow release of breath. It was my own beautiful blue decompression chamber. I swam endless laps, tumble-turning and flipping slow on to my back every few lengths. The steam wafting from the heated water offset the cold of my breath frosting white. Swimming under the night sky across the heart of the capital was amazing, yet sometimes even that wide vista felt too small.

  Now, thinking back, I am incredulous at how, for so many years, I was landlocked on this island. Deterred by the cold, I rarely swam in the sea or the loch. I was happy to dip on hot days, but even then I could not bear more than a few minutes. I am not the only one. Few islanders take to the water. The sea is freezing, its tides are powerful, its currents come off the wider Atlantic. If you are not familiar with its conditions, it is dangerous.

  But now I am so glad to know this shore intimately. Whenever the island feels too narrow or small, I run over the hills and step off into the waves. It offers uncharted territory beyond the single track road’s binary north and south options and polarised arguments. Sometimes I wonder if living here might be different if there were a circular coastal route, too. Landscape shapes the psyche of its people in so many ways. Perhaps the idea of a third, circuitous way might have taken root in the local culture. I used to envy the birds their ability to lift and land anywhere, on waves or soil. Now I, too, have a limitless freedom. It helps me to redraw my own parameters with fresh, fluid lines.

  There is a point at the skerries where the tides of three bays meet and the water rushes in and through from different directions. It can be unsettling at first, but I have tested these waters in the summer months. There is no rip tide or current here. When I look back at the island, the rocks look like great humpback whales. The wind is keen, ruffling the fine down on the exposed back of my neck. It is here, and across my bare shoulders, that I feel the raw cold most intensely. In winter, I instinctively seek the faster water. It keeps me focused, adrenaline singing. Still, calm water is harder to swim in when temperatures sharpen. It lulls and tires, demanding greater concentration, effort and stamina. Always I duck my head under. It helps to regulate my body temperature.

  I keep breathing, drawing my hands through the water. Lungs expel air as a gasp and skin whitens. Here, as the waves start to chop, the sea keeps a thin skein washing over my skin. I feel warm and protected out of the sharp teeth of the wind. Halfway across, the water suddenly deepens. I am at the meeting of the tides. A great pulse shimmers, rising up from beneath. As the sea swirls, I am lifted up and borne forward as if on the breathing back of a whale. It is exhilarating to be held and supported. The sea washes into this bay, and so carries me on to the skerries with minimal effort. For those last minutes of my outward journey, I am flying like a bird.

  At the skerries the gulls are bickering, jostling and skirling into the wind. The water here is teeming with fish. Silver shadows dart. Further out, a murmuring flock of geese drifts, quietly resting. Birds lose their fear of humans when they are in the water. We glide past each other curiously. I feel embraced by the sea and the sky and connected to both.

  Hauling myself on to the rocks, I light a crackling fire. A small tarp tied to the ground keeps my few sticks dry. There is no time to dry off when temperatures are this low, and a towel is raw and burning on the skin, so I just step straight into my fleece-lined oilskin and pull on my hat. It keeps things simple. I keep moving as I gulp hot coffee and feel that warmth filling my core. Back at the shore, there is a sturdy backpack filled with basic provisions that will help me recover after the swim. An enamel mug, a flask of hot soup, a kettle and some tea, a wedge of chocolate, firelighters and kindling, and plenty of dry clothes. You learn routines so that with practice you don’t have to think. Your muscle memory goes through the motions. It is important, because cold slows you down.

  These days I value my life and I do not take risks. I have learned how to protect myself through experience. There was a time when I wasn’t so careful. My knees are scarred with fine white criss-crosses from rock cuts. I know now how to recognise hypothermia. The threshold between severe cold and hypothermia is perilously thin and it is even harder to recognise in yourself when it becomes a real threat. My body is a living testament to this.

  I have a souvenir in the form of a small section of frostbite on the knuckle of my right index finger. It will remind me of these beautiful days when I am old. It is nothing much to look at. Just a small smooth area across the knuckle, with no wrinkles or markings, like scar tissue, or a burn. When I first came out of the water it was red raw. I had been swimming in a wind chill dipping to minus sixteen degrees, and my glove had ripped so my fingers were exposed to the flaying cold of the air. You lose circulation in your extremities faster than you realise. The rest of my body was covered by water, apart from my head, which was protected by two woollen hats over my swim cap. The sea was freezing around me, crackling in soft, hissing murmurs. It was so extraordinarily beautiful that, although I knew I should not, I stayed in the water for ten minutes longer than I ought to have done. And I do not regret this, because it was one of those brilliant, crystalline wonders that stay with you – a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will always remain seared into my heart and my flesh. For weeks my knuckle burned with an itching, aggravating sensation, like a boring inside my skin, so irritating that I could not bear to touch it. Now it is a talisman. That day, the sea kissed me and bit my hand, sending its silver venom coursing through my veins. In this brand I feel that the sea will forever be with me.

