Waterlog

by Roger Deakin

  There is something atavistic about all swimming, but this was so intensely primitive it was visceral. I felt like Jonah inside the whale. Each time I dropped, or was swept, into a new cauldron, I thought it would be bottomless; the turbulence made the water opaque. Borne down this magical uterus, deafened by the rushing and boiling of the flood, with the sheer rock and just a crack of sky high above me, I felt at once apprehensive and exhilarated. Water was cupped, jugged, saucered, spooned, decanted, stirred and boiled. It was thrown up in a fine spray so you breathed it in, it splashed in your face, it got in your ears, it stung you with its force, it bounced back off every curving surface, it worked unremittingly to sculpt the yielding limestone into the forms of its own well-ordered movement. Beneath the apparent chaos, all this sound and fury conformed to the strict laws of fluid dynamics.

  So steep and labyrinthine was the descent that it was impossible to know or see what was to come next. The slippery blue-green wetness and smoothness of everything, and my near-nakedness, only made me more helpless, more like a baby. It was like a dream of being born. Unnamed thunderings like deep, booming heartbeats rose from somewhere below. It was exactly as Frederick Leboyer said in Birth Without Violence: ‘The horror of being born is the intensity, the immensity of the experience, its variety, its suffocating richness . . . It is a sensory experience so huge, it is beyond our comprehension.’

  Everyone I had talked to about this descent had said that once you’re in, you must keep on going down, because you can’t climb up. I was glad of the rubber boots and the grip of their soles, but the rope was no use at all because every surface was so perfectly smoothed there was nothing to loop it round. I was conscious that I shouldn’t really be doing this alone. I had impetuously broken the first rule of potholing or climbing: that you let somebody know where you’re heading before you set out. The feeling became acute as I reached a waterfall that sounded as if it dropped to Australia, and might be the source of the thundering Pink Floyd ‘Atom Heart Mother’ effects. They were becoming louder and more insistent.

  Suddenly I found myself beneath an overhang of rock. A rope was bolted in here and there, and stretched off into a gloomy void beyond. It was impossible to see where it led, how deep the pool below might be, or how far down. I had no idea where the next foothold was. The torrent just shot over a rocky lip and disappeared from view, into a gothic emptiness. One option was to plunge blindly towards the waterfall and hope to drop into the pool, which might be deep enough for a safe landing. But the voices of reason shouted above the din that I stood an equal chance of being dashed into a rock face. The dilemma, and the stark solitude of my predicament, set my mind racing feverishly. I considered that for all I knew I might find myself, like the climber in H. G. Wells’s story ‘The Country of the Blind’, marooned in a subterranean land full of people like myself who had strayed optimistically down the Hell Gill chasm and stranded themselves beyond the waterfall. I also recalled that in the story, the sightless majority propose to put out the eyes of the newcomer.

  I pondered my position carefully, still thinking fast because every minute I spent immobile I was getting wetter and colder. Normally, you would clip on to an overhead rope, but I had no harness. I had met a pair of potholers down by the road and spoken to them briefly. They were accoutred in harnesses, buckles and steel clips like door-to-door ironmongers, and I now cursed my failure to ask them about Hell Gill. Once over the edge and dangling from the rope there was no going back. I would have to go hand over hand down it with fingers that were by now half-numb. But how far? I didn’t fancy being stuck in a freezing beck all night in swimming trunks. On the other hand I had been told it was impossible to climb back up. Was it really? I wondered. I spent what seemed an eternity fighting my reluctance to turn back and accepting a growing conviction of the logic of at least attempting the ascent. The slight fading of the afternoon light filtering down led me to my decision. I would try going up through the cascading water, and, if I failed, then I would just have to risk going down instead. With the help of strung nerves, the rubber boots, and liberal helpings of adrenalin, I managed to heave myself up the narrow chimney from pool to pool, waterfall to waterfall, against the water. It was slow going, making my way up like a salmon, and I resolved to return some day with a companion, a little more local knowledge, and the right kit.

