the salthouse sea

August 2020

The waves were bigger than either of us had ever seen before; as towering as the ocean was cold. It would have been so, pitifully easy to just give up, hobble back across the shingle away from the roiling Salthouse sea and watch it from a distance as the dogs pranced up and down the beach. There wasn’t even a single ray of sunlight — the clouds were a blanket across the sky and the wind helped to move nothing but the icy fetch across the North Sea. Twice, I asked you whether you were sure about going in, and twice you turned around and looked at me as if I’d offended you. There was no going back, and I would never have had it any other way. We ditched flip flops and leads at the top of the shingle bank, and I took it upon myself to storm into the water first, denim shorts and a cotton shirt already hanging heavy and damp. It was freezing, and the only thing that kept me in was you, crashing in resolutely behind me. Straight away, the waves were on us and I was head-deep in seconds. We both were, squealing like... children, I suppose. I say that as if we weren’t just kids at the beach in August, and I can hear the laughter of readers at my failure to see the obvious but I swear, we were more than that.

At first, the waves only crashed behind us, huge and rolling but swimmable through, and it was the joy of being lifted high up into the air by the ocean that satisfied us. Steadily, unsteadily, whatever it was, they started to break earlier on until it was us being tossed about like the pebbles that littered the seabed around us. God, it was cold, but once we were diving headfirst into these gargantuan masses of force and froth, the temperature was the last thing we had to worry about. Twice, a wave took me with it, merciless in its intensity and hurling me into the ground with force that might have killed me, if I had been naïve enough to die. The pull of the shore tugged my legs one way and the riptide pulled my torso the other as if I were a rag doll, spinning me around once it had released me before it finally let me burst out into the open air, coughing and laughing and yelling at you about how I’d seen my life flash before my eyes. It was all the adrenaline that my body needed to go diving into the face of another wave, riding either underneath the worst of the force or up over it and praying that it didn’t throw me with the weight of the ocean into the ground. We rose and fell and spun around, pushing all the while against the tow that pulled us right, away from the dogs and worldly possessions that suddenly meant nothing. Not compared to this. Not compared to feeling so impossibly on fire. Minutes later, you’d been pulled under as I was, thrown, as I was, into the shore and wrenched back away by the receding tide. You broke out from the sea once you’d recovered, grinning away the fear that tends to come with the threat of drowning. God, though, what a way to go that would have been. I kept on thinking it as we fought harder and harder against the ocean, screaming curses at Poseidon and shushing Enzo’s barking from the shore — how wonderful would it be, to die, like this? Grinning and cursing and spitting out the seawater that dried our mouths, diving over and over into the waves that came, and calmed, and rose again. I wouldn’t have minded, to be taken like that. 

Eventually, your hands were literally going blue and our feet were stinging from the slices of a thousand tiny rocks — we battled to stay in but, eventually, it was time to head back to the shore. You said it yourself, when we were still trying to convince ourselves to spend a little more time in the ocean: “we’ll never have this opportunity again,” and it hurt my heart to hear — but you were right. Never, probably, would we have waves this big or wind this strong, and yet it was the reality of having had them at all that drowned out the sadness of leaving. I grinned at you from the water — you were the first to get out, and I was still kicking against the ocean in an attempt to escape the waves — dipping one last time under the writhing sea to push the hair back from my face. Once I’d finally conquered the tide, the air was cold and my feet were sore and my clothes were sticking to my skin — it sounds miserable, I know, but as I turned for the last time to bid farewell to the ocean, with the dogs behind us and you by my side, I can’t remember ever having felt so unfathomably alive.