The Outrun

by Amy Liptrot

  We swim in windscreen-wipers-on-highest-setting rain when we rush to get into the water where it’s dryer. We’re lifted by the bow waves of passing boats. The water is always different: sometimes dark and velvety, sometimes perfectly clear, flat and glassy. We swim when sunshine dapples the surface and illuminates bubbles under water.

  On 1 May, in celebration of May Day or Beltane, we meet at dawn – five fourteen a.m. – at the most easterly beach on the Orkney Mainland, where we can see the sun rise over the ocean horizon. The sea is black and thick when we walk in, but as the sun rises, it lights our laughing, yelping faces and catches the rippling waves.

  We swim on the minute of the summer solstice at the north coast of the Mainland, just after midnight at 12:09 a.m. when it is still light in the grimlins. The next morning I smell of bonfire smoke and taste of sea salt. Following the points of the compass and the turning points of the year, we go to the west coast for sunset on Lammas, an ancient celebration of the first harvest. It’s a misty night with no sunset and it’s spooky in the geo, where we slip on seaweed and my fellow swimmers are half shrouded in the fog. I was on Papay when the group swam after dark on the winter solstice, wearing head torches, guided back to the shore by a light on the beach. It feels ritualistic, this celebration of solstices and equinoxes, following compass points, moon and tide charts and sunrise calendars.

  I didn’t realise until I was back in Orkney and more aware of these things, but the day after my last drink – my first day sober – was the spring equinox, 20 March. Since then, each solstice and equinox has marked another quarter-year of sobriety. I enjoy this: it links my small choices and individual behaviour into the patterns of the solar system. The swims are a way to celebrate.

  It is always gaspingly cold. The sea temperature gets gradually higher all summer, to an average of a ‘cold’ thirteen degrees in September; then, when the air temperature becomes cooler than the water, it goes down to an ‘extremely cold’ four or so degrees in February. The first time felt like it was burning my skin but each Saturday it gets slightly easier – your body acclimatises – although I am the wimpiest member of the club, back onshore drying myself while the others are still breast-stroking around the pier. It’s a convivial group, heads up, chatting while we swim.

  I want to shock myself awake: after central heating and screens, to feel cold, with skin submerged in wild waters, is attractively physical. I want to blast away the frustrations of being stuck on this island and no longer have the outlet of getting drunk. The chilly immersion is addictive, verging on unpleasant at the time, but I find myself craving it, agreeing to go again, planning my next swim, eyeing up lochs, bays or reservoirs. I want to swim in bomb craters.

  During each of the first few swims there is a point when my body panics. I picture drowning and, knowing the depth beneath me, my heart rate increases. I need to reach the shore as quickly as possible. When I do pull myself out up the slipway, climbing the ladder onto the pier, or washing up with the waves onto the beach, I feel saved: reborn and very alive.

  People claim all sorts of health benefits from wild swimming – better circulation, improved immunity – with the Outdoor Swimming Society pledging to ‘embrace the rejuvenating effects of cold water’ but I mainly do it for the ‘cold-water high’, the exhilaration and endorphins resulting from even a short dip. Afterwards, I go about my Saturday – first stop the supermarket – with a crazy smile and bright red salty skin. Other Polar Bears report an increase of energy to start the weekend but one member told me she just enjoys that other people think she’s mad. It’s an unconventional hobby and a weekly adventure.

  When I move to Papay, I decide to swim on Saturdays at ten a.m., the same time as the Mainland Polar Bears: the club’s solo outpost member. I cycle the five hundred metres down to the bay at North Wick, drop my bike on the sand dunes, strip and run into the morning sun on turquoise water. The sea at North and South Wick is always a vivid aquamarine, due to its clarity, shallowness and the sand underneath, but the tropical colour belies its chill.

  As I take my clothes off and leave them on the shore, I remember stripping in a stranger’s flat in London. I remember that frustration and anger. This is all I’ve got. This is what you have reduced me to. I am not in so much pain today but I am the same person: naked and raw.

