I cancelled my exercise class and took myself to the lake. Told myself if the choice I have is between starting something later than originally planned or never starting it at all, then the better option has to be the first one.
I got the email notification as I was going into work and knew I wouldn’t be able to check the applicant portal until I got home. For those five hours on shift I was caught in a pocket of time where the university, and the universe, had made its decision regarding my life, but I was ignorant to which doors were opening and which ones were closed. Now the truth has settled. They want me. I’ve been chosen. But maybe I don’t want to go. No, of course I want to go. I just already miss my life. The life of right now I was so desperate to change.
I pretend I am leaving tomorrow, just to practice. I make a point of really looking at TV aerials on the roofs of my street, and the Tunstall Hills beyond, in the golden hour light. I’m well practiced in melancholy and dipping my toe into Solastaglia – feeling “homeless in one’s homeland”. Earlier that day, I walked the same path, minutes after sunrise, on my way to pack thirty minutes of HIIT into my already busy morning. There was fog on the distant fields, so low to the ground. I imagined eyes watching from afar, my body disappearing into the drowsy vapour. But when I came upon the earthbound cloud, its substance all but vanished. I felt no dampness on my skin, no chill about my exposed ankles. Behind the Sainsbury’s, someone threw a red toy for their Baskerville hound and a song thrush pushed his chorus up through the trees.
This evening is like a new day. Mr Swan (A051) floats alongside me on the path round the bottom lake, aloof but accepting of biscuits. The coots circle and posture, wings high, charging at each other like little Dodgem cars. I’m pleased to see Mrs Swan (A050) up in the reeds on the inner island, meaning she’s laid or preparing to lay at last. I indulge myself by believing the swan couple recognise me. They know I am on their side. The recent fires will certainly have spooked them, likely jeopardizing their mating success this year. The silvery cygnets are always such a joy, even for the most hardened of locals.
Less than two hours until sunset, I pause on an angling jetty. The sun is coming just over the treetops in such a perfect way, I let my vision flood with light, naming sights and sounds. Three young girls with pond nets, on the hunt for something. A plastic football bouncing. A wood pigeon’s heavy flight. I sit for so long I feel my face begin to burn. At the western end of the lake, I pass a young angler leaning against the mudbank with a stupefied look. It’s incorrect to say the reeds are burnt because the reeds – once a perfect haven for ducklings and moorhens chicks in their first perilous days – no longer exist. The fire has disappeared them. What remains are the blackened ankles of once tall stalks, hundreds and hundreds of them. The creche is now a bed of nails complete with ash dusted, rusting cans. Last year’s seed heads reduced to brittle curls of white.
The fires coincide with the lengthened evenings this time of year. Lighter hours inspire a ritualistic burning. It was seeing these fires start up after winter that set me off again, got me thinking about any small change I could affect to protect this wild space, if I dared. All of life becomes waiting if you’re not careful. What am I waiting for?
I caught them at it last year, two young lads. I heard the crackling before I saw the flames, and as someone who doesn’t see fires that aren’t in a fireplace or pit very often, I was in awe, and scared. It was a nightmare trying to give the fire brigade accurate directions. The blaze doubled in size during the 60 second phone call and the boys were laughing, squealing, running. I couldn’t hang around either, maybe I had work, I don’t remember. I heard the sirens start up as I walked away. At a recent fire marshal training day, the instructor described an instance of deadly backdraft – “The fire came screaming out of the window.” I knew the trees were screaming then. The birds and the little bees, whose puffball bodies would have gone up in an instant, like stage magic. How many nights have I lay sleeping as the lake burned and screamed less than a mile away? Does someone always come and douse the flames? Who are those people? Why do I feel alone in my attachment to this place, to these more-than-human beings? When the land was a pit and dotted with slag heaps, the night held a different burning. Does the land remember a heat it’s felt before?
I cannot be the only one, but if I am, so be it. Better late than never. At the top lake, the wind hits different. There are lots of people out, walking, fishing. Cars rush by on North Moor Road. I stand and let my eyes relax on the shimmering water. I think I see rain, but the little flecks of movement on the surface are only insects, touching briefly then alighting. The sky is an unblemished blue and the house martins have returned. They skim the water then lift up high, high in the blue. They could fly all the way up to the lid of the world if they wanted to, the skin of the bubble, keeping us safely in. I spot a Little Grebe among the reeds where a Coot is nesting. The Coot gives a defensive honk. Mallards are snoozing on the grass bank. A lithe, brown rat skips along the waterline. Who would believe that I saw a Woodpecker the other week, jumping from birch to birch? Or a Gadwall pair who didn’t want to be photographed? Or the flock of noisy parakeets, at least a dozen strong? Was it a Buzzard or a bi-plane, with “Save our NHS” painted on the underside, that sent the Black-headed Gulls into a panic? If I hadn’t stepped out the way of that motorised BMX, I wouldn’t have been looking across the bottom lake at the exact moment a small, azure bird dashed under the willow’s branches, like a stone cast expertly over the water. The Kingfisher.
If only there was some way to celebrate it. I circle the top lake, sun behind me and shadow long. I decide to take the long straight path home and think about Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of A Survivor. I’ve passed lots of young people, in groups of half a dozen or so, mixed gender, stalking the littered paths. It’s not hard to imagine them as petty gangs, looking for mischief. Calling and shrieking into the peaceful evening, like they’re charging up the air. Is their engagement of the space any less legitimate? How will they learn to appreciate and protect nature when the majority of behaviour modelled for them involves exploitation and destruction?
And then I hear it again, the unmistakable crackle. Over the trees, not far from the pigeon coops, a wispy column of smoke. March has been very dry, whatever is burning catches easily. Then creaking, a loud pop. Someone whoops. The sky is yawning from blue to yellow, a sleepy peach at the base of the trees. It is a true spring evening. The kind of evening where you’re finally sure the world is turning in the right direction, and you feel hope again, almost like nausea, in seductive waves.
But it’s also the kind of evening where I fear for those precious lives in the dry reeds. When thrill-seeking, one-upping kids start fires they can’t control, swallow drink they can’t stomach, and run as fast as they can from the frightening, flickering light.