The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (15 page)

Ian called the long waves ‘whalebacks’. He was a connoisseur of waves, and I was starting to learn his vernacular for different kinds of water. A ‘
stramash
’ was the boiling effect where currents met and mixed. Where they clashed there was a ‘clutter’. Small waves ‘swithered’. Extremely disturbed water was either ‘bouncy’ or ‘jabbly’. ‘Long ones’ were the big, fast, purposeful waves, smooth in profile but intent in action, that ‘scratched their backs’ on the keels of boats. ‘Big bastard long ones’ were problem causers: they offered what he called ‘rough greeting’, breaking over the stern or bow of low-beamed vessels. To me, the surface of the sea was the fluid equivalent of white noise or Classical Chinese. To Ian it was legible as a children’s book.

I was realizing that Ian had two simultaneous states on the water. One was quietly and simply joyful to be at sea. The other, a background process humming away, was analytical: his mind gathering data from sources and of types that I barely knew existed; from subtleties of wind, wave, and waymark, from smells, from what he had called in a poem ‘
the bounce of light
from incidental land’ and the ‘elaborate counter-physics’ of tidal water. Each acquisition of information shifted the outline and position of the whole. He practised a pilot-poetics, and interpreted the sea with a rabbinical intensity of study. ‘You need to look for disturbances to the expected,’ he told me, ‘be alert to unforeseen interactions.’

Watching Ian sail, I thought of Mark Twain, who studied as a river-pilot on the Mississippi. For Twain the river was a capricious text, which punished literalists and allegorists alike for the fixities of their interpretations. Horace Bixby, the veteran steamboat captain who apprenticed Twain, taught him the need to read surface for depth: how small perturbations might infer large submerged truths: the ‘
long slanting line
’ that suggested a reef which would ‘knock the boat’s brains out’. Under Bixby’s tutelage, Twain learnt to steer his paddle steamer through the shifting sandbanks of the river, and to dodge snags and wrecks. Bixby gave the young Samuel Clemens his illustrious pen name (‘Mark Twain’ is a measurement of water depth, meaning ‘two fathoms deep’), and forced him to learn the river ‘by heart’, standing in the prow for days, ‘reading’ the surface in silence. ‘The face of the water,’ wrote Twain, ‘in time, became a wonderful book – a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve … it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.’

We settled into the patterns of a long sail in an open boat. Spells on the tiller: the course due north, a meridian bearing. Sandwiches and hot drinks when not helming. A watch-rota scribbled on the back of an envelope. ‘That’s the roster of the sleepless,’ said Ian.

The sail flapping and gasping, sucking for air in the light breeze, bucking like a dying fish. Wildcat squeals of the outboard now and then. The land diminishing, details slipping away, Lewis thinning from cliff to band to line to nothing.
The boat, an open boat, has left the sight of known marks.
In a low wind on a single bearing in an open boat, time stretches, expands. There are hours for everything, it feels. An unhurriedness seeps into you. So we sailed happily on, into the long northern dusk, telling stories as we went, up and down the hills of water, past porpoises and under kittiwakes making their cat’s cradles of flight, and at last into a darkness that seemed to lift from the sea rather than falling from the sky, starting as a black dye upon the surface and then wicking upwards into the cloudless air.

Ian told a story, an old one that I had encountered before. Versions of it exist near the gannetries of the Irish and Scottish west coasts, revised to freshness with each new telling. A small open boat is sailing out to St Kilda – or to Rona, or the Blaskets (choose your distant island) – when, far out of sight of land, it passes through a herring shoal so profuse that the surface of the sea seems firm enough to walk on. The herring brings the predators: whales, dolphins and gannets, gannets in their thousands, thumping down from the sky into the sea all around the boat.

‘Suddenly,’ said Ian, ‘there comes a noise like a firearm being discharged.
Pack!
’

A gannet has dived by error into the open boat itself and there it is, up near the bow, stone dead, its body limp and its beak driven clean through the timber of the hull, its great wings, six feet for sure from tip to tip, splayed on the thwarts. Twenty miles from land in the big Atlantic waves and with a hole in the hull; well, that should have been death to the boat and its people. But then they realize that the gannet’s impact has been so powerful that it has plugged the hole it made.

