Today I was thinking about the quality of silence, and a memory came to mind of a winter walk I took some years ago when living in Robin Hood’s Bay
. It had started to snow. Great fluffy blobs of snow, made up of moist snowflakes stuck together. There were no tourists in Bay that day that I could see — if there were, they were hunkered down inside the holiday cottages with central heating, or perhaps a coal fire. I had the shore entirely to myself. Conveniently, it was low water, so I walked as far out on the scaurs as I could. There is always an agreeable feeling of danger when doing this, for the scaurs form long pointed fingers of rock stretching far into the sea. The sea reached around me on either side as the scaur narrowed, so that soon I was far from the absolute safety of shore, nearly surrounded by water. Only a slender band of rugged rock to bring me home again. Yet I had checked my tide timetable, knew there was no risk, and the sea was calm enough that day. But still — that little prickle of danger in my veins, the instinct that warns me to take care.
All the while I had been walking through the quiet fall of the giant snowflakes. Somehow all sound from the shore was blotted out, I could have been alone in the world. But for the gentle wash of the lapping of little waves, there was utter silence. How could it be silent when there is still that small sound? Yet it was. For the waves were equally a part of the silence as the absence of other sounds, because the waves belonged here and had always been here. Were they perhaps the first sound ever, when primordial seas moved across the face of the earth like the breath of God? Unlike the noise of traffic or people talking or machinery, the whisper of water was interwoven with the silence, as if silence could not exist without it.
The great flakes covered my long hair, caught in my eyebrows, blanketed my jacket. It was like being taken up into the silence, absorbed by it. Curiously, there was no feeling of loss of identity — it was more like becoming part of something greater, where I was still myself, just more so. I stayed there a long time, wishing to remain a part of that silence. But low tide does not last forever, and judiciously, I picked my way over the rocky scaur back to the not-so-loud and friendly noise of the village. In the end, we always come back home.