Notes on the Tide That Was Not There

The estuary at Weldenmouth is a wide flat nothing at low water — three miles of grey silk with a channel cut through it, and a wind that arrives from the sea without anything to break it. I had gone out at dusk to walk the sea wall, which is a mile of concrete with a rail on one side and nothing on the other, and I had intended to turn back at the sluice.

I did not turn back at the sluice. By then the water had begun its trick.

The sound arrives first

A tide announces itself before it appears. There is a hiss, very low, and under the hiss a knocking as the first of it finds the shingle. I knew this sound. I had walked that wall a dozen times and the sound was the reliable part, the part that told you how long you had.

The sound came in on schedule. The water did not.

I want to be careful here, because the obvious version of this is that I could not see in the dark, and that is not what happened. There was enough moon to read the mud by. I could see the channel, and the ribs of the old jetty, and the pale line where the last tide had left its wrack. All of it stayed where it was. And over it came the sound of a tide making, at volume, from a great width — a sound that requires several million tons of water and had none.

Being a witness

What I felt was not fear. It took me most of an hour to work out what it was, and the closest I have come since is this: I felt dismissed. As though the estuary had been doing something for a long time and had now decided it could do it without the part of the arrangement that involved being seen.

I stood at the rail and did the reasonable things. I checked my watch, which was working. I looked for the boats at Craill, which were where they should be, with their two lights. I put my hand flat on the concrete and it was cold and slightly damp and entirely concrete. Every instrument I had reported normally, and reported into a roar of water that was not arriving.

There is a particular loneliness in having your senses disagree in public. Alone in a room you can put the disagreement away. Out on a wall in the open, with a landscape that is plainly a landscape and plainly lying, I had the strong sense of being an unnecessary witness at an event that had gone on for ten thousand years and had never once required me.

The turn

Around what I think was eleven the sound began to go out again. It receded the way a real ebb recedes, with the knocking dropping away first and the hiss thinning after it, over perhaps forty minutes. The mud, which had not been covered, was uncovered anyway. By the time it was quiet the flats were exactly as they had been at dusk, and I was very cold, and my hands had stopped working properly on the rail.

I walked back. At the landward end there is a bench with a plaque on it for someone who liked this view, and I sat on it for a while because my legs had opinions about the last mile. The plaque says the person was never happier than here, which I read four or five times.

Afterward

I have been back to Weldenmouth twice since, both times in daylight, both times with the tide doing its ordinary work. It comes in over the flats in a thin sheet faster than a person walks, which is the fact the signs warn you about, and it makes the sound. Water and sound together, as advertised.

I am not looking for an explanation, and I would not know what to do with one. What I took from the sea wall was smaller and stranger than an explanation: a working knowledge of what it is like to be told, courteously and at length, by a place you are fond of, that the arrangement does not depend on you.