21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  1 August 2010

  I’m like most people when I’m getting changed in a public area: I keep my eyes down, myself to myself and my turning circle tight. But when, as was the case today, a man is standing in front of me, meticulously drying his pubic hair with a hairdryer, it is very hard not to notice.

  4 August 2010

  They played that awful Duffy song at the pool today and I hid underwater until it was over.

  29 September 2010

  No sign of Guy Who Blowdries His Pubes at the pool today but it was quite busy and Man Who Swims Like His Body Is His Large New BMW, Farting Chinese Guy and Mr Zorro Towel were all there. I also note that the new NO COMPARING TATTOOS THEN DUCKING EACH OTHER sign doesn’t seem to be having much effect.

  3 October 2010

  Conversation in changing room. YOUTH ONE: ‘All right, Rob? What you here for today, mate? Kick-boxing?’ YOUTH TWO: ‘Nah, most times I just come here to ’ave a wash these days, to be honest.’

  20 October 2010

  Dear man standing in the shower cubicle next to me when my bottle of conditioner exploded: I’m sorry if you thought the white rain falling on your head was semen.

  17 December 2010

  I love the way that when I’m swimming at the pool in low sunlight the rays will softly illuminate the ripples and the used plaster that floats by on them.

  3 January 2011

  Awkward conversation witnessed in the steam room today between two men in their fifties, largely revolving around one of them’s desire to have rough, uninhibited sex with his son’s new girlfriend. ‘I can’t help it,’ he said as his friend shifted uncomfortably on the slimy porcelain ledge beside him. ‘Every time I see her I can’t stop thinking about taking her from behind.’

  17 March 2011

  The pool seem to be having a crackdown on the condition of ‘dirt leg’ among their regulars. At least, I can only assume that that’s why a cleaner sprayed my shins powerfully with his hose through the gap under the door as I was having a shower this afternoon. Still, it is reassuring to know that the facilities are being kept clean, especially with the realisation that there are many out there who view shower-based urination as exercise salad’s essential accompanying vinaigrette.

  I enjoyed swimming in the sea in Norfolk and Suffolk, but my excursions to rivers, largely the slow-flowing Waveney not far from my house, were poorly planned and characterised by a half-commitment to the task in hand. I climbed apprehensively into the water from small vertical banks thick with bulrushes, breaststroked fifty or so yards upstream with the air of someone who’d broken illegally into a private complex, came face to face with an obstacle or something I’d convinced myself was an obstacle – Did that Egyptian goose look a bit handy? – then breaststroked back and got out, silty-toed and unsure of my role in society. But in 2014, when I moved to Devon, I found that its rivers were much more inviting: clearer and faster-flowing, their rocky banks dotted with enticing launching points. The sea down here is warmer too – not on the whole warm warm, but between May and October it generally doesn’t make you shriek or pull a face like you’re sucking a lemon when you get in, which was previously the norm for me.

  I posted a few photos on Twitter and Instagram of the swimming challenges I set myself in Devon last summer, which probably look far more spectacular and brave than they were. What I forgot when I did this was that my dad, who is always on a determined search for the cloud in every silver lining, stalks my social network accounts with the zeal of a private detective. Pretty soon the emails started to roll in: three, sometimes four, every day. ‘TWO DIE IN RIP TIDE OFF THE COAST OF NORFOLK,’ announced the subject heading of one. ‘SEARCH FOR CURLY-HAIRED MAN, 41, FEARED DROWNED, CONTINUES,’ said another. After about fourteen links to modern news stories, tales of a more retrospective kind of maritime horror began to appear. One dated from as far back as June 1956.

