Sitting in the garden, I felt I could actually see the new green buds pushing out from the dark branches. I watched early bees orbiting the pink lilac. Magpies jumping through the bramble and a greenfinch crooning from the blackthorn, completely hidden.
On the walk down to the lake I heard activity in the car wash. Voices and machinery, violent sprays of water. I took pictures of the years of litter in the dry leaves, beneath the trees. It felt important to document, to have the evidence ready, because in a few weeks the green will have covered over our shame once again. Energy drink cans. Cloudy white milk cartons. Traffic cones and men’s boxers, torn to shreds by lovers and foxes. And among it all, the daffodils, coming up in bright bunches, perfectly arranged.
When I stepped away, two butterflies lifted from the nettles – one white and large, one small and brown. I thought of the delicate wings I’d seen in the garden, impossibly green, more so than the new leaves. I heard a quick song and caught the tail ends of two birds flitting into the cool shade. It’s not always possible to name things for exactly what they are.
When asked how I remember all the names, I say I don’t know. Actually, in reflexive modesty, I say, I don’t know all the names. Not nearly. I hear hidden questions in their spoken one. Why do you care about this, of all things? I say, it’s just nice to be interested, to find pleasure in what’s readily available. And it has not been an effort to learn, like some things. Each encounter both new and familiar reinforces my intrigue, my urge to know more.
When the sun hit the cycle path, there came a ripe stink of horse shit. Great glossy mounds of it on the white dividing line. One pile with a cleft through the central peak, where a cyclist failed to swerve. The boggy slope where sedge and early orchids pop out was dry, too dry for April, the mud deeply cracked and pale. Branches of sweet white flowers protruded at head height across the path. I craned my neck to gaze up at the metropolis of blossoms. Chiffchaff traffic, humming car horns. More white butterflies, flighting in upward spirals.
I arrived at the bottom lake, listening to a song in the water. I thought about flatworms and wild oysters. It was still there, the small body suspended between two sheets of metal fencing, meant to keep debris from the lake from running into the stream. The body was still black with feathers but the head of the bird was bare bone, and the neck as thin as fishing line. A live bird, a moorhen, was pecking about in the water directly below the hanging, downturned beak. Had they known each other, these birds? Had one hatched from the other’s egg? You cannot let these things interrupt you. You cannot succumb to despair at others’ suffering, not when your own stomach needs filling.
I threw some feed out for Mr Swan preening in the middle of the lake but he didn’t come. The little ducks squabbled over the tossed biscuits. A wood pigeon clattered into a tree on the island and I heard kids screaming on the other side of the water.
Another scorched patch of grass. You could tell it was recent because the remains were very black, and the wind yet to disperse the fine loose ash. The leaves on the close trees were orange and curled. The burned reeds hadn’t miraculously regrown but a covering of happy marsh marigold had sprouted from the desolation. And just beyond, where the fire had not reached, delicate cuckoo flowers grew protected and half obscured by a thin curtain of remaining reeds.
I’d gone out with the intention of speaking to people and networking. At the top lake, a parent and toddler were tossing bread to a mallard and two ducklings. There were more to begin with, a posse of fluffy, yellow and brown golf balls, hysterical with energy, but the rest had been picked off already. Perhaps by the stoic heron at the edge. I watched someone with two big dogs let them crash into the water, where I know the coots forage with their chicks. The owner wore the leads draped around her neck and she was laughing, at ease in the sunshine. I didn’t say anything. The dogs looked old, hardly agile enough to catch anything, but that’s not really the point. With little tolerance for disturbance, the heron took off for the bottom lake, its slow departure something prehistoric in the sky. I thought of Mary Oliver, and that I’d promised to lend Sully my copy of her collected poems.
The islands that got dislodged from the lakebed during one of the major storms a couple of years ago have never been reattached, and now they move across the water’s surface, appearing at new coordinates each time I visit. There were baby coots in the small reeds on one such shipwrecked island. I threw feed for the parents and watched them dutifully return back to their chicks, biscuit by biscuit, but their beaks were still too small to take it.
I looped the top lake twice, working up the courage to introduce myself to one of the anglers, who seemed friendly enough when I overheard him answering a phone call. He greeted me with an open smile, and threw live maggots for the ducks while I tried to explain what I hoped to do for the lake. I said I was a naturalist and a writer, even though I feel like a fraud claiming those titles. I could feel myself stumbling over my words and panicking, at first embarrassed by my earnestness, but growing in confidence when I saw it reflected back at me.
I told him about my great-grandparents house on Hawthorn Avenue. About my grandad, also called John, going to school in the village. My dad playing cricket on the steps down from St Christopher’s Road. John said he comes down to the lakes from Castletown. The area is supposed to be members only catch and release, but a lot of people simply ignore it, and the rules aren’t enforced anyway. He remembers when all the water drained out of the top lake, leaving something akin to a mud flat, because the council or whoever didn’t seal off the mine shaft underneath it properly. All the fish and everything else sucked into a cavern beneath the earth, never seen again. He says it was a terrible idea putting a path around the bottom lake, where it used to be lovely and quiet and secluded. I try to imagine the bottom lake as he described it, and realise it mustn’t be too dissimilar to how it is now. Fuschia and willow overgrowing the path. The steep wooded banks full of cowslip and rabbit holes.
John says the real problem now is the Eastern Europeans. They don’t pay for membership and they steal the carp for their traditional meal on Christmas Eve. While my senses pricked at this, I didn’t challenge the generalisation, because I can’t claim to know the truth of it, either way. I’ve heard it before in passing comments from other anglers. If it’s not the Eastern Europeans, then it’s the herons, it’s the seagulls, it’s the cormorants. At least he didn’t threaten to go out with a BB gun to pick off the competition.
As he was telling me this, my sunglasses slipped off the back of my head. They bounced off the ground and when we looked down we saw one of the lenses popped out. The tension is immediately broken and we laugh together as I force the lens back into the frame. We survived our first emergency, and the conversation returned to lamenting the noise of the motorbikes, the damage of the senseless fires. As a parting comment, John says he’s stopped bothering to challenge the anti-social behaviour he witnesses. Instead he “acts like a Japanese tourist”, just smiling and nodding, because it’s simply not worth the abuse he gets back.
On my way home I think about the land we share with each other. I think about gardens and front drives and neighbourly tensions. What prevents the motorbike users from going to a cycle park designed for such activities? Is it time? Cost? Access? Where could the kids be spending their time after school instead of at the lake starting fires? And if more people care about it, why aren’t we coming together to tackle these issues? I wonder where the swifts are. If they’re coming back at all this year? I took down an email address from the head of the angling committee who happened to walk by as John and I were chatting. I hope we can come together and make something of all this love and care we have for the lake and its wildlife, and not just sit back, smiling and nodding, as things get worse and worse.
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