My trip to Dover Beach was better than the Poem

White cliffs, a full moon, and a ghostly night. I saw it in my mind, probably from some movie. I pulled up a picture of those cliffs on my phone and turned the screen toward Kaleela, who sat across from me at the dinner table.

“I’ve heard of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, but not those,” she leaned toward the phone, brown bobbed hair swinging forward, “They’re beautiful though. Where’d you say they were again?”

“It’s right across from France, so close they say you can just see it on a clear day.” Again I searched for the memory, but failed. Eager to sell this trip to Kaleela, I pulled up a map of the port city, its corner reaching out towards the edge of France. We bought two bus tickets to Dover after dinner.

At 5:40 the next morning, we met in the dining room to grab some bagels coffee to go. We strode side-by-side down the street in darkness, giddy with anticipation. I had repacked my backpack three times the night before but was still mentally reciting my packing list. Johanna, Kaleela’s roommate from the fall semester, would meet us on the bus.

We rode the Circle and District lines a few stops to Victoria station, where our bus would depart. It was 6:40, twenty minutes to spare. We stopped briefly at the departure board and matched our ticket to the bus number. I silently chanted it with each step as we found our way to the buses. I was surprised at how smoothly things were going, but I thought too soon. Among all the buses, none had our number.

We stood there for a few seconds. I repressed my panic. We paced back to the departure board to check the numbers and directions. No, we had followed the signs correctly, we had the number right. Then why wasn’t it there? After a painful minute, we differentiated between the bus coach station. We followed the coach signs. They led us out of the station, to the street, and no further.

Bewildered, we spent another minute checking our phones for maps. Kaleela flagged down a passerby, deciding we had no time to waste.

“Excuse me, would you point us toward the Victoria coach station?”

“Oh that’s just around the block this way. You’ll see a round sign on the left.”

Ten minutes to go became nine.

“Thank you!” we chimed together and swiveled off in the direction she had pointed, praying she was right. We had to sacrifice those five minutes and check. If this was wrong, we were going to miss our bus.

The street was still dark, but people bustled all around. Two minutes down the sidewalk, and anxiety conquered pride. “Should we run?” I blurted.

“Yes,” said Kaleela immediately.

I was bound to end up there sooner or later — a backpacked foreigner running madly through the city for a bus, or coach — good thing I got it out of the way in the first week. With seconds to spare, we spotted our coach, glowing in the yellow streetlights, and hauled it for the final sprint, our backpacks jostling frantically.

The inside was nearly empty, but one bright young face with a knit headband that barely contained her curly light-brown hair popped up from behind a seat and smiled. Johanna. Kaleela and I shuffled over to her, gasping and panting. Johanna raised an eyebrow at us.

“We got lost,” said Kaleela.

An hour later, swaying down the highway, I watched the late winter sunrise flash against the tops of Kaleea and Johanna’s heads. They giggled across the aisle at old inside jokes. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I smiled and thought of some of my own friends that I hadn’t seen in a while.

The movement of the coach began to melt my stress into tranquility, the hum of the engine rocked me into a warm haze, and I closed my eyes. The sun’s rays filtered through my eyelids in a vibrant red glow. When the light passed behind the trees, the red light strobed, but not annoyingly. Again I imagined the cliffs: glowing white limestone, a pebble beach swashing below, the lights of France in the distance, a lighthouse standing on the tallest cliff. Wait… a lighthouse?

My eyes snapped open. It gleams and is gone… This wasn’t a memory of a movie, it was a memory of a poem! Leave it to me to plan a whole trip around a place I only half remembered from a poem.

As I googled the stanzas I could remember, the city of London expanded and disappeared into the countryside. The first verse of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” brought back the picture that I’d been imagining all this time. I dozed off with the words trailing through my head.

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

[…]

When I opened my eyes again, the sun was above the tree line and shrouded in clouds. Kaleela and Johanna were still chatting, but more gently, and houses were popping up on the landscape again.

