The Accidental Coca Lord

Chapter 20 - The last chapter

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Shetland 2022

The Tin Man

Watching a chainsaw slice effortlessly through the buttress trunk of a huge, perhaps four-hundred-year-old mahogany tree is something no human should have to watch. The moment of collapse, as the tree groans its last, creaks, snaps and topples, is like witnessing someone die. A world, and all the life it holds, over in an instant, the great climax ending with an ominous thud. Then silence. Our guilt hangs in the air.

The guy with the chainsaw strides over to inspect. He’s now silent too. He has all the paperwork, but the executioner rarely enjoys his work. We stare from a distance; me, Jenny, Ruthybear and Andy. Not a word is muttered. Frozen, unable to justify or quantify. The camera spins on to me and I pretend to cry.

We’d spent the previous twenty-four hours doing a ‘bio blitz’ of the tree. A group of Peruvian scientists, led by my friend Andy Whitworth, had been studying all the life we could find in the tree. The great scaled bark trunk, the expansive protecting canopy; from top to bottom we’d explored, touched, felt, absorbed. Two hundred and fifty species, mainly insects, had been gathered, identified and processed. One, a large but drab brown and orange butterfly, was new to science.

Now the tree was felled it would be cut and processed, shipped across the world, perhaps turned into coffins and buried in the ground. To witness the life and the pointless death of such huge living organism, after getting to know both the tree and its occupants in its final hours, created a sense of dissonance that none of us could really compute. The tree had been approved by CITES (Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species) as one that could be sustainably ‘harvested’ by the local Indigenous community, and we were witnessing its final exploitation.

Andy and I walked over to the splintered and twisted stump where an entire tree had once stood and climbed onto it – it was huge, maybe eight feet in diameter. I photographed the little metal dog tag that remained nailed to it, displaying its number. Neither of us said a word, the only sound coming from Jenny and Ruthybear sobbing in the background. I stepped off the stump and wandered along the tree’s enormous trunk, lit by the sun above as the felling had ripped a gaping hole in the forest canopy. I sat down and took in the sight, trying to make myself feel something. Gavin approached me and stuck the camera in my face. He asked me how I was feeling, and I delivered a half-arsed piece to camera with a slight break in my voice, knowing that I should really have been more upset than I actually was.

I had, of course, distanced myself from any emotional connection to the experience. I simply did what I do best, reducing the felling and everything else to an event that was happening that I needed to photograph in order to highlight an issue, rather than actually investing any part of myself into it. This is what I’d always done: witnessed an event, in all its horror, as if I were staring out from the safety of a nuclear bunker, hidden behind a camera, my little wall that helps keep my mind off things.

This book is a catalogue of these events, the things I’ve seen and done, told by a third person. The third person is me, the distance is my disengagement from my life. I’ve an extraordinary memory for detail, perhaps because pretty much none of what I saw went through my amygdala. It was, at the time, all processed mechanically.

I’ve lived an extraordinary life. I’ve played my cards wild and wrong, followed paths on impulse, indulged in chaos, taken too many drugs, broken hearts and abandoned my responsibilities, all in the quest for perfection, a grail I’ve sought for most of my life. And however I cook my books, justifying it to myself, as I always do, it has been a selfish endeavour.

My pictures are all I have to show for it. They sit next to me as I write, a shoebox full of hard drives beside my desk. Some are good, a few brilliant, the odd one iconic. Yet I can find fault in all of them. There’s always something missing, some tiny imperfection that could be improved upon. They were taken to fill a void, yet they themselves are the void. The relentlessness of my pursuit transformed the extraordinary into the ordinary, as I invested no more in the journey than a stand-in production-line worker would in their product. For most of my life I compiled the world in this way, disengaged where necessary, fully able to turn off the pain in an instant – and with it, everything else. I look back now and realise all I’ve missed. And finally I know why.

