Floating Read online

  Journalist Joe Minihane became obsessed with wild swimming and its restorative qualities, and developed his new-found passion by following the example of naturalist Roger Deakin in his classic Waterlog. While putting one arm over the other, sometimes resting on his back, Minihane begins to confront the often buried issues in his life. Along the way, he rekindles old friendships and forges new ones, and after an unexpected setback discovers that he has already gained enough strength to be able to continue his recovery on dry land. The activity that he describes is both strange and beautiful, as the wild water puts him in touch with nature and himself.

  Floating is a remarkable memoir about, on the surface, a passion for swimming and nature. Moving from darkness into light, it is as intense and moving as it is lyrical and generous. It captures in memorable detail Minihane’s struggle to understand his life and move forward and, steeped in the anti-authoritarian and naturalistic spirit of Roger Deakin, celebrates the joy of taking time out to feel better.

  From Hampstead to Yorkshire, from Dorset to Jura, from the Isles of Scilly to Wales—with this book, Joe Minihane has written what is often a love letter to different wild stretches of water. We swim with him through ponds and lakes, rivers and canals, lodes and marshes, even the ice-cold sea. With him, we too finally come out of the water and dry ourselves off.

  Copyright

  First published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom by Overlook Duckworth in 2017

  LONDON

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  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 2017 Joe Minihane

  Lyrics from Mutual Benefit’s ‘Strong Swimmer’ © Mutual Benefit/Mom and Pop Music, reprinted with permission

  Quotation from Steaming by Nell Dunn used with the permission of Amber Lane Press, copyright © Nell Dunn, 1981

  Quotes from Waterlog by Roger Deakin, published by Chatto & Windus, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  Lines quoted from ‘Where the Water Comes Together’, from All of Us: The Collected Poems by Raymond Carver, published by Harvill Press, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1534-9

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Jumping in, Feet First

  Chapter One: August

  Chapter Two: September

  Chapter Three: October

  Chapter Four: February

  Chapter Five: April

  Chapter Six: May

  Chapter Seven: June

  Chapter Eight: July

  Part Two: The Break

  Chapter One: August

  Chapter Two: September

  Chapter Three: October

  Part Three: Surfacing

  Chapter One: January

  Chapter Two: March

  Chapter Three: April

  Chapter Four: May

  Chapter Five: June

  Chapter Six: July

  Chapter Seven: August

  Chapter Eight: September

  Chapter Nine: October

  Chapter Ten: November

  Chapter Eleven: April

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Keeley

  PROLOGUE

  The blinds were not doing their job. A shaft of sunlight breached the wooden slats as I stirred and fumbled around on the bedside table for my watch: 4.12 a.m. I lifted myself onto my left elbow, took a swig of stale water from the glass I’d left out the previous evening, and sighed.

  Keeley, my wife, was sound asleep next to me. Her breath caught in her throat with a rhythmic click, her arms raised above her head the way she always slept. Her dark brown hair spread out across the pillow.

  I moved carefully so as not to wake her, pushed my pillows back onto the headrest and sat upright. Through the break in the blinds I could see a bright blue sky emerging. It was midsummer, almost a year since I had quit my job as a journalist to go freelance, and my mind was full to bursting with worry.

  Thoughts zipped across my brain like plane contrails. Every time I tried to follow one I would lose it as another hove into view. I would chase that one and then the next one. My mind could not settle. I had been awake all of five minutes and already I could not stop this swell of anxiety from lifting me up and taking me out into the depths with it.

  Work was what made me most anxious. What was I really doing? In the past month I had written ‘news’ articles about the chipset of an unreleased smartphone and covered the launch of a new Bluetooth speaker. To my mind, everything I had set out to do when I had decided to become a journalist at the age of nineteen was gone. I had failed to amount to anything as a music writer, made a fool of myself while trying to learn to drive when working for a major motoring magazine and wound up presenting corporate videos from big brands to pay the bills.

  Where was the glamour, the excitement, the buzz I had always wanted from working in London? What had happened to my dreams? I was struggling to equate the need to make money with what I was doing in order to get it. I felt as if I needed to grow up and be more mature, but just thinking about it brought me down.

  To compound it all, the regular writing I had been doing on the latest technology trends for a friend’s website had ended. Budgets had been slashed. I looked down at Keeley. She always believed in me and told me how well I was doing. But despite the fact that I loved her, I couldn’t agree. I had never wanted to write about technology. But it had always paid OK, and now I worked for myself I had to find cash somehow. I had learnt on short work placements, and then over a series of full-time roles, that I hated the confines of the office. The rules. The politics. The clock-watching. But with this regular source of income gone, would I have to go back? How would I cover the rent otherwise? Would I have enough money to still go out, to go on holiday? How could we ever save to buy a house or have enough money to bring up kids in the future? Were these things I could even give her?

  Keeley worked full time as a journalist. We would be OK. But I felt a strong sense of responsibility towards her to make everything right. To be in control. To show her I could provide. To make life predictable. That way, I believed, worry would stop and life would begin.

