Burnout feels like a luxury I can’t afford as I walk on my usual beach in St Andrews – a town full of abundance.
The dogs know before I do. They’re already tumbling out of the car, nose-down and joyful, while I’m still standing in the gap of the open door, bracing.
It’s the wind that does it. Not the cold exactly – cold you can layer against – but the wind, which finds the edges of everything and gets in anyway. There’s no dressing for it. You just have to go.
I’ve been coming to this stretch of beach long enough that my body knows the shape of it before my eyes adjust to the light. The dry, uneven shore. The pull up through the dunes. The moment the path opens out, the Old Course immaculate and indifferent to my passing as I am to it, and the full force of it hits you. Burning thighs, stinging eyes, the involuntary flinch that never quite stops being involuntary.
I come here the way you come to anything that keeps you level. Not always consciously, not always gratefully. Some days it’s just the next thing before the day starts, a change from the river walks, my body already knowing the route before my mind has caught up. I drive past the students on the way, hundreds of them gathered at the traditional town end in the half-light, their own ritual already underway. I keep going to the quieter stretch where the dogs can run. The wind doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t reward intention or punish the lack of it. It scours regardless, doesn’t care what you’ve been performing or for whom. It just strips it back.
The dogs are already ahead, quartering the sand in wide, purposeful arcs while I find my footing on the uneven shore. Bent forward against the wind, thighs burning on the soft bit, eyes streaming. The body just does what the body does.
There’s a particular quality to this kind of cold. It gets into the ears, finds the gap at the collar, works at the exposed skin of the face until everything feels rawer than it did. Not unpleasant exactly, but unignorable. You can’t drift here. The wind won’t allow the kind of half-present wandering that passes for thinking when you’re tired. It demands the full surface of you.
By the time I reach the students they’ve already committed. Shrieks carry on the wind, clothes in abandoned heaps above the tideline, the sea doing what the sea does in May in St Andrews. There’s real joy in it, and something else too, the particular lightness of people who have just done something their bodies didn’t want to do and come out the other side. They wrap themselves in towels, find each other, move back toward the town and their warm kitchens and whatever the day holds.
I turn my back and walk the other way. Away from the town, away from the golf courses, into the longer stretch of beach where the wind has more room and there’s nothing left to look at but sand and water and whatever I’ve brought with me.
The dogs are joyful. That’s the thing about them; they’re always joyful here, blameless in their pleasure, and I love them for it even as I acknowledge I wouldn’t be walking in this wind before breakfast by choice. I’m here because they need this, and because somewhere underneath that I probably need it too, though need feels too clean a word for it. It’s more like requirement. The walk asks nothing of me except to keep going, and the wind takes everything I was performing anyway, and by the time we turn back to the car to head home something has shifted, not fixed, just loosened enough.
They get their ritual. I get mine. And I keep going.
Windburn
Braced against the shock of that inevitable consciousness
As the dogs tumble from the car in joyful, sandy exploration
I tenderly step once more into the chill dawn.
Burning thighs drive me over dry, uneven shore
Bent for balance, the salty sting of wind whipped truth
Cuts through curation.
An instinctive flinch against its swirling demands
That abrade my skin and puncture my ears
Excoriated extremities rawly shielded.
A strip of sand between wild tides and meticulous links
My solitary traditional traverse, today shared with
Salvation seeking students.
Joyful shrieks of temporary immersion, doubts with clothes discarded
They flee from my chastening suffusion
Welcomed back to warmth by towels and tradition.
They leave and the walk continues with what cannot be put down
Wind, sand, sting, the long pull of breath.
They return to their homes from mine.