  With hindsight I admit that the first swimming challenge I set myself was quite bold. I hadn’t even thought of setting myself swimming challenges before that. I was splashing about in my favourite cove in a dreamy way, and as I was I got to thinking about the cove around the corner, which I had visited on holiday when I was little, and I thought it would be quite fun to swim around the corner to revisit it, so I set about doing just that. Swimming to this cove from my favourite cove didn’t seem a huge deal, as when you start you are close to the shore and the water is clear beneath you, but as I rounded the corner everything was very different: I was fairly far out in open water, the waves were bigger and stronger, and I got a small but genuine sense of what an unsympathetic bastard the sea could be. The swim was around a mile in total, and I was tired when I returned to the beach of the original cove, so much so that I staggered a bit like someone who’d escaped from a shipwreck. I also couldn’t see from getting so much saltwater in my eyes, which probably made it look like I was crying, perhaps owing to having lost a loved one in the same shipwreck. When I fully regained my sight I noticed both of my kneecaps were streaming blood and that a devastatingly beautiful woman had appeared on the beach not far from my towel and bag, as devastatingly beautiful people have an annoying habit of doing when you are looking your least dignified. On the plus side, I knew that my hair would feel great in an hour or so in that excellent crunchy way it does when you’ve been in the sea.

  ‘YOUR KNEES WERE BLEEDING BECAUSE YOU SMASHED THEM AGAINST SOME ROCKS,’ my dad told me later that week on the phone. ‘I ASKED MALCOLM AND HE TOLD ME. I SHOWED HIM YOUR PICTURE TOO AND HE SAYS YOU’RE AN IDIOT. HIS BROTHERS HAVE SWUM THE CHANNEL AND HE’S REALLY STRONG AND GOOD AT SWIMMING. HE’S SEVENTY NOW BUT HE CAN STILL PICK ME UP AND TURN ME UPSIDE DOWN IN THE WATER AT THE LOCAL POOL. DON’T DO SWIMS LIKE THAT ON YOUR OWN. AND WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS, LOONIES AND JELLYFISH.’

  My second swimming challenge – to cross the mouth of the River Erme at Mothecombe – looked quite brave from the photo I took, but didn’t feel particularly brave at the time. It was a first for me in that it involved swimming in the rain, which was much more pleasant than I expected. I’d watched the temperature gauge in the car drop as I’d driven south-west to the beach from home – 22 degrees, 21, 20, 19, 18 – and worried about getting a chill, but the water was shallow and pleasant. Only when I crossed the little invisible barrier separating river mouth from sea did I notice a shift in temperature: a hint of something breathtakingly cold and epically devoid of remorse that you knew was not far away. As I swam, gentle inquisitive seaweed grabbed for my legs like a thousand face flannels gone sentient. The sea was murkier than it had been ten miles away, at my favourite cove, but kinder. This is something I love about the south Devon coastline: its erratic shifts in personality, its high standards of experimental cliffing and inability to settle for the three or four types of flooring that many other coastlines do.

  A couple of days after that a softish package arrived in the post. I opened it with fevered excitement, expecting it to be the Linda Ronstadt T-shirt I had ordered from an American website. Instead, I found a fluorescent item – not, as I first assumed, a high-visibility tabard, but something harder and more rubbery in character. OPEN WATER SWIM BUOY, announced its packaging, which also included a strap and buckle. BE BRIGHT. BE SEEN.

  That afternoon an email popped through from my dad. ‘NOW FUCKING USE IT,’ instructed the email, which contained no subject heading or preamble.

  It is curious how during a period of your life you will find yourself drawn to some music in what you believe is an entirely arbitrary way but later see a correlation between the character of the music and what you are doing in that period of your life. During my addictive summer of outdoor swimming I had been listening obsessively to the first four albums by the Californian psychedelic rock band Spirit. I had listened to these a fair bit during the late nineties, then moved on to Spirit’s less well known, floatier mid-seventies period, and had recently felt like I needed to give their early work more time. Spirit sold a fraction of the units that their similarly
jazz-tinged LA contemporaries the Doors did, but they were a much braver band, although their bravery is far less showy so sometimes people don’t notice it, and their story is more tragic and weird. Another thing that makes Spirit cooler than the Doors is that they were formed by a teenager – the group’s songwriting mainstay Randy California – and his bald, middle-aged uncle. Jim Morrison, you sense, would have thought himself too cool to form a band with his bald, middle-aged uncle, which is of course one of the precise reasons he is in reality more uncool. Spirit are brilliant and weird and perfect for a green summer day, and this was at least part of why I could not stop listening to them.

