Samantha Kathryn O’Brien
Doggerland
As the souls of the dead fill the space of my mind,
I’ll search without sleeping till peace I can find.
—“Bones in the Ocean” by the Longest Johns
When the women swelled out of the ocean, their bodies dripping onto the black sand, all the other hikers packed their bags and fled to higher ground. I, too, prepared for escape, scrambling around our campsite, tossing things into backpacks.
Dad held me back. “Haley,” he said, “let me handle this.” He stepped forward to greet the newcomers.
They rose from the sea with their bare breasts spilling out, their pubic hair untamed. Their skin was clammy, an algal-bloom green. Shards of glass stuck out of their sides and plastic six-pack rings hung around their necks like yokes.
“I wouldn’t set up camp here if I were you,” Dad told the women, with a world-weary shake of his head. “When the tide turns, you’ll be swept out to sea.”
They all looked at each other and cackled, a creaking noise at first, like their laughter had been clogged in their throats for an eternity and only now, as they breathed the air above the sea, could they erupt with the full force of their humanity. I bristled at the noise, the unbridled expression of self. Dad’s ears turned red. They were so very nude. He didn’t know where to look.
Dad and I gathered our belongings and began to hike up onto higher ground. We carried 75 liters apiece, our packs piled high above our heads. We’d been hiking along the coastline for ten days and we still had thirty to go. Hiking along the coast meant we were beholden to the tides; every twelve hours and twenty-five minutes, seawater engulfed the trail, forcing us inland for the next three to six hours, at least. We couldn’t stop moving, not for too long anyway, if we wanted to reach the end of the coast in forty days. I had an app that tracked the movements of the tides and I studied it with a religious intensity, quickening my pace every time the dreaded hour drew near.
The women lagged, molding the spongy earth around their feet, throwing their arms in the air and bathing in the world like newborns. They didn’t seem to understand the rush.
That night, Dad and I pitched our tent like we had so many nights before, pulling the metal poles through the holes in the nylon. We left off the rainfly and sipped whiskey from a flask, drank in the starlight. The women prepared for sleep not far away, lying directly on the earth, folding their bodies into the porous soil. They never seemed to get cold. They knew about sex in a way I found startling—moaning and writhing, stroking their own bodies with practiced hands. Dad closed his eyes and faked a snore. I laid awake all night, blinking at the stars.
“I fear not the weather, I fear not the sea.
I remember the fallen, do they think of me?
When their bones in the ocean will forever be.”
Dad and I had always journeyed on foot. The Scottish Highlands, Snowdonia, the kelly-green Wicklow Way. We vowed to see all of Britain together, moving one step at a time across its blistered landscapes. He sometimes fantasized about the American West, but all I knew of America was that it was on fire. Mum was in America—she’d left us for a job, a dream, and some shoddy health insurance, Dad used to joke—but I could see how it hurt him, how he’d rub his temples as if he were trying to erase the memory. I had no need for the woman. I knew from photos that we had the same face, but this meant very little to me. What Dad and I lacked in resemblance, we made up for in our shared love of walking.
In my earliest memories, hiking was a simple indulgence. Dad and I used to take off mid-morning on a Saturday and get lost in a park somewhere, discovering new trails and craggy peaks. Sometimes we’d hoot at the sun and pound our chests and name these peaks after ourselves. I loved the burn in my thighs, the wet moss taste in my mouth. I loved the mornings, rising with the sun and charging off into the mountains with all my belongings on my back. The day lit up with possibility. Never in my life did I feel more beautiful. A human-monkey-woman clambering up rock, calves bulging.
We didn’t always talk during these long walks. He, a man of finance, lived primarily amongst numbers. It was always “545 meters of elevation gain, 400 to go,” or “if we continue at this rate, we might reach the next peak by noon.” Still, I loved it. Loved his propensity to quantify the world around us. I entertained a fantasy that one day, I would see it all. At this time, the whole world seemed within our grasp. I felt as though I accumulated the kilometers as I walked them.
As the years wore on, we’d encounter more and more roped-off trails due to flooding.
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Dad would say, muttering something about how it was just our bloody luck.
And I too, had begun to waste away. The more mountains I scaled, the smaller I became. My ribcage jutted out, threatening to tear my skin like cheap linen. I loved the manic feeling of pound-pound-pounding my way up a mountain, the burning in my throat, the ragged breaths. Dad praised me for becoming strong. I wanted to hold all of the kilometers on planet Earth within my small frame, and at the same time, I wanted my body to disappear.
Last winter, before we started our hike on the English coast, I discovered a book in a secondhand shop. It was my favorite color green, bringing to mind swaths of Irish hills, a premature nostalgia. I picked it up, paid in cash, and brought it home. Its author, Robert MacFarlane, wrote about the English Broomway, the deadly seawalk extending out from the Essex coastline to the tip of Foulness Island. At precise strokes of the tide, brave souls could endeavor to walk it. MacFarlane was enraptured by the notion of the Broomway. He devoted years of his life plotting and planning and training in preparation to cross it. Before his departure, his Alaskan friend James bestowed upon him a single piece of advice: bring a small hatchet. That way, if he got stuck in the mud when the tide rolled in, he could lop his feet off at the ankles and crabwalk back to safety.