At 9:30am, the coach brought us to the middle of town by a big square park. I stepped down the coach steps and got a blast of fresh, cold air to the face. I took a deep breath in, though the wind didn’t really give me a choice as it forced cold air into my lungs. This was so much better than city air. It smelled green and a little salty, almost like home, but a little more damp. I felt like running through the park straight to the cliffs and the wide open sea! We did it!

We stretched our legs and took in the grey sky, the few people strolling in the park with their dogs, the forested neighborhood sloping up to the side of the park and the strip of shops across the street.

“Okay, so should we find the cliffs first?” suggested Kaleela.

“Yeah, but I don’t see them from here,” said Johanna, squinting in the glare. I tried to imagine a cliff from behind. Probably wouldn’t be much to see.

“Oh look! There’s a castle just up the road through these houses,” said Kaleela, showing us the map on her phone “shall we head there before the cliffs?”

“I’m actually pretty hungry, I was hoping we’d find something to eat in town before we head off,” I said.

“Well let’s see what we have,” said Johanna, turning toward the shops.

The strip of buildings glared back at us with their rectangular windows from the apartments above the stores. They squatted together, gaze toward the horizon, as if guarding the center of town from the visitors who might come from the bus stops. The belly of the stores supported two more stories of red tile, which was all capped with a flat square concrete roof.

There was a pharmacy, a dollar store (or pound store), a dominos pizza, and both a quick cash and lottery joint, a local convenience supermarket called Costcutter, a post office drop off, and to the very right on the corner was a café called Caffe Macaris.

Johanna turned slowly back to me, “Maaaaaybe there’s something further in town?”

I was the only hungry one, so I took my sausage sandwich with tomato sauce on white bread from Caffe Macaris to go. It was warm, wrapped in brown paper, and surprisingly delicious. Or the cold and hunger told me so, anyway.

We passed uphill through the houses and reached the castle. It was much bigger than I had expected. But it was also deserted. The sign read “open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10:00–16:00.” Oh well. Instead, we enjoyed looking out over the town.

It was time to find those cliffs. We found a trail that claimed to lead to the White Cliffs of Dover, but confirmed it with our phones to be sure. It led us around the back of the castle. As we passed the lower wall, which was still very high and surrounded by a ditch, a thought crossed my mind.

“Do you think people make camp around the castle when they’re homeless?”

“I don’t know,” said Kaleela, “It would make a good place to huddle up against.”

“You could build a fire inside the walls and no one would be able to see it,” said Johanna.

“Yeah, and the wind wouldn’t get to you either,” I said. I imagined the life of a person who lived in the shadow of the castle while we walked downhill into the woods behind it. The air cooled, and the sun that was finally beginning to peek through the clouds was now blocked by the trees. A thrill ran through me as I smelled the forest air.

The clay that packed the trail was pale, slippery, and occasionally icy. I entertained myself by breaking little frozen-over puddles along the way and by spotting the different kinds of trees and birds. The conversation meandered on with us.

Someone brought up the pronunciation of “oregano.” Kaleela’s Australian take was “or-ay-GONE-oh,” Jocelyn is German and called it “or-EE-gah-no,” and my American accent said it was “or-AY-gu-no.” None of us could guess the original pronunciation. Our hot debate was then cut short by a fork in the trail.

One path continued straight over a low wooden fence to some open hills, and the other veered right, perpendicular to the fence and up into dense, shrubby woods.

While Johanna and Kaleela tried to orient us, I looked around. The round fencepost had something scratched into it: “↑ WHITE CLIFFS”.

“Should we trust this sign?” I asked. I suspected it was done by a local or someone who had gotten confused by this section and decided to help out any fellow strugglers. They looked.

“Oh, could be!” said Kaleela, “What do you think Johanna?”

“I don’t know… on the map it looks like the cliffs are this direction,” she said pointing to the trail on the right, “I don’t know if we can rely on mysterious messages.”

“Well, I would think we’re pretty close, so if it’s the wrong way we can just turn around,” I said. And up we went.

