Memory cards

An account of events on Sunday December 4th 2010, at Sully Island in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, UK.

Unusual feelings washed over me as I reversed into my parking space outside the flat. Stunned relief, mainly, as well as gratitude, muddied by a lingering incomprehension. Everything feels unusual so soon after eyeballing the abyss like that. I cut the engine and sat there for several seconds, air freezing in the new quiet around me, and contemplated the past few hours. “Lucky stupid, lucky idiot. Lucky.”

There was plenty of time to ponder everything in the single hospital cubicle, waiting three hours for a two minute chat with the Doctor. I pawed through niche interest magazines and old newspaper supplements, hearing raucous applause from a television in the waiting room next door as gameshow followed gameshow. I grew impatient, bored and tetchy, wondering if anyone had been missing me. “It’s best, for your own peace of mind as much as anything else,” the Paramedic had said. Nobody had been missing me.

1.

I could really die here, thrashing around in the December sea, fully clothed, a large winter coat on and camera still around my neck. This could be it. Time up.

My head went under for a moment, as I summoned the energy for a heaving diagonal stroke towards land. Remember that handsome lead actor from the film a couple of nights before. Robert Pattinson. He’d played a wayward young man whose life was belatedly showing signs of coming together when it was snuffed out by 9/11. Sudden death is theatrical. A Hollywood, overly-convenient, slightly lazy but still popular solution when people can’t think how to end stories, books and films. You can easily forget that it can happen in real life too. Death doesn’t care about human self-regard or interruption. It can happen whenever.

Drowning though? I pushed more water behind me and gasped for air, waved my feet hoping for rock, land, anything beneath my feet. Nothing there. Drowning then. This would be a horrible way to go. Traumatic and slow.

I stopped swimming for a moment and treaded water. After taking a deep breath, I yelled for help as loud as possible. Hearing that sound, the legitimate fear and panic in my voice, it tightened the grip of reality. Definitely not a dream. I began swimming again.

Through a podcast still somehow twittering in my right ear, I heard a shout from land: “..on its way!” That was hopeful. I unpopped the earplug and came to terms with the probable destruction of my iPod, mobile and camera. Perhaps the memory card would be ok.

Making any ground?

Must have been.

Anything beneath my feet?

Nothing. Trying to take my coat off could take too long.

I spat out cold salty water and kept working.

Why hadn’t I turned around and waited on the island, or called a rescue boat? It never occurred to me. I had imagined perhaps wading a short distance across the rocky causeway, but it wasn’t THAT far to land. Then I’d make the ten minute drive home in wet pants. No big deal.

Seeing the ocean begin to cross the causeway I was encouraged forward as blind panic bled into nervous acceptance of momentum.

And now I was swimming against a reverse current, remembering the occasional news stories about people drowning in this place - a place said to have the second highest tidal range in the world. I wondered if I would be next, if this might be it. And I felt disappointed by my lack of achievement, an absence of any legacy, how little my life had registered anywhere with anyone.

The sunlight had been low and golden all afternoon, sun dazzling off the ocean to give a glowing warmth for the time of year. A zen-like state swaddled me as I idly clambered across rocks an hour earlier on a different stretch of the bay; gentle hangover from the night before slowly subsiding after an evening with new football team-mates. An echoing nightclub din often leaves you with unusual acoustic clarity the next day.

Now in the sea fighting against waves and current, that blissful calm seemed a foreboding punctuation mark.

I looked up to see progress had been made. Land was within reach.

People. Distant dots raced down the rocky beach in front of me. One had something in his hand, a pole or aid of some kind. Like a high-rise suicide in reverse, I found rock beneath my cold numbed toes. Beautiful solid rock. And more, toes to feet.. more of it still. The surface dipped away and rock crashed into my knee but I felt nothing. Back to wading. I might not die now! Men were upon me as I staggered weak-kneed and Bambi-like, up and out of the water. Ocean slopped off the shoulders of my thick coat, knees buckling under the weight. Exhausted, I fell back down and wanted to stay lying, spent on the rock like a beached whale. A voice told me to get up and keep moving, I wasn’t safe yet, still freezing and soaking head to toe. Accepting the props of two men either side of me, one the owner of the voice, we carried walking up and away.

A small crowd had gathered in front of the pub, most from the adjacent caravan holiday park. Faces gawked at me as I half covered my own, humiliated by the attention, trembling and tired. But breathing. A siren grew louder.

2.

A paramedic opened the backseat passenger door and poked his thermometer in my ear. Although wrapped in three blankets and clasping a fourth mug of tea, the cold blast of outside air set my core juddering again. The professional verdict was that my temperature was rising but not quickly, and the Paramedic to take me in to get checked, just as a precaution.

