Later in August I left Devon to complete a short spoken-word tour. After an event in the north Pennines, I stayed in a farmhouse B & B under the grey ridge of the nearby moor and ate a hearty breakfast consisting of eggs from the farmhouse’s chickens, although not the eggs of one particularly bold chicken, who had recently left the farmyard to live as a nomad. ‘We still sometimes see her, up over there, wandering along the ridge, alone, as the sun is setting,’ said Michelle, the B & B’s owner. Fortified by these more homely eggs I set off with my conservationist friend Chris along the Pennine Way to High Force, the waterfall which, when in full spate, has the largest volume of water of any in England. ‘Shall I bring my trunks?’ I asked Chris, who knows this area better than I know the contours of my own knuckles. ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ he replied.
After passing the whitewashed cottages of Lord Barnard’s estate and admiring the aerial ballet of an enormous late flock of golden plover, we proceeded a few miles along the way and stood on the unprotected southern bank on wet rocks within inches of the precipice of the waterfall, where the torrent makes its uninterrupted ninety-eight-foot plunge to the pool below. Its elemental power was like nothing I had known. No photograph I’ve seen of High Force comes anywhere near capturing it, although Joseph Turner’s sketches of the waterfall from the early 1800s do come a little closer. The roar tumbled me into its epicentre, and I was inside the wet whirlwind even without taking the fatal single step forward, my bones crushed by its spate like so many matches before I’d even hit the bottom. I was pinned to the spot, and my future and past and even a great deal of my present receded to a unimportant fog beyond the race of a gazillion droplets of good cold northern water. Nothing could be more opposite than this to any of the vicarious, part-lived lives we sometimes live, and for a split second it felt like it would be worth perishing just to entirely embrace that oppositeness, but only for a split second. Chris had been right: there’d been no need to bring my trunks.
I had been touched when I completed my first few swimming challenges and people expressed worry over me, but I also chuckled inwardly. Sure, I was alone when I did them, but how could there be anything to worry about? I was, after all, me. I am outdoorsy, but I often feel that I define being so in a different way to many. I am not a daredevil or an adrenaline junkie. I am not one of those youths who dive from a height of over twenty feet into the Tees from the wobbly suspension footbridge two miles downstream from High Force, close to the waterfall’s still quite intimidating little brother, Low Force. I am not even one of the fourteen-year-olds who strip off and push each other into the Dart near Totnes weir in January when the thermometer says one degree. Look at all the other risky, wild challenges properly adventurous people set themselves every day, I thought when people expressed reservations about my swimming adventures. Why focus on a frivolous not very brave person like me, with my silly half-adventures? But if I am truly honest with myself, a small element of risk has been part of the driving force behind my swimming. I have a positive view of risk and doing the opposite of what most people tell me to do since I associate risk and doing the opposite of what most people have told me to do with all the most positive turning points in my life. Then there was the fact that I had hoped to complete at least one of the two books I was writing, and due to various factors – losing a vast chunk of one in a data disaster, making the greedy decision to also have a life – I had not done so, and this had left me dissatisfied with myself. I wanted the sense of achievement that goes with getting my writing out of my system and, sometimes, into a small public sphere. Deciding to do a small outdoor swimming task then completing that small outdoor swimming task filled some of the holes where that sense of achievement should have been.
I avoided the Dart during the couple of weeks following the boy’s death not because I was scared to swim in it or didn’t plan to again, but to avoid it seemed somehow respectful. Part of this was perhaps out of respect for the river too. Can you respect the landscape too much? I don’t think so. I love the landscape of Britain’s Deep South West so fervently that I have chosen it ahead of an arguably more straightforward life closer to many people I love. It is more life-enhancing than any other terrain I’ve lived amid, but I hear more stories of tragedy associated with it than any other landscape I’ve lived in, and I cannot help but believe these two facts are inseparable. I think I have as much respect for this coastline, these rushing rivers,
