Sailing without sound

I take the turning off the main route, slowing to follow the single-track line of tarmac out towards the sea. It’s late summer and the verges are thick with bracken and fireweed, their stems knocking at the car as it passes. Over to the north the sky has blackened, banks of cloud massing. Half a week of perfect weather, and it looks as if it’s going to break now.

Six miles on, the track widens. There’s a farm, a scatter of buildings, an office. Beside the verge lie the curvaceous outlines of several upturned canoes with a rack of yellow kayaks poking out of the car park beside it. As I pass the farm a collie comes hurtling out of the yard, racing towards the car. He flings himself at the bonnet and in the instant of his collision I flinch the steering wheel away. His fur flattens against the glass and I feel the thud of his body echo through the metal. A blur of hackles and then he’s gone, slid out of view. Oh God, have I run him over? Then he’s up again, a snarl of black and white against the closed window. His tail is up and his teeth are bare and there’s so much energy in him, so much unleashed delight in his rage. He jolts up, front claws ticking on the glass. I can see the force of each bark shoving his whole body forward: thud, thud, thud. The slower I go, the angrier he gets.

I straighten the steering wheel and drive on, the dog receding in the mirror. He’s running down the track, the tuft of his tail peacocking his achievement. After a few moments he stops and watches the back of me.

Just beyond the farmyard there’s a passing place so I pull in and stop the car. I look down at my hands, watching them shake. It’s not the dog. It gave me a fright, but dogs love chasing cars and that collie has done it before. It was the fact that I couldn’t hear the dog. Nothing. Not a whisper. He was giving it his all, every last atom in him, and none of it reached me. No sound, just a sort of muffled rush, and even that might have been my imagination.

I put my hand up to my right ear and cover the little hole on the right hearing aid. Open, close. Close, open. All working fine and the other one too. The aids are small, plastic, flesh-grey, in-the-ear things designed to fit down the tunnels to my eardrums. At the outer end there’s a socket for the battery and a tiny gap for sound to get in. At the inner there’s another slot where the processed sound enters my ear. I take them both out and dip my head from side to side, then turn the radio on and off. There’s nothing blocked, nothing out of the ordinary.

I put the aids back in and the world returns. These ones are designed to cope best in indoor environments, places like offices and homes full of double-glazing and other human beings all soaking up sound. The aids don’t deal well with big reverberant spaces and they really don’t seem to have got the hang of the outdoors at all. Out here the wind works on the aids the same way it does on a phone, drowning voices below a storm of white noise. If I turn my head slightly the noise eases but that probably means turning away from the speaker, and I need to see people properly in order to be able to hear them because half of what I’m listening to is the words on their faces. Take away most of the sentence, and I can still see whether it’s a question or a statement, or pick up enough of the tone to gauge the mood of the speaker. I’m looking for physical guides, and half their diction is there in the features – the lift of an eyebrow, a hardening tone, the warmth in the eyes.

At this time, in 2004, I am deaf. Not completely deaf, just down to about 30 per cent of normal hearing. I had started to lose my hearing in both ears about seven years ago and it has been declining ever since. I wear hearing aids in both ears and when I take them out, I can hear individual fragments of sound but not really the links between them. Certain words in a sentence or specific sounds are audible, but music is only a beat and a voice is just a chain of broken plosives.

I am here because I’m going sailing. My friend Eric has asked me to come and I very much want to do this. But water is not my element. I’m mesmerised by it and I’m scared of it, and because I’m scared of it, I head straight for it. I love sailing – the adventure, the pleasure of being with friends. But I hate sailing – the cold, the wet, the seasickness, the fear. I’m here because I want to push the love in and the fear away, and at that time I believe the best way to deal with fear is to hurl myself head first at the thing which most frightens me. It is a kind of idiot courage, a determination to force myself towards a different shape. I hope if I do the things that scare me for long enough, they will become easier. I want to override the physical facts, and to teach myself a lesson.

The trouble is that water is not like land. It’s said that almost all of what we experience as sound is an echo – that the conversation you hear when you’re sitting in a room with someone is mostly just their voice bouncing off the walls. Outside, at sea, there’s very little echo. Still water carries sound beautifully because there’s such a big surface area from which it can rebound, but choppy water presents a thousand different points of connection. The only surfaces with a good echo are the ones on the boat itself – fibreglass, metal, wood. And when the engine is running it lays a steady thrum over any lower sounds. What that means in practice is that all the sibilants get knocked out of speech: Nyoupuenerou? Ucuthemooinroe? Ilanacoupleougarleae?

The difficulty is that sailing requires a lot of instructions and understanding. In the heat of the moment I can’t expect anyone to stop what they’re doing and turn towards me so I know the next couple of days are going to be tricky. If I can’t hear something on land it’s a problem but there are things I can do to improve it. Out here, blanking an instruction or mishearing a command has much bigger consequences.

I start the car and drive on. Half a mile beyond the farm, the road opens out to a view of water. Down the slip to the loch there’s a trailer, a tangle of broken ropes and a few fading fishing nets. Three lines of boats lie anchored in the bay laid out with their bows to the land and their sterns pointing towards the weather. I park up and sit for a second, eyes closed. The bracken is high and there’s a bramble patch directly in front of the windscreen. The berries are ripening and when I look at them I feel a surge of affection for all this abundance, the trees and the moss and the solid ripe comfort of earth. I’m homesick for land, I realise, and I haven’t yet set foot on the boat. Beyond the windscreen the trees have stilled. No movement from the birds. The loch is clear and a bee probing one of the late foxgloves vanishes into the top blossom. Just for a second time stands and waits. No sound, no movement, just a single moment suspended.

I inhale a single lungful of breath, climb out, lock up, and head down the track.
An extract from Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found by Bella Bathurst and published by Wellcome Collection and Profile Books