This Paramedic had been the latest in a reel of quick-changing people that started with the three figures who steered me away from the sea. One was a dog-walker who hadn’t been either of the men directly propping me up. This spare guy had relieved me of my camera and carried it for several yards before giving it back and leaving the scene. Most of the others, the professionals had spoken CLEARLY and EXACTLY about what was happening, like I was still under water.

Another, a hard-faced middle-aged man, stayed awhile and led me to a quiet corner behind the pub, away from the crowd of onlookers. He seemed unsympathetic but dutiful, as if he blithely considered me just another idiot but would serve me well regardless. He helped me out of my wet clothes, draped me with a foil cape, told me to keep moving and ordered a mediterranean looking barman to make tea.

I was still trembling, disgusted by myself and humiliated at all of this. A man entered with the Paramedic, a boxy machine, and more blankets. Being hooked up to a bleeping machine via several wires suckered to my body produced a line-graph with which everyone approved. The ungraceful man who rightly thought me an idiot excused himself at this point and I thanked him profusely for everything. I kept thanking everyone around me for everything, and apologising, keen not to miss anybody, not even the mediterranean looking barman for his neverending supply of tea.

Unsuckered from the machine, I went to a toilet to take off my jeans and clothe myself in more blankets. I tried not to think too hard about the secondary drowning thing the Paramedic had explained, where swallowed sea water can retrospectively swamp the lungs. Had I swallowed any? Another mug of tea was forced into my hands as I exited the gents and was shepherded to the car park, and a van of the Sea Rescue people.

There were three or four of them. Did they need that many? One had a confusingly aggressive style of care: you DO NOT worry about wasting all our time! This is what we’re here for!

Seated in a heat-blasted van, I met another member of the sea rescue team. We spoke of the lovely sunset, now blazing down over the sea, firing embers into the last whispy clouds; and of London, where we’d both lived. Her gentle sympathy was more traditional.

I caught my eye in the rear view mirror above her head. A pale, washed-out fool.

That was when I had the thermometer shoved in my ear, and agreed to climb into the Paramedic’s van to be taken to a local hospital. Everybody seemed to fall over themselves to help. It was almost a bit excessive.

A preliminary hospital check required more suckers and machines, but the main two-minute check from an affable young Doctor took about three hours to arrive. “Wear armbands next time,” was his sage advice. By now I was tired and hungry and really wanting home.

The Paramedic kindly returned to to take me back to my car, parked on the seafront, where the temperature hovered around zero. While densely starlit above, mere yards away the sea silently skulked, black and invisible, like she was angry she hadn’t claimed me.

My small vehicle was frozen over by the subzero temperatures and seawater had killed the key’s remote locking system, which for some reason meant the car was only accessible via the passenger door. Having shuffled over the handbrake and experienced a freezing blast under the hospital dress, I landed in the driver’s seat.

I turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened. I whined, before slowly headbutting the steering wheel, because that’s what Marty McFly did in Back To The Future when the car came to life. But the car didn’t come to life.

This wasn’t the best of days. But obviously it could have been far worse. That could be used as a caveat for every bad stroke of luck forever. At least I didn’t die that one Sunday afternoon. How long would that last?

I plucked the breakdown rescue card from the windscreen holder and, still wrapped in two blankets and a loose hospital robe of the kind women give birth in, gingerly padded back over the cold concrete to the Paramedic’s warm van. I was extremely grateful to him for waiting, and emitted yet more gushy sorry-thankyous before summoning a rescue service on his phone.

We sat and waited. He asked me if I’d told anyone and I thought about my parents, the one phone number I knew off the top of my head. If they had tried calling a few hours ago and still couldn’t reach me, it was possible they could be nervous.

“Hello Mum, sorry to call so late.”

“Oh hello,” she sounded cheerful, “how are you?”

“Oh, fine,” I rearranged the blankets around my shoulders and wriggled my toes. “You?”

It seemed all was fine so I made up a quick Christmas present related reason for calling and ended the call.

“Wouldn’t wanna play you at poker,” said the Paramedic.

The breakdown rescue van only took twenty minutes to arrive. A burly thick-set man named cleverly diagnosed that the key’s waterlogged electronics were responsible for the car not starting. His surgery involved meticulous dismantling, air-conditioning powered drying, scraping and tweaking — all of which took remarkable dexterity for a mechanic who did not naturally exhibit dexterity.

From the backseat of the Paramedic’s van, I saw the car lights ignite and a silhouetted chunky outline of the breakdown mechanic, two arms raised jubilantly aloft, like he’d scored a goal.