In the loneliness of the salt-water land, we cannot help but be haunted, by presence, by absence, by the echoing sentience. The shedding of skin and skeletal settling of boats returning to the water one last time. Memories are called out by curlew’s sorrowful cry. The smallest crabs, wraith-like, ethereal, unreal. The changeling nature of the creeks. Ebb & flow are somewhat inadequate words for the rise and fall where the treeless, boundless, fearless marsh breathes its tides.
Did I say the saltmarsh was a place of emptiness?
Not today.
Today it is invaded by hordes of children, excited about the next stage in their rewilding, knowing only that they have been told to bring a second pair of socks and not believing that the first pair will be to wipe the earth-ooze from between their toes when they’ve been led barefoot squelching through the cold autumn creek. Teachers returning equally muddy and with similar glee having reminded their own feet what it means to be free.
The yacht-song of chains chinking is drowned out by chatter and distant cars and a collie splashing after a bright plastic ball.
I cannot find the unpeopled space, the emptiness that I want to be inside. I am denied the solitude.
Like some prima donna film star, I want to be alone. I want to be left alone. I want to be left.
Or do I really want to be found?
I want to cross over, over the water, step through the luminous air, splodge through the creeks, smuggle my soul beyond the banks, into this half-land of mud and water, held together by what chooses to grow regardless; regardless of scouring winds and brackish waters; regardless of trampling bird-feet and piercing beaks; regardless of bus-loads of bright-coloured humans who have no idea what it is they seek.
The rotting hulk, rusting, it’s storm-glass gone, Perspex upper windows fragmented, sits double-fenced, and the wheelhouse door has a shiny new padlock, as if some ancient marsh mariner might sneak in, in the dead of night, and sail her away – or draw her resisting across the mud, into the waters that snake towards her unremembered seas – out past the point, where the lonely house stands. Or as if maybe she would choose to make her own way there in preference to this undignified end.
Is that how it is?
I cannot say for sure. The marsh is strong in emotion. All those running creeks of tears for the drowned child, the downed airman, the fowlers and the sailors, all gone. Tears for the youth that never grew old, and for the old that lost their youth. Tears for the fallen and for those who carried on.
Regardless.
Slate-coloured tears, untidy tears, snotty with mud and moss, and running away to hide tears. Tears for fears. Tears for all the years, that have gone by…as years do. There is no comfort here. The salt marsh clings to its melancholy, its mystery and its loss, like the autumn fogs and the dark moon nights when it revels in its pretended desolation.
But the truth is that I do not feel it.
It is not merely that on this day it is busy with people and dogs, it is simply that I find I do not speak marsh. I cannot sneak my soul into this place, this is not where it belongs. Whoever I am looking for, she is not here.
So I evade the trip-wires of anchor cables whose boats have long since sailed, or been hauled up for fear of winter. I walk away from the causeway and tramp over the marram and all the other salt-singed plants, low-slung and subtle hued, like the heather of my much-missed hills.
Finding none of my own ghosts in this landscape of memory, I retreat into the memory of landscape.
I come from hill-stock and have grown lazy and old and fat in the flatlands. It strikes me that what I find in the marsh is the ghost of my walking days, the ghosts of the hills, worn away to nothing, but mud to be oozed ever thinner and carried away on the tide, or to unwanted stones stacked beside a channel someone is fighting to clear a century too late.
I look to skein'd skies.
The geese could not be clearer in their call or in their arrowed flight towards the west and the north. I marvel at the beauty of it, and wonder at the communication, and wonder about the communication. What is it they say to each other? Are they just gossiping? Or begging for a turn to lead, or are leaders asking if they can drop back into the wake for a while? I'm entranced, and like all enchanted people I miss the message they're sending specifically to me.
I retreat into memory.
I retreat into the hills, where the landscape wraps itself around you, protectively.
I retreat to the stone-walled fields, and grey-stoned houses that look as if they simply grew up out of the quarried cwm. I walk alone with my ghosts, and then I go back further and walk with my Dad.
I remember that first just-us walk up Grisedale Pike in my very first pair of boots, the easy wide path, curling round the hill and views across the valleys, and the four-footed scramble to the top.
And I remember the stupidity of the way we descended the Ben when I was seventeen and exultant at summer snow and being claimed for the hills – not the mountains, just 'the hills'. We'd walked up slow, again the trodden path. I remember the bog at the foot, white with marsh-flag, and the velvet brown of the early reed mace. And the snow, and the old man. I remember us talking about consequential things. I don't remember getting to the top. I remember coming down. Abruptly. Four hours up, less than one coming down. Steep grassy slopes, craggy scrambles, and a little slip-sliding, and my utmost faith faltering. I'll admit he scared me once or twice that day.
I have been lost in the hills since then. And frightened. Perhaps that was the lesson: beware the paths that might not be true, and know that some that are may still well frighten you.
And then… if we ever have a first, it follows that there will be a last. Cauldron Snout and Cow Green. Easter this time, but fittingly there was again snow in the hollows, and we'd mis-read the map, and there were barbed wire fences and a sheep to be pulled roughly out of a gulley. No creeks in the hills, no places to go paddling, not that early in the year, but gulleys deep and treacherous if you're a ewe and manage to get your cloven foot stuck among the rocks, the icy snow-melt numbing, and no use bleating.
But we do. As the ice melts, we sit like gulley-trapped sheep and bleat.
Back then, all the fear was of a nuclear winter or another ice age.
And so the world turns.
And now it warms.
And burns.
And the warnings are like the calls of the geese,
high overhead and unheard,
heading west.
