The Outrun (18 page)

I help with a monthly winter survey of birds on Papay. The absence of trees helps in the count and I scan the hill and coastline with binoculars. There is a rainbow over the sea and I stop for a while to watch gannets dive. They fold their wings swiftly and efficiently to form a perfect arrow when entering the sea. Observing them, I have a sensory memory of the meteor shower a few weeks earlier: the darting descent in the corner of my eye, the flash or the splash at the end, the thrill. Unlike most seabirds, gannets have been one of the few recent success stories of breeding around Orkney. The colony at Noup Head on Westray, which only began in 2003 with three nesting pairs, has grown to 623 nests.

On a Monday morning in mid-January, on our small island, 47 species of bird are counted including 102 curlew, 280 purple sandpiper, 276 fulmar, 16 red-breasted merganser, 1,000 starling, two hen harriers, one kestrel and 1,500 greylag geese. There are many hundreds of birds for each human resident.

Fowl Flag is the most northerly part of the whole island, a treacherous acre or so wedge of blue-black flagstone, sloping into the crashing waves, carpeted with slidy black lichen. I see lichen’s photobiology played out on the rocks: black/green
in areas that are damp, white/grey in the dry and yellow in ‘splash areas’.

Around Fowl Flag, marked on the map, there are caves. I lie on my front on the cliff edge, trying to stick my head out far enough to glimpse one. The best way to see the caves is from the sea. Fisherman Douglas tells me that he has taken a boat inside some of the caves, which can extend back fifty metres into the island, and that you can go into one cave and come out of another. The hill is riddled and the ground beneath my feet is hollow.

I develop a walk, straight and compass drawn, up the spine of the island, past the telegraph-pole lookout to the trig point on North Hill. When I turn at the top of the hill to look back over the island, the diffuse winter sun shines from the south straight up the road. It’s windy today and the sun has struggled to break through the haar. The island is hazy and trembling.

In the mist I hallucinate. I transpose the island’s boundaries onto a map of London. Papay is about half the area of Hackney but has just a hundred-thousandth of the population. In my dream state the central road through Papay becomes Mare Street, the same north–south drag, and in each field springs a block of buildings. The Holm is the marshes and the loch is the park, the power lines are train tracks, each house a station. The screaming gulls become sirens, and the sea is traffic.

I once cycled along a Hackney towpath in winter, through fog so thick and cold that, when I emerged, frozen droplets of water were caught in my eyelashes.

*    *    *

One morning I’m out walking on the hill when there is some unexpected sunshine. I’m striding on in sudden good spirits when the thought pings into my head that the thing to complete this mood would be a cold pint of beer. It gets me at my worst times but also in my best moments. I’m crying. I’m sober, twenty months and eight days now, and I like the changes happening in my life but I’m still often frustrated about not being ‘able’ to drink. I’m sober but I would like a drink. It’s a painful paradox to live in.

For a while after I stopped drinking I was on a drug called Campral, prescribed to help with the cravings. But no medication is going to eradicate the deeper thirst. It’s not that I want the alcohol itself, it’s that I want to feel the effects it gave me: I want to feel easier. My problem is not physical. And even if I did get rid of the cravings, I am still left with the question of why I had that need in the first place – and what will fill the void.

In defiance of this dissatisfaction, I’m conducting my own form of therapy through long walks, cold swims and methodically reading old journals. I’m learning to identify and savour freedom: freedom of place, freedom from damaging compulsion. I’m filling the void with new knowledge and moments of beauty. The dangerous thoughts will happen – and while I’m experiencing them I feel like that’s the way I will feel for ever – but I just have to let the cravings pass lightly. I must not entertain them and help them to grow.

On a windy day, I climb and kneel unsteadily on top of the trig point on North Hill. Sunlight is making a rainbow through
sea spray. I then continue right out to Fowl Flag. On the clifftop my heart is wild and open and empty. I’ve reached the edge. I howl as loudly as I can into the churning Bore, my cry caught by the waves and blown back to the shore, into the inaccessible caves, echoing and rumbling deep below my feet.

