A year ago we were sweltering in 30-degree heat. This year we’re doing our best to stay out of the rain. I remind myself that we want and need the rain. I admit to myself that I would have preferred it not to be this fortnight. I submit to the weather gods doing what they do. I dodge.
On the first day of the week that promised to be dry all day, I had a plan. Walking across the island to Cobo Bay looked simple enough on the map. In theory, I could just follow the main road until I hit Route de Cobo and then turn left. I shifted that plan slightly but still it was a simple matter of taking an earlier left that would take me into Vazon Bay and then I could follow the coast.
That is not what happened. I would love to describe what did happen, but the truth is that I have no idea. I must have taken a random turn somewhere and then…and then I just blundered about for a bit. I managed to place my position on the map at the hospital, but even then, I was only ‘not lost’ in the sense that I knew where I was. I was still lost in the sense of not knowing how to get to where I was going.
One of the wonderful things about Guernsey is that the roads on the ground are nowhere near as straight as they look on the map. On the tourist map there are red roads, and yellow ones, and white ones, but on the ground it isn’t always easy to tell which are which…and of course there are no-entry signs, and diversion signs, and very few actual road signs – you know, the ones that point to actual destinations. In that regard it’s a bit like being in Norfolk, you have to be within spitting
distance before anyone thinks you might be looking for a place and decides to give you a clue how to get there.
At one point I am actually about to repeat a full circle. I thank the people who live at No. 18 something street who have a fox on their gate. I am slowly collecting photographs of numbers. I can’t remember why. I think about that one, but there is something about its visibility from the property that makes me feel it would be too intrusive. But I notice the fox, and seeing it again is what stopped me going round the same loop one more time.
Perhaps that’s why I’m collecting numbers. Perhaps its another navigational tool.
I also thank my own perseverance with what-ever marginal sense of direction I have – trust me, it’s not great – and my insistence on staying with the paper map. I was tempted to take out my phone and call google-maps to the rescue, but that’s a cop-out isn’t it? I won’t say I never do, but I try not to.
Eventually I emerge at the Church of Ste Marie du Castel. By then I could see and smell the sea. By then I had added a mile or two to the plan. I’d had that spurt of adrenalin that comes with don’t know where I am. Even after all these years of getting lost, and finding myself again, there is still that spike of something just this side of fear. Even when I know that I am not very far from base, that I am only yards from help that I could ask for, and that I have hours of daylight left.
Your idea of adventure might be rowing across the Atlantic or cycling round the world or walking the Empty Quarter – mine is walking unknown gentle paths alone and hoping to get home in time for tea, while getting just a little bit lost along the way.
On this day I was out early enough for it not to matter. It was a one-way trip, the plan was always to get the bus back. So rationally my wallying-about-and-getting-lost did not matter at all. I had hours to spare. My knee wasn’t playing up. Most of the lanes were gentle undulations, no severe cliff paths to navigate.
But I find I have become unused to being lost. I have become unused to not being able to place myself on the paper plan, or to have a clear idea of which way to head. More importantly, I have become unused to not worrying about it.
Later, I realise that is because this is a different kind of lost. When I walked more often and further and in more challenging terrain, I planned more. I set out with detailed maps, and a compass (NOTE: to self: bring the bloody compass!), and a route plan. I knew where I was going, roughly how long it should take (allowing for the WAAGL). So I knew where I should be, and how far off course I had gone. Mostly that meant getting back on course was relatively simple. Not always easy, and sometimes a bit scary, but relatively simple.
When I get lost here – it is because I set out without a plan. I have a map. Two in fact. I have the tourist version, which is a sort-of street map, with named roads, only not all of the roads are named on the map and not all of the roads are named on the road. I also have the official Bailiwick 1:15000 version. I carry them both, but have a tendency not to fully use them. I tend to think, “how far wrong can I go?” I try to mind-photo them before I head out the door and then trust to luck.
In the minutiae of things, this is not a good plan. I do not have a photographic memory.
In the grand scheme of things, it works. I eventually get where I’m going, or I go somewhere else and decide I’m ok with that.
