Two ends of a question

A loose collection of impressions from last week's excursion to Durdle Door.

A white wall suspended above me. Up, up, up, I strain my neck to see to the top, crowned in blue sky. The stone is chalky-smooth, an uncomfortable premonition of squeaks against a blackboard. Up, up, up, a knot in my stomach, this is it, this is beauty.

Hopping from stone to stone, here I go, into another little cavern! I don’t know what makes all these enclosed spaces so thrilling. Small winding paths in deep forests, surrounded by tangles of weeds and overhanging branches, narrow routes to mountain peaks, underground mines, tunnels, caves, it’s all the same sort of thing. It might be the exquisite combination of the undisputable cosiness of such places and the fear for your life lest the walls should decide to grind you to a messy pulp. You feel terrified out of your mind and at the same time very much at home. Plus, there’s the otherworldly experience of looking out of your little cave, onto a picture framed with stone.

There aren’t very many seashells on the Southwest coast, but there’s another attraction – seaweed. Clevedon has the bubble wrap ones that you can stomp on and make squishy sounds with; they come in all shapes and sizes – hats, hearts, ears, you name it. The seaweed near Durdle Door is different. Once in a while you chance upon a mop of brownish-green hair, but mostly there are the long, rubbery stripes that make such beautiful belts. One thing that sets them apart from seashells is the uncanny ability to transform any car, at least smell-wise, into a storeroom for rotting fish.

First there is a little tunnel in the cliff ahead of us. Then there isn’t. You know that the thing obstructing the view must be a solid piece of rock jutting out of the seabed, but still it has the ethereal quality of a painted cloud. One minute the space between the rock and the cliff is tangibly three-dimensional, the next it is non-existent. Until finally, as we stroll on towards it, the rock moves to the side, revealing yet again the rays of the setting sun poking through the little tunnel.

There is an island of stones afloat on the sea, aflame with the red sunlight, licked by white tongues of fiery waves. A powerful symbol. Of what nobody knows.

The grass above Durdle Door is orangey-green and the shadows upon it are blue. As I walk across the beach, I search for the quiet that had been all around me in the Pyrenees. I should be able to find it here – the road is too far away to hear, humans other than us have been scared away by the settling dusk, all is still save the ever-pulsating rhythm of the tide. But as I take each step along the shoreline, I find myself composing these very lines. The echo of my stream of consciousness throbs in my head, magnified, magnified. Can I no longer appreciate without describing? Do I not understand anything before I place a label underneath it?

How difficult it is to write this article. Durdle Door beach was so real, so presently beautiful, with no need for words to explain it. Can I ever adequately describe the world I appreciate? Can I possibly place an accurate label underneath my experiences?