  These days, I always run over the hills to the shore and light a fire there to keep myself warm. I have hot tea or soup before I swim. Afterwards I shower in tepid water rather than hot, to keep my body heat safe in my core. Allowing warmth to move out to the extremities is dangerous, because it robs the core organs and tissues of blood. When you have been overly cold, or close to hypothermic, a flood of cold blood, even once you are slowly warming up, can shock the heart fatally.

  Each day, when I come out of the water, after drying and stepping into protective thermals, I wrap shivering arms around Maude’s wet body to warm us both. I place a tiny tin kettle on burning sticks, listen to the waves roar and the trees gust. Boiling steam starts to bubble and sing. Stuttering fingers wrap tightly about a mug of hot tea. Often, staring into those flames crackling on the rocks, I wonder, how in the world did we end up here? It is strange to be so alone and yet so immersed in such a beautiful moment. I feel more complete and connected in these wilds than I have ever felt with another human being.

  It can be frightening to cope alone when you have no one to turn to, but I feel I have met the challenges I have been dealt and they have been important in shaping the person I have become. I know now that burning out is when a longer struggle gives way to a relentless, unstoppable assault, like a rock’s face being worn down by erosion. You emerge with your contours hewn differently and something else inside transfigured. Some of these changes are welcome, but others can leave you grieving for the self you have lost.

  Out at the skerries, the light and tide are turning. Back in the water, I grasp a rock to catch my breath. Beyond, the seals are slipping smooth beneath the surface, dark heads lifting, black eyes blinking, reflecting the sky as the water flows slick off cold brindled skin. We watch each other silently until one calls curiously, a singing gurgle, sweeter than a
bark. As it dives into the dark depths, I take a lungful of air, slip under and follow into that dark, green-fronded world below. Further out in the channel, the rich feeding grounds are waiting. I am reassured that other, unseen worlds are breathing; that here are as many worlds to inhabit as beating, invisible lives. These days, the sea is no longer an object to me. It has a name and a presence that is loved and intimate. As the sea rises to meet me, I open to its beauty and flowing possibilities. I am discovering how life becomes less complex outside day-to-day human interaction. Its infinitely simpler rhythms allow me to connect deeply to my instincts and a more primal voice. They allow me to reach closer to the sky, the sun, the wind and the moon.

  Transformation is regenerative, redemptive and comes with a struggle. For change to come, or to strike out differently, you have to let the rough edge of the pain of all that life throws at you graze your heart. Some days I feel like an oyster shell creating itself from a handful of grit from the inside out. Each day the sea washes me smooth. As it draws back, it reveals a part of myself that is new and subtly different to me. When you step beyond your fears, it takes you into a wilder space. It is not for everyone. I am not who I was, but I am still evolving.

  ‘This is just the beginning,’ I whisper to the sea. ‘We are just starting out together.’ And then I gaze out at the seals slipping under the tide, and I think of how much further I have still to swim.

  2

  Fire

  A hard permafrost has seized the island. Every morning I rise in darkness and pad down to the kitchen in my woollen kilt socks and thick thermals. An empty flask is waiting for me on the kitchen table, together with other essentials – matches, a fire steel, a handful of dried kindling, a rough breakfast for a shallow pan, and a small tin kettle to warm me from within.

  When I return from my swim, I know how important it is to keep moving. Today I fold two large hessian sacks that were once old post bags, still stiff and durable, shoulder a heavy tartan rug and collect a worn saddle as Maude’s paws skitter out of the door before my boots scrunch into a brilliant frosted world. At the gate I stop as my voice calls, ringing over the croft. There is a brief silence and then a whinny. Hooves come drumming over the frozen earth, and then my Highland mare stands before me, nostrils flaring, breath snorting. So you feel the beautiful wildness of her.

  Fola is dark in shadow but glittering with frost, her long lashes blinking slowly as she nudges the rug and saddle. Her mane is frozen stiff and as she arches her neck her back crackles with rigid ice sworls. ‘Are you ready?’ I murmur, and she tosses her head, circling and flaring her tail high. I imagine how it might be if we always travelled like this, saddling up at dawn every morning to journey to where we needed to be. Our breath clouds white as I rub her thick coat briskly with my chapped hands. Shivering shards of ice shower us with a white iridescence. Our outlines are lit by a golden glow as the sun starts to rise and the day feels immensely beautiful in its physicality and stark simplicity. I acknowledge, looking out over the land, that it provides me with everything that I need not just to live, but to thrive. The granite mountains framing the horizon are chiselled into insignificance by the otherworldly flaming rings cast by the ascending sun. Below the silver sea is a shimmering mirror of glass.

  It is strange how the skies have the power to stir our deep atavistic instincts, drawing on our ancient impulses and ancestral memories to bring some deeper spirit alive. For a second I feel I have been here in this moment before, and that nothing will ever surprise me again. ‘I know this land,’ my heart whispers, and time feels suddenly such a blink and yet simultaneously hugely expansive.

