The Whimbrel

By Katherine Abbott

It's getting close to the end of my trip. This morning, I'm walking with that usual sense of dread. An occasional jolting nerve pain sears through my jaw, instantly suggestive of the internal resistance to impending re-entry to a disquieted existence. During this hiking and writing visit to Tenerife, I sit every day by the ocean. I walk  bare footed on the mucilaginous surface, bio electromagnetism doing its thing. The earth's ironically named negative charge, neutralizing the free radicals coursing through my body system, grounding me, regulating my biological functions. This sand is drawing out my inflammation and allowing the inner roads of my circulatory system to flow straight, for me to walk straight, think straight. She: this black, wet and unexceptional expanse is my medicine woman.

The support of a lapping shore and the immediacy of nature is a fully fleshed out experience, providing everything I need. My interaction with it – thought, bodily movement, sensory response and immersion, feels pure and unfiltered. This way of existence is one of total authenticity, where thinking, inspiration and something one might name divine intervention, intersect. It is playground and work bench at their best. The silence. I spend hours in this walking and writing life in complete silence. Any talking is gentle, banal chit-chat, seconds long, requiring only automatic responses and enabling a total and complete immersion in the inner world and  creative space. The thought of  return to the inauthentic life of commotion and exteriority fills me with a tired, weighted sensation. It's the irony of it: so much effort and work to create something so shallow and fleeting, so fickle. Such is the work of a modern city life, or job, or relationship. I'm reluctant. Resistant. Of course, resistance is futile. I am yet to make money or a life from the inner contents of myself and so it is, back to the dormer extension of this being. Like my childhood home, with the cheap roof conversion (an ugly monstrosity), the only reason my parents were able to afford to buy it. The house with a caravan shot through its roof. The quintessential terrible house on a good road, with its white plastic cladding working loose from the wooden frame during our frequent coastal storms, slapping at the side of the building, keeping me awake.

I'll live there, in that life, until I can escape again. Live, in the noisy bolt on of a fabricated life, listening to the plastic chorus against my wooden sides, waiting for a chance to remove myself from the self-conscious eyesore I've had to construct to live in this 'ideal world'. This selection of thoughts and the myriad variations on a theme sing through my head in a blustering chorus. I'm aware that I'm tainting my final moments of joy, causing further reprimands which add to the cacophony. I reach the end of this part of the beach. I can get no further this morning, the tide is up and battering with white curls against the pyroclastic pumice outcrops. I go to the foot shower and start the flow – pressing my hand forcefully onto the worn silver button. As I do so, a whimbrel appears, tipping its head to the side, diagramming my outline. They're surprisingly tame here – as are most of the wading birds. This time, not only swathes of grey plovers but also ruddy turnstones. The whimbrels are among my favourites, with their chopstick beaks and barbed, almond bodies. It waits, as the water cascades over my feet and onto the grate, falling between the grid structure and creating an outlet flow towards its partially submerged feet. Once the river is established, it energetically throws down its head and turns it to the side, its beak opening and closing vigorously in the stream of liquid.

I'm caught in the glorious excellence of it, of the interaction, of the symbiosis. These are the things I live for and think about when I sit in the caravan of my desk life – when the storms are slapping the plastic against my natural under shell. In that glorious moment, I stand, my mouth hanging. I wonder if I'll cry. I could, I'm so completely thrilled by it and filled with a sort of reverence and appreciation that defies a linguistic interpretation. The water flow slows, leaving only a dark tongue of moist sand. The bird lifts its head and looks at me. I press the button again and, as the water fills the rivulet once more, its scissor like motion recommences. Is it drinking or eating? Sifting for tiny organisms or algae? The questions bring with them the usual guilt and self depreciation. Call yourself a bird lover? How can you not know what it's doing? I wonder why I don't just wait and pretend that I do, wait for Google or some equivalent to make me feel superior once more. Isn't that one of the few benefits of the continuous stream of information so readily available? As I press the button again and again, I remember that, like any addict, I don't really care. I'd rather keep pushing the lever than take the time to disjoint and inform myself.

After the sixth or seventh push, my feet are clean and my trainers back onto my feet. I realise that, at some point during the performance, someone who appears to be a local man has returned to his nearby beach chair and is watching this interaction. I am wearing my large noise cancelling headphones, evening jazz tinkling away in the hissing background. His mouth is moving. He's saying something. I strain to concentrate, to hear through the muffled piano and brushed snare. No, I realise, he's not talking, he's singing and, from the direction of his gestures and eye movements, I can see it's not directed at me. Surprised by two things: one that there's something even more unusual than the whimbrel exchange going on here on this tiny, obscure and nondescript bit of scruffy, black beach and two that I'm not the least bit perturbed, I watch him momentarily. I'm caught in a sort of quizzical disbelief. It isn’t usual for someone to enter one's personal space and start singing, after all. Interestingly, the whimbrel doesn't give him a second glance. It's still cutting away at the final trickle. I wonder if maybe they've met before, what with them both being locals. I look back to the man who is still in the thick of it and then I turn back, instinctively. The whimbrel has disappeared. As though somehow connected, the man sits down quietly and looks out to the sea. I wonder what has happened, waiting for a second, watching the tide beating against the resplendent opal surface, catching a reflection of a cloud in its dusty grey mirror. Unable to fathom the mystery of the interaction or of the reality facing me, I sigh and walk onwards.

As a writer from a working-class background, Katherine Abbott’s pieces focus on the tapestry of human experience characterized by the perpetual search for connection, meaning, and understanding in ordinary life. Her work has appeared in Thought Catalog and Café Lit, with an upcoming publication in The People's Friend.