The salt-wetted air tangs your tongue and sprays your skin, but still the tide feels strangely distant.  Under normal circumstances you would gaze at the steady horizon, trying to absorb the enormity of the ever-shifting ocean.  Its depth, its strength, its unknowable currents and flavors.  Under normal circumstances you would be awed by the way it has sanded and pebbled and beached the world.  But here, today, the mystery of the sea is merely a bystander compared to the dark hexagonal column beneath your feet, the mutability of earth and time bringing your fourteen-year-old self so close you can feel her.  You look down at her white-socked and school-shoed feet framed by the face of the six-sided basalt and you relish the thrill that you are finally here, in Ireland at the Giant’s Causeway.

In Geology class you learned that 60 million years ago this land was turbulent with volcanic activity, the molten lava collecting as a giant lake that cooled slowly into interlocking columns that rise up from the sea to create stepping stones of the most elegant kind.  There is legend that these columns and those found at Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa in Scotland were created by feuding giants who wanted to do battle by bridging the sea-silver gap between them.  You don’t understand the purpose of creating a fantastical story when the truth is so fantastical.  Is it not enough that the earth itself designed these perfect and consistent polygonal structures? 

You think of your Geology teacher, Mr Cage, standing before your school-girl self at the blackboard.  He seems old to you although it’s likely he’s only in his fifties, the age you are now as you write this.  He has a mass of wild dark curls and small glasses that frame his glinting eyes as he talks, his passion for geology fuelling your own.

Sitting beside you is your arch-enemy, Zoe Swanson.  You are the only two girls in the class, so you are uneasy allies for the duration of your weekly lessons.  You are competitive with each other but most of all you are competitive with the boys.  Perhaps your solidarity comes from knowing you are both smarter than them and get better grades, although you are not as smart as Zoe.  Her sister, Annabel, is one of your best friends.  They are twins, but Zoe is tall and her skin so white it looks vampiric against the blackness of her frizzy hair.  Annabel is also pale-skinned but her hair is carrot-red and she has matching freckles and a birthmark that covers half her right cheek.  She is gentle and kind and not as clever as Zoe, and because of this her twin bullies her, making her life in their shared bedroom a quiet misery.  This is why you and Zoe are arch-enemies.  

You both take copious notes as Mr Cage tells you places of geological significance: Gaping Gill, Durdle Door, Arthur’s Seat, Lyme Regis, Fingal’s Cave and its geological sister, the Giant’s Causeway.  He tells you about the volcanoes too: Mount Etna, Vesuvius, Fuji, Krakatoa. He shows you rocks and minerals and fossils and he takes you on field trips to find them for yourselves.

You dream about these places with a longing that wedges itself deep within your core so to be here now, standing on the dark stones of the Giant’s Causeway thirty-four years later, you feel an astonishing level of circularity, as if in some way you have come home, even though this place is hundreds of miles and a stretch of water away from the English village where you live.  

Somewhere behind you is your new lover, who has driven you here for your birthday.  You suspect he doesn’t fully comprehend the value of this gift, and you’re not sure how to explain it to him but he is thrilled by your happiness, even though he disappeared from your focus the moment you stepped onto these stones.  Neither of you know that your relationship will only last another month or two, merely the blink of an eye in the moving plates of both your lives, a moment’s brush with the tide in the moon movement of the earth.

Like the enormity of the ocean you find it difficult to comprehend the intelligence of the world, but then you see how your feet step easily from one stepping stone to another, quickly as though you are in a child’s game, or slowly where you have to climb and the waves have worn their surfaces to slippery slopes, and you realize that this intelligence has designed you too, and all the other people that are stepping from stone to stone across the world. 

A world that great thinkers have decided is not a being but a thing.

You take photographs of this place but most of all you store it in your memory alongside the classroom and Mr Cage and Zoe and Annabelle Swanson and your exercise books filled with labelled drawings and notes of colourful longing.  You fell in love with the science of this world rather than its myths and legends, the feuding giants of Ireland and Scotland merely curious footnotes in a much bigger, expansive story.  You are fascinated by the true story of Zoe and Annabelle, a story that can only live on in your imagination as when you left school you left behind your friendships and your enemies.  Your memory of Annabelle has faded, a reflection perhaps of the softness of your friendship, whereas Zoe is vivid and stark, the sharp angles of her body and sly eyes still enough to evoke rage and reluctant admiration.  

You wonder about them in adulthood, if they were able to bridge the gap between them or if their stepping stones continued to be separated by a vast simmering ocean.  You wonder if Zoe followed her fierce intelligence and found it to be all she wanted it to be.  Perhaps you’ll find her on one of your future visits to places of rocks and fossils and fantastical earth creations.  Perhaps you’ll talk to each other and find that you understand each other, the child as well as the adult, and perhaps you’ll become friends and message each other about your geological adventures.

You’ll tell her that you’ve already visited Gaping Gill in Yorkshire, and the cliffs of Lyme Regis, and the Grand Canyon in America, and you’ve watched the ash drift above Mount Etna, and you’ll tell her that you want to see more of the things you learned about in class.  Most of all you want to see the inside of the earth as it spills out.  You want to see orange lava snaking down the slope towards you, feel the incinerating heat of it on your skin.  

You want to feel heartbreak and loss, achievement and glory.  You want to meet the world with the wondrous generosity with which she meets you. 

Whatever the human, the animal, the plant or the landscape, you want to feel it all.

 -Sally Gander

Sally Gander writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Litro, Porridge, The Lincoln Review, The Blue Nib and Elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Hinterland and Backlash Press. For many years she taught Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and now teaches students from across the world at Advanced Studies in England. You can read her blog and more of her published work at https://sallymgander.blog/