The Seven Sisters
Following the footsteps of well-loved travel writer and (fellow American) Bill Bryson.
I don’t blame the young tourist, standing there at the cliff’s edge, cell phone tilted horizontally to capture as much panorama as possible. All Seven Sisters are showing off today. Each tries to upstage the next, jutting from skinny pebble beaches and chalk-wash tides, striking ivory against a sapphire sky. On their shoulders, they wear a shawl of silvery green interspersed with puddle-wonderful pockets of mud, edges frayed as if nibbled by moths. Marshmallow sheep dot the horizon to the north. It looks like Heaven, and the young tourist ignoring the fenceline is asking for a one-way ticket.
Dangerous things come in pretty packages. Death estimates along the South Downs Way vary from twenty a year to eighty. No one knows the exact number or what percentage is caused by inattentive cellphone use. However, the ambiguousness of these reports says almost as much.
What the young tourist can’t see through his camera lens, no matter how great the pixel density, are the fractures beneath his feet. Geologists claim that fissures stretch back as far as ten meters. Water passes through the chalk and freezes as temperatures drop. The water expands, and the chalk cracks, causing the cliffs to erode from the top. Hefty segments fall away regularly and without warning. It is this natural process that leaves the cliffs with near-vertical faces and a jagged key bitting coastline.
A steep incline stands between me and the summit. On my way up, I watch in awe a gaggle of young girls dangling their feet over the cliffside and a father holding his toddler son over the edge like Simba. They're all too far to shout at, and I wonder if they’d listen if they weren’t. Nowhere on the stretch of pristine landscape have I seen any obvious markers cautioning visitors of the peril. No guards patrolling the tourist hot spots. No education on coastal dangers for people who are not familiar with the sea. Nothing that would make me believe this area is anything but safe. The only thing remotely preventative is the nylon string fence a few feet off the ground and a wooden sign that reads, ‘Cliff Edge.’ There is a little yellow triangle beside the letters that could depict a stick-figure man falling from a cliff. But it could very well be a man taking a jumping photo. It’s almost inviting oblivious tourists to make their Brexit early. Come to think of it, it may have been me out there had I not had a chance encounter the night before.
On an evening walkabout through Eastbourne, I heard music and ventured into a furniture store disguised as a wine bar. Or perhaps it was a wine bar disguised as a furniture store. I sat at a rustic oak table, and almost immediately, the guitarist stopped playing to ask if I wanted a drink. I thought this a little presumptuous, until I learned later he was the owner. I listened to the last hour of his show while I sipped my large Cabernet. And when he finished, I was just buzzed enough to ask the burning question I’d been itching to ask since I’d sat down.
“Why wine and furniture?”
“I started as a furniture store. At the time, Eastbourne city council allowed shops to host special events four times a year, so I started hosting small gatherings in the store. And well, the wine was more popular than the furniture, so I made it a full-time gig.” I ogled at this. What other departments would be infinitely improved with a wine bar? Bookstores? Cell phone retailers? Pharmacies?
A woman with cropped blonde hair and a leopard blouse piped up behind me. “Dawson is amazing. He can do everything. He plays guitar. He sells wine. He built all the furniture you see in here!” She was gushing a little too much for her husband's liking. The thin man beside her crossed his arms and leaned back into his chair, which did indeed look well-made, and grunted.
“What brings you to Eastbourne?”
I explained to them that I was following in the footsteps of Bill Bryson, whose book “Road to Little Dribbling” I was reading. At the mention of Bill Bryson several people in the room turned with interest.
“Tomorrow, I’m going to walk the Seven Sisters.”
The woman gasped. “Stay away from the edge! Those cliffs are unpredictable. A tourist died there just last week.”
The husband yawned. “We get about eight deaths a year.” He said it as casually as if he were discussing wine tannins or how many times his wife allowed him to go golfing. But then he leaned forward and, in a critical tone, said, “We’re losing three meters per year of countryside to the ocean. The sea is claiming us back.” Clearly, the death of tourists and his wife’s infatuation with another man were average concerns, but the loss of his country could not be tolerated. He was a true patriot. I wanted to point out that the sea was also claiming a few of us foreigners, so maybe there was a silver lining, but I thought I better not. One sarcastic American travel writer is enough for the whole of England.
The man’s statement that England loses three meters per year is both true and false. While parts of England erode at that rate, the sediment is also moving and building back up in other areas. So the country is not losing so much, as it is changing. Of course, this isn’t much comfort for people whose houses have crumbled into the sea due to coastal erosion or whose relatives had the misfortune of being on or beneath the wrong cliff at the wrong time.
The National Trust website advises people to stay at least 5m back from the cliff edge at all times to lower the risk of death. But when was the last time you read the website before visiting a place? Three hundred and fifty thousand people visit the Seven Sisters each year. If we can figure out a way to combine furniture shopping with wine, we can figure out a way to keep fewer people from dying.
I’m heaving by the time I reach Beachy Head. At 152 meters, it is the highest of Britain’s chalk-sea cliffs. The payout is the vista that greets me like a happy postcard on the other side. It’s the scene that inspired me to walk the South Downs Way, a scene first dictated to me in a book. Bryson’s words marquee: “To my left were bosomy hills of green and gold, to the right a spangled plane of blue sea. Dividing the two were cliffs of brilliant white and a sensational view of the famous Beachy Head lighthouse with its jaunty red and white stripes, standing in the sea at the base of the cliffs.” I inhale open air and close my eyes, reveling in this English gem. For a moment, I empathize with the man from the previous night whose grief stemmed from his perceived loss of the countryside. When I open my eyes, I find my sensational view blocked by yet another young man taking a selfie.
I wave my arms, the international sign for attention. “Excuse me. These cliffs could fall at any minute. You should probably step back behind the fence.”
“What?”
“I said you should step back…”
“Oh, piss off!”
And with that, I concluded my first journey following in Bill Bryson’s shoes. I could only hope that every destination would be as delightful.