19

ONLINE

WHEN I ARRIVED AT
R
OSE
Cottage, I made sure broadband was working before the hot water. I’m medieval with Wi-Fi: concentrating on the fundamentals of making fire and baking bread while becoming increasingly reliant on my smartphone.

Wherever I am, I spend most of my time with a laptop online, so I might as well do it in the calm and beautiful surroundings of Papay. In the past decade or so, the internet has made island life possible for more people, able to work remotely for employers down south. This way of working increases hope that the fragile populations of some of the smaller islands will not only stabilise but grow. The internet can be more important to remote communities than it is in cities. Since I’ve been sober and in Orkney, I’m online more than ever as a way of keeping myself linked to the old life I’m not prepared to cut ties with. I’m keeping in spectral communication with the ghosts of my past.

There can be connection problems. Our internet on Papay comes through the copper phone lines as the population size does not justify the phone companies installing fibre-optic cables. The signal is sent by microwaves from Kirkwall to Shapinsay to Sanday to Westray then to us, declining in speed with each transition. The mobile signal can be affected by the wind, and one side of the island gets the Orange signal, the other O2. I’m waiting for the next gale to receive my text messages.

In the islands in the age of digital media, we often find that, although it seems contradictory, technology can bring us closer to the wild. When an unusual bird, such as a sea eagle, is seen in the sky above Orkney, or a pod of orca along the coastline, people pass messages immediately via a local birding forum or text-message groups so that others can rush out to see them. Alerts on the possibilities of seeing the Merry Dancers circulate on the social networks and, the next day or the same night, people share their photographs.

On Sanday, a webcam is trained on the colony of grey seals that pup in November. I post a link on Facebook and my friends in offices in London watch the hulking grey females hauled up on the beach with their white teddy-bear-like pups, unable to swim yet. We chat while watching seals caught before dawn by night-vision camera and a black-backed gull eating a seal’s afterbirth.

I think of Maggie and her lifelong connection to a place; her memories of names and houses on the island were similar to the way I can place people I know to different corners and times of the internet. Many of them I’ve never met in person
but we’ve vaguely followed each other’s lives for years. Often I feel as if my real life is inside the computer while my time back in Orkney and the people I see here are just a temporary intrusion. I know people on Twitter I’ve never met better than people I’ve sat opposite for months at work or people I went to school with. I’ve moved around a lot but the internet is my home.

I begin to use a GPS app on my phone to track my daily walks around Papay, along sheep trails and high-water lines. I’m building a map, within the limits of the island, revealing the lines I am drawn along. Overlaid on satellite maps, a story emerges. The GPS tracks show how my walks change. At first I stride out, covering good distances along the coastal paths, marking my territory. As the weeks go on, I become slower and more exploratory, covering smaller areas in greater detail: climbing down the stones into a geo, looking in rockpools for treasures.

Cross-referencing the shoreline with the Ordnance Survey map in my pocket, Google Maps on my phone and my physical and visual experience, I am locating myself, putting the correct names to the inlets and outcrops around the North Hill. The Pow of Keldie looks like a potential spot to swim at low tide; Mad Geo is dark and intense. For me, these places – ‘The Sneck’, ‘Eerival’ – exist both digitally and underfoot.

Orkney and Shetland often used to appear in a box at the side of the map, to the east of Britain rather than the north. Now Google Maps stretches endlessly around the globe. Late at night, I keep ending up on the Wikipedia page for and satellite view of Sule Skerry, to the west of the Outrun, just beyond the horizon, home in the spring to thousands of breeding puffins
and gannets. It seems the tides are strong around these parts of the internet, pushing me back here again and again.

With the Sky Map app, I am able to point my phone at the night sky and name which stars and planets are in that direction. One night, a friend asks me what that bright star is, and when I answer that I think it’s not a star but Jupiter, the app confirms that I am correct, improving my confidence in my meagre astronomy knowledge. The programme marks the horizon, like a spirit level, providing a digital gravity even on the windiest, darkest night. Down there, on the other side of the world, is the International Space Station, only visible to people in the southern hemisphere tonight. Astronauts on-board tweet photographs of their view back to us on earth and people reply with long-exposure images they took of the station passing above, a trail of light across the continents.