My entire career and all of my creative drive are based on protecting my mother, being perfect for her so that she would never have to worry about me. To be perfect would save her from the pain she felt at my father’s death when I was six. I cried once when he died, and I saw that this upset her, so I stopped and bottled up my emotional world ever since. I’ve since extended this burden of protection to all the women I’ve loved or been involved with. I’m the protector, the rock that’s built on kindness, patience and virtue. I’ve taken everything they’ve thrown at me, sometimes to the point of abuse, and I’ve always tried to put their happiness before my own. And as a result, I couldn’t help feeling that they were banking a debt that they could never possibly hope to repay.

To cope with being the protector I became impervious, emotionally shut down, from everything I’ve witnessed and experienced – all the elephant corpses, all the forest fires, the poverty, the death and the misery. All these things were shut off behind a great big wall. I’d become a one-way streak, a lake filling behind a dam. I ignored it all, and assumed that by doing so I’d diminished it, taken the sting out.

I had no idea that one day, all it would take was one word from Maria, when we split up after the Serengeti story, to finally break my heart. I realised that I couldn’t make the woman I loved so deeply happy. The dam then finally burst, a river of pain flowed out of me and, in the same moment, my world fell apart.

This explosion of grief coincided with my National Geographic story coming out. I had shot the entire feature section, which stretched to ninety-eight pages – my greatest achievement, representing a lifetime’s work and a lifetime’s dream. But holding a copy of the magazine in my hands meant nothing to me but the end of all my dreams. I’d reached completion, full circle. My ego had died, my confidence was lost. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t make decisions. I was shattered. A few weeks after the story was published, I was presented with the National Geographic Photographer’s Photographer Award, perhaps the highest honour I could have bestowed on me. I smiled when I got the email from my colleague and friend, Ami Vitale. I rarely enter competitions but always wanted to win this one. But the smile faded almost immediately. I told a couple of people but then just let the whole thing fizzle out. I tried to record an acceptance speech on my phone but I cried in all of the ten takes, so in the end I had to admit defeat and eventually sent one with me blubbing like Gwyneth Paltrow receiving her Oscar.

I cried at Tesco’s, I cried ordering coffee and buying petrol. I cried sitting in the pub on my own as I did most nights as I was so lonely and bored. I cried watching films, I cried at any hint of anyone else’s pain, I cried listening to any song that reminded me of anything. And I cried for no reason at all. I’d be driving along and would have to pull over because I was crying so much, without the faintest idea where it was coming from. If I had to explain to anyone what was wrong, I’d break down; embarrass myself by sobbing uncontrollably while trying to apologise, humiliated. I begged my old self to return, to switch off the pain, but he was gone, and however hard I tried I couldn’t find him. In the end, blubbing and with all hope abandoned, I did what I do best. I ran.

There’s a little spot on the downslope of a sheep trail just east of the remote hamlet of North Sandwick on the island of Yell in Shetland. If you park your car on the grass by the turning spot where the road ends, climb a fence or two and walk down past the centuries-old broken stone houses, you eventually reach a beach. It’s rocky, the large pebbles slippery with shreds of dead kelp and ridden with discarded plastic crap from lousy fishermen. The wind is usually blowing strong, curling off the islands, channelled between the buttressed cliffs of Bluemull Sound. Fulmars surf the gusts around the rocks that have splintered from the cliffs and now rise from the gunmetal sea, forming an impressive wall, dashed white with sea spray.

A modest stream cuts the beach in half, just wide enough to leap without getting your feet wet on dry days. It runs dark as it courses from the peat bog of the Black Park. Beyond, you go along the beach for a little while before climbing the moderate cliffs and following a trail carved by ewes precariously along the cliff edge, peering down with mild vertigo at the waves rushing into the geos. After a few hundred yards the cliffs give way and the slope starts slanting down towards a large crescent-shaped beach. This is my spot. It belongs, as far as I’m concerned, to me and me alone.

