Togetherness Apart: Walking on the Beach With Friends

I need the sea because it teaches me.

— Pablo Neruda

Being out in nature is often advanced as a counter to depression and other mental health difficulties. I’d never go so far. Mental illness can have many different causes and its symptoms are not so readily lifted. Having said that, spending time in the natural world can take us out of our present situation, both literally and figuratively. Alone or in trusted company, such times afford us the opportunity to gain distance from, and perspective on, whatever may be going on for us.

I was reminded of this the other day. Fran was telling me of the great time she’d spent the day before with a mutual friend of ours on Ferry Beach in Scarborough, Maine. The setting itself, the companionship, the conversation, had meant a lot to Fran. I thought back to when she lived on Peaks Island, when we were first friends. She’d walk on the beach there, occasionally sharing her location with me so I could follow along virtually. She’d return home and tell me about what she’d seen and heard and thought about. One spring, as she emerged from a crippling episode of depression, she’d bring me haiku-form poems that came to her on the shore, holding the words on her fingers until she could write them down. The title of the book we’d later write was born in the lines she brought home from Centennial Beach.

high tide
low tide
edgeness..

After our conversation ended, I thought of times I’ve walked by the sea with friends over the years. In its own way, each was deeply meaningful to me and is fondly remembered. I explored several of these occasions in poems, connecting my experiences across three decades and three thousand miles with Fran’s walks on Peaks Island.

Silverdale

January 1981

My first vivid memory of being on the beach with friends dates from January 1981, two months before my twentieth birthday. Somehow, I found myself sitting with friends by a driftwood fire on the shore of Morecambe Bay at Silverdale in Lancashire. I say “somehow” and “found myself” delberately, because that’s how it seemed to me at the time. I felt welcome, but these were mostly recent friends and being with them was new and strange to me. I was content go with the flow, experiencing things as they unfolded, but my amazement and delight came with an equal dose of uncertainty. A reality, a way of being, was being shown to me that I’d scarce imagined possible. I have no photographs of the day, but I wrote the following poem shortly afterwards.

Driftwood (no sunset)

No sunset flares breathless and photogenic
In the skies over Silverdale
As we light our little fire amongst the sheep and pebbles.

Nothing but these few flames to dare the dark
Gathering, oozing velvet from every rocky pore,
Caressing the shadows
Fluttering mothly where the firelight fails.

Few would share our vigil
Lost in a blaze to which we feed
Our driftwood dreams, our precious pasts,
In fire to purge ourselves of fear or false regret.
Dry and tear-damp — crack — in fragments burst
And burn, or shower their sad sparks skyward
With a little sigh
— Hot ashes scattered by a west wind.

Nothing to dare the dark …
But silver in the shallows
And high stars trembling

and the mercury constellations of the bay
map flights of fancy beyond Heysham Head.

What I recall most clearly is everyone sitting around the fire we’d built with wood collected along the shoreline. I lent one of my friends my coat and walked with her to the water’s edge. For reasons I never understood, she suddenly lay down in the water, still wearing my coat. It was a lesson in acceptance, emblematic of the in-the-moment approach to life I was being offered. I travelled home on the train next day wearing a coat that was still damp and smelled strongly of wood smoke.

That evening and the night that followed are among my most precious memories. One year later I recorded in my diary that “The memory is still deep within me, but it seems removed beyond the claim of Time, somehow. It isn’t really meaningful to say ‘a year ago’ because it is a part of me — then and now.”

Sheringham

November 1982

The second walk on the shore I want to share happened in 1982. I was on a six-month placement from university, working at the regional hospital in Norwich, Norfolk. One Sunday in November I accepted an invitation from Janet, one of the friends I’d made there and a fellow pharmacy student.

After lunch I went out to post Dawn’s letter. Later, Janet and I went out for a run in her car to Sheringham for a walk along the shore. It was quite wild and cold, but very Romantic [...] no less so because we were both thinking of Other People.

Those few lines from my diary belie the significance of the event, which is more fully commemorated by the poem I wrote at the time.

(In the depths of) singing

Down the western reaches of the sea i
Findme walking with a friend,
Wind and seasalt wildly in the sky, you on
My mind. Late november: pebbles in a
Wilderness of oceans and a fulling moon.