The island really is too small to get stranded too far from home, but that doesn’t stop the adrenalin kicking in when I know that I have no idea where I am, what direction I’m heading in, how long it’s going to take me to get where I intended to go or whether I should turn back…
Like I say: I’m out of practice.
Nevertheless, by lunch-time I’m on the beach and stripping off. The tide is low, and my plan in walking here today was specifically to swim off this west coast, which in all the years I’ve been coming here I have not yet done. The water is clear. I’m blessed with an hour or so of sun. And the water is COLD!
In my recent dips in Fermain, I’ve come up with my personal gauge. If you don’t actually flinch when you walk into the shallows – it’s warm enough to swim. I’m not yet a winter wild swimmer. I’m still more of a wimp than a Wim Hof.
Fermain is on the sheltered east coast, pleasantly refreshing. Cobo is on the exposed west. Not flinch-making at the ankles, but definitely a slower walk in, a splash to arms and chest before risking full immersion.
We all have our own methods of getting into the wild water. Mine is to take it slowly, let my body know what is coming, give my heart time to adjust to it, adjust my breathing. I remember Dad telling me to take a deep breath. I used to think that was a one to hold in case you ended up under the water. I’ve only just worked out that it is actually one to let go slowly as you adjust to being held by the water. It is the deep, relaxing, out-breath that is the one that matters.
The schools went back today. The beach is almost empty. Two groups of women of a certain age, probably local. An elderly gent I’d followed down the road, him with just a towel, me with a day’s worth of “whatever the weather” stuff. A young man probably on a lunch-break, or getting his fill of the local beach before heading off to Uni or a gap year or starting a job he’s not sure he wants.
It is the youngster who walks as far away as possible from anyone, who is self-conscious at getting changed and walking into the water. The rest of us are past that.
It’s not that I am ‘comfortable in my skin’ – I cringe when I look at my nakedness in the mirror – there is much work to be done – but I remember a friend saying, "the world does not need to see my legs," and me responding, "the world doesn’t need to look." Experiments show that for the most part, the world does not look. Most people barely register our presence let alone whether we were fat, thin, wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt or shaking the sand out of our knickers.
I am not comfortable in my skin, and I would prefer you not to look, but I am past caring about contorting into unnatural positions to hold a towel round me, when I can cover up much more quickly by just doing what I do. And on a beach that has two old biddies eating chips, some sea-swimming women, a couple of aged gents more intent on their own reaction to cold water than whoever else might be around and a young man way out by the low-tide rocks, I can face the wall, and just get on with it. Perhaps it’s an age thing.
I get dry. I get dressed. I eat a sandwich, watched by well-behaved gulls. I read recently that the Herring Gull is now on the red list. Have we poisoned it with too many chips and not enough fish? Herring and Common. They don’t come mob-handed and they wait politely in a not-really-expectant kind of way. I know they don’t need to be begging, so I watch them watching me, and eventually they wander off back to the water.
I follow them into the shallows, camera in hand now, looking for nature’s abstract art. A sand-striated maple leaf resolves itself into overlain fronds of serrated wrack (or saw wrack), refracting a deep olive green. I wonder if I’ve caught something, nibbling at a corner of the nutritious weed, but suspect it’s just a random broken frond of oar weed lying around on the sand.
Sand gives way to rocks – outcrops of the earth that remind me once again that the planet is also a living, breathing, changing thing. It is all a matter of scale and time.
Outcrops and rock-pools are miniature landscapes, high mountain cairns among the crags. Rivulets carve out canyons, with overhanging cliffs, swirling rapids, kelp-forested islets and barren-rock ones. I look at a photograph and impose on it the scale that I remember. I try to look at it without knowledge of scale: how would it seem to me then? What if I had never seen it before, and someone told me one of those specks by the huge bare mountains in the desert sands were a human? How different it would be – and yet how much still the same.
Water and sand. Rocks and sea and sky.
At some point I end up in a short stretch of dune and marram. Hare’s tail grass bends away from the predominant winds, and small blue butterflies dance towards the end of summer.
