Is the Whole World Asleep Then? Or Just Blind? II
Every year at this time of year, as the summer dips towards autumn, darkness creeping a little closer every evening and the beginnings of a chill when I wake in the morning (even though I maintain it is still too early to light the first fire of the season until at least October) I feel a growing urge to go to the beach. Never in the summer, the traditional time of beach-visiting for ice cream and sunburn and frolicking in the sea amidst crowds of other happy day-trippers - no - I am drawn to the beach at this single, specific time of year as the season turns, after the crowds have gone and it is just me and a distant dogwalker sharing the lonely sands; when the clouds sweep grey above and the sea crashes gunmetal below and everything feels poised in time, a breath held between summer’s end and when winter begins. Buoyed lately by Charlotte Eriksson’s poems of life on the road[1], a lonely life but one full of adventure and depth, I envisioned that I too would live a life of travel and profound musings, even if just for a day. With a newfound understanding of balance recently I felt like new adventures could only enhance my connection to a world that felt like it was beginning to blossom from a tightly closed bud to one that might contain exciting possibilities.
This year I decide to go to Formby on the North-West coast, a place I had forgotten about until recently but remembered from my student days as beautiful and wild, all long stretches of golden sands and windswept dunes on the rugged edge of a National Trust woodland nature reserve. It was the place where I first saw a red squirrel darting through the branches back when I still thought that they were semi-mythical creatures before I moved to the Lakes and saw them all the time out on the hostel bird-feeder. About a forty-five minute drive from Liverpool in the days before I trusted satnav - when I would plan trips like this with road atlas directions scrawled on a scrap of paper and it still felt like an adventure - I would go there periodically, sometimes with friends sometimes alone, to escape the city and the stresses of university life for a day. There are photos somewhere (old-fashioned printed photos on that glossy paper sticky with developing chemicals) of me on the beach smiling timidly, looking into the camera, my scarf wrapped tight against the wind and sand stretching away behind me. Walking barefoot on the dunes in baggy black harem pants and my favourite grey floral-print jumper, bag slung over my shoulder. I had my hair dyed black then and it hangs in a long braid down my back, whips in wisps across my pale face shyer and more self-conscious than it looks now.
I didn’t sleep well the night before the trip, plagued by strange nightmares of being back in university halls and kept awake by thumping music that I couldn’t find the source of only to wake and find that that it was coming from the real world, a heartbeat baseline pumping too fast in the weak morning light, apparently coming from a secret all-night rave that happens once a year at this time in one of the little villages somewhere away over the moors (another reminder that I am not as far removed from the world here as I would like to be). The morning is grey and overcast, promising rain. Bleary eyed I remember jarringly that in all of our many adventures I somehow never went back to Formby with Tom, that the last time I was there was with my ex, before the violence and the bullshit and the endless budget flights. I had playfully swatted him on the arm because he kept turning to grin at me when I was trying to squat in some scrubby bushes for a piss and afterwards he turned sullen and silent then ranted about how unfair it is that women can hit men all they like but if men hit women then its abuse.
I didn’t remember much about the drive except a wide dual carriageway past an airfield and a garden centre and that Formby - complete with its quaint little railway crossing - was actually just a pleasant little middle-class retirement town full of wacky houses that you pass through before a further winding drive to the sea. When I come off the motorway nothing is recognisable to me but it is recognisably the coast. Even before you can see the sea the landscape is somehow more seasidey, flatter, the sky wider, the vegetation more gnarled and spiky. I know there are seagulls everywhere but as you get nearer the beach they become a kind of symbol that you are getting closer, almost there; they twirl in the choppy air like they belong there, tempting you onward with the taste of salt on your tongue to that first glittering glimpse of waves.
Formby is just as I remember it, the railway crossing, the quaint and quirky houses, the air of retirement and money, but as I take the drive down towards the beach everything feels different. The National Trust have a second site now, two flat, grey car parks blasted by the wind with a recruitment van and a deserted crepe truck and a huddle of rattling portaloos. When I follow the arrow that points the way through the dunes to the shore the path is all boardwalk and I struggle to remember if it is a path I have walked before or just the same but different. It emerges next to a squat lifeguard tower where two young lifeguards look bored but cosy and I am briefly jealous and wistful, lost in a fantasy of youth and possibility. I was planning to swim, to slip my body into the icy waters and make myself feel alive in the way that only wild swimming can but now I don’t want to because SWIMMING ONLY BETWEEN THE FLAGS and I don’t want to feel them watching me, to feel obliged to get out of their cosy little hut just to inform this foolish woman that it is inadvisable to swim in a fucking storm. I turn left then, walk south and the wind whips the sand into streaming rivulets around my feet making me feel like I am taking virgin steps on an alien planet having just emerged from the soft cocoon of my spacecraft. There are more turbines and shadowy oil rigs on the horizon than I remember. I collect two shells, one the colour of sandy gold, the other a faded denim streaked with oily black. When I shortly realise that this direction leads back towards the skyline city I turn and walk towards the wilder north instead.
