The Gifts of the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 265

not been for the near-disaster from which I had just emerged, I would
not have done so.
As the bird receded up the beach I felt my energy surging back.
Buoyed, ecstatic, I fairly marched the next mile, crashing through the
rocks and surf. Then the beach widened and I was able to drag the
boat along a strip of smooth pebbles above the tideline. Within an
hour of seeing the corncrake I came to the bank of the river, now
dammed by the risen tide. I plunged in, dragging the boat behind me,
but soon found myself out of my depth, so I swam across, towing the
kayak. I reached the pebble beach on the far side. Beyond it were the
long low slacks across which I could carry the boat back to the car.
I sat on the kayak, exhausted, watching the yellow sun arcing down
towards the water. In the salt mist above the breakers gulls skated and
jinked on the wind. The waves opened and closed their jaws, slick
with sunlight. I felt a curious mixture of shame and triumph. I had
confronted the casual power of nature and - no, not won, no one ever
wins - survived.
At lunchtime the next day I drove through the long glacial valleys of
Snowdonia. The trees and bracken had suddenly turned: the dull greens
of late summer had burst, almost overnight, into russet and umber,
ochre and flame. I travelled to the point at which the road came closest,
a mile and a half to the north of the beach where I had lost the bag.
It was another bright day. The wind still blew strongly from the
south (I thought of the poor corncrake) and the waves roared, now, at
low tide, far from where I stood. I walked down the concrete steps
from the campsite in which I had parked and stared at the beach. I
was confronted by the impossibility of what I had set out to do.
The bag could have been anywhere along that coast. It might have
reached Porthmadog by now, or been swept out to sea, or buried in sand
or weed. Even if it were somewhere on the mile and a half of strand
between where I stood and where I had landed, only a search party of
hundreds would have stood a good chance of finding it. The beach at
low tide was a quarter of a mile wide. Below me was a long sweep of
sand from which grey rocks emerged. Closer to the water were craggy
boulders, rockpools and deep beds of wrack and furbelows.
But I had used almost a litre of fuel to get here, it was low water