Honest Nature

The scene was quite beautiful. Freezing fog cloaked the park which in turn was surrounded by the yellow stone buildings of the ancient town which were, in places, highlighted by the sodium flare of the streetlights. The trees were black outlines in the grey. I was walking with a  friend, enjoying the muffled stillness invoked by the dense fog, that thrill of being in a new place and the darkness. As we walked under the lime trees a classroom memory was very suddenly stirred as an icy droplet found its way into the small gap between collar and neck. The stillness was shattered.  My shout, partly triumphant, part surprised was – almost – involuntary.

“Fog drip!”  

The friend, in all ways a calm and meditative soul, looked at me in alarm as up until this point we had been walking in relative silence. Seeing his confusion I quickly followed up with a clear and concise explanation of why I had just shouted these two words:

“Mr Hoyle…Geography.”

This, bizarrely, did not satisfy his curiosity and I had to explain that whilst being taught the many types of precipitation by the irrascible Mr Hoyle in a chalky sixth form classroom he had expounded on the principle of Fog Drip, proclaiming that many people denied it’s existence as a form of precipitation. In short, fog condenses onto the branches of trees and then drips off. Many people might deny it but here it was in all its freezing glory. Here was nature, making itself felt, daring me to deny it. I wasn’t observing it or noticing it or photographing it or writing about it. Nature was pushing an icy stream down my spine.

I like that idea very much, that nature happens to us. It’s a fine line though. For much of the time we are the observer. We can see nature happening but it’s almost always in the past tense, over as quickly as it began. But sometimes, there is the sudden engagement of an unexpected sense and the line is crossed: the stinging bite of an ant, the streaming of the eyes when the spade bites into a buried horse radish or the involuntary shrinking of the skin and quickening of pulse that comes with the sudden knowledge that a predator or something you do not care to brush against is very, uncomfortably close. This is nature happening to us. We are acted upon as another living thing instead of carefully controlling our choice of natural experience. It is quick, it is inclusive, it is nature at its most honest. 

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Into the Silent Planet

The sun has come again and the last of the snows have melted in last night's rain. With that comes the chance to think about winter. Winter didn't feature much in art before the late sixteenth century and according to one source this is because before that time, winter was just too hard. It was only after we became better at coping with its effects that we had the luxury of observing it. Before that, we were too busy just surviving it. It now feels as if I have chance to think more about it now that the snow - that most tangible sign of winter - is gone. 

During the snows the activities of wild things were everywhere. At the feeders the to-ing and fro-ing was dizzying. On the piles of apples on the banks the winter thrushes were gorging themselves on any exposed surface of fruit. And in the open fields the fox, normally sly and edgy in his movements, loped across open ground driven by urgency and desperation. 

In thinking about the human relationship with the extreme seasons I like the idea that what is now the developed world was once governed by them. We ran, worked, foraged, prepared, farmed, played and lived to the beat of the seasons and none other. This was no different in the farms and the fields than it was in the cities and towns and with that must have come an acute awareness of how every other animal that walked the world felt at the coldest, most difficult times. 

The 1909 painting Lone Tenement by the New York artist George Bellows is a reminder of this. Any writer on the natural world worth their word count would dismiss out of hand any difference between the streets and the fields as negligible when it comes to describing our response to nature. Lone Tenement shows this just as clearly as any image depicting a rural scene where nature is supposed to be closer. That might be true in summer but winter changes that. It levels the playing field. 

In the image the building of the painting's title looms largest but it is the urgent and furtive nature of the figures in the bottom left that draw the eye. It is clearly a winter harder than stone on the east river. Amongst the tanneries, slaughter houses, breweries, wharves and warehouses they seek warmth. They might live in the city but they're aware of nature alright. They have to be. They are being slowly broken by it. 

I have no wish to revisit those days. I would hope the days are gone of developing a dangerous nostalgia for an environment where children were damned to the same iron-hard existence as their parents. Nonetheless we have lost an awareness, an empathy. In the hardest of winter moments we've lost the thought and feeling that other flesh is struggling just as we are. Our genetic memory on this is slightly faded now, reduced to decision making on whether to get in the car or not. 