  But there is something very watery about Spirit too: a bubbling quality to their far-out yet understated songs. California was a strong, obsessive swimmer, an athletic hippy who, already a Hendrix-approved guitar prodigy, was only sixteen when Spirit recorded ‘Water Woman’ and the other songs on their visionary 1968 debut album. In 1973, while living in west London, he infamously swam out into a choppy, violent Thames while tripping on LSD as a crowd watched, fearing for his life. He made it back to the shore that time, but, swimming off the coast of Molokai in Hawaii in 1997, California and his twelve-year-old son were caught in a rip tide. His son, with California’s and a lifeguard’s help, survived, but California did not.

  On a Friday in August I was walking to the pub listening to Spirit’s most famous song, ‘I Got a Line on You’. The track opens with California singing of taking someone down to the riverbed and giving them something that will ‘go right to’ their ‘head’. It was as I listened to these exact words that some teenagers called and waved to me from the riverbank. I removed my headphones to hear what they were saying. ‘This might sound like a strange question, but have you seen a naked boy running around by any chance?’ one of them asked. I said that I had not. It didn’t, in all honesty, seem that strange a question in this area, where on a warm day skinny-dippers are as rife as moorhens.

  I did not give the question much more thought until my friend Sarah and I were walking back from the pub and saw men in orange jackets wading in the river, shining torches into the water. Five minutes later a police car stopped beside us and its driver made the same enquiry: had we seen a naked teenager anywhere in the vicinity? We said we hadn’t. The next morning I woke to the sound of circling helicopters. A sixteen-year-old boy had been spotted on Friday evening, running towards the water, naked, under the influence of a legal high named N Bomb, and nobody had seen him since. On Sunday his body was found in the river by divers.

  Throughout most of July the stretch of the Dart between the moor and the estuary had seemed amazingly tranquil and shallow: the ethereal and unthreatening nature of most of the people in it only adding to the ethereal and unthreatening nature of the water. It looked trustworthy: a place that repelled dark events. I challenged myself to swim from the mellow stretch of the river near Dartington Hall to Staverton, just over a mile away, but gave up after progressing barely a quarter of the way because for a while the river became so shallow that my chest and legs were in danger of scraping on the pebbles on the bottom. This was comical, but a river is not comical, or at least it is only comical in the way that all the most serious things are also comical. A river should also not be mistaken for being only one thing. It can be many things on the same day, and many, many more things over the course of a year. It should not on any account be messed with, as something linking directly to the Mother of All Things That Should Not Be Messed With: the sea.

  Later in August I left Devon to complete a short spoken-word tour. After an event in the north Pennines, I stayed in a farmhouse B & B under the grey ridge of the nearby moor and ate a hearty breakfast consisting of eggs from the farmhouse’s chickens, although not the eggs of one particularly bold chicken, who had recently left the farmyard to live as a nomad. ‘We still sometimes see her, up over there, wandering along the ridge, alone, as the sun is setting,’ said Michelle, the B & B’s owner. Fortified by these more homely eggs I set off with my conservationist friend Chris along the Pennine Way to High Force, the waterfall which, when in full spate, has the largest volume of water of any in England. ‘Shall I bring my trunks?’ I asked Chris, who knows this area better than I know the contours of my own knuckles. ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ he replied.

  After passing the whitewashed cottages of Lord Barnard’s estate and admiring the aerial ballet of an enormous late flock of golden plover, we proceeded a few miles along the way and stood on the unprotected southern bank on wet rocks within inches of the precipice of the waterfall, where the torrent makes its uninterrupted ninety-eight-foot plunge to the pool below. Its elemental power was like nothing I had known. No photograph I’ve seen of High Force comes anywhere near capturing it, although Joseph Turner’s sketches of the waterfall from the early 1800s do come a little closer. The roar tumbled me into its epicentre, and I was inside the wet whirlwind even without taking the fatal single step forward, my bones crushed by its spate like so many matches before I’d even hit the bottom. I was pinned to the spot, and my future and past and even a great deal of my present receded to a unimportant fog beyond the race of a gazillion droplets of good cold northern water. Nothing could be more opposite than this to any of the vicarious, part-lived lives we sometimes live, and for a split second it felt like it would be worth perishing just to entirely embrace that oppositeness, but only for a split second. Chris had been right: there’d been no need to bring my trunks.