  Emerging at last at the mouth of the gorge, I glanced back at it with faint disbelief and greeted the sky. Then, having dressed, I wandered a little way up the beck in the warm evening and fell asleep on the grass like a new-born babe. I was woken with a jolt by the searing rush of a buzzard stooping on an unwary pigeon. There was a silent explosion of pale grey feathers, like a distant shell. I felt a breath of wind in the grass that could have been a white rabbit hurrying by. ‘I’ve had such a curious dream!’ I said to myself, and went off for my tea.

  22

  HOT & COLD

  Argyll, 20 August

  WHATEVER HAD HAPPENED to me in Hell Gill, I felt profoundly changed and cleansed by the long slide and the deep drenching. I had never delved so far into the earth before, so alone, or so naked. It could have swallowed me up, but here I was, the other side of it. Like every boy of five, I had begun digging a hole to Australia, and abandoned it at six. Now I felt I had completed something; that my sliding and struggling had fulfilled some purpose quite unknown to me. It was the same feeling that comes after I’ve struggled and grappled through a big dream. I awaken from it, but the essential feeling of it may stay with me for days, so that I know it has been important without knowing why and I half inhabit both the waking and the dreaming worlds at once.

  It was in this freewheeling state that I decided to abandon the route I had originally planned, missing out the Lakes and the crowds of hikers, and going straight to Scotland in the warm, dry spell. Inspired and elated by my descent into Hell Gill, my one desire was for the beauty and silence of the West Coast of Scotland and the Hebrides. I longed to swim the lochs and the wild islands, and at last I felt ready to cross over the sea to Jura, and to meet the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

  I took my first Scottish swim two days later on the Argyll coast at Ardpatrick. I had stayed here before, in the lovely old estate house beside West Loch Tarbert, and it was from the Point Hut, as they call it, a solitary wooden cabin perched on the rocks at Ardpatrick Point, that I had first looked across the sea to Jura. I was immediately fascinated. In the distance, the island looks like Saint-Exupéry’s drawing in Le Petit Prince, of the snake that’s just eaten an elephant. The humps are the three Paps, rising off the sea to over 2,000 feet. The light reflected off the sea before the island gives it the appearance of floating, airborne, like Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels. The optical illusion is intensified by a luminescence that stems from the tendency of cloud to hang over the mainland, while over the Hebridean islands the weather is clear and sunny, like a halo. As soon as I saw Jura, I knew I had to go there, and I have returned to this rugged paradise several times since.

  Before attempting the Gulf of Corryvreckan, I wanted to swim across the loch at Ardpatrick, almost the same distance, but without the whirlpool. My bedroom at Ardpatrick House looked over this lovely expanse of water (between half and three-quarters of a mile wide, depending on the state of tide) beyond wide, sloping lawns, a field of rough-coated cattle, and the chimney smoke from the old ferry cottage where they bake the local bread. The Caledonian Macbrayne ferry sails past the window each morning to Islay, and the Islands. Seals, cormorants and otters swim off the rocks, and on the far side a single white house stands on the hill, with its own jetty. I had talked about crossing the loch with friends on earlier visits, but we had never actually done it.

  We waited until the evening to catch the top of the spring tide when the loch would be at its deepest and the currents slack. The plan was to row across from the ferry cottage to the quay on the opposite shore. I would then swim back, escorted by the boat. We had also timed things to avoid meeting the ferry from Islay sailing
back up the loch. It was a crimson evening as we crossed over and picnicked on the little quay, my companions thoughtfully saving enough hot tea in the flasks to warm me after the swim. There were four of us in the boat: Caroline, Ruth, Neil and I, and a pair of spaniels, Louis and Nelly.