‘So they sail anxiously on, with the head of the gannet buried like a bung in the hull.’

At last they reach the island, Hirta, in the Kilda group, with the weather worsening and the waves building. The islanders gather on the shore to help them in, and they see to their astonishment, as the boat’s bow is lifted up by the last big wave, the black beak of the gannet sticking out like a short sharp keel.

I told a story about Tory Island, twelve miles off the Donegal coast, to which I had gone two summers previously. One night while I was on the island I heard a man shout, ‘There’s a dolphin in the harbour!’ and I ran down to the jetty to find an astonishing sight. A Labrador dog was in the water, barking and paddling in circles, while around the dog played an eight-foot dolphin, blue in hue when on the surface but green-grey at depth. So I joined the two of them, stripping off to my shorts and then walking down the harbour steps and into the clear grey icy water of the sea. For fifteen minutes or so I swam with the two creatures. The dolphin was curious, familiar. It lay on its side beneath me, nuzzling my ankle, or bottled up to watch me with black cheeky eyes. Once it retreated to a distance of ten yards, then disappeared, before rising up sharkishly. Its skin felt blood-warm to the touch, and smooth as neoprene.

Later, an islander told me that the dolphin had been coming to the harbour for a year and a half, seeking company after the death of its mate, whose corpse had washed up on Tory’s south shore. The dolphin had befriended the dog, with whom he now often swam. He also said that he had once seen ‘upwards of a thousand dolphins’ in Tory Sound, all heading westwards. The parents and their children leapt together in perfect synchrony, he said, ‘as though each child were stuck to its mother’s side’.

By nightfall we were in fully open ocean. The first stars showed, and then they came fast and then faster, speckling the cloudless sky, dozens more a minute. I cannot now describe the feeling of emptiness and remoteness that attended us then, the like of which I have only ever known when out at dusk in high mountains in winter, coming to the end of a long day’s walk with the sun showing red on the snow, and a sleeping place still to find.
Jubilee
carried no lights. Ian would occasionally flick a torch-beam onto the sail, offering a glow to any unseen ship. Otherwise the dark and the sea extended about us with no implication of limit. We passed through what the philosopher William James once called ‘
roomy
’ darkness.

My watch turn was at midnight. I groped along to the stern, over sleeping bodies. A whisper from the dark, Diyanne handing the tiller over to me: ‘It’s simpler to steer by the North Star than by the compass. Look for Polaris; it’s easy to locate, though it’s not the brightest star in the sky. Find the two stars on the far side of the Plough – see them? Now, follow to where they’re pointing, keep going, one star, two stars, and there’s Polaris, blazing away. Just hold the North Star steady between halyard and spar and sail on up.’

I felt glad to fulfil this oldest of celestial navigation techniques. The instruction rounded into a couplet –
Sail on up by the old North Star; hold it steady between halyard and spar
– and the lines rocked in my head as I steered. The water gurgled and slapped, as if it had thickened. I thought of Pytheas, the Greek voyager who had sailed north from France in 325
BC
, following established trade routes to begin with – the ‘
tin road
’, the ‘amber road’ – and then just kept going, pausing on Lewis to erect his
gnomon
and take readings of sun height and day length, before sailing still further north, until he reached a latitude where the sea turned
gelid
with the cold and the air palled with freezing mists, such that the atmosphere resembled what Pytheas enigmatically called a ‘sea-lung’ (
pneumon thalassios
).

I have heard a sailor describe night-sailing in the busy waters of the English Channel as a deeply relaxing experience. At such times, he said, the world is reduced to code: the lights carried by the different vessels, the shared rules known by all participants as to who should give way to whom. The number of data-streams is minimized; inputs limited to night-murmurs on the VHF, blips on the radar and sequences of lights. Provided that the codes are correctly interpreted by all participants, tankers will slide darkly past dinghies, ship will pass ship, and so the arrangement will decorously proceed. What it most resembles, he said, is a quadrille – a stately dance of vast and mutual order. There is also, he added, a calming relationship of disproportion between the nature of the game played and the stakes wagered, in that proof of competence is derived only from absence of catastrophe.

