Out of sync with the tides. Out of sync with the season. Out of sync with the sudden drop down to the beach where the storm has washed away the sand. I know it will catch me off guard and I will stumble again. Now feels like a forever stumble.
Blue sky with wisps of cloud, at one time I could have named them. Deep blue sea, calm but for a multitude of white crests whipped up by the wind. It is an offshore wind blowing straight out to sea, I know before I even get there that it will be perfectly perpendicular to the shore. Short grasses vibrate with each gust, they quiver. The grasses of the dunes are taking the full force, but they can flex and twist. In front of me seedheads of an umbellifer, browning and stiffening, showing signs of the decay to come, look as if they will snap and break in the wind. Inside I wonder if that is me? Will I just snap in the wind? Will tiny fragments of my soul break off, and fly away with the wind far, far out to sea?
Would that indeed be so bad?
I can’t separate the love from the loss. I can’t shake the memories from the present. I can’t untangle my entanglements with this place. I am part of it, it is part of me.
I often wonder how other people see this place. It is iconic, a skyline of towers and spires, golf balls flying, the “Chariots of Fire” beach. But I’ve been here when the crowds have gone. I think I’ve been here at every hour of the day and of the night. In joy and in utter, broken despair.
For years I chased the sunrise here: a hint of pink would make me run to catch it, sometimes a whole sky full of roses and reds and golds mirrored in water, some days just grey. I’ve chased ice clouds in the summer twilight, green arcs and purple pillars in the winter darkness.
I have seen changing patterns in the sand. Flowing contour lines between the different textures as the particle sizes of the sand changes and washed-up markers of the high tide line. I have seen where the water drains differently as the tide retreats, unexpected pools, undulating sand ripples where yesterday it was flat, constantly shaped and shifted. This expanse has changed so many times, but you have to come here often to see that. From the bustling town edge, it still just looks like the same long flat classic West Sands beach leading to the Eden estuary with the dark green tree-line of Tentsmuir beyond. That is how it has been for at least living memory, the infrastructure has radically changed, but the beach appears comfortingly and reliably the same. That is, unless there’s been a storm, then catastrophic changes make local news and people come to see the damage. The town rubbish dump of past years is being unearthed again at the far end, the storm waves washing away the facade that it is all “natural”. The edges of the land are uncertain and crumbling. Signs say “danger”, people say it’s “unsightly”. Turn and retreat. Avoid the awkwardness of the climate-change conversation. Just mutter about the weather.
I remember the days of that town rubbish dump at the end of the beach, but my recollection of its timeline now seems uncertain. Landfill operations ceased around the time of my birth at Craigtoun Maternity Hospital, so maybe I’m remembering hazard warnings and a very young child’s consternation at being subsumed into a detritus netherworld if she did not tread lightly enoughTo my shame, I do not know where my rubbish goes now. Then it became the place for the town fireworks. Then health and safety happened, and the fireworks moved out of town to Craigtoun Park. The maternity hospital there is now an empty building at risk, boarded from view, and we get huge firework displays back down near the beach for the golf. Nearly full circle but not quite. Do not mention waste.
It was also a place to escape, you could drive all the way down to the end to Out Head, bump across the grass and park up facing back towards the distant town. As a child I always came with a parent so in practice my escape antics were limited.
Trips with my dad, my dearly beloved dad, always ended with me as a soddenly wet toddler sitting in the sea running her fingers through the sand, usually within minutes, then scooped up and taken home to an irate mother who had thought she finally had time alone. My dad loved this place and he must have known it intimately for he walked here every day. No matter how much of a gale, it was always just a breath of fresh air for him. My heart still misses a beat, sometimes a little rise of anticipation when I catch sight of an elderly gentleman, navy jacket, maybe even a red bobble hat, and then I realise it’s not him. I often cry. No more unexpected encounters walking along the beach. I wonder, does the place miss him too? He would walk the length of the beach and back like clockwork daily. Do the gulls know he is gone? Do the returning swifts and swallows sense he is not here? Do the curious bobbing seals miss him like I do? It is a loss that still feels raw, maybe that’s why I ache when I come here. Like the ferocity of the winter storms that showed no mercy to the coast, it was sudden loss.
There are creeping losses too. Out Head now has a barrier. Despite knowing it is installed with all good intention, I wish it would open to just let me past sometimes, after all I’ve known this place longer than many. I am, at the moment, so tired, it is hard to walk right to the far end. Then, when I do, it is confused mixed feelings for the other loss. An insidious loss, a loss of a complicated person to be honest. Loved but not beloved for which I am ashamed. Trips to the beach with my mother, always highly sanitised and never ending with a satisfying plunge into the North Sea, invariably ended up with her turning away from the beauty around her to decry melodramatically “how can such a small town bring so much trouble?”. Uncharitably in my teenage years I would think in my head that’s because mum, you were here. My remembering of my reaction still does not sit well with me. But age brings, if not wisdom, a change in perspective of human flaws. Maybe I still crave escape, going down to the end of the beach as far away as I can get for now. For while she’s not dead, she’s not here: lost to Alzheimer’s. No longer resident here, no longer resident anywhere it would appear. We seem to have had seasons of death on the beach these last few years, so many seabirds washed up due to the avian flu pandemic, jellyfish strandings, sometimes a dead sea mammal – occasional seals, once even a minke whale.
How can I bring myself back into this place? A recent unexpectedly joyous conversation was about attention and noticing. I’ve been so distracted for so long that I haven’t paid full attention to the wholeness of this place, I have ignored, either wilfully or carelessly, the restorative and healing actions going on: the mending of broken fences that protect the fragile dunes whilst they stabilise, remediation of pollutions past, the rebuilding of the accessible walkway, the post-covid normality of families on days out to the beach. My noticing has tended to be cursory: that’s not like it used to be… Oh, bring back what I cannot have because it is gone forever. I have not been here with all my senses. Lost, not escaped, and this time not yet found again.
But I can turn around to face the wind head on, I know it would jolt me, waken me, recharge me, reset me. I can be held in perfect tension as sand zig-zags in turbulent streams around my feet dragging me towards the sea with that familiar childhood lure yet the waves will chase me back towards the land. I can drop my shoulders in the rare warmth of the sun, feel the damp sand if just reach out with my hands again, pick up a shell and feel the sea worn, sea crafted surface. I can reconnect with the more-than-human, linger over a flower – a brilliant hint of blue harebell sheltered in a dune pathway. Sit tight and follow the swooping arcs of the birds, I can follow them for hours again, tracing the patterns in the sky. I can learn to tell the time differently again, resynchronise myself with the ebb and flow, knowing instinctively whenever I wake whether the tide is coming in or going out.
I can’t separate the love from the loss. I can’t shake the memories from the present. I can’t untangle my entanglements with this place. I am part of it, it is part of me.
Rebecca Cornwell
Mother, daughter, sister; researcher, listener, teacher; sky-watcher, sea-watcher, and lover of all things small, neglected and on the edge in the more-than-human world, especially the wild plants of Scotland.