My second swimming challenge – to cross the mouth of the River Erme at Mothecombe – looked quite brave from the photo I took, but didn’t feel particularly brave at the time. It was a first for me in that it involved swimming in the rain, which was much more pleasant than I expected. I’d watched the temperature gauge in the car drop as I’d driven south-west to the beach from home – 22 degrees, 21, 20, 19, 18 – and worried about getting a chill, but the water was shallow and pleasant. Only when I crossed the little invisible barrier separating river mouth from sea did I notice a shift in temperature: a hint of something breathtakingly cold and epically devoid of remorse that you knew was not far away. As I swam, gentle inquisitive seaweed grabbed for my legs like a thousand face flannels gone sentient. The sea was murkier than it had been ten miles away, at my favourite cove, but kinder. This is something I love about the south Devon coastline: its erratic shifts in personality, its high standards of experimental cliffing and inability to settle for the three or four types of flooring that many other coastlines do.
A couple of days after that a softish package arrived in the post. I opened it with fevered excitement, expecting it to be the Linda Ronstadt T-shirt I had ordered from an American website. Instead, I found a fluorescent item – not, as I first assumed, a high-visibility tabard, but something harder and more rubbery in character. OPEN WATER SWIM BUOY, announced its packaging, which also included a strap and buckle. BE BRIGHT. BE SEEN.
That afternoon an email popped through from my dad. ‘NOW FUCKING USE IT,’ instructed the email, which contained no subject heading or preamble.
It is curious how during a period of your life you will find yourself drawn to some music in what you believe is an entirely arbitrary way but later see a correlation between the character of the music and what you are doing in that period of your life. During my addictive summer of outdoor swimming I had been listening obsessively to the first four albums by the Californian psychedelic rock band Spirit. I had listened to these a fair bit during the late nineties, then moved on to Spirit’s less well known, floatier mid-seventies period, and had recently felt like I needed to give their early work more time. Spirit sold a fraction of the units that their similarly jazz-tinged LA contemporaries the Doors did, but they were a much braver band, although their bravery is far less showy so sometimes people don’t notice it, and their story is more tragic and weird. Another thing that makes Spirit cooler than the Doors is that they were formed by a teenager – the group’s songwriting mainstay Randy California – and his bald, middle-aged uncle. Jim Morrison, you sense, would have thought himself too cool to form a band with his bald, middle-aged uncle, which is of course one of the precise reasons he is in reality more uncool. Spirit are brilliant and weird and perfect for a green summer day, and this was at least part of why I could not stop listening to them.
But there is something very watery about Spirit too: a bubbling quality to their far-out yet understated songs. California was a strong, obsessive swimmer, an athletic hippy who, already a Hendrix-approved guitar prodigy, was only sixteen when Spirit recorded ‘Water Woman’ and the other songs on their visionary 1968 debut album. In 1973, while living in west London, he infamously swam out into a choppy, violent Thames while tripping on LSD as a crowd watched, fearing for his life. He made it back to the shore that time, but, swimming off the coast of Molokai in Hawaii in 1997, California and his twelve-year-old son were caught in a rip tide. His son, with California’s and a lifeguard’s help, survived, but California did not.
On a Friday in August I was walking to the pub listening to Spirit’s most famous song, ‘I Got a Line on You’. The track opens with California singing of taking someone down to the riverbed and giving them something that will ‘go right to’ their ‘head’. It was as I listened to these exact words that some teenagers called and waved to me from the riverbank. I removed my headphones to hear what they were saying. ‘This might sound like a strange question, but have you seen a naked boy running around by any chance?’ one of them asked. I said that I had not. It didn’t, in all honesty, seem that strange a question in this area, where on a warm day skinny-dippers are as rife as moorhens.
I did not give the question much more thought until my friend Sarah and I were walking back from the pub and saw men in orange jackets wading in the river, shining torches into the water. Five minutes later a police car stopped beside us and its driver made the same enquiry: had we seen a naked teenager anywhere in the vicinity? We said we hadn’t. The next morning I woke to the sound of circling helicopters. A sixteen-year-old boy had been spotted on Friday evening, running towards the water, naked, under the influence of a legal high named N Bomb, and nobody had seen him since. On Sunday his body was found in the river by divers.
Throughout most of July the stretch of the Dart between the moor and the estuary had seemed amazingly tranquil and shallow: the ethereal and unthreatening nature of most of the people in it only adding to the ethereal and unthreatening nature of the water. It looked trustworthy: a place that repelled dark events. I challenged myself to swim from the mellow stretch of the river near Dartington Hall to Staverton, just over a mile away, but gave up after progressing barely
