This Side of the Pond

Most of the time, I’m proud to share snippets of my culture with you, but this is not one of those times. This week, I bring you the cautionary tale of what not to do when you’ve been told it’s finally safe to emerge from self-isolation.

Last weekend, my countrymen were released from their homes for the first time in months and told they could drive wherever they wanted in the country as long as they made it home for bedtime. This was welcome news to everyone who had run out of books to read.

Because the sun had decided to celebrate by making one of its rare appearances, the beaches of my home county were instantly littered with pale-faced Brits, blinking in the unfamiliar light. I’m told there were traffic jams for miles along the coast, and a fair few cranky locals trying to get home from the supermarket as their frozen goods slowly became just regular goods.

They came from far and wide to enjoy the beauty of our sands, which would ordinarily be a welcome thing to hear. Just like Wyoming, my home town is a tourist destination and a lot of our businesses rely on that traffic to survive.

Unfortunately, some of those humans had been storing up their bad decisions for many weeks and were boiling over with the need to do something less than sensible. In most places, this manifested as leaving litter all over beauty spots, packing themselves onto the sand like sardines and apparently causing a forest fire in the sensitive wildlife habitat of the New Forest.

To give you an idea of how disgusting things got, a local volunteer group that works to keep the beaches clean suggested there may have been an issue with finding bathrooms. To solve this, enterprising visitors used whatever was handy to disguise their emissions, with surprises found in everything from takeout containers and towels to yogurt pots.

In what can only be described as a masterful understatement, one of the volunteers told the local newspaper, “We did not enjoy clearing it up.”

At Durdle Door, however, they took things even further.

Durdle Door, aside from being a fun thing to say, is a natural limestone arch that reaches out into the waters along the Jurassic Coast. If you’re wondering about the name, it comes from the Old English “thirl”, which means to pierce or drill. Arguably the most famous stone arch in the world was created 10,000 years ago when the sea pierced through the limestone, and today is a major tourist stop.

So it’s not surprising that people would burst through their front doors and head straight towards Dorset to see it, hopefully stopping to buy ice creams and beach towels along the way (which would make up for at least a little of the nonsense that transpired, but they’re all still on the naughty list). Given the ability of some human beings to make daft choices, it’s also not a surprise that four of those visitors thought they’d climb the arch and leap from it into the sea.

Now, those of us who have an ounce of common sense have probably already recognized the problem. At 200 feet, the summit of Durdle Door is close enough to the sky that landing in water isn’t going to make a lick of difference to how much it hurts.

Apparently, this activity is called “tombstoning”, which seems appropriate. At a height like that, you’ve picked up enough speed that the water can’t get out of your way fast enough to cushion your fall.

In fact, Durdle Door is over three times taller than the maximum height recommended by the World High Diving Federation unless you’ve got professional rescue scuba divers waiting for you in the water. These four twits did not have rescue scuba divers waiting for them, just a heroic paddle-boarder who risked his own life to drag the first of them to shore.

The paddle-boarder later told reporters that the first man to jump was lying on the seabed, 20 feet under the water – he never came back to the surface because he hit the water so hard. It took five attempts to bring him back up.

Coastguards, ambulances, first responders, lifeboats, police, air ambulance and rescue helicopters were all called to the scene, where police had to clear the area to create a landing site because those badly behaved beachgoers thought it would be much more useful to crowd round the three injured men.

Eventually, most of the day trippers were cleared off to an adjacent beach by the name of Scratchy Bottom. I promise you I’m not making that name up, and I too have many questions.

This week, it was announced that there will now be “tombstoning marshals” patrolling the beach to warn people of the dangers of jumping off a cliff that’s 200 feet high. Personally, I feel this is the same situation as when you find “contains peanuts” labels on a bag of peanuts: I am astonished that such a warning is necessary.

The police closed the roads to Durdle Door after the incident, but this did not deter the kind of people who need peanut labels. There was already a pointless queue of cars the next morning as thousands attempted to get back to the beach, even though they’d been asked to stay away.

Oh and, if you thought the rest of those visitors must surely have been better behaved than the tombstoners, I’m afraid they were not. At the end of that fateful day, I’m told that volunteers cleaned an incredible nine tons of trash from our beaches – and that doesn’t even include the trashy people who put it there in the first place.