For many of us winter is no longer be a thing to be feared but the complete opposite may be to give up too easily a sense of the value of what lies beneath the snow. 

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A Gyrfalcon for a King

Reposting this as it seems to have gotten lost over the years...

“An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, and a Saker for a Knight; a Merlin for a lady, a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, and a Kestrel for a Knave” – The Boke of St Albans, 1486. 

There are some experiences, which are in retrospect even more powerful, where the solitude, the landscape, the time of day, the wildlife and any amount of other emotional and physical variables (perhaps my own state of mind?) combine to create something affecting and physical. And it was in Iceland that I saw her. The Gyrfalcon. The King’s bird. 

I didn’t see her until she was upon me. I was sitting deep down beneath a small volcanic cliff amongst the boulders sloping down to a shingle beach into the sea. Nearby, the carcass of a juvenile killer whale gave the air a taste and in the bay the head of grey seal watched the shore as if keeping a watchful eye over the sleeping but still lethal orca, it’s dorsal fin clearly visible as it lay on the beach. Little auks were whirring close over the surface of the water and behind me the silent hulk of the volcano, covered in cloud. 

And then, from my left, just a few metres away, she came. Over the edge of the small cliff where the peaty turf hung in ribbons over the rock. She was not alone. Behind her trailed a ragged streamer of mobbing birds; wheatear, oyster catcher and a purple sandpiper. At least five of them testing their will and speed against the gyrfalcon. Amongst the melee she seemed almost motionlessly calm, beating her powerful way in slow motion. The feeling of muscular and taut control was pervasive, a visceral and tangible presence. She moved so perfectly that she could have been on a rail. 

She passed over my head and over the opposing cliff bank before disappearing over the volcanic grassland pitted with sink holes and caves. I stood up to climb the bank but was not able to see her as her speed had already taken her behind some upstanding volcanic rocks. And then, just as a red sky gives away the presence of an invisible sun, I knew she was there, but I couldn’t see her. I saw a sign of her presence, a ripple of clamour in the sky where she had passed.She had scythed over the surface of the ground putting waders and other birds up and now all that was left was a pair of merlin climbing and stooping down to a spot that was still invisible to me. She was there. 

I walked over the rough ground until I could see her and, thinking that my sudden and intermittent appearances over the tussocks and mounds would scare her, I sat and watched from a distance. But soon I pressed on to get closer. She sat, seemingly impervious to the screeching of the merlins, at the very top of a tall, grass covered volcanic stone. The merlins shyed away from my presence long before the falcon who looked at me with cool and quick precision. At that moment the Gyrfalcon was absolutely in its landscape, full of sorrowful tundric beauty. I watched her for few heavy minutes before she dropped away from the edge and circled around to my right, disappearing behind the seaward cliffs. 

The thrill of the encounter passed, I was left lying where she’d left me, looking up at a grey sky. But her presence had tied me into that moment and that place. The presence of the living animal had forced me to take a fresh view of the landscape and my place in it. This is what it means to be human. As an animal in the landscape we can be observer or particpant. But to be separated from it? To move around in our own world instead of the one we’re already a part of, to live impervious to the potential effect on us of our natural environment, is a form of surrender; a self-imposed exile which is ultimately found lacking, lonely and fruitless.

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Clockwork Jackdaws

 

The jackdaws come like clockwork. They don’t come at a given time, it is a clockwork the rhythms of which change with the year because they come at the moment the light is correct; it is just as the prinicpality of the sky is being rubbed at by the sun.

 

I stand in the long grass of the primrose banks behind the house waiting patiently in the half darkness. I can always look in the same direction because they always come from the north and fly directly south over the roof towards the chalk downs. It starts with the faint ponging of their calls and the straggling scouts appear over the tops of the triangular stand of oaks and scots pine that point south like an arrow head. Then more infantry appear until a flock of thousands is catapulting themselves over my head.