It narrowed and became noisier. It sounded like construction, the low vibration of big machinery. A steep dip and rise brought us to a dead end. We clambered out to the edge of the trail to see what we were on top of. I stepped down onto a lower ledge, and between the trees I saw an impressive sight. The main port sprawled out beneath us. Concrete, busy, and stacked with arriving and departing containers . Ships, cranes, trucks and dozens and dozens of people worked on the lot that started on land and extended about a hundred yards over the water. Concrete gates went out further into the straight to manage entrance to the shore.

We turned back, agreeing to follow the directions on the fencepost. Kaleela was in front of me, and Johanna behind as we came back to the bike path dip. Kaleela turned her head back to make a comment as she picked up her right foot to step, but I’ll never know what she was going to say.

Her whole body suddenly dropped out of sight and went careening down the path. Her supporting leg had slipped on the clay, which was now streaking up her brand new plaid waterproof trench coat and pants.

I gasped when she fell, but held my breath; I knew a laugh would come out if I exhaled.

“Oh my god are you okay?!” Johanna said while we carefully followed her track down the hill. I could only see her back, and her shoulders were shaking. Oh no, I thought, she twisted her ankle or worse. She lifted her head towards us and… was that a wince or a smile? I waited. But then she inhaled and started laughing out loud.

“You scared us!” yelled Johanna through her own laughter. We were all bent over until we started crying and couldn’t breathe. We managed to make it back to the fence in one piece, still giggling.

When we got there, we found a man in a red rain jacket, jeans, a beanie, and a camera slung around his neck. He was looking back and forth between a map and the fencepost that we had seen earlier.

“Hello,” we said.

“Hello, uh, do you know which way to the white cliffs?” He had a European accent that I couldn’t place.

“Well, we’re looking for them too. We do know that they are not that way,” Kaleela pointed back the way we came, “We’re betting on the sign, if you want to come along.”

“Yes, sure.” And off we went. The trail passed through an open field with long grass.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jean Paul.”

“Where are you from?” asked Johanna.

“Oh, I came from Rome, Italy. Where are you from?”

“Well I’m from America.”

“Australia,”

“I’m from Germany.”

“We’re all study abroad students from a school in London,” I said, “Are you backpacking or did you just come to see the cliffs?”

“Well I want to take pictures of them. I am a photographer, and I’ve seen other pictures but wanted to see if they were really that beautiful. I like to travel to different places and take nature photos.”

“Oh that’s really interesting,” said Johanna.

We walked on, and he fell behind us and became silent. Johanna leaned over to Kaleela and said something about “oregano.” We giggled, recalling the debate.

“So, we were wondering something earlier, and thought you might know the answer. None of us could decide how the word ‘oregano’ is supposed to be pronounced. How do you say it in Italy?”

“Oh, yeah, O-ree-GAH-no.”

“Ooooooh!” we chimed. He seemed slightly confused by our excitement.

“See I was closest!” said Johanna. This little victory and recalling Kaleela’s spill again and again kept us amused as we wound our way down the path.

Soon we came out on a dirt road. The trail was gone, so we blindly went to the left. It felt like we were lost again. But then a short, long white building with a sloping grey roof came into view. A visitor’s center with a small dirt parking lot. We grabbed some maps and walked a few more yards.

There it was.

It looked as if the rolling green hills of England had been sliced from the continent by a giant serrated knife, as if it was a crumb of big crispy wafer that had snapped off, and we were just microscopic beings that had clambered on its moldy face. It was a colossal fortress of white stone towering above the sea, which brought in a strong and salty wind. The sun peeked out from behind a cloud, reflecting off the limestone and blinding us.

I was breathless.

With my face turned toward the sea, emotion surged in my chest. Until then, I didn’t realize that I had been missing the ocean, the thin horizon line, the wind. I was four thousand miles away from what I knew, yet here it all was. It had a slightly different look, but just the same heart. And it was true, I could just make out the shadowy sliver of France on the horizon. The city had been exciting in a buzzing, mysterious way. But this feeling was home.