Winding Ways

September, 2020  |  South West Coast Path

The first time I saw the sea, the tide was out. The night was cold but windless, and the water, in gentle moon-soaked rushes, washed glinting sand. I had known vastness before—I grew up on Lake Michigan, which resembles the sea on a calm day—but this was something different, like meeting the twin of an old friend for the first time. The sea was familiar, and yet utterly new.

Just days before, I had arrived in Falmouth, Cornwall, four thousand miles from home. I was adrift in a world I did not know. To get to know my new environment, I started walking: lichen-draped lanes through local woodlands, narrow village alleys between leaning terraced facades, muddied tracks over cow-clogged moorland. It was the South West Coast Path, however, which won my heart.

The Coast Path is England’s most comprehensive trail, covering six hundred and thirty miles of cliffs and beaches from Minehead, in northern Somerset, to Poole, in southern Dorset, by way of Devon and Cornwall. It joins national reserves, local parks, and privately managed estates and gardens along high and winding cliffs and surf-battered beaches. I walked my home section, meandering west from Falmouth’s Gyllyngvase Beach, more times than I could count; it was my refuge and my respite in the tumult of my life.

I have now walked my local stretch of the Coast Path hundreds of times, under hundreds of skies, and seen hundreds of disparate oceans. I’ve found every color of the rainbow in those shimmering waters, every kind of cloud in the pastel sky. I know the muddy turns of my home section better than the street in front of my home itself.

In the early days, the Coast Path was a bridge: on one side, the sea, that grounding blue expanse, and on the other, unfamiliar England. I could walk its high and twisting cliffs and surf battered beaches with one foot in the old and one in the new. Now, although the new is no longer so new, the coast and its winding walk remain my refuge. Far from my old life, I can always look out across that vastness and find reassurance, some inkling of familiarity in a distant land.

Whenever I miss home, walking the path makes four thousand miles feel not quite as far. Perhaps one day, I will appreciate the Atlantic not as an emotional derivative of the lake of my youth, but rather as its own entity, a vastness in and of itself. I will find refuge in the Coast Path not because it reminds me of home, but because it is home. Until then, I’ll keep walking.

Originally written and shot at Falmouth University. For more photography from the coast path, see my horizons.