(no subject)
One of the long treks that kept me active and, obstinately, gave me some sense that eventually I would have to return to work, took me out of the edge of the village into somewhere a little different. I’d not headed around the headland this time, that old walk so very familiar, due to years of going up there to be away from everyone, with friends and on my own. This time, I’d headed inland, on a different tangent to the road that led through the cut in the hills and down towards the village. Somehow, I’d not ended up where I thought I would, on the hill that gave a vantage around the village, the sea down over the bluffs on one side and the road on the other. I knew I had been on the bluffs, thinking of coming towards the hillside from the sea edge, but somehow I’d traipsed down instead of up; somehow in the cloying stillness of mist that dampened the hearing and neutered the senses I’d ended up away and got turned around. It was as if the village was trying to eject me into the wilderness, wildness that was exaggerated by the lack of sight to feel ancient and endless.
I was aware at this point that I was a little anxious about the idea that I might be lost. It was, after all, ridiculous. If I avoided the cliffs I would eventually run into the road, or one of the roads leading down to one of the other villages along the sea. There simply was nowhere much else to go. The village, on its strange peninsula, enclosed and somehow claustrophobic when I was young, was not so isolated. My pace had picked up, I had to admit, by the fact that in an hour and a half I had reached somewhere I did not remember so well. As such, eventually I would find somewhere I knew, or a road that had signs, and then I would be able to find my way home. Or if too far, I would call on my mobile (providing, of course, that other villages did not seem to have the blanket that made even reception from Orange a tricky business) and get myself a taxi home. No harm done or possible.
I then stepped from one bit of hard turf, onto another expected stone, and then onto something a little more wet. My boot went in further then I expected. Water - no, not water, but something infinitely more deceptive, something you couldn’t see as well, but could reduce or kill pace just as effectively: marsh. Once more, mist was swelling around me, somehow jelly-like and pressing, not hard to the touch but still somehow confining. I moved back the weight onto my other leg, as to pull myself free from the mud’s sucking pull.
There is something that mist does to you. Perhaps it is purely a memory of mine; perhaps this is something primal, complete, within everyone with the imagination and the strangeness to touch a deeper memory within. You make that first step into marshland, and you end up looking down, at your feet, trying to find your balance among the water, and to make that balance complete, you’ll step from place to place, for a couple of minutes continuing, trying to find some sort of place to stop and breathe and think about where you’re truly going. Perhaps our first ancestors who stepped onto these stores, from the west, found themselves navigating around the peaks that are now the isles of Scilly, into the deep marshlands that are now drowned Lyonesse off the south western coast. Boats, travelling up ‘rivers’ or