Something like the flesh of friends too
Raw for touching walkwe. Two
Investigating puddles. Our togetherness apart
We wander down our dreams while all the
Waves one water can involve strike
Sparks about our feet. From flints we
Gather in the night.
We gather. In the

(o i love the waves that break upon me like you)

nightly

Janet and I weren’t close friends and we didn’t keep in touch after completing our respective placements. I’ll always be grateful to her, though, for our afternoon on the shore. The “other people” I was thinking of, the “you on my mind,” was my best friend and first love, Dawn. Leaving her and other friends behind in Bradford for six months was hard, but we kept in touch by letter and phone call. Walks in and around Norwich, and by the shore that afternoon, allowed me space to think, and not think, to feel, and to let my feelings go. The phrase “togetherness apart” was my attempt to express the paradox of sharing time with someone yet experiencing it in an intensely personal way. My friend Janet and I walked the shore together, talked together, but also took time to wander separately or in mutual silence. Each of the memories I’m sharing here was like that.

West Wittering

October 1985

I described the background to this walk in a recent post on mental health in the workplace. Here, I want to focus on the walk itself and what it meant to me. I was working in London at the time, unhappy with how things were going and on the verge of giving it all up. Frustrated and uncertain about my future, I took time out to visit a dear friend from university. We spent the evening watching English singer-songwriter Judy Tzuke in concert in Guildford. That was a beautiful and intense experience in itself. I’d seen Judie Tzuke previously in Bradford and her music was part of my emotional landscape. The concert in Guildford reconnected me with my friend, with the years I’d spent at university, and with the people I’d known there.

Next day, I was supposed to head into work but I wasn’t ready to return. My friend suggested a trip to the seaside and I was happy to abscond with her for the day. After a little deliberation we settled on Wittering on the south coast. The hours we spent walking and talking on the beach are amongst the most impactful I’ve ever spent. The following is excepted from my diary.

For us both, shores are very personal places and we separated; [she] plotting the height of the waves with pebbles on one of the breakwaters, me just wandering along the beach.

The break away from everything I’d been going through and stressing about was exactly what I needed to gain perspective. I wrote to my friend afterwards.

Eloping with you gave me the opportunity to find some calm, and to remember that there are more important things than whether or not I’m 100% happy in work. Like people.

At the end of the year I was able to look back and write of that day on the beach:

All this [the concert and our time on the shore] brought me to the edge of decision. Suddenly, in a moment, all the months of anguish, distress, planning and indecision evaporated: and I realised (in that moment) that my reasons (legion) for leaving did not exceed the single, small, terrifyingly potent reason to stay. The love and support and Reality of friends and family: my life in London.

A year later as I was about to leave London for a new life in the north, I put it more clearly if less poetically. “It wasn’t just [my friend] it was the release she gave me from the terrors of the department.” She’s unnamed here because we’re no longer in contact and I can’t ask for or assume permission, but I will always be grateful for that day, and much more. In a spirit of disclosure I’ll note it’s the same friend who rolled in the sea wearing my coat at Silverdale four years earlier. Some friendships, some people, some lessons, are more important than a ruined parka.

King Edward’s Bay

January 2019

This story isn’t mine to tell, but it’s impossible to write of significant moments I’ve spent with friends on the shore without including it. “Togetherness apart” captures the day as I experienced it. Walking together and on our own. Words spoken and unspoken. Trust offered and accepted. Being there for a friend.

Other Times and Other Shores

Those are my key walking on the shore with friends moments, but others are worthy of mention.

PJ (Pamela Jane) and I never walked together on the beach, but one day in September 2005 I took a day off work and spent it at the coast. At the Rendezvous Cafe in Whitley Bay I wrote my friend a letter, as I’d done almost every day for two years, as her world contracted due to illness. I never posted the letter. That evening I got the news that PJ had died the night before. A month or so afterwards I repeated my walk along the shore, allowing myself to remember and re-feel all she’d meant to me.

I’m reminded of walking along the promenade at Crosby beach in Liverpool the evening before my mother’s funeral, and again the next evening. The following short poem came to me on the latter walk.

Wandering
Wondering

How do I feel
What do I feel

Release
Relief

Re birth

Stillness
Silence

Un known
Un homed

Un tethered

Still
Calm

Centred (thank you

— Liverpool, March 26, 2018

When Fran lived on Peaks she’d take me with her virtually on walks around the island. I’ve likewise shared many calls with her by the sea over the years. I specifically remember calls at Prior’s Haven at Tynemouth, along the shore on Holy Island (Lindisfarne), and the promenade at Whitley Bay.

My most recent coastal walk was this July when I visited Blyth Beach with my friend and fellow blogger Aimee. We didn’t venture onto the sand but had a marvellous time walking, talking, and taking photos. It would be good to visit there again and maybe go paddling together!

 

Photo by Yuliia Herasymchuk at Unsplash.