So I’m here, I’m doing it, my moody, pensive beach trip just as planned except now I’m here and it is too windy and exposed to shelter somewhere in the dunes and read my books and write as I had planned and there are still just a few too many people around so I don’t know what to do but walk and keep walking, northwards, the wind at my back, trying to think about adventure and the change of the seasons and something deep and profound and not shitty ex-boyfriends or what I am actually doing here. When I look up I realise that I’m the only person left on the beach. I’ve walked beyond the boundaries of the National Trust nature reserve and now I’m in some deserted no-man’s land between it and Arnsdale; to my right the dunes have risen to crumbling, sandy cliffs, to my left the tide has crept in alarmingly without my noticing, the crashing roar of waves edging me in to an ever narrowing stretch of sand. I should probably turn back but decide I will walk just a little further, to the craggy point on the nearby horizon but I walk another twenty minutes, and another, before I realise that there is no point, just the curve of the shore endlessly arcing away from me, and the tide has come in more and the rain is falling harder now, and the wind at my back has become a gale.
Ducking into the shelter of a sandy channel between the dune-cliffs, I get curious about what is at the top and so I slog up the steep shifting sand, littered with washed up plastic flotsam and debris. I was somehow expecting just more dunes, as if I had wandered to the edge of some cold and rain swept desert but at the top, back in the blasting wind is a landscape even more alien and unusual, a rolling plateau of scrubby grass and bushes ringed by distant knotted paleolithic looking trees. No footpaths here, no friendly National Trust signposts to point the way; beyond the tide line of plastic detritus no sign of human impact as far as the eye could see. I felt like I had stumbled onto what is surely a rare find in modern-day Britain, a patch of landscape that had seemingly gone unnoticed by humankind and been left to its own devices, like finding another world that only I knew existed. I had the urge to go home, pack a nondescript green tent that would blend in among the scrub and just live there for a while. I think I would have come back and found the world changed.
When finally paranoia about the incoming tide and the prospect of being stranded here desert island survivalist style (although obviously there was a part of me that wished I could be) compelled me to turn back, I turned into a wall of solid wind that ripped back my hood and lashed me with stinging rain. I hadn’t realised how strong the gale was with it at my back but now the return walk felt like a battle against the elements, walking head first into the weather while my feet sunk deep into loose sand that had somehow felt solid before. I tried to pull my coat tight around me, to force myself forward one step at a time; after one hundred steps[2] I allowed myself to stop briefly and look back at the single line of my staggered footprints twisting back towards the horizon, already licked by the tide before pushing on. In the same amount of time it had taken me to walk there I made it barely a quarter of the way back.
Taunted by the flashing dot on my now much-depended-on satnav as my phone battery dwindled I decided to duck away from the beach at a suggested footpath and try to find a more sheltered way back among the dunes. What I thought would be a more direct route turned into a winding maze of interconnected footpaths traversing from dune to sandy woodland and back again before spitting me out incongruously at another National Trust car park the same but different teeming with bank holiday beach-going families. When I rather sheepishly asked the National Trust assistant for directions she went to point the way but stopped to ask if I needed to gather up the family first, assuming that not only was I a mother (what kind of terrible woman would come to the beach alone on a bank holiday??) but that my multiple unruly children were off somewhere scattered to the winds, no doubt under the dubious supervision of a goofy but lovable husband.
Feeling windswept and alienated then I sat writing numb-fingered on the most sheltered bench I could find, still somehow a couple of miles from the car park where I had started. My day of exciting adventure had turned into somewhat more of an ordeal than I had planned and here I was again, questioning whether it was all worth it, whether it was better to live a life of adventure at the risk of it tipping into misadventure or whether it is right to prioritise a life of comfort and security. What is it about “adventure” that makes it worth it? What parts of it don’t feel worth it? I had brought the latest copy of Resurgence and Ecologist magazine with me to read (as part of my day of travel, pondering and obscure life research) drawn particularly to an article by Easkey Britton about ebb and flow, how we need times of quiet ebb in order to experience states of flow, how finding this can be aided by kinaesthetic empathy with the natural world. “History and even geography allows us to reconnect to our intuitive self”. This is what I had been hoping for from my day at the beach at the tipping point of the year even if I didn’t quite manage it. She talks about how being in water in particular can facilitate this connection and I wish I had swam, despite the storm, and despite the onlooking lifeguards, wish I had stripped down to my swimsuit in the howling wind and walked brazen into the roiling sea, a creature at one with these wild elements.
I stopped at a pub in Formby on my way back home, strange to be actually inside the town which before had felt like only a cardboard cutout to drive past, never stopping. I ate some chips and drank a glass of wine and tried to concentrate on reading my book Ruth Allen’s Weathering (more study for profound ponderings) and out of the wind, safe in the warmth of this stale and familiar environment (the same as all generic pubs everywhere but different), tired and looking ahead to a long drive home, I thought that maybe there was some value to adventure after all, even if it is just to make you better appreciate comfort. Ebbs and flows.
[1] I’ve been reading Another Vagabond Lost to Love and swooning over its dreamy pages
[2] I sometimes resort to trance-like counting habits to get through challenging parts of walks, is it just me?