That night, though, far out into the North Atlantic, there were no lights to be seen, for there was no shipping. The deep-water lanes that ducted the big freighters stayed much closer to the Lewis mainland. There was the
Hebridean
, 500 yards or so off our port stern, its green starboard lamp winking as it rose and fell in the waves. Otherwise, the only lights were celestial. The star-patterns, the grandiose slosh of the Milky Way. Jupiter, blazing low to the east, so brightly that it laid a lustrous track across the water, inviting us to step out onto its swaying surface. The moon, low, a waxing half, richly coloured – a red-butter moon, setting down its own path on the water. The sea was full of luminescent plankton, so behind us purled our wake, a phosphorescent line of green and yellow bees, as if the hull were setting a hive aswarm beneath us. We were at the convergence of many paths of light, which flexed and moved with us as we headed north.

At some point I handed over the helm, crept forward to the bows and tried to sleep while the boat slipped on into the night. I lay on my back, head on a fender, hands pocketed for warmth, gazing at the sky. That night was the last of the summer Perseid meteor showers, and shooting stars came most minutes: bright dashes, retinal scratches. I counted a hundred and then gave up.

I hadn’t expected this of the night sail; the serenity it induced in me. Perhaps the cold, the fatigue of the early hours and the lulling chuckle of the water were involved with the effect. Stray images drifted into my mind, thoughts from other tides and oceans. Perhaps it was the mirroring of the sky’s stars and the water’s phosphorescence which made me experience the illusion of absent volume to our boat and its people, such that it seemed we were made of paper, laid flat like a model ship ready to pass through the mouth of a bottle before being sprung back upright by the tug of a thread, or as if we were sailing on through a narrow mineral seam between air and water, up that old and invisible sea road.

A hand on the shoulder, shaking me awake, and I sat up to find that I had woken into winter. There was Sula Sgeir, less than a mile away, surf sloshing about its foot, and it was covered in snow. Winter had come during that spellbound night; we had somehow sailed from August into January. No, of course, it wasn’t snow – it was birds. Gannets, thousands of white gannets and their white guano and their white feathers, on every ledge of every cliff, and the air above the boat filled with flying gannets: their stout nicotine-yellow necks, their stiff-winged glides. Between the gannets, fulmars and kittiwakes were cutting the sky up in arcs and curves, leaving – to my night eyes – trails of light like the traces on an overexposed photograph. I looked up at the sky of birds, feeling vertiginous, unstable. Lines from one of Ian’s poems came into my head: ‘
Wheeling flights
/ would drag you sky-high / if your wide feet failed / to suck the deck.’

Ian was pointing, saying, ‘Look over there, look there!’ A battered fishing trawler anchored a few hundred yards away:
The Heather Isle
. On her decks stood men, some facing us, others looking to the island. It was the
guga
hunters, ready to start their two weeks on the Rock, crashing into the
geo
to begin the work of unloading. We had by chance coincided with them to the hour.

Jubilee
sloshed and rocked in the swell. Rona was a wedge of green to the east. Death and murder were everywhere underway. For Sula is a killing ground: a gathering point for predators and prey. Seals come for the big fish, gannets come for the herring and the sand eels, skuas come for the adult gannets, and the men come for the
gugas
. I watched gangs of skua pursue single gannets: their method was to fly above a gannet, drop onto its back, force it down onto the sea, smash its skull with their beaks until the gannet was dizzied, then paddle its head underwater with their feet until it vomited up the contents of its stomach, which the skua then ate. But other gannets were on their own hunts, slamming down into the water after fish invisible to me; you could see how they might pierce a hull. They came back out of the sea like white flowers unfurling. Fold, tuck, dive, unfurl: avian origami.

We boiled up black coffee in the galley bucket, then two of us set to the oars and rowed
Jubilee
once round Sula Sgeir; a circumnavigation under sail and oar. Ian was keen that we carry out this ritual circling to mark our passage.

It took us an hour to get round the island. Cormorants stood cruciform on low rocks, drying their wings. We turned the point of Pal a’ Cheiteanaich, went through the narrow gap between the black skerries of Bogha Leathainn and Dà Bhogha Ramhacleit, sharp stacks over which the sea foamed, past An Sgor Mhòr, past Sròin na Lic on which the lighthouse stood, past the
geo
and Bealach an t-Suidhe. Sula Sgeir, a scrap of rock hardly ever inhabited, bears almost thirty
toponyms
.