The World is Too Much With Us < The Happy Monk Baking Company

The view west from our “prow.” Saanich in the far distance, a freighter rounded Turn Point, and the moon hovering high over Living Rock Island.

It was strange to find myself on the beach this past Sunday amid news of an assassination attempt on the ex-president south of the border. I was about to go for a swim in the frigid waters of Boundary Pass, looking across to Stuart Island and the U.S. San Juan Islands. I stood there, thigh-deep, in the water, acclimatizing my body to the temperature. In a few moments, I would take a last breath and immerse myself in the icy waters. In “the scrotum-tightening sea,” as James Joyce would say.

It was just past sunset, and the sun cast its last light on the rocky cliffs of the islands on the other side. The blue sky was much faded, and a faint pink glow was hovering over the San Juans. Swallows swooped and dove around me, dipping low to the water, then soaring back up over the cliffs and trees at my back. There were bare ripples on the water’s surface, though the flowing tide carried strands of kelp and bladderwrack across our little bay towards Living Rock Island.

No open sign

It was a scene of such exquisite beauty — summer in all its gentleness. Yet, who could indulge in unrestrained reverie given the circumstances in the news? The turmoil south of the border, Canada and much of the rest of the world was too much on my mind. What a strange thought when there was no visible sign of open discord on the shores of Stuart, Waldron or Orcas Islands!

I thought of the lines from Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet, from his poem “Dover Beach:”

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A salve to the soul

As I make my slow swim out to the rocks, it’s easy to see what the swallows are after. The surface of the water is littered with the bodies of insects the size of fruit flies. They’ve dropped out of the air and become stuck in the surface tension of the water. Some of them still flutter their wings, unable to lift themselves up. Multitudes have given up, dead, or waiting to die or to be plucked up in the mouth of a soaring swallow.

Three minutes into my swim, the cold is like a salve to the soul. My breathing slows when I immerse myself, the world slows. I notice the textures of the rugged cliffs rising out the water. The gnarled oak trees that cling to the rock. A lone seagull flies overhead to the Living Rock Island. A heron tries to find a stable place to stand on a piece of driftwood. A sailboat heads silently around the point towards Bedwell Harbour.

Swimming over rocks

I stand on the rocks a few moments, facing east. My body is still gripped by the cold. My breath still slow and deep. Such a feeling of stillness, peace.

The water is so high in the evenings I can swim over the flat boulder that I sometimes walk on when the tide is low. As I swim, my legs brush over the bladderwrack that covers the rock. It undulates with the waves and currents. Sometimes the toes of my water shoes hit rock or scrape against the white barnacles.

I’m back into the deep water, sixty feet from the shore. The sky is a little darker. The swallows have thinned out, but now it’s bats I see. There’s something quieter in their flight, a bit more fluttery, tentative. They’re after the same insects the swallows were chasing.

When my feet touch solid ground, I linger a few moments. I don’t want to leave the water, don’t want this deliciousness to end. One last look at the western sky, the fading light. I turn and scramble over the rocks and up the stairs.

I’m restored. The world is restored

A line or two emerges in my mind from William Wordsworth. And I think he must have known what a cold-water swim can do for an ailing mood:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

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No open sign

A salve to the soul

Swimming over rocks

I’m restored. The world is restored

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