When I used to come here as a boy I’d sit on a raised clump of grass, look out to sea and shiver, occasionally sipping some revolting coffee from my flask. My only purpose was to scan the coastline and find otters with my dad’s shitty binoculars. The view’s nothing special. The beach sweeps east towards the headland of Burra Ness, where it gives way to rock banks and peat overhangs. At the far end of the peninsula you can just make out a small lump of tumbledown rocks – an old Pictish broch. Beyond lies the island of Fetlar, impressive on a clear day with its green hills and high cliffs. To the south of the beach a small lochan glistens white beneath the grey skies, and in the summer months a lone red-throated diver will float silhouette upon it.

I only have to think of my little spot on the downslope and I cry. To visit it as I did thirty years later was as traumatic as it was cathartic, the greying man gazing back at the simplicity of his childhood, so unburdened and so focused. The view hadn’t changed at all, but the man had been destroyed in pursuit of the same dream that took me there in the first place. And so I sat, with better coffee and superior binoculars, and cried some more. All I wanted was to escape, hit the road again, vanish in my own chaos. I lay back in the wet grass and wondered where I could go. Grab a camera and disappear into Africa, see old friends in Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya. Go live with the Maasai for a bit or the Machiguenga in Peru. Unbridled and alone, phone off, free from burden. When stress overcomes me, I begin to believe my fantasies of solitude, but they’re all bullshit. And I knew that the time to run was over. This spot was where I always ran to in my mind when things were tough. And now, lying here, with the rain drizzling my face, I realised I had nowhere left to run.

If depression is a cut that won’t stop bleeding, trauma is being stabbed in the throat.

I didn’t know how to put all the pieces back together. I was weak. My body was falling apart. I suffered from acid reflux, chronic eye problems, stomach pains, liver pains, constant back pain. I was exhausted by insomnia. Muscle spasms in my face, arms and legs ruined what sleep I could grab. I concentrated on these things as I lay there. All my neuroses, all my weaknesses, unable to figure out how to fill the void.

I’d spent a lifetime disregarding humanity, certainly in my earlier years where I’d found my solace with animals. The time in the rainforest with Elias, Inez and Heidi and all the other people I’d worked and lived with had made me realise my compassion towards people was real and deep. It had changed me profoundly and I’d left the rainforest a changed man. But the void remained.

It’s hard to explain my take on other people. I’ve always looked down on human emotion as self-indulgence, written off religion and spirituality as naivety, suspected that human beings deliberately complicate their ideas of the world so they feel their place in it has some actual purpose, creating depth simply by looking for it. To me people were no more, no less than animals, but burdened with the poisoned chalice of a complex brain, emotions and self-awareness.

To write off humanity like that diminishes just about everything. It’s a cold, unsentimental take on the world as driven by nothing more than inevitable, impersonal natural forces. For me to finally realise that all the pain I’d locked inside me was perhaps the result of how I saw other people had taken far too long.

And so I eventually picked myself up off that hillside above the crescent-shaped beach, walked back to my car in the pissing, fucking rain, pulled my phone out of my pocket and for the first time in my life, with nowhere left to run, held my hand out and asked for help.

The love, compassion, understanding and patience I received led to perhaps the most profound realisation of my life. To have an arm put around me, being told I was loved and was going to be OK. To be listened to while I cried and blubbed my way through figuring things out. To be given wisdom and understanding beyond my comprehension. To break down in front of women, my worst fear in the world, and to be carried by them. All of these were the most extraordinary release, helping me identify my missing piece –my failure to unburden myself, to take my cape off, stand naked and imperfect, as weak and vulnerable as any other human being.

It has taken me months to get where I am now and I still have a long way to go. I remember Maria laughing at me when we arrived on the beach in Zanzibar just after we’d got together, hopelessly and completely in love. I refused to take my shoes off on the beach, so she sat me down on my arse, gave me one of her lectures and removed them for me, pulling my socks off and making me walk barefoot in the sand.

A great unravelling began that day, and it continues two years later. I’m a shell of the man I once was. I’ve learned who I’m not, more than who I am. Grief and pain have brought me a freedom that I never realised I needed. I dance now, alone with my headphones on, when no one is watching. I take walks in the rain, I spend guiltless time not working and with my boys, because they’re the most precious thing in my life and I forgot that for a while. I hang out with my friends, and I listen to them and open up in a way I never believed I could.