One morning, I have a tip-off on Facebook that orca have been seen hunting dolphins along the west coast of Orkney, heading north. I go out to the North Hill and look for them. I am all eyes, my body efficiently insulated. I don’t see any whales but I watch a huge ship just disappearing from view. I think it must be an oil tanker heading out to one of the North Sea oil platforms but, back at the cottage, I look on the marine-traffic website and find that she is Russian cargo ship
Kuzma Minin
, with a destination of Kandalaksha in northern Russia. The flight-radar website tells me that the contrail high above Westray one clear dawn is the overnight Lufthansa flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt.

The more I take the time to look at things, the more rewards
and complexity I find. Long-exposure photographs glow supernaturally. With all these tabs open on my browser, I feel omniscient, watching how global-transport logistics dance and intersect, never crashing, like flocks of starling.

Seabirds have been caught and fitted with satellite tracking devices, GPS data loggers, finding out, often for the first time, just how far they travel searching for food. One fulmar tagged by Yvan and Juliet on Copinsay was found to have flown as far as Norway before returning to its nest. The corncrakes were tracked to Africa with daylight geolocators, which stopped working when they finished their migration and again found shelter in long foliage, blocking exposure to the daylight. While kayaking this summer, Mum saw a basking shark in Scapa Flow, anecdotally a species increasing in numbers in our seas. Aiming to quantify these stories, researchers have fitted twenty basking sharks on the west coast of Scotland with trackers and we are able to watch their movements in close-to-real time on the internet.

I am not tracking a mysterious or endangered species: I am carrying out semi-scientific studies into myself, performing bathymetry of the soul. My last.fm counts every song I listen to, constantly updating lists of my favourite artists and recommending new ones. My Facebook prioritises the friends I interact with. I jostle for retweets and edgerank. I am in an ever-changing process of defining myself, fascinated by counting and plotting
and marking my daily activities and movements, collecting bottomless data. I’ve been tracking my sleep cycles and carrying out surveys of my dreams. I download a menstrual-cycle recorder and watch it sync with the moon, waxing and waning in another window on my browser.

With my phone, I record the noise of the wind and rain on my Rose Cottage bedroom window late one night during a gale. According to my dosimeter – the noise-measuring app on my phone – the sound of the weather is averaging 68 decibels from my bed, about the level of a loud conversation, making it hard to sleep. I remember these noises from my childhood bedroom at the farm. I remember shouting into ears in nightclubs, trying to be heard above the music. Tonight the wind and my phone are my companions.

I record the sound of the breaking waves at Fowl Craig, the greylag geese that sometimes mysteriously honk and rise late at night, wind in the telegraph wires and the familiar hum of the propeller plane. I upload my recordings to the internet – twenty-second sensory postings from my island life, like poems.

Sometimes, though, the internet – all this hyper-connection – just makes me lonelier. Chatting on Skype, looking at the screen rather than the camera, creates a shifty dissociation, a not-quite eye-contact. Meeting in real life, we are unsure, blinking and leaving too long before responses. We spend too much time online and real life is just another window. What’s the point in
going out to look at wildlife when I can watch nature documentaries on YouTube, in bed with an electric blanket?

I half wake in the night with rootless anxiety and grasp for my phone. The internet is still a place I turn to for comfort and I used to post online when I had been drinking. Lately, I have been tidying up trails I left in different parts of the internet under multiple identities, some years ago, while drunk. I used to spill my heart over the internet like red wine.

‘Cross-addiction’ is the idea that, in the absence of drink, alcoholics will transfer their addictive behaviour to something else. It’s commonly seen with food, exercise, shopping or gambling. For me, it’s Coca-Cola, smoking, relationships and the internet. Sometimes I am smoking one cigarette while craving the next. I can fixate on a new friend and escape into their internet profiles, wanting to obliterate my personality with theirs.