March 27th. Return.
Returned from a two week stay in England. The grass appears to have grown enormously and for the first few days back I felt like a real stranger again. Not that I didn't want to get back. I had arrived in Britain during storms and an arctic chill. Plastic bags decorated the bleak trees and verges, signage had sprung up and through, like the council knew it was supposed to be spring. Friday and Saturday evenings still sprouted their bunches of lurching blobs; a gross animus pervades. Is this just me?
Yet on return to the mountains I know that I will never be truly at home here, that the traces, signs, faces and features do not share my recent history, that I am a visitor, an escapee from the shades and clouds that drove me here to focus inwards and to the land that might give me motive and sort me out.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
If you manage to get up very early in the morning and go out into the snow that fell, just before the full night began, you may see the tracks of animal traffic. These are untainted, as yet, by thaw or new snow. The passers by leave their signs. Here is a hare, two prints in front, with just a trace of hock or thigh. These first are the hind feet, passed under and through the fore legs, which print themselves behind. I follow them alongside and find scrapes where this hare has found tasty shoots. The hills are silent, no birdsong, no cursed dogs. I'm almost ashamed to sully the cleanliness. It's not that cold, just white, but the trees up the mountain have already shed their shawls and the thorn blossoms are like dirty handkerchiefs. I can hear the river clearly; the water sounds are exaggerated, framed by the muffled landscape.
Being a poor gardener one gets excited by very small things. And they are here, the tips of ruffled daffodils around the well. The snow lies like a skirt around each prima donna. In spite of the snow, the season is changing. Molehills are lumped in a diagonal across the field, like big brown mushrooms. I watch a greater spotted woodpecker shin up the bare trunk of a beech. 'Pchikk, pchikk!' Its call ecoes its French name: 'pic epeiche'. Its loopy flight gives it away before the sound.
In the house, ash from the fire fills a metal bucket and fills me with pleasure too. The simple and repetitive routines I indulge in, riddling the stove, collecting the wood and ash, are profoundly satisfying. Yesterday's despair has lessened. Nature might be waving at us frantically, her imperatives obvious, but, as James Lovelock says: enjoy life while you can; and that is why I am here, lucky, in this wild and abundant place.
Being a poor gardener one gets excited by very small things. And they are here, the tips of ruffled daffodils around the well. The snow lies like a skirt around each prima donna. In spite of the snow, the season is changing. Molehills are lumped in a diagonal across the field, like big brown mushrooms. I watch a greater spotted woodpecker shin up the bare trunk of a beech. 'Pchikk, pchikk!' Its call ecoes its French name: 'pic epeiche'. Its loopy flight gives it away before the sound.
In the house, ash from the fire fills a metal bucket and fills me with pleasure too. The simple and repetitive routines I indulge in, riddling the stove, collecting the wood and ash, are profoundly satisfying. Yesterday's despair has lessened. Nature might be waving at us frantically, her imperatives obvious, but, as James Lovelock says: enjoy life while you can; and that is why I am here, lucky, in this wild and abundant place.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
8. March 9th. Pyrenean Journal. Oaks.
I'm off to plant a red oak, whatever the weather, before I crumble into an elderly bigot.
The wind howls, the sleet streaks and drives and hail tinkers with a tin roof. The broad beans are just miserably proud of this thin blanket of snow. Garlic, too; erect points of bright green hope. No optimistic blackbird pipes up this time. But I am out; winding up the wind, slurping over the field, to dig a hole for the oak. Emile has told me not to plant it too near the fruit trees, as its root system will eventually be unsympathetic to them. That is, the fruit trees will not prosper. Now that is interesting because I also know that oaks planted near other oaks ARE mutually conducive. They can, in a way, share each others' root systems, and, so to speak, download nutrients to others in their group that are perhaps struggling to survive. Ah trees, what magic is working there!
I'm off to plant a red oak, whatever the weather, before I crumble into an elderly bigot.
The wind howls, the sleet streaks and drives and hail tinkers with a tin roof. The broad beans are just miserably proud of this thin blanket of snow. Garlic, too; erect points of bright green hope. No optimistic blackbird pipes up this time. But I am out; winding up the wind, slurping over the field, to dig a hole for the oak. Emile has told me not to plant it too near the fruit trees, as its root system will eventually be unsympathetic to them. That is, the fruit trees will not prosper. Now that is interesting because I also know that oaks planted near other oaks ARE mutually conducive. They can, in a way, share each others' root systems, and, so to speak, download nutrients to others in their group that are perhaps struggling to survive. Ah trees, what magic is working there!
Saturday, March 08, 2008
7. Pyrenean Journal, March 8th. Here and there.
After a forgiving February, sleet and hail are sweeping across the plateau. The pale blossom of the blackthorn/sloe is torn from tree and twig by a vicious wind. I'm trying not to let the weight of depression measure my days. I watch the TV, read books and newspapers, write my journal, fiddle with paint and listen to the weather. Outside in the wider world, [because that's what it feels like here; like I'm in a removed space, a world separated from the real, political, conflict strewn planet that does exist], platitudes are breathed, wars are conducted and managed, habitats are defiled, ecosystems lost or interrupted and profits made there. Here, because I'm not outside, because the weather is persistently atrocious, I find myself lost in a mind rant on the corruption, ineptitude and irrationality of the human species.
If we were living at the tail end of human existence, with environments either degraded or lost, what would we dream of? Our lost landscapes? The dust deserts and skies of Ulan Bator? The soft fields and water mills of Suffolk and the Cotswolds of little England? The crusted crags of the Pyrenees or Rockies? The melon slice of a beach or the enveloping forests of our childhood, when trees were no surprise? Or a palingenesis, a new space,a rebuilt paradise?
After a forgiving February, sleet and hail are sweeping across the plateau. The pale blossom of the blackthorn/sloe is torn from tree and twig by a vicious wind. I'm trying not to let the weight of depression measure my days. I watch the TV, read books and newspapers, write my journal, fiddle with paint and listen to the weather. Outside in the wider world, [because that's what it feels like here; like I'm in a removed space, a world separated from the real, political, conflict strewn planet that does exist], platitudes are breathed, wars are conducted and managed, habitats are defiled, ecosystems lost or interrupted and profits made there. Here, because I'm not outside, because the weather is persistently atrocious, I find myself lost in a mind rant on the corruption, ineptitude and irrationality of the human species.
If we were living at the tail end of human existence, with environments either degraded or lost, what would we dream of? Our lost landscapes? The dust deserts and skies of Ulan Bator? The soft fields and water mills of Suffolk and the Cotswolds of little England? The crusted crags of the Pyrenees or Rockies? The melon slice of a beach or the enveloping forests of our childhood, when trees were no surprise? Or a palingenesis, a new space,a rebuilt paradise?