We protect ourselves with the stories we tell. Those of us who’ve experienced trauma tend to tell ourselves such stories with more vigour, but they blind us to ourselves, laying the blame at the feet of others. To take the blindfold off forces us to look at ourselves, and that can be hugely painful. But I’ve done it now. I’m lonely these days. I’ve got a few friends but not many. But the few I have mean more to me than all the photos on the memory sticks in my stupid fucking shoebox.

When Billy met Molly she was emaciated, alone in the world and helpless. She needed a friend. A wave threw her onto Billy’s feet one windy March day, as he was standing on the pontoon that stretched out into the sea by his house. Her ribs were showing, and as she looked up at him and sniffed about, weakness overcame her and she fell back into the water. Billy vanished into his garage and returned a moment later with some fish. He gently placed a portion before her and she snatched it up, devouring it with the desperate enthusiasm of a starving child. The next day Molly returned to the pontoon and Billy fed her again. He continued to do this for weeks until Molly had regained her strength and the two crossed the invisible line and became friends.

Billy’s a beautiful soul. He’d been through a lot and finally found peace in his little house by the sea. He never had children and so he lived for his otter. He talked with a soft Shetland accent, which he codeswitched for southerners like me, even though it’s frowned upon by Shetlanders in general to ‘kannap’, soften your accent for outsiders. Absent from Shetland for thirty years working on the rigs, his heart finally pulled him home, where he met his wife Susan. They bought their cottage by the sea, and they took me in and rescued me, just as they’d taken Molly in.

Molly would visit Billy and Susan’s house most mornings for a feed – a piece of haddock or salmon, or a chicken wing. She’d nose about the yard until someone appeared to feed her. Sometimes she’d come to the door of the house, other times she’d wander into the extension that was being built and inspect the builders while they worked. Some people were scared of her, but most found her utterly endearing, with her shock of whiskers, her inquisitive eyes and hands, which she used to investigate everything she came across.

I first met Molly one cold morning on the pontoon. She inspected me, sniffing my boots and up my legs. I sat quietly and allowed her to get used to me while Billy gave her some food. She’d grab bits from him, give herself a few feet of distance and then munch away before returning for more. It was simple and beautiful to watch. Billy cooed over her, chatting to her as if she were a child, calling her Molly Maid and generally embarrassing himself while his sheepdog Jade obsessively dropped a deflated football at his feet. Both Jade and Molly completely ignored one another.

‘You should get your wetsuit on,’ Billy suggested, ‘she’ll be here for a while.’

Molly was in a relaxed mood apparently, and Billy could tell. Sometimes she’d just show up for a few minutes to eat, other times she wanted to hang out and play.

I got up and went off into the garage to squeeze myself into my undersized wetsuit, grabbed my mask, snorkel and fins, and walked down onto the pontoon. Molly grabbed my fin as I put it on, my leg dangling in the water, then whirled around beneath me as I slipped on the other one. I was slightly nervous; she was so confident, and that scared me slightly. I waggled both fins in the water and she grabbed at them, then swam down to the bottom, waiting for me to get in. I took a lungful of air and hopped into the cold, dark sea.

The moment I hit the water she was on me, all around me, in my face, above me, below me. I swam backwards and she chased after me, biting at my fins and trying to grab them with her front feet. As I rolled over, took a breath and sunk to the seabed, she was alongside me, darting around in front of my face, completely fascinated with what I was. She moved with the hypnotic grace of a ballerina, smooth as oil, spinning serpentine coils as she shot to the surface for a breath. Then she’d drop back down, glide towards me for a further inspection, roll over on herself and vanish into the murk, only to reappear a second later behind me, to frighten me a little. It was impossible not to laugh.

Molly took me across the thin blue line into the world I needed to be in, a world free from burden, where every thought I had vanished with her and happiness overcame me. We played for twenty minutes around and under the pontoon. She’d peel off occasionally and busy herself by annoying crabs or investigating old bottles on the seabed, and I’d follow after her, encouraging her to swim down into the depths with me, where I’d circle her clumsily and she’d weave around me, inspecting me and mocking me with her agility.

