Andrew Fusek Peters is a writer and long-time wild swimmer. In Dip, we’re invited to follow his personal journey to overcome depression as he takes on an extraordinary year of wild swimming around the Borderlands of Shropshire and the Welsh Marches. Lynne Roper reviews for OSS.
Lynne’s Review – Beautiful and Uplifting
This dream of a book from Andrew Fusek Peters communes with my wild swimmer’s soul. Recently, clinical depression left him hospitalised and barely functioning, struggling to find a reason to live. When after six months and the correct medication he began to recover, he undertook a year-long journey dipping around the Borderlands of Shropshire and the Welsh Marches where he lives, and writing about his experiences. This was Peters’ route to understanding and the restoration of his health and connections to family, friends and water.
Peters uses delightful imagery that reveals his warm and observant humour, poetic nature and essential connection to the environment. “Today, the wind whips round the beach like a bossy horse rider, encouraging walkers and waves to go faster”. It’s weather and seasons and wild water that provide the metaphors that frame and excavate Peters from his experience of being engulfed by the fog of depression. This is his description of how he feels immediately after an icy swim: “And although the day is damp and the cold rain is scribbling zigzags through the air, and grey is not a colour but the appellation of whole months that have been and are still to come, I feel synaptic, almost giddy with stars, my limbic brain coursing with ideas; banks and boundaries breached and flooded with language and life.”
The borderlands he explores meander geographically and metaphysically, between his “beanpole” body and ponds, rivers and waterfalls, and land and sky, England and Wales, life and death, health and sickness. When Peters attends the funeral of an old schoolfriend, Charlie, who “was unable to heal himself”, it’s a watery metaphor that helps Peters to deal with it.
“…the rabbi takes us back for final prayers…And she reminds us that there is a small basin on the way out and that we are welcome, both Jew and Gentile, to wash our hands if we wish. The water is the symbol, and our act a way of marking our transition from departing the place of death to entering that of life once more. Yes, finishes the rabbi, you must grieve, but also you must live”.
The atmospheric black and white photos are taken by Peters and his then teenaged daughter, Roz. Her poignant blog post printed at the end of the book is heartbreaking in its deeply perceptive explanation of her father’s illness.
“It now strikes me that his illness left him stuck at the bottom of a silted lake. We wanted, desperately, to catch him with hooks, suddenly yank him from the depths – dredge him up in an instant. Instead it was an agonising process of waiting for the dark liquid to drain away, drop by drop”.
Dip: Wild Swims from the Borderlands is as beautiful and uplifting as it is visceral. From shivering conversations with other wild swimmers I know that many of us have struggled with physical or mental illness. Peters magically captures the nebulous intangibles of a fragmented mind, spirit and body, and allows us to experience how wildness and frigid water reform those pieces into a whole human being.
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