  She had never asked this of me. But I worried all of the time about it. I wanted to make sure that everything was easy for her, for us. She was loving, warm, caring, supportive, and had always been there since we had got together at the end of our time together at journalism college.

  I knew I was being overly harsh on myself, that my thoughts were needlessly cruel, but still I chased them, one after another, after another. Why was I not as successful as the people I used to work with? Success to me was working for big publications, going on glamorous assignments, interviewing my favourite bands; not having to churn out copy about phones, games consoles and speakers, or doing ‘advertorials’ to make ends meet. I believed, misguidedly it turned out, that ‘successful’ people didn’t need to indulge in the everyday, the things that help pay the bills.

  Why had I not done what I always said I would do and become a travel writer, follow in the footst
eps of my literary heroes like Paul Theroux, seeing new places, meeting new people, learning new things and writing about them for a voracious readership? Could I ever do this? Surely not. I felt I had become trapped in a professional rut – failed to live up to the lofty expectations that I had set for myself.

  I could never tell anyone this. It felt easier to lie in the dawn light and allow my mind to crank through the gears. I wasn’t sure if Keeley would understand, but I didn’t know why I felt like that. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me. A vivacious, life-affirming presence whose calm assurance and beautiful, glittering blue eyes made my stomach flip whenever I thought about her.

  I felt guilty for not telling her how anxious I was and how, when she went to work every day, I felt an enormous sense of guilt for having all of this time on my hands to chase editors, to come up with killer story ideas, to be the person I always thought I could be, when instead all I would do was sit on the sofa and feel low. I felt ashamed of the whole sorry mess.

  I knew where this guilt and shame came from. My parents had never made me feel like this, but fourteen years of being taught at Catholic schools had instilled in me the sense that I should feel bad whenever I wasn’t doing something constructive or productive with my time. That to me meant working, or pushing towards a goal. Leisure and downtime were to be frowned upon as a waste of precious minutes, hours, days. This feeling had proved useful when I had first gone freelance, pushing me on to work harder for longer. But now I just felt guilty for feeling that I hadn’t done a good enough job of striking out on my own. My work felt meaningless, and because I had made work my biggest focus, it felt like life had lost meaning too. I was realising, slowly, that all this worrying had made me depressed.

  But most of all I felt that this anxiety, this burgeoning depression, was nothing but narcissism. I needed to simply buck up my ideas and knuckle down, I thought. People like me don’t feel like this, I told myself. Not people who’ve had a happy childhood with loving parents. Not people who have strong, loving relationships. That thought played over and over in my mind like a mantra. It made me feel like more of a failure, yes, but I thought that by repeating it, I would remind myself of all the good things in my life, which would make me feel better. It didn’t. I knew, deep down, I needed to tell Keeley how low I felt, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. I was too embarrassed. I was aware that she knew that something wasn’t right, but I knew she didn’t know the full extent of my despair.

  I looked over at her. She was still sound asleep. I rolled back over and looked at my watch: 5.03 a.m. I closed my eyes, followed the contrails of my mind and tried to get some sleep. I needed help, but I wasn’t sure how to ask for it or what it would even look like if I did.

  A tadpole dashed over my feet as I lowered them gingerly into the water. The first step of the metal ladder was cold, the green murk of Hampstead mixed pond below. I stood stock still and held on to the railings, staring out to the far-off boundary rope and the causeway beyond. Shaggy dogs shook themselves dry, while coots and moorhens scuffled in the undergrowth. Far below, I imagined a pike hiding in the depths, waiting for its moment to strike.

  I looked down. There was now a swarm of tadpoles crowding around my toes. I stifled a nervous giggle and dropped my feet lower, one step at a time, before they were groping for metal and I could go no further. With that, I pushed off and felt the cold wrap itself around my chest, my arms, my legs.

  I fell in love with wild swimming over one glorious summer in 2010. I swapped the strictures of the indoor pool for open water on a sticky London weekend, the kind where the city forgets how to behave itself and people wander around as if every street corner is a beach. At her suggestion, Keeley and I took an overheated Tube north to Belsize Park and spilled out onto Hampstead Heath with the rest of the hordes who had come to cool off in its ponds’ deep waters. We had always wanted to come here, and with the weather as it was, it seemed like the ideal way to spend the day.

  This was my first time swimming outside in anything other than the sea, and as I swam from the steps towards the nearest tethered life ring, I felt buoyed up by the green water, any concerns about what swam beneath lost in a summer reverie. Teenagers screamed and shouted from the grass verge where they lay stretched out on towels, sunbathing and preening as if their lives depended on it.

  I felt the cold keenly but kicked on to the far rope, eighty metres away from the safety of the concrete jetty, grasping hold and letting my legs sink and take a rest. I was gripped by an endorphin rush as I closed my eyes, yellows and reds throbbing as the sun’s rays hit my eyelids. As I swam back, my strong stroke fast becoming something akin to a doggy paddle, I realised that this was something I wanted to do again and again. Swimming in the local pool had helped me get fit, but outdoor swimming could offer something more – a mental and emotional buzz to match the sweet ache of limbs.