  I went in off the stone jetty at six o’clock. The loch was clear and cold, and during the early part of the swim I had to pass through the beautiful kelp forest that grows in the shallower waters. Beautiful, that is, to all but swimmers; kelp tends to wrap itself round your neck and arms as you swim, so I soon felt like Isadora Duncan out for a drive, or like the Houdini who used to jump off Southend pier, bound in a weighted sack. Untangling myself broke the rhythm of things. But I wasn’t long gaining deeper water, sensing its coolness and swimming free. Caroline rowed beside me, and Ruth and Neil peered ahead for jellyfish, dolphins, or other items of interest, liberally dispensing encouragement from the boat. Neil talked about Belnahua, one of the Black Isles, where the light changes every half-hour, and you can swim in the deep lagoons of its flooded, long-deserted quarries. He also told a story of how his sister was locked in the aquarium at Brighton for the night. We discussed swimming across Jura, which they say has a loch for every day of the year, and weighed the chances of swimming the Corryvreckan whirlpool.

  Killer whales had recently been spotted in the loch, but none appeared. Louis was concerned for my safety, returning again and again to the stern and whimpering in my direction. The picnic baskets, and the dog standing alert on the thwarts, gave our little flotilla the authentic look of a Famous Five adventure. A curious mixture of vertigo and exhilaration at the miracle of the sheer mass of water bearing you up from beneath overtakes the swimmer in deep water. I was crossing the main channel of the ferry route, and a slight swell drove in up the loch from the open sea. A seal appeared and swam some of the way across with us, all whiskers and openly inquisitive, coming up from below at every point of the compass in turn. We could only guess where it was swimming underwater, and it never came up where we expected it to. It was quite harmless, and a useful bearing in the water: on the wide horizon of a longish swim, anything that can help convince you you’re actually moving is a help. It was at about this point that Caroline mentioned the possibility of a hot bath up at the house, and I swam with redoubled energy for the shore. Some yellow mooring buoys marked the three-quarter point of the swim, at which moment, as usual, I was just beginning to relax into the rhythm of the breaststroke. The final stretch of a swim always seems quickest, and I reached the beach in about half an hour through moored boats and buoys.

  Up at the house, I now proceeded straight from the frigidarium to the caldarium, and took a second, equally memorable dip in one of the Ardpatrick bathrooms. The bath itself was an immense lion-clawed seven-foot wallow with a column of white porcelain pipe at one end leading to an orchestrated arrangement of levers and brass valves operating the plug. Its white enamelled cast-iron and moulded porcelain formed a shrine of scalloped soap-dishes at one end. Soft, pale brown water from springs in the hill now gushed like mulled whisky from two of the three giant taps. Steam splashed and billowed to the high ceiling and fogged the tall windows that looked over the walled garden. The plumbing was magnificent and ponderous. Pipes wandered about everywhere, as if part of a great musical instrument, and four different taps filled the washbasin. The lavatory was panelled and caparisoned in the original mahogany of earlier times, long before rainforest crises put it out of reach for responsible citizens. Even the cistern was casked in deeply polished panels, like something in a church.

  Following a prolonged immersion in cold water, the wise swimmer will always enter a bath lukewarm, having recruited a reliable friend (preferably lacking too keen a sense of humour) to test the water first. What with ‘endolphins’, cold sensors, adrenalin, thyroxine and the hypothalamus, the body has a hundred ways of protecting itself from the cold, and will anaesthetise itself from the discomfort of prolonged exposure. The prudent bather knows that numb fingers and toes are no judges of water temperature. What greater pleasure than to come out of the sea aglow from your swim and then gently to raise the temperature of your hands and feet by trickling the hot tap as you soak? Your lukewarm bath will feel deliciously hot by contrast with the cold water of the swim. To enter it thus as a prelude to later excesses is to practise what the psychoanalysts call ‘deferred gratification’. It is the ante-room of the hammam to which you now proceed, opening the hot tap, letting rip with a scalding waterfall that reduces visibility to zero and raises the bath to new levels of pleasure. You lie and soak your chilled chops, feeling the warmth, the softness, the intoxication of guiltless indulgence permeating every cell, floating your toes up towards the steamy ceiling with sounds of dinner underway somewhere below. The boat-shaped tub was so generously proportioned I fancied I could almost swim a stroke or two from end to end, and I wallowed for some time, doing imaginary lengths, melting away the numbness and the pins and needles, topping up with hot water now and again like a man on a veranda augmenting his sundowner.

