One day about a week ago, a sudden crashing sound from the bedroom alarmed me. I rushed in there and saw a big helter-skelter pile of paperback books on the floor.
They had been stacked up very high on top of a tall bookshelf. As I prepared to re-stack the books, the first one that caught my eye was a Penguin paperback entitled “The Road to Wigan Pier.” It’s by George Orwell, author of the famous dystopian novel “1984.” ‘Wigan Pier’ is a non-fiction book about dirt-poor coal miners in the 1930s in northern England.
As I picked up that water-damaged Orwell book from the bedroom floor, a flood (and I do mean “flood”) of memories rushed to me about the time a school buddy and I nearly got washed away by the tide.
It happened in 1980 when I was a student in London on the British Studies Program, along with 76 other Americans. One of them was Paul Wander of Elrosa, Minn. Just before an extended school break, he and I decided to hitchhike down to the city of Brighten on the English Channel.
I packed my backpack, including the “Wigan Pier” paperback I’d recently bought. Paul packed his pack too, cramming a vinyl tent into it.
After a long day of getting rides on roads, we arrived toward evening at the outskirts of the city of Arundel, which is very near the English Channel. Exhausted, craving sleep, we decided to pitch Paul’s tent near a small river flowing nearby. There was a nice flat area just a few feet above the little river. I asked a passing woman walking a dog if it would be OK to camp there.
“Yes,” she said in her veddy-propah chipper English accent. “But, oh dear, do be careful of the tide.”
So I grabbed Paul’s folded-up tent and plopped it down on that flat ground.
“Let’s pitch it right here,” I said.
“I dunno,” said Paul, looking concerned. “This ground seems awful wet and spongy.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “That’s because it’s near that little river, and the ground absorbs a bit of its water moisture through a kind of osmotic process.”
“You sure?” Paul asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said. “At St. Cloud college I took a course called Water Environment and learned about stuff like that.”
We pitched the tent, crawled inside and were soon snoring.
Later, I awakened, alarmed by a lot of water under my body.
I woke up Paul.
“Hey, Paul, this tent of yours leaks bad!”
He too felt a surge of water.
He scurried up and opened the tent flap.
“Hey, Denny, remember that little river we saw last night?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“We’re IN it!” he said.
Only then did it dawn on me. The high tide from the English Channel must have soaked the tent and us – the same “tide” the walking-woman-with-dog had warned us about.
Paul and I quickly grabbed our stuff and scrambled from the tent up to higher ground a few yards above the soggy, sagging tent. We sat on two big rocks as we shivered in darkness just before dawn.
“Hey Denny, what grade did you get in that Water Environment class?” Paul asked.
“An A. Why?”
“Well, if you ask me, you should’ve flunked!”
“Yeah, we were dumb to put that tent there,” I said.
“WE?” Paul asked.
“OK,” I said. “ME! Call me dumb.”
“Dumb,” he said, suppressing a chuckle.
I’ve always associated that paperback with the tide incident because the gushing water damaged that book, making it water-logged, swollen, off-kilter. And it still is. That’s why I so quickly noticed it – and chuckled – after it fell from a bookshelf that day.
I think I’ll frame that crippled paperback as a travel souvenir in a water-proof glass-box frame. I’ll paste a warning on it that states, “Beware of Tides, Dummy!”
