Dreaming of Dolphins
At
school I was voted the guy least likely to tear off his clothes and run into the
sea. That’s not actually true. But it could be. I don’t do crazy impulses. I’m
the man who holds up the coffee shop queue before ordering the same latte as
ever. I use SatNav. On the train. You certainly wouldn’t catch me braving the
English Channel in October, without so much as a towel to hand. And yet, on one
autumn afternoon several years ago, I did. And I’m still trying to understand
why.
My wife
and I were in Lyme Regis, in Dorset, walking along the sea front. We saw a
commotion in the water. Amidst a group of swimmers, something dark kept bobbing
up. We saw a fin. It was like a scene from Jaws, except the screams weren’t
terror but delight. Unbelievably, it was a dolphin.
My first
fear was that the creature must be in distress, to be so close to the beach.
But the dolphin was clearly revelling in the attention, scooting from one bunch
of kids to another, splashing them, letting itself be stroked, and generally
showing off.
At that
moment I realised that I’d probably never have this chance again. To swim with
dolphins is often held up to be one of life’s great experiences. Some polls
have even voted it ‘the number one thing to do before you die’. And this wasn’t
some captive dolphin in a pool, or a purchased, pre-packaged ‘experience’. This
was the real deal, a wild bottlenose dolphin, an utterly random stroke of
fortune, quite literally out of the blue. And I didn’t have any swimming
things.
So no-one
was more astonished than me when, a minute later, I was splashing out into the
cold water towards the dolphin. (Note to Dorset police: I kept my shorts on).
The next ten minutes was like being a kid again. What I remember most vividly
is the creature’s speed, melting underwater to reappear far away, almost at the
same instant. Its skin felt wonderfully strange to the touch, like a living bar
of soap, though when I tentatively grasped its fin to see if it might tow me
along like Flipper, it rolled over with a glare as if to say, ‘I don’t do tricks.’
It occurred to me then that this animal, with its size and power and huge jaws,
could easily have killed any one of us human beings in seconds – without
meaning to, or even noticing. Yet there we were, children and adults all,
prepared to risk our literal necks just for the sake of being close to a
dolphin.
Why?
What possessed me? For a long time afterwards I struggled to answer that
question. Somehow, these efforts resulted in a book. The Storm Bottle is a tale
of humans and dolphins, an adventure story as full of thrills and perils and
fantasy as my other books (The Cat Kin Trilogy), but drawing for inspiration on
that first very real experience. In the story, a boy name Michael nearly drowns
when he tries to swim with a dolphin – and then he discovers what it’s like to
be one. The action unfolds in Bermuda and its surrounding ocean, where we learn
that it is not just humans who have legends about that lonely archipelago. And maybe
we come a little closer to answering that tantalising question: why is swimming
with dolphins the number one thing to do before you die?
The
Storm Bottle by Nick Green is available from Amazon. To view the trailer, visit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBunMF3BTys
NICK GREEN
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