  I had been touched when I completed my first few swimming challenges and people expressed worry over me, but I also chuckled inwardly. Sure, I was alone when I did them, but how could there be anything to worry about? I was, after all, me. I am outdoorsy, but I often feel that I define being so in a different way to many. I am not a daredevil or an adrenaline junkie. I am not one of those youths who dive from a height of over twenty feet into the Tees from the wobbly suspension footbridge two miles downstream from High Force, close to the waterfall’s still quite intimidating little brother, Low Force. I am not even one of the fourteen-year-olds who strip off and push each other into the Dart near Totnes weir in January when the thermometer says one degree. Look at all the other risky, wild challenges properly adventurous people set themselves every day, I thought when people expressed reservations about my swimming adventures. Why focus on a frivolous not very brave person like me, with my silly half-adventures? But if I am truly honest with myself, a small element of risk has been part of the driving force behind my swimming. I have a positive view of risk and doing the opposite of what most people tell me to do since I associate risk and doing the opposite of what most people have told me to do with all the most positive turning points in my life. Then there was the fact that I had hoped to complete at least one of the two books I was writing, and due to various factors – losing a vast chunk of one in a data disaster, making the greedy decision to also have a life – I had not done so, and this had left me dissatisfied with myself. I wanted the sense of achievement that goes with getting my writing out of my system and, sometimes, into a small public sphere. Deciding to do a small outdoor swimming task then completing that small outdoor swimming task filled some of the holes where that sense of achievement should have been.

  I avoided the Dart during the couple of weeks following the boy’s death not because I was scared to swim in it or didn’t plan to again, but to avoid it seemed somehow respectful. Part of this was perhaps out of respect for the river too. Can you respect the landscape too much? I don’t think so. I love the landscape of Britain’s Deep South West so fervently that I have chosen it ahead of an arguably more straightforward life closer to many people I love. It is more life-enhancing than any other terrain I’ve lived amid, but I hear more stories of tragedy associated with it than any other landscape I’ve lived in, and I cannot help but believe these two facts are inseparable. I think I have as much respect for this coastline, these rushing rivers, these hills, these moors, as it’s possible to have, but it turns out there is a
lways more to be had. Perhaps that moment when I swam around the bend from my favourite cove and an unsuspected tide did a sleepy quarter-roar at me like a grumpy lion rudely half-woken from an afternoon sleep and unseen rocks clawed at my knees, and maybe even that other moment when I went beyond the line of the bay at the mouth of the Erme and the temperature dramatically dropped with its suggestion of power and violence, were examples of me not showing the necessary amount of respect.

  I’d had my eye on another swimming challenge: a more ambitious one but one I still viewed as very manageable. This was to swim around Burgh Island, a rocky mound off the mainland near the village of Bigbury on Sea, with its own pub and art deco hotel. I chose a Saturday for my mission, which wasn’t ideal in parking terms. Having found the main car park at Bigbury on Sea full, I left my car up the road in the memorably named Economy Beach Car Park. This cost me four pounds, although it had only been a pound back in January, when it was the subject of possibly the most forlorn photograph I have ever taken of the British seaside. It is not just the economy beach car park sign, the advertised one-pound fee and the bleak hillside beyond that make this photo, but the centrally framed bin and clump of pampas grass. ‘Hey! Married couples! Come and do your swinging here!’ it seems to say. ‘But please take care to dispose of all rubbish afterwards.’ That said, it is not my favourite photo out of those I took at Bigbury on Sea during my winter walk there. My favourite photo out of those I took at Bigbury on Sea during my winter walk there is of a lone windswept sheep on the bare hillside above the village, gazing off towards the art deco hotel on Burgh Island as if dreaming of one day staying in its plushest suite.