Eventually she got bored and turned her attention to hunting. I followed her along the coast as she barrelled through kelp fronds after fish, a chain of silver bubbles streaming in her wake. She foraged with excitement and speed, nosing through the kelp and churning up the fine sediment of the seabed into clouds. She’d emerge with small eel-like butterfish to snack on briefly, treading water. We passed over beds of starfish, sea urchins and green shore crabs caught out in the open and vulnerable. They’d raise their claws and snap at her as she passed. But she ignored them.

A hundred or so yards from Billy’s, the surface was overcome by a thick, peaty halocline – freshwater run-off from the previous night’s rain, which sat a couple of feet thick on top of the sea water. It was icy cold and so dense in parts that I could barely see my hands in front of my face, as any movement mixed the salt and fresh water together into a blur. Molly took on a beautiful form as she passed through the halocline, each thrust of her body and feet exaggerating the vapour trail behind her. When I took a breath and sunk beneath the surface, crystal-clear turquoise water appeared beneath and I could watch her skimming the seabed for flatfish in a world of fairy-tale beauty, the dark brown ceiling suspended thick above us.

Molly seemed to know every rock and crevice, every clump of kelp and bank of bladder wrack. She moved between them all with purpose and precision, knowing what lurked where and how to find it. Eventually the rocks on the seabed gave way to sand, and she left the shallows and headed out to sea. I was breathless from the chase by then, my huge frame bulky and lacking her dynamic form. I lost her briefly as she accelerated away from me but picked her up again a minute later as I drifted over a reef, forested thick with kelp. The whole scene had turned a weird yellow colour as the sun tried to break through the peaty water above, which lit the kelp up gold and glowing. I swam deep into it, following the constantly moving chain of bubbles that rose from Molly’s fur as she wove through the canopy below. She emerged after a moment right in front of me, her silver suit vanishing as she popped onto the surface. She eyed me from a few feet away.

‘It’s just me, Molly,’ I reassured her.

She took some air, rolled and dived back down, lost to the kelp again. I drifted along above her, absorbed by the bubbles that rained up from below. When she locked on to something, the bubbles would explode like a jacuzzi from the kelp like, then trail away as she shot off.

Eventually she popped up with a butterfish that she devoured in a few bites, before again watching me suspiciously. I reassured her, and she vanished back into the kelp once more. I followed her as she made her way along the edge of the reef, then I swam down and drifted along with her. It was amazing to see her hunting so naturally. In a lifetime of working with otters, trying to film and photograph them underwater, I’d never witnessed anything remotely like this. I watched her using her nose and whiskers as both primary sense organs and physical tools that spooked the frightened fish from their lairs, before grabbing them without effort. I watched how she swam, arching her body and thrusting her back feet, their huge webs expanding out as she forced them against the water, her front feet coming out to spin her, break her, twist and fire her through the kelp after her prey. It was simple, it was beautiful, the perfect conclusion to that unburdened dream from long ago when I’d chosen not to photograph an otter.

As we reached the far end of the reef, Molly broke off from her hunting, stopped among the kelp and stared at me from below. I slowed myself with my fins, trying not to get so close as to drift over her. She rose to the surface and popped up a couple of feet away from my face. I swung my arms out to reverse slightly and stopped. She hung in the water for a second and looked at me, then swam right up to my face and squealed. I lurched back, absolutely shocked, and watched as she plopped under the surface and, with a few flicks of her back feet, shot off at a speed I could never match, vanishing into the deep yellow murk. I was slightly shaken but I smiled. I knew just what she was saying: ‘OK, that’s enough. Now fuck off back into your world.’ And so I did.

To watch a wild otter underwater, to see something so incredibly beautiful and rare, is an extraordinary experience. To play with one is a life-altering one, because the line that separates us, is the line that ruins us.

The End

Billy and Molly one beautiful morning.