The Big Read: When the brave horizon beckons

There are many reasons people fear growing older — the pain and the illness, for instance, and also the death — but I think one of the fears is that we are leaving possibility behind and crossing a point past which we are too comfortable or too afraid of losing comfort or too busy seeking comfort to do something new or to change, except in a sad way.

I am currently in my favourite place in the world, Kalkan on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, staying in my favourite small hotel, The White House, run by the splendid Marian and Halil as though it’s a gracious whitewashed, bougainvillea-bedecked summer villa to which they have invited their friends and their friends’ friends.

I discovered Kalkan by chance six years ago when my wife and I were in Turkey to walk the Lycian Way, a long, hard, satisfying trail that runs down the turquoise coast and through the Taurus Mountains.

We stopped off at a small village running steeply uphill from a blue bay and a lovely pebbled beach, and we only had two days there but I have never stopped thinking about it, and planning to return, and trying to persuade friends to come with us.

My wife has just finished a hard season of work and we came back to Kalkan because she needed to immerse herself in water. Water helps and heals her, especially salt water, and it’s one of the frustrations of her life that she can’t swim. Well, that isn’t true — in fact she can, she has taught herself to swim using a kind of modified breaststroke, but as with most people who didn’t learn how to do something at the same time everyone else learnt how to do it, or who never received the formal training, she is insecure about it and self-doubting.

She dreads currents and waves and undertows; her feet must always be able to touch the sea bed. She doesn’t go into the ocean alone. It’s in her head that she can’t swim well enough, but everything we can’t do well enough is in our heads.

On Kalkan beach the sea is flat and calm but drops away quite steeply. Fifty or a hundred metres away, in ten or twelve metres of water, is a line of red and white buoys to demarcate the area beyond which boats might be passing in and out of the small harbour, and a hundred metres  or so beyond that is a breakwater mole of white boulders with a small white lighthouse on top.

On our first day in Kalkan we went out to shoulder depth and she looked at the row of buoys and said, “Before the end of this holiday, I want to swim to there.”

“You can swim there now,” I said. “I’ll take you there.”

She just shook her head and paddled back to shore.

We swam every day in Kalkan, and we had conversations, not all of them easy ones, because part of the deal of being a grown-up is learning to have difficult conversations, ones that make you feel angry or uncomfortable or afraid, and holidays aren’t for running away from your life, they’re for looking at it clearly.

Yesterday it was her birthday. She turned an age that isn’t old but at which most people are more energetic about deciding that there are things they no longer do than about finding ways to make themselves afraid. It’s an age when people start clinging to dry land and support, rather than looking at the horizon.

She was quiet all morning, staring at the sea. “I’m grateful for your help,” she said, “but sometimes help doesn’t help.”

I was reading a book so I sort of nodded, but when I looked up some minutes later I saw her in the water, swimming away from shore with a silver V forming behind her. She has never been in the sea on her own before.

I stood up and my instinct was to run in after her, to be nearby if she panicked and went under but I made myself stay where I was, staring out like an idiot. I watched as she swam until she couldn’t touch the bottom and then kept swimming into the deeper blue, and I watched as she reached the buoys and grabbed hold of one and turned and waved to the shore.

I thought of the empty water underneath her feet and how alone she must feel out there and also how strong. I thought of how proud she must feel, and what a birthday present that was to give yourself. And then I watched as she let go of the buoys and slipped underneath the rope and turned away from the shore and carried on swimming out towards the lighthouse.