 

Their pace is urgent and direct. There is no deviation, frolicking, cartwheeling or gamboling chases that typify their species during the height of the day. Their calls are incessant and, it seems, joyous. The sound is defiant of the bucolic dawn chorus that will, as the year draws on, be in full swing by the time the jackdaws come. But they will continue to be the chanting football crowd answering the refined cadenzas of the willow warblers, whitethroats and blackcaps, their sheer numbers being in their favour.

 

Their appearance is a morning talisman for me now. When they have passed over and the last stragglers have disappeared as smudges against the hillside I can walk back to the house content that the day has started. In the moments that they pass overhead I enjoy that an exchange has been made, that we have somehow shared a greeting and that I have seen them safely across. The birds circumscribe a moment when I know that all is normal and as it should be; the world has made one more turn. Maybe there’ll be one morning when I actually do call out a greeting, of course checking that no-one’s watching. Until then, just as you can be on nodding terms with a person you always see on your journey to work but whose name or circumstances you never learn, the fact they’re there at the right place at the right time is enough.

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Latest on-line Publications

Haven't been especially helpful at keeping you, my loyal followers, up to date but here are two recent on-line publications

Guest blog at the wonderful Earthlines Magazine's on-line Review pages

http://earthlinesreview.org/2012/10/25/guest-post-sea-voices-by-colin-williams/

And a piece for travel company eDreams about responsible Whale Watching

http://blog.edreams.com/a-guide-to-whale-watching-the-dos-and-donts/

Hope you enjoy them...

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The Clash and the Titan

Hearing properly for the first time London Calling by The Clash was one of those life-defining moments. I don’t wish to exaggerate but I imagine the unveiling of Picasso’s Guernica was but a ripple in the artistic pond compared to what this record meant (and means) to me: Mick Jones’ atom bomb guitar punctuating Joe Strummer’s desperate howls. I was, and I mean this quite literally, transfixed with every pulsing, sweating, sneering word and note. If He played in a band, this is what God sounded like when He brought His A-game.

Looking back on the experience with hindsight, I always knew this was what music was supposed to sound like. Before the needle even rested in the groove I carried a genetic imprint in my fibres of what would happen to all of my endorphins, hair follicles and cells when music was at its best and most affecting. But until that moment, it was largely a matter of faith, kept alive by what history has proved to be a pretty tasty collection of my Father’s records. Records like London Calling turned me into a true believer.

Seeing a whale for the first time brought about much the same crisis of physiology and mental instability. Despite being steeped in affection for the wild and wild things from an early age this was a piece of blubbery, evolutionary liveliness on a scale which was unlike anything I’d experienced before. The animal, a fin whale in this case, was breathing, stinking and swooshing just a few yards away from me and I was suddenly plunged into a depth of feeling for which I was quite unprepared.

Up until that point, I had seen endless hours of footage and countless photographs: I knew what whales did, how they moved, what they looked like, that there were species that seemed impossibly strange, that they made noises and leapt and breached and swirled and blew. I knew all of that. But seeing the thing… that was a needle dropped on a very deep groove indeed.

Since then I have seen thousands of cetaceans. It would be cool and detached of me to say that the experience of that first whale is dimmed slightly in the light of the sheer volume of blubber I’ve observed since. But that would be a fabrication: Much like the first listen of that record it wasn’t a one-off high but instead acted as an elevator of everything after that; It was a new lens through which I could view everything else rather than a temporary hit. Because of that, my experiences around whales and dolphins since then have built in a slow-burning intensity and never, but never, get boring.

And years after that first listen, I met Mick Jones, guitarist on that beautiful mess that is London Calling. He had just come off stage at an event which I was involved in and in the backstage bustle he looked exhausted but elated after a barnstorming set with his band of the time, Big Audio Dynamite. Always intending to play the cool and reluctant observer it was inevitable that this façade would crumble in the presence of yer man. He was with an eye-wateringly beautiful woman but I barely noticed the poor girl as I shambled up to him and proffered a hand. He was, of course, the quintessential rock n’ roll gent: pleasant, affable, self deprecating and patiently putting up with my ridiculous questions before autographing a scrap of paper and leaving me beaming.

