Stay Dry. I’m sure it was meant as a blessing, a hope, rather than an instruction, but I had no intention of heeding it. I can’t say that I went out in the hope of getting wet, but I went out not as appropriately dressed as I might have been and certainly in the expectation of coming back sodden.
I’d been awake half the night listening to the wind blattering the bin-store doors, until eventually at four in the morning I got up and went out half-dressed to do what I could to anchor them down. Sleep didn’t feel imminent so I made tea and fetched my journal and a book, the kind of book that might help me figure out what I need to do and what I can stop trying to do and how come I don’t feel any better yet.
And I wrote and read and drank tea until I thought I might fall asleep.
I slept and woke up dream-soaked about three hours after that. Made some more tea. And toast. And went back to bed with a magazine.
If I’d learned anything in the early hours, it was that I’m still taking life too seriously. Still trying to achieve, even though in my heart I know there is nothing more to be achieved, nothing left to prove. And no-one to prove it to. I’d learned that tea and toast and a magazine in bed was a perfectly sensible way to spend a Sunday morning with the wind still blowing and the rain still falling.
Then, out of somewhere or out of nowhere I knew I wanted to go out into whatever the weather was now doing. To be fair, we don’t get the worst of the storms over here, so I’m not talking about heading out into a dangerous maelstrom, just into a bit of wind and, probably, rain.
I had no intention of going very far, or very far away – a local patch walk out my door and round and back again. One thing I have learned about rain-walking: it soon loses its appeal if you know you’re going to have to sit in those wet clothes for an hour or two while driving back, or worse (and more likely in my case) waiting for a train in the cold, before training / bussing home. Knowing that at the end of the walk – right at the end of it – you will have warmth and hot water and then dry clothes, that is the game changer – that’s the bit that means it really doesn’t matter how wet and cold you get, because you know you’re not going to stay that way.
I went to walk in the rain.
There was a jay on the wall across the road, patiently waiting to be photographed, and another as I walked down to the Broad who paid me much less attention.
The sudden eee-yik of the moorhen made me jump as I neared the water’s edge.
Violets in the road-bank already.
I had no particular aim and mind. The wind had dropped, and the rain was only making a half-hearted attempt. Good walking weather. I might have wished I’d set out for further afield, except winter public transport is not reliable enough to be setting off towards mid-day and hoping to get back again. Now there’s another mind-set thing that I could give some thought. There’s no overriding reason for me to make it home again on any given night. An inbuilt reflex that needs dismantling.
At the far end of the Broad, I started on the board-walk towards Cringleford, but there’s a path leading off just past the newt pond that tempted me away. It doesn’t really lead anywhere. Soon blocked by new fallen trees, at first I decided to be bold and clamber through them, but beyond all was squelch and sinking and I was grateful for an exit-route back onto the main round-the-Broad path.
I came upon a willow. The willow and the birch vie for my affections and I’m fickle between them. What I love about them are the characteristics they share: the drapery of their branches, the hippy hairstyle of long flowing locks that dance in the breeze. I suspect the willow wins out, because the birch stands straight and tall, conforming, whereas the willow twists and embeds its essence of fluid grace into even its most robust trunk and branch. I love the way that riverside willows reach out across the water, as if to drink – or as if to capture more light from reflection, letting none of the sun’s energy be wasted. Out, they reach, and up, caught in their T’ai chi movement which is performed too slow for us to see
Against the uniform grey of the sky, he was like darkest malachite, or pines at night, green-black, but stepping around, to where the light fell directly and even absent the sun, his moss coat gleamed emerald bright. Of course I had to stroke. I had to go close and peer at this forest on a tree trunk, enchanted by its periscopes of rosewood-coloured stems and jade tear-drop buds. How disheartening to learn that according to one website this is simply: “Ordinary Moss”. I’m happier when somewhere else describes it as “Rough-stalked Feather-moss”. I hope that’s what it is, because when you look closely, it deserves a grander name than ‘ordinary’.
It was the moss that drew me to the willow this time, but as I looked and thought about what Tony Hare would have described as “worlds” below us (in size not value), I looked at the bark of the trunk and it struck me as a craggy mountain side, sheer, but tempting-climbable to men with ropes and courage, tiny men they’d be, deep fissures, hand-holds, and would they trust the vegetation to hold their weight, would they lever up upon it?
The rain fell more heavily and I watched its patterns in the water. I watched the grebe dance half-heartedly. Just the one pair of them. Then I saw her.
She was incongruous. Almost everyone out walking today was in wood green or rain grey, blending in. She stood out in her dawn-blue. Blue wellingtons print-decorated with pink flowers. Blue fleece, matching anorak, that precise pre-dawn-blue of summer’s day before the sun has truly risen, but you know it’s going to be a hot one. A summer colour. A colour echoed in her dark glasses.
She sat on one of the benches by the Broad, fiddling with her phone, which she then pushed into her fleece pocket, raincoat wrapped over, wire trailing up to earphones. And there she sat for a while. I wondered what she was listening to. Music? A podcast? An audiobook? Whatever it was, it was presumably something intended to make her feel better, to assuage the sadness hidden behind those dark lenses.
I watched her later, appearing and disappearing between the trees across the water, and thought of the fleeting figure in the red raincoat in the film Don’t Look Now. I’m not ascribing anything sinister to the woman in blue, just that same incongruity. That same mis-placed flash of colour. And my same response: who are you, what are you doing here?
I watched her hunker along the path, hood up, head down, earphones in, and wondered why she was out at all. I couldn’t square the idea of her taking a rain-walk through the woods and along the Broad-shore, whilst doing everything to resist falling under its spell.
Then she walked away, and so did I.
Back through the woods, my camera gave up the ghost and I tried to focus on sound rather than sight. Trying and failing to find precise words to describe my boots in the mud, the raindrops falling through the branches. Raindrops. A flight of fancy caught hold: as I walk through the rain I fundamentally alter the future of individual raindrops. I drastically change their route back to the sea. These that land, increasingly, on me – in my hair, seeping now through my alleged waterproof – they will have a delayed journey home, being forced to take a detour via strange pathways and sewers rather than soil and river.
But in the meantime, I was reaching that point in a rain-walk were the discomfort of it was batting up the boundary of its pleasure. Time to go home and get dry.