  It is a time of year when you can feel the seasons and the Earth’s axis shifting, and something else awakening in your own consciousness. The ground is still frozen, but you can feel soil stirring in the darkness, all the life below germinating, as if aching to reach upwards, to break the crust of the world and to shatter this paralysing cold thrall with the warmth of new growth.

  The freezing air reddens and burns the tips of my nose and fingers. Quickly, I tighten the straps of the saddle and girth. It is immensely satisfying to feel the leather slip butter-soft through each cinch, thanks to hours spent rubbing wax into its brittle skin. As I inspect my handiwork, I smile. ‘What do you think?’ I ask Fola, as she curiously eyes the rough hessian bags hooked on to the fixings saddled to her back. It is a rudimentary device, but it works. Her front hoof lifts and paws the hard ground, so I stroke her and say, ‘Walk on, girl.’ Her nose blows blue clouds as she pulls forwards, Maude streaking like a shadow behind. We are going to the woods to collect kindling and windfall, and piles of wind-dried furze and gorse.

  Winter is long in the islands. With the sun setting at 3pm and not rising until after 9am, every day can feel like crossing a high mountain pass with low supplies. You do not take the winter months lightly. It is important to prepare for them, mentally as well as practically. Winter was known here as the time of the Lesser Sun, its light fallow and pale. The weather can hold sway over your spirits. I love the cold glittering days, when the ground is frozen and snow falls thick on the hills. It is a time of stillness and containment, when the earth quietens and draws its sap. Yet for all its beauty, these long, dark months can drag.

  For six months of the year, from October to March, the sea accentuates this closing in. Its tides beat fierce against the island. On quiet nights, a timetable curfew means the last scheduled sailing to the mainland runs at 6.30pm. Every year storms set us adrift from the mainland. When I first came to the island, I was discomfited by being cut off from the rest of the world. Darkness resonates, and it is felt more intensely away from the urban centres. I had not yet become inured to the storms, or acclimatised to lengthy periods when the sea and winds were raging, resulting in cancelled boats, electricity cuts and fallen telephone lines. In those early days, the longer the rough weather lasted, the greater I felt its corresponding emotional deficit and dropping of morale. Cold can injure not just our physical bodies but also our emotional resilience and equilibrium. As well as spurring you to take precautions, such as shoring up provisions and fuel, and being efficient with timing and chores, it stimulates you to reflect on your frailty and your place not just on this tiny island, but as a human being craving contact with others in the universe. There is nothing like a storm to bring to front of mind your own vulnerability and to prompt you to toughen up your resilience.

  When I think back to my first Christmas on the island, those years with Rab seem so long ago. We were so young, naive and childlike in our enthusiasm to experience our first island festivities, as if we truly belonged, that we willingly elected to spend Christmas away from our own families. Even though we had so little, we had each other, and therefore so much. Now those times seem like distant echoes from a different world.

  My first winter alone after Rab left was the coldest and harshest I can remember. This was the winter when the heating tank ran dry, with the fuel lorry not due for another six weeks. It made no difference, given that I had no money to pay for the oil anyway, so that year the house sat cold until the spring. Sometimes you simply make do with what you have. I wrapped up in thick layers and blankets, lived off soup and slept wearing several coats and hats. When the coal ran out, I burned the kindling wood I’d collected from the woods. I would take a rope and tie up a large bundle. With my broken hands it was too painful for me to lift, so I tied the rope around my waist and walked slowly back up to the top of the croft, dragging it behind me.

  That was how life felt to me then: heavy, cumbersome, awkward. But I learned that if you persevere, the load will lighten and your skills and fortitude will strengthen over time. Those hard years are gone and I would not wish for them back. And yet they were an extraordinary and invaluable time. And occasionally I miss them for their raw, elemental edge and stark beauty. Sometimes the hardest years give us a strength we might otherwise never know. There is always a time of darkness in life, but it makes the light all the brig
hter when it comes.

  This year I have no problem filling those quiet winter hours. Lanterns are trimmed ready for when the power cuts out. Matches strike calmly in the darkness. Candles are lit and paraffin wicks flicker brightly. Breaking down the running of the croft into a series of small, manageable tasks makes the day-to-day jobs easier, rather than confronting yourself with an outsize list that can feel overwhelming. Each morning I set myself three goals to achieve by the day’s end, in addition to the usual daily chores such as gathering kindling, walking the croft, mucking out, lifting dung and doing the rounds checking livestock. Fruit trees and plants, vegetables and herbs require attention and maintenance all year round. In the long evenings I reach for beeswax and oil the cracked leathers of Fola’s tack. Maude and Isla doze by the fire, legs twitching with their dreams. This year a hen sleeps indoors on the back of a chair. I read aloud. I shuffle and play cards. I catch up on mending clothes. I write poetry. Candlelight is soft on white pages. I gaze into the flickering flames.

  Fire draws your eyes towards it in darkness. The sensory stimulation of its heat and flames is the great call to life. It ignites a spark of courage or hope. And when you rest close by a fire at night, you are held safe, secure from all that lies outside its flickering glow. You know the wolves are still there, but as long as that light is burning, nothing can harm you.