  In the weeks that followed, as summer stretched into autumn, I returned to Hampstead regularly. I came on wet days as well as dry, nosing through the flotsam and shrugging off the brush of dead leaves and errant weeds while the rain popped off the surface.

  I would swim a serviceable if basic breaststroke, my head out and my neck snapped back so that I could see what was happening around me. This was partly through fear of what lay beneath in the deep green murk of the pond, and partly out of necessity – as my front crawl wasn’t really up to much.

  Having your head up and out has its advantages, though, even if it can leave you with a sharp neck ache. It gives you time to enjoy what’s around you – the wildlife, the shouts of the people on the banks, the scorching rays of late summer sun – and for me it adds to the meditative aspect of wild swimming: it strips everything back to its essence and allows me to just be in the water at that moment, like a duck pottering along the surface. Everything else melts away and becomes irrelevant.

  I swam further and for longer every time, relishing the fact that I could lose myself in the moment, my body forced to focus on simply staying alive, my mind going quiet.

  More than that: the simplicity of it all eased the anxiety which was causing me to wake at night, following the contrails of my mind as I turned over worries about my work, money and life. The water soothed this worry like nothing else.

  When I first allowed Hampstead’s waters to envelop me, I was the lowest I had been in my life. It was not long after that sleepless early dawn, and things felt difficult and at times hopeless. I felt ashamed that I felt like this and kept things bottled up. I didn’t tell Keeley. I didn’t tell family. I didn’t tell my friends.

  Days would pass without my getting further than the newsagent, trawling the same web pages and social networks over and over for a sense of purpose. I was lost, lonely and in desperate need of help. Getting into the water, giving myself up to the pond’s buoyant green depths, pushed these feelings away. When I was in the water, there was no worry. My only concerns lay in keeping my arms moving and my legs kicking. There was a sense of boundless possibility, a lightening and easing of myself which I no longer felt on dry land. I wasn’t in sole control of my situation, the water was, and I found such thoughts immensely satisfying.

  I could date the swell of anxiety I was struggling with almost to the day. When I was a postgraduate student, studying journalism and readying myself for the brave, terrifying world of career and adult life I made a pact with myself. By the time I was twenty-seven, I would be a freelance journalist. I would be my own boss, I would answer only to myself and my life would be perfect.

  I achieved my goal six months after my twenty-seventh birthday, after five years of writing for magazines and websites about topics as diverse as poker, cars and technology, none of which held any particular appeal for me. On my first day working for myself I started work at ten in the morning and was in the pub by two. I thought that I had gamed the system, cheated my way out of a day-to-day existence of which I had grown weary. I looked at myself as a happy retiree, forty years ahead of schedule
.

  What I soon discovered was that I derived all my self-worth and my self-esteem from my work. I didn’t like the work I had to do to get paid. At first, hacking out news stories and writing puff pieces about everything from car adverts to an Asian tech company’s latest 3D telly didn’t matter, because I was my own boss and had time to do something new and exciting, whatever that was. But rather than seizing the opportunity to do something for myself, to take my career and my life in new and interesting directions, I froze. The boundaries between work and home had blurred to the point where I couldn’t separate them any more. I wanted to work for myself, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do beyond journalism. I’d never given it any thought.

  My anxiety manifested itself as inertia. And inertia came through comparison. Comparison with peers, comparison with journalists, editors and writers that I believed I could never hope to be as good as. Social media is both your best friend and your worst enemy when you work from home and spend most of your time alone. I began to trawl news feeds and read articles I wished I had written and look at people I knew professionally on Facebook and Twitter with an endless sense of envy, coupled with the feeling that I could never, ever measure up.

  I tried to fall back on an old mantra from Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, my favourite book as a teenager. ‘Comparisons are odious,’ was Japhy Ryder’s wise line whenever Ray Smith, The Dharma Bums’ Kerouac conduit, cast an envious eye over someone else’s life. I played that line over and over in my head while I read another article and dreamt of another life where I was ‘a success’, where I had a more ‘glamorous’ job, wrote about things like travel and music rather than smartphones and games consoles. Yet still I allowed jealousy and worry to frighten me away from making my life better. I became depressed and fearful.

  Soon this professional inertia spread to my day-to-day life. I would rise early and see Keeley off to work, before quickly completing the regular daily writing jobs I had taken to cover the rent and pay the bills. News about smartphone tariffs. List features about mobile apps. I told myself that, if I wanted to be a serious journalist it was time to read, develop ideas and write. To start something. Instead, I sat on the sofa and stared out at London stretching in front of me from the fifth-floor window of our flat, afraid to go outside in case I got caught bunking off – by whom I wasn’t sure. I had made myself anxious thinking about what others thought of me, as if they were judging me for making my own schedule and working to my own beat. I knew it was preposterous to think like that, but I did it anyway. Worrying, I believed, made things better.