Free Atlantic Britain by Adam Nicolson Page B

too late to do anything about it. I certainly couldn’t turn sideways on now. The boat began to climb the vertical face of the wave, I leant forward because I thought the wave was going to break over my head and I didn’t want to be washed out of the back. But the wave didn’t break over the boat; it simply turned the boat over, bow over stern, a slam-dunk, head-over-heels, throwing me out as it did so.
    It goes slow then. I am underwater and under the boat. The wave is breaking through me and over me, an aerated chaos of half-lit green. I am no way up but I am under. I didn’t know it at the time, but the anchor that George and I had put in the bow fell out as thedinghy went over. It hit me in the face, cutting my forehead, cheek, and upper lip. All I knew was that my face felt hit, as if punched, sore in the salt water. And then I was up in the light and the air, breathing, looking at the sky and its hobbled clouds. No sooner had I emerged, than another of the big ones, the big seas, the sea monsters that can consume you more easily than any sea monster with fins and tails ever could, was on me again and I was rolling down into its turn and overturn. Back up and breathing, the dinghy beside me now upside down, with the shaft of the outboard sticking up above it and the propeller still turning in the air, the two of us, the boat and I, slurping in the big valley between two swells. Another coming. My life jacket. Why hadn’t I inflated that? How to inflate it? I thought it was one of those self-inflaters. No, as flat as when I had put it on. Pull the toggle. Where was the toggle? I was scrabbling for it, unable to see it or feel it or find it with my fingers, as the third of the huge breaking seas came through me again and that, for a few seconds, is when I thought I might drown.
    Down deeper this time into the roll of the surf, suddenly alarmed at the idea of the dinghy itself, andits protruding outboard, coming slamming on to my head as I was down there, and the feeling of enclosure, of wanting to shout, but the water of course clogging me into silence, a wet muddled claustrophobia like the worst of a bad dream, a fear like a nightsheet twisted around your head, into your mouth and nostrils and neck, a gag on your life, a garrotting by water.
    This was the sea in its killing horror, the death element, the antithesis of life. This moment, seen face to face, was the reason that people have always, from the very beginning, loathed the sea. The
Odyssey,
which is not only the first but the greatest sea poem ever written, as old as the tumuli in which chieftains lie buried on the hills of southern England, and older than the great hillforts that straddle the skyline beside them, is suffused not with love of the sea but fear of it. Odysseus - the first great middle-aged hero in literature; his poem the story of the Middle-aged Man and the Sea - longs to go home, to the sweetness of land and the stillness of a house. But the loathing of Poseidon, the sea god, encloses him in one near fatal sea-trap after another. That is one of the
Odyssey’s
central meanings: the sea itself is the element of death. And nowhere more powerfully than the land of thedead, which Odysseus finds at the very limits of the known world. He travels there only so that Tiresias, the blind seer, can tell him how he might return home.
    The sail stretched taut as she cut the sea all day and the sun sank and the ways of the world grew dark.
    These are the outer limits, the edge of the Ocean River, a desolate coast, where the only trees that grow are ‘tall black poplars and willows whose fruit dies young’. The waves break on a darkened beach. Hell has never seemed so beautiful.
    I came bursting to the surface. As I rose, not knowing if I was rising or falling, I was looking with my fingers for the toggle on the life jacket, scrabbling in its folds with my fingertips, like a piglet or a lamb desperate for the nipple, some source of life. At last I found