  That hot baths are now two a penny for many of us may not be such a boon as it seems. G. M. Trevelyan’s house-master at Harrow, Edward Bowen, an ascetic bachelor who once walked the eighty miles from Cambridge to Oxford within twenty-four hours, told him, ‘O boy, you oughtn’t to have a hot bath twice a week; you’ll get like the later Romans.’ T. H. White thought once a fortnight was probably about right, arguing that, ‘The true voluptuary wears sackcloth nearly all the time, so that when he does put on his sheer silk pants he can get full satisfaction out of rolling in the hay.’ Our cossetted, over-heated way of life may have robbed us of a natural ability, evident in most mammals, to enjoy both extremes of the spectrum of warm and cold. I have always had a special affection for François Truffaut’s film L’Enfant Sauvage, in which he plays Jean Itard, the anthropologist-teacher of Victor, the feral boy raised by wolves and found in the Aveyron region of France, in the woods near St-Affrique, in 1800. Before he came under the tutelage of Itard, Victor was looked after by Monsieur Bonnaterre, the natural history teacher at the St-Affrique school, who wrote careful notes about his behaviour, and noticed how he loved the cold as well as the warmth of a fire:

  One evening, when the temperature was well below freezing, I undressed him completely, and he seemed delighted to get out of his clothes. Then I made believe I was going to take him outdoors. I led him by the hand down the long corridors to the main door of the Central School. Instead of showing the slightest hesitation about going out, he kept tugging me through the door. From all this, I concluded that the two things are not incompatible. He can both be indifferent to the cold and take pleasure in warming himself by the fire, for one notices that cats and dogs have the same habits.

  Like fires, hot baths engender meditation, and I dreamed happily in mine almost until dinner time, imagining cooler dips ahead.

  The following afternoon, under a blue sky fringed white with distant clouds on the horizon, four of us swam in 360 feet of turquoise water in a sheer-sided quarry on Belnahua. The island encircled a huge natural swimming pool, raised above sea level, whose waters were so utterly transparent that when we swam, we saw our shadows far down, swimming ahead of us along the bottom. All around, only yards away, was the deeper blue of the open sea, and the Hebrides: Fladda, Scarba, Jura, Lunga, the Garvellachs (the ‘Islands of the Sea’, St Columba’s favourite place), Luing, Mull and Colonsay. The light and the skies kept changing all afternoon: from bright blue with distant dazzling clouds to deepening red and gold. Diving from the rocks into the immensely deep, clear, brackish water, intensified the giddy feeling of aquatic flying. There was a curious absence of water plants, and absurdly crystalline underwater views down the sheer faces of hewn slate. The only signs of life in the water were aimless three-inch fish grazing the apparently barren rocks. It was so still and silent that as we swam, we could hear the trickling of the racing tides beyond the strip of land and the black beach.

  We had
come up the Sound of Luing in a beautiful aluminium motorboat, steering for a dot on the horizon that was Belnahua, a tiny, almost square island not much more than a quarter-mile along each side. The island is now uninhabited, but was once home to a hundred people, whose menfolk worked the slate quarries. The slates from Belnahua, and Easdale island, across the water towards Mull, roofed most of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Belfast, and even New York, because cargo boats would often carry slates back over the Atlantic as ballast.

  The tide runs fast through the Sound of Luing, and although there was plenty of power in the boat’s twin engines, they had to work hard to make headway over a sea that was calm but alive with cross-currents, eddies and the polished smoothness that belies great turbulence below. Jura was off to the south-west and our course lay close to Scarba, passing within two miles of the Gulf of Corryvreckan and its whirlpool. I looked across at the channel I would have to swim between Jura and Scarba, then gazed at the warring currents, wrestling each other beneath the surface. Their unease had a palpable effect on us all, and we fell silent for a while.

  After Scarba, we skirted another notorious tide-race to its north known as the Grey Dog and headed for Belnahua, leaving the white lighthouse on the tiny island of Fladda a few hundred yards to starboard. We landed and anchored on the southern shore by a ruined jetty, then waded in over a bed of slate pebbles like loose change. Getting the anchor to bite on them was not easy.