Like I said, some things do not diminish with the passage of time. I, and my pleasures in life, will age well having been gilded somehow. Because whales (and The Clash) can do that.

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In my Counterfeit Paradise

There has been an extraordinary series broadcast by the BBC in recent weeks called Unnatural Histories. The programmes challenge the notion that our most dearly cherished perceptions of wild, untamed landscapes such as Yellowstone and the Amazon are not as virginal as they appear; that their very presence and shape is rooted in their historical relationship with human beings: These now empty wildernesses were once, and until relatively recently, teeming with people. The near-river Amazon bason, for example, had an estimated pre-Columbian population of 5.5 million people according to the best archeological and anthropological evidence.

It is of course churlish to compare the environmental impact of these historical populations to the sort of destruction we seem to effortlessly wreak upon these places in modern times. Even 5 million people living in harmony with the landscape would not have nearly the effect a few hundred people with chainsaws and tarmac in this century.

One particularly unsettling historical fact that the programme makers explored was the 18th and 19th century european concept of ‘the sublime’. This was, to all intents and purposes, a self-fulfilling spritual journey embarked upon by rich patrons of the arts: The wild, untamed and untameable landscape, with all of its natural inhabitants was a place in which one could be closest to God and His original blueprint for the earth. They flooded in to experience the sublime by being as close as possible to nature and, even better, capture it on canvas. The problem was, this required the absence of human interference and, in extreme cases, the absence of predators. Benign herbivores were, it was deemed, more befitting such a scene and artificially creating such sublime conditions was something we used to be quite comfortable with. The eradication of predators to produce something more ‘Godly’. The irony of this does not need to be pointed out.

Just how far is humankind prepared to go to better understand his relationship with not only the way the land looks now, but how it once looked? There are some obvious and laudable reasons why the return of a place to ‘how it once was’ is the right thing to do. There are some equally tense reasons why the constant interplay of man and nature should be a thing that continues and, in some cases, encouraged.

I’m as sure about this as I can be about anything. The very place I was raised, the fenland of East Anglia, is as it is because man was and is there. And we need to move on and accept that. Living in and being part of these unnatural natural landscapes should, as Richard Mabey neatly puts it, now be part of a ‘post-colonial’ view of nature and the best we can hope for is that our behaviour towards them is typified by that view.

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What isn't like the sea?

The late Victorian and Edwardian periods saw the explosion of a new phenomenon: The holiday. These holiday entitlements, normally no more than a single week and negotiated locally by unions meant that the workers and their families needed somewhere to go. In many cases the workers were escaping the industrial north and the place they chose to spend their week of freedom became the coast. The same coast that had been there, undiscovered by the working class traveller for millenia. What they turned it into was the seaside, a distinctly eighteenth and nineteenth century invention. In many cases, this was a case of proximity and cost both of which worked in the favour of the mill cities and the average wage. They escaped to the ‘pleasure palaces’ as the contemporary journalist GR Sims described them.

It is interesting that the escapism they craved most was delivered by the sea. The sea became emblamatic of being the furthest away from the grime, the soot and the industrial conditions of their working lives. Professor John Walton said that “all these perceptions reflected the 'liminal' nature of the seaside as gateway between land and sea, culture and nature, civilised constraint and liberated hedonism. The spirit of carnival bubbled close to the surface, threatening and promising to turn the world 'upside down' as the holiday atmosphere stimulated the latent fun, laughter and suspension of inhibitions”. That’s what the sea meant to us.

So where does that leave us in 2012? Is the sea still perceived as the ultimate place of escape? A quick google search reveals the following are ‘…like the sea’: some girls’ eyes, love, women, men, knowledge, time, emotions, democracy and my heart. The ocean remains the ultimate metaphor for human frailty and endeavour.

So how do we view the ocean? Is it simply a map of trade routes or an obstacle to be gotten over while we chip away at the size of the planet, desperate to make it that little bit smaller? It’s true; travel in the 21st century rarely includes the sea passage. The ocean itself is less a place to escape to but instead a place that is either jumping-off point or barrier.

