Globetrotters Monthly Challenge: Flow Like Water

Water Home

A world awash with water, and home to intelligences we are yet to understand.

I never experienced large expanses of water until I was eight years old. Before that, I laughed and splashed in a bath, jumped in every puddle after the rain came, getting into trouble with Matron at the orphanage. In the grounds there was a water fountain and a ginger cat. I would fill up my water pistol from the fountain and go looking for the ginger cat!

That was a game I most often got into trouble about.

When I left the orphanage with my new parents, we were headed to Scotland, and to the Isle of Mull, which would become my home, and the place to which I return every year of my life.

So here I was, eight years old, surrounded by water. It was a problem. That was my first thought. If I didn’t like my new parents, and not being able to swim, I had to come up with plans on how to escape. Those plans were not necessary. Not only was a large expanse of water new to me, but so was the expanse of love, and that was another kind of ocean on which I flourished.

Arriving by train into Oban, my parents had a car parked nearby. We drove to the harbour, and there I saw my first steel monster. It looked huge. It was going to swallow up the car with all of us in it! I got down behind the seat as the man I was to call dad, drove the car into the mouth of this steel leviathan.

The great mouth opened like a whale feeding. Dad encouraged me to sit up and watch as the car clattered over the metal grated bridge and into the belly of the monster. It didn’t just startle gulls into flight, I nearly peed my pants.

These many decades later I still think of the child, Jonah, swallowed into the belly of a whale.

The sounds I thought forgotten come hurtling back in the writing: the yells of the men calling out, the whoosh of the piston-powered doors, the noise of dragging chains on metal, and the pungent smell of exhaust fumes. I realize, as these words appear on the page, those sounds are old friends.

It was dark in there, but a woman, primly dressed, wearing a black jacket, a black ‘pencil’ skirt and a crisp white blouse directed us forward as if marshalling a jet fighter across the deck of an aircraft carrier. Dad inched the car forward until the woman faced up the flats of her palms. ‘Turn off your engine,’ she instructed, ‘take anything you might need. This deck is off-limits during the crossing.’

Dad locked the car and mum put me in a huge black coat, three sizes too big, touching my new shoes. I didn’t understand why, I was warm anyhow. But mum insisted I would need it. Dad grabbed his coat and hopped quickly out of the car, making for the closest door and the stairs. These seemed to go up and up and up. Then we were on the deck of the leviathan. Dad called it a ferry. He told me I would come on the ferry to school. School, that’s when the idea of escape first took shape.

Half an hour later, I jumped as the great monster blasted its horn. We were slipping silently away from the harbour and across the Firth of Lorn toward Craignure. I couldn’t understand why we didn’t sink. Every stone I put in water sank immediately. Mr. Bunsen, the orphanage caretaker, told me it was because the stone was heavy. Okay, why are we not sinking? Dad said something really dumb, and it sounded like displacement.

After forty-five minutes, the ruins of Duart Castle were off to the left, the thirteenth-century home of the Chief of the ‘Maclean’ family. The ferry slipped toward the dockside.

As an old man, remembering this momentous time in my life, I’m reminded of the many crossings made during my schoolboy years, believing Craignure was a magical entrance to secret places: ‘For here, if legend be told, giants walk, witches fall, faery-folk and ancient battles fill the landscape,’ Dad told me and it’s what I believe to this day.

He also told me, whenever you see a rainbow over these Hebridian waters, it is the island calling you home.

I was full of questions. Why doesn’t the island sink into the water?

As the weeks and months went by, and my parents showed me the island, the biggest of the Hebridean islands, I was full of myself. Spending hours with the silver and sun rivers that flowed everywhere, running under bridges, throwing pebbles, looking for frogs, and catching newts. It was a wandering childhood, guarded by the flow of water and the mountain.

Mostly I loved walking on the shore with Dad, collecting shells. His hands so huge, lifting me onto his shoulder as if a feather. From there I could see way out on nothing but enormous water.

I learned as I grew, it’s out there, somewhere. Some need, I guess. I didn’t know. I did learn a thing or two about humbleness. I got to know what is unattainable and free, the wanderings of the whale, the dolphin’s flight, and me living a charmed existence.

In these first early hours I watch the clouds split, surrendering their hold on the moon as the oncoming breakers rise, bringing the tide home. The drama unfolds in front of me. The seaborne awakenings bring to the shore the deliriums of surf and the shivering of seabirds that hover and hang and roll over on the wing.

Sometimes, I think I have seen all I imagine. The swells rush in like hysterical monsters battering the rocks, wreaking havoc on their land limitation. Or the leviathans moving unknown in the scandalous deep, toward their fate, hurled there by hurricanes from ocean to ocean, moving freely into abysses, drifting through gulfs, twisting through kelp, mingling with the shipwrecks and drunken sailors looking to free themselves from their rolling captivity.

It is the life of the ocean. Bottomless nights. Dawns of emerald sunlight. Heartbreaking movement. A life-force dictated by the lunar gods. It’s also the home of the mermaid making her way. Her forehead adorned by violet fogs, maelstroms curling her hair, black seahorses for escorts, she moves serenely within her watery space.

In the end, the oceans broke my heart. It is now the home of my son and his mother.

Mermaids are at home, passing carriers of cargo, liners like bright islands, hair flying amid the whale songs and accompanied by a dolphin child.

Each tide of life will bring something new to the shore, it will clear intruders’ footprints as easily as it dumps driftwood. The oceans, with their ragged edges, have a certain beauty because the mystery of their complexities remains hidden, like a woman’s secrets.

Too much comes and goes beneath the surface of an ocean for any single mind to comprehend.

Not everything about oceans is pretty, often demanding a bitter prize; a head to batter against the rocks to remind us, lest anyone think the ocean is something not to respect.

Your life might be bought and paid for, it might belong to no one, but one day the tide will find your feet. I promise you. Stand back a little and read the beauty, see the sails so bright and full, watch the white caps and hear the gulls on the air. Learn each ocean’s gift, it will set you apart. You are on her shore, watching the changing tide and waiting for the answers to come, sure and true.