A hike so deadly, I found it romantic. It kept me up at night, fantasizing, plotting the course. I myself wanted so badly to be more than my chafing thighs, the protrusion of my stomach. I’d tried and repeatedly failed to starve and sweat my body into obsolescence. What an incredible act of commitment and restraint, it seemed, to be able to cut oneself off, limb by limb.
But as we planned our hike, Britain was flooding, the cobblestone streets engulfed in a thick sludge. One day, I stepped out of my flat in Edinburgh to find myself ankle-deep in a briny deluge, the smell of urine on cotton on a hot summer day. Floating downstream away from our flat was a rusted water pipe. A used tampon bobbed up and swirled around my feet. We moved inland. The whole nation was rank with rubbish by the time we took on the British coastal walk. We were warned against it. But if not now, then when? Dad and I both thought but didn’t say.
So it was settled. When summer came, Dad and I set off to hike the entire English coast. The Broomway only made up 9.7 kilometers of the 557-kilometer trek. But it was those 9.7 kilometers—the “Doomway”—that we whispered about night after night on the trail. Dad rubbed sticks together and attempted to light a fire in the damp air. When the miraculous flame would catch, we’d talk of the Broomway, with the same mixture of deference and irony we might reserve for a ghost story, our faces lit by the fireglow. We were invigorated by the notion that we’d be partaking in a several-hundred-year-old tradition, a venture into the past.
What we hadn’t prepared for was for the past to flash up before our very eyes.
“As the songs of the dead fill the space of my ears,
Their laughter, like children, their beckoning cheers.”
In the morning, I woke to the sounds of children screaming and laughing. Then they weren’t the voices of children anymore, but something sharpened by the knife-edge of time. I unzipped the tent to find the women gathered on the shore, limbs flailing, flesh wobbling, dancing and cackling beneath the sun, water lapping at their ankles. Or were they singing? It was impossible to tell with them; the noises that emerged from their bodies were unlike anything we’d ever heard before. They saw me and stretched out their arms as if to say, Join us, but I looked away, woke up my snoring father, and packed up camp.
They slinked behind us while we hiked. I easily maintained my position at the front. When my heart didn’t feel as if it were about to burst out of my chest, I’d go faster. This was the rule. But they seemed unaware of the competition. They dawdled. I sustained petty thoughts about them. The way they kept pausing to drink in the air. Their rolls and lumps of flesh. Their flatulence. How their bodies seemed to spill out of themselves.
Each evening, I’d select a place to set up camp while waiting for the rest of the group to catch up with me. Dad diplomatically maintained a place in the procession somewhere between me and the women, keeping an eye on us. By the time he caught up with me, I would be standing next to our fully constructed tent, struggling only with the final step: forcing a metal pole to stay erect and sturdy when staked into wet, boggy earth.
And then, as predictable as the sun racing past the horizon, they would arrive. Sometimes, the sounds of their laughter preceded them; I’d bristle and straighten my spine in preparation. I’d be strapping Velcro around metal and turn, startled, to see a face as familiar as my own, smiling at me peacefully. Even as it morphed into something green and bloated and eternally strange, I still imagined I could see a trace of my own self there.
Sometimes, as the weeks wore on, I accepted their outstretched arms as they circled up and danced. I watched them thrash their limbs and tried to mirror their movements and then realized the trick was not to think at all. For the first time, it felt easy to exist in my body.
After several days, we arrived at the Broomway: neither water nor earth entirely, it managed to be both at once. The women showed me that this was a wonderful, lethal thing. They taught me to revel in it. They taught me to raise my arms above my head and howl and prance through the wet. They taught me to pick the earth up with my hands and let it run through my fingers. They taught me to rub it all over my fleshy body and let it drip down my chafing thighs. How delicious that felt, to lose myself to the vanishing earth. We emerged on the other side, panting and caked in a muddied green. No longer was I just a spectator to the mythical outdoors; I was part of it.
That night, the women told me stories about Doggerland, the prehistoric land bridge laid to rest at the bottom of the ocean, the place they called home. It was that sweet center of the summer where the sun never sleeps, and as we circled around the campfire, I gazed out longingly into the indigo expanse. Tomorrow we would swim to it, the women promised. I twinged excitedly at the thought, the notion of civilizations submerged and discovered again.
Dad taught them how to build a fire out of just a pile of damp sticks. He still avoided looking at them directly, their dangling breasts, but learned to interact with them through concrete tasks, the tangible outdoor survival skills that built the foundation of our relationship. They indulged him, nodding at all the appropriate moments. What was the harm, at this point, in making a man feel like a man? In return, they taught us their songs, their sea shanties. Millenia of trekking across bruised lands and angry seas were dredged up with the sounds of our three-part harmonies. They taught us how to make animal noises with the back of our throats. We growled and snarled and howled at the wind. We sang in rounds. We sang until our throats gave out. And even then, we continued singing in coarse whispers, our voices flickering out alongside the dim campfire light. The promise of tomorrow settled over me like a whisper as I slept.
“I remember the fallen, do they think of me?
When their bones in the ocean will forever be.”
As all the salt of the world-ocean fills my throat, I choke myself awake. No land, no tent, no father, I am just a body in a expanse of swirling water. No, not a body, something else: I am every swell of emerald and sapphire, every rusted pipe and can. I am the white blanket of foam. The wet.
And it’s perfect. It’s bliss, it’s joy ballooning in the cave of my nothingchest and I’m the most I’ve ever been. I slip off the edge of the world and beneath the cool blue, and then I am less and less and less, until I am not.