The True Skinny on Dipping

One of the more popular things to do on Jura is walk. The island has several marked trails, an annual run (yes, run) up the Paps, and, from what I’ve heard, some very interesting caves and coastlines, especially on the west and northwest sides. Right now, I’m on the east side of the island, and have found out from George how to get to the secluded Market Loch, four or so miles from town.

I left The Manse at 9:15a, stopped at the Spar for an apple and Snickers bar to supplement my lunch, and found the trail to Market Loch easily from the main road out of town. The trail used to go through a shady plantation of fir and pine trees, but most of the land was recently harvested, so the path is exposed logging road much of the way.


And it’s hot today, with the sun beating down on areas with very little shade. The hillsides are still strewn with the debris of clearcutting—splintered wood, brackish ditches, sawn-off tree trunks, empty fuel and oil cans, fern trying to grow amidst the jumble of leftover limbs and branches. Where it tracks along the edge of a gorge toward a skinny waterfall, the trail turns into real footpath that goes uncomfortably close to the cliff before veering off into a half mile mass of waist-high fern.

The map showed that before I got to the gorge, I’d pass the Stones of the Glen—one of the many sets of standing stones on Jura and in the UK. Only one stone was still standing, with four fallen nearby. All were six to seven feet long, granite, narrow like needles. The standing stone had a thin edge that pointed straight toward a distant hill toward the northeast. The map shows a cairn on that hill. Are these two sites related? I got out my compass; the edge points about 25 degrees off magnetic north. The location of magnetic north changes slightly each year. Was the leading edge of this stone dead-on magnetic north at the time it was set into the ground ages ago?

Shortly before I reached the loch at 11:15, I spotted someone else leaving it—the same man in black that I’d seen take a different logging path earlier in the day. I was glad to have the place to myself, and wondered how he had made such good time ahead of me. Must have been a shortcut over the heathered hills. I saw no trail in the direction where he went.


I ate some lunch—peanut butter on crackers and the apple—and gathered the nerve to strip down for some skinny dipping in the lake. I’d never done that before, being usually too bashful of someone coming upon me unawares, and then fearful of their snitching my clothing from the bank and leaving me high and drip-drying.

Lake swimming wasn’t really in my childhood repertoire, either. I grew up near ocean beaches in San Diego, and my few school-based lakeside camping experiences were miserable affairs of water and teenage cliques that were both too cold for my comfort.

True to form, it did take me some time to work my way into this chilly loch, slowly walking in on smooth stones that hurt my feet to stand on, and easing down until I was neck-deep in dark yellow water. My body looked like it was encased in amber, the water was so brackish with peat. No stink, though, and the temperature was alternately warm, then cold as the current shifted. Amazing that this water ends up so clear by the time it reaches the distillery miles away. Many of the rocks deeper in had thick plant life growing on them. They were like walking on a long shag carpet that has lots of padding underneath. Soft and comfy and easy to stand on as I treaded water.

I swam out a little, thankful again for the time my Grandma spent teaching me how to swim at the TraveLodge pool in Hawaii when I was nine. Her brother had drowned as a teenager, and although Grandma didn’t swim, either, she made sure I knew how to dive for pennies and do the crawl all the way across the pool.

Today I was without makeshift water wings, though, and I didn’t go very far from shore for fear of getting tired too far from the bank. I stayed long enough to commune with flies hovering over the water, just missed a fish jumping up to grab one, then returned to the upholstered rocks to get out and get dressed and bask on a boulder to dry. The warmth from the rock seeped into my buttocks, even though the sun kept ducking behind cloud cover to leave me shivering.

This end of the loch has been edged with concrete berms, a small aggregate concrete pad, and stones stuck together with cement. While the cement was still wet on the rock wall, someone had written, “Will ye nae come back again?” I liked the Scottishness of that invitation.

It was very quiet at the loch. I heard the light lap of wind-ruffled water against a stone, the bomber buzz of a fly, the whine-up of a mosquito, the baa of a sheep practically invisible on the high hill to the right. A splash of a fish jumping up from the loch, the twitter of a bird coming over the crest, the muffled tapping of my stylus on Perry, the lift of wind as is passed my ears.

Beyond all that, stillness. Creation recreating itself all around me, silence begetting silence.

At last I gathered my gear and climbed the hillocks at the south of the lake to see the water views and how far I’d walked today. No trails here, just clamber over the heather and rocks as best—and as non-invasively—as I could. The sun was strong again, and I was already sweating off the memory of the cool swim.

I walked back to The Manse, cleaned up for another walk into town for supper, and while heading home for the last time today watched a seal sitting on a near-shore rock. He looked around, raised and lowered his tail, scratched his face with a fin, then looked around some more. Two herons were out this evening, big gray ones. They flew away with big, swooping, heavy wing-beats that glided one along the shoreline and the other away over the water.

I’m proud of myself for living today the way I did, for breaking through tiny inhibitions that I used to hide behind. I stopped to say hello to Christine and Catriona at their garden in the morning, got the grumpy grocer at the Spar to smile on my way out of town, and tried new things like hiking four miles to swim naked in a loch. I got a good workout, climbed a small mountain, ate well, napped well, accepted a last-minute lift into town to dinner, accepted a ginger beer from a party of four after I gave them the table I was at, watched a sea lion on its rock, and pretty much won the war of the midges.

Yep. A full day.

I am very much liking this stillness of life, sitting and watching the world reveal itself to me, having it teach me. I stop thinking and figuring and naming and identifying. I begin absorbing, taking in, accepting, knowing, claiming my own readiness for anything.

Not “Why?” Not “How?” But, “What now?”

Today, this is the essence of Being. It’s a state I want to practice more.

Surprise. Jura isn’t nearly as scary as I’d expected.