  There are things about the sea you find out only by being in it. The waves carry stones, large pebbles suspended in the water, thrown around effortlessly. I watch, from a seal’s-eye perspective, a gull descend and land on the water. It seems not to have noticed me. One morning, the sky is reflected in the flat water and I’m swimming in the clouds.

  I miss the encouragement of the group when I swim alone. One chilly Saturday morning, I cycle down to the beach, look at the waves for a while, take off my breeks and feel the cold north wind, drizzle and sea spray on my legs, but just can’t bring myself to get into the water. I’ve found my limit.

  Seals pop up their heads close by when we swim, interested in our human presence, looking at us with familiar eyes. We are mirror images, both at the edge of our worlds, only able to share a small proportion of our territory. On my walks, I’m sure it is the same pair following me around the island. One watches me so intently that it seems the sea takes it by surprise and I watch, through the clear water, its body flail, suspended in a breaking wave.

  I’m not the first person to think a seal is my friend. ‘Selkie’ is the Orcadian word for ‘seal’ but it also has links to the tales of seals shifting into human form. Selkies, it is said, slip from their seal skins as beautiful naked people, who dance on beaches under the moon, as described by George Mackay Brown in Beside the Ocean of Time: ‘And there on the sand, glimmering, were men and women – strangers – dancing! And the rocks were strewn with seal skins!’ If the seal skin was lost or stolen, the selkies would be unable to transform back. There are stories of men hiding skins and taking a seal-maiden as a wife, but she would always belong in the sea.

  Some say the selkie idea was invented by lonely sailors as an excuse for falling for the mournful song of a seal but there were many who believed. In the 1890s a mermaid was seen in Deerness in the East Mainland ‘with hundreds of eyewitnesses swearing to the validity of their encounters’.

  By swimming in the sea I cross the normal boundaries. I’m no longer on land but part of the body of water making up all the oceans of the world, which moves, ebbing and flowing under and around me. Naked on the beach, I am a selkie slipped from its skin.

  I have a quote written in my diary but I can’t find the source: ‘Swim naked whenever you can, summer or winter, you’ll never die.’ Swimming has long been prescribed as tonic or cure. After my swims on Papay I get into the shower, balancing the stimulation of cold water with soothing heat. I am performing my own method of hydrotherapy, historically used in the treatment of alcoholics, often against their will. AA founder Bill W was treated with hydrotherapy for alcoholism in the early 1930s. Alcoholic and mentally ill actress Frances Farmer, incarcerated, was put in cages with other madwomen and sprayed with hot and cold water.

  Mum’s church performs baptisms on the beaches of Orkney. Two elders walk with the new convert into the cold sea and, holding an arm each, plunge them under the waves, symbolising their new birth as followers of Jesus. They come back smiling and shivering in wet clothes to what they hope is life anew. The cold water is cathartic. It’s refreshing, like the first drink; it offers transformation and escape, like intoxication, like drowning. I am so thirsty and full of desire.

  Once after being out all night at a party in a squatted east London warehouse, Gloria and I decided, high and wide-eyed, that what we needed was a dawn swim in Hampstead Heath ladies’ pond. We had grimy rave skin and sleep deprivation and thought the cold water would provide refreshment and even salvation. The sun was coming up and the tube reopening as we made our way north. Down at the pond we met a group of elderly women and one told us that she swims in the outdoor natural pool every morning o
f the year, that it is her health and happiness.

  Lately, I’ve noticed a gradual reprogramming. In the past when I was under stress, my first impulse was to drink, to get into the pub or the off-licence. A house-moving day years ago once ended a month-long attempt at sobriety. Now, sometimes, I’m not just fighting against these urges but have developed new ones. Even back in the summer, set free after a frustrating day in the RSPB office, my first thought was sometimes not a pint but ‘Get in the sea.’ Swimming shakes out my tension and provides refreshment and change. I am finding new priorities and pleasures for my free time. I’ve known this was possible but it takes a while for emotions to catch up with intellect. I am getting stronger.