But in the eyes of some it is still a destination in itself. It is a place where the best encounters with ourselves and the planet’s most impressive creatures still occur. What’s more, they can occur nowhere else and John Masefield was compelled: He must down to the seas again. The boundary line between coast and ocean remains a charged border and the Norfolk poet Jay Appleton called his coastal landscape an “encounter with infinity”. Infinite in volume or not, the sea’s ability to be infinite in its capacity to move is unchallenged by other mediums.

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It's only rock and roll but I lek it

As a student of the natural sciences you get drilled into you the things that drive life along. You learn quickly about the requirements of life and these needs form an indelible list in your mind as you categorise every behaviour under these several umbrellas: Safety, Food, Reproduction. And in the gloaming of a pre-dawn upland pine forest in North Wales I had volunteered myself for an experiment upon the importance of the last of these. I was indulging in a rare slice of primaeval voyeurism: I was going to watch black grouse do the dance of love.

I had been told exactly where to go and, knowing well the nature of such things, I had steeled myself to be there at around 5.30 in the morning to walk the mile or so in the gloom to the lek. As I began my walk through the black forest I found myself, torch in hand, completely alone. Not another living soul was close by which was just as well because I’m fairly sure I wasn’t supposed to be there. This presented several unmissable opportunities.

Number 1: Enjoy the silence

Nothing really touches the silence that befalls the world before it wakes up and if that can be enjoyed with the scent of pine needles assaulting your nostrils then so much the better. Yes, there are the nocturnal churrings and shufflings of various creatures but the usual human accompaniment is gloriously absent. There was a terrific article in the New York Times recently that listed the top places to go in the United States if you’d like to enjoy some silence (bang goes the silence in those places, then.) But articles like that speak of a tragic loss of something when it means special excursions in a noisy machine have to be planned in order to stop hearing the things we’ve chosen to surround ourselves with.

Number 2: I could practise my impressions of other animals unselfconciously and very loudly

So out came the little owl, green woodpecker, a grunting badger, a barking fox and my renowned red deer bellow. This last one was accompanied by bulging eyes, knitted brow and testosterone fuelled stance. Oh yes, I was serious about finding a mate.  This made me laugh. Long and loud.

Number 3: I could let the landscape and the birds do the talking

Under normal circumstances I would be with other people, joking, laughing, perhaps leading them. But now, as I reached the edge of the mature forest and it gave way to short pines, heather moors and rough yellow grass, the sun was inching up and the principality of the sky light enough to backlight the early morning mists. Just above the mists, floating on disconnected pine tops, songbirds began to appear, taking advantage of the clear stillness to really let go on their best chops, the warm-up acts for the full dawn chorus. 

And so there I sat, back against a pine, looking out across a rough patch of grass and heather. This rose to a ridge a short distance away, dipped down to a place I couldn’t see and then the hulk of the mountain shot steeply upwards, a mottled work of browns, purple hues and yellows. And within minutes of my arrival, somewhere just beyond my visible range, the bubbling call of the grouse tumbled down the hill to my feet. They continued calling as they became visible: First, the white rump feathers, fluffed and desirable in the gloom, then the curved points of the tail and then the red eye wattles. And there they were, strutting, bobbing, rushing and dancing; the to’ing-and-fro’ing, the didyouspillmypint posturing and the victorious ruffling of neck feathers.

Watching those seven or eight individuals, working the dancefloor, I liked the fact that one of the most basic life defining functions could be still be witnessed in its genetically driven glory. My genes would have to work very hard to tempt me into a physical display of prowess. (And if I were persuaded then my dance moves, which are akin to someone in an uncomfortable amount of pain due to a serious bowel complaint, would be unlikely to earn me much of a harem.) But joyously, in the early morning mists lay displays of such natural force that I am compelled to wonder what we’ve surrendered in exchange for the comfort of a lifestyle where layers of artifice dress up every aspect of life and the way we live it.

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