  The motivation is the same but my methods of dealing with the way I feel are changing. I used to confuse my neurotransmitters on a Friday night in a hot nightclub. Now I shock my senses on a Saturday morning in a biting sea, plunging warm skin into cold water, forcing a rush of sensation, cleansed.

  21

  THE HOLM

  ON GOOGLE MAPS, LOOKING AT uninhabited island the Holm of Papay, the satellite picture gives way to the default cerulean ocean blue. The Holm is where the internet ends, beyond the realm of digital cartographers: here be cyber monsters.

  Britain is an island off Europe, Orkney is an island off Britain, Westray is an island off Orkney, Papay is an island off Westray and the Holm of Papay is at yet another remove. It is where to go when life on Papay gets too hectic.

  There are ‘holms’ (pronounced ‘homes’) all around Orkney, the name coming from the Old Norse word hólmr meaning ‘small island’, offshore islets near the coast of a bigger island. The Holm of Papay is our ‘calf’ island, constantly in view to the east, a wedge shape topped by a stone cairn, across just a few hundred metres of shallow azure water. At low tide rocks are exposed between the two islands, and when people lived at the Knap of Howar, more than five thousand years ago, they might have been joined by land.

  On a calm, bright morning, Neil, the farmer at Holland – the farm in the centre of Papay, seat of the island’s lairds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century – rings to tell me they will be taking a ram over to the Holm and I can come along. I career down to the old pier on my bike.

  The ram, small and horned, is manhandled from a trailer into a little boat. He will have just a few weeks to carry out his one job of the year: servicing about twenty of the ewes on the Holm selected to have lambs in the spring. The crossing, in a small boat with four people, a ram and a sheepdog, takes less than ten minutes. Today, without much wind, I can see right to the bottom of the seabed: the water is clear, the surface unruffled.

  Stepping off the boat onto an island where we are the only humans, I get a sense, as I did on Copinsay, of exhilaration tinged with fear. The birds and seals seem bigger and tougher. I take a wide berth around a fulmar in case it tries to vomit on me. There are hidden geos, pointed away towards North Ronaldsay, their secrets seen only by occasional visitors or from the sea. There is a dead seal pup on the grass by the shore but when I get closer it moves and I realise it is not dead at all but basking in the rare winter sun. Eighty or so ‘holmie’ ewes stay on the Holm all year round and, especially in the winter when the grass is scarce, live off a diet that includes seaweed. These sheep are incredibly hardy to survive out here all winter without extra food. The similar hill breeds we used to have on the farm were my favourite, more nimble-footed and independent than the stocky, docile Texels or Suffolks. The odd ewe would develop an ability to jump fences, breaking free of the nursery fields onto the Outrun, and was sometimes followed, squeezing through the barbed wire, by her lambs. Once a year in summer on Papay, there is ‘holmie day’, one of the last remnants of communal farming in Orkney, when islanders go over to the Holm to help to catch and shear the sheep.

  There are no signs that the Holm has ever been inhabited yet it is where the ancient people brought their dead. There are three chambered tombs, the biggest of which, the south cairn, well excavated and maintained, is now looked after by Historic Scotland. Due to its inaccessibility, it is Historic Scotland’s least visited site.

  I see the cairn every day from Rose Cottage and it is strange now to be standing on top of it, the low sun casting my shadow over the island. I lift a metal hatch and descend a ladder into the mound. I use the torch left for visitors to crawl through the long passageway and look into the ten small cells or enclosures leading off. There are carvings of what look like eyebrows on the stone, similar to the ‘eyes’ of the Westray Wife.

  A friend tells me that the cairn is – like the tomb of Maeshowe on the Orkney Mainland – aligned with the midwinter sun. At Maeshowe, on the solstice and a few days on either side, on the rare cloudless days at that time of year, the setting sun will shine directly down the entrance corridor. Webcams are set up there and one midwinter afternoon I watch over the internet as the golden light hits the end wall.

  I had a reckless idea to get farmer Neil or fisherman Douglas to take me out to the Holm one day around midwinter and leave me overnight – for both sunset and sunrise – so I could investigate and find out if there is any sun alignment. I thought I was brave and had no superstitions to stop me spending a night in the tomb, but now, after just a few minutes down there, I want to get out: it is cold, damp, dark and scary. There is no way I’m going to spend a night there.

  I climb out of the cairn and walk to the south-east corner of the Holm, the part that is not on Google Maps, and feel I have escaped. I am beyond the internet.

  I am attracted to these places at the edge. I crave either life in the inner city or to go to islands beyond islands, islands of the dead. In a Hackney pub Gloria and I played pool with two guys who invited us back to their place across the road where they had some beers. Their place was a homeless hostel. A few nights later we were in a luxury hotel with a band, sneaking into the sauna in the early hours, spraying each other’s warm skin with plastic bottles of cold water until the fridge was empty. I want to have splendid success or to fail beautifully.

  Sometimes I’m indignant: it’s unjust that a conscientious person such as me, with much good fortune, opportunity and support, ended up in rehab. But when I look at it from another perspective, it’s no surprise at all. Extremes were normal for me. I grew up with mental illness: unpredictable flurries of unusual and wild behaviour, followed by withdrawn lows. I remember in glimpses: looking up at Dad and Mum fighting and pushing at the top of the stairs, a neighbour taking me out of the house, and when I came back Dad being gone for weeks or months. I was born into dramatic scenes, lived in the landscape of shipwrecks and howling storms, with animal birth and death, religious visions, on the edge of chaos, with the possibility of something exciting happening at the same time as the threat of something going wrong. A part of me thinks that these wildly swinging fluctuations are, if not normal, at least desirable, and I grew to expect and even seek the edge. The alternative, of balance, seems pale and limited. I seek sensation and want to be more alive.

  At the edge of the Holm, I spin around on the spot for a few rotations – the islands on the horizon whirl around me in a blurred panorama. I’m dipping in and out of phone reception and satellite view, trying to get one step ahead of my short attention span, spinning like the rotating beams when I slept at the bottom of the lighthouse or the helicopter’s blades on the day I was born.

  I don’t have long here before Neil wants to go back to Papay – lighter without the ram – and get on with the rest of the day’s work, so I make my way across the Holm to the boat. Gradually, on winter walks and these exploratory trips, my understanding of myself is growing. I’m seeing patterns and tracing the roots of my desires. But in order to find a way forward, I will need help.

  I first encountered Dee when she emailed offering her support as another sober woman in Orkney. At that point I didn’t know that I would be coming to live on her island: she and her husband, Mo, had moved to Papay four years ago and since then had turned a derel
ict croft into a warm home. I had not asked anyone to be my sponsor. I was only interested in someone who shared my prejudices and didn’t mention Jesus.

  Before I went to my first AA meeting, four or five years before my time in the treatment centre, I spent a long time reading material on the internet that criticised the organisation: alternative programmes that allowed you to drink in moderation and articles on atheist fora. I was suspicious of the coercive and religious aspects of the programme, wanted to be fully informed and, if possible, have an excuse not to attend.

  The essential paradox of AA/NA, and the treatment centre, is that the thing we are trying to eradicate from our lives – the thing we used obsessively to seek out and consume – is the very thing we spend all day discussing, analysing, reminiscing about. Many would say that it is simply replacing one way of being fixated with it for another.

  When I’m in a spiky mood I fear it will be impossible ever to leave the world of addiction, that I’ll be defined by alcohol – or, more accurately, defined by its absence – for ever. I don’t want to be endlessly telling the newcomers about what I took, what it made me do and how I kicked it. I want to do other things with my liberation.

  Back in the treatment centre, I was sometimes scared about what the treatment programme was turning me into. Endlessly self-absorbed and self-doubting, I was shocked to find myself speaking platitudes that used to make my brain recoil. Was my moral compass wonky? We listened to people ‘share’ about terrible behaviour and crimes they had committed under the influence, and praised them for being ‘honest’. I hung out all day with jailbirds, junkies and crackheads, and nodded when one peer told me proudly that his family was so well connected in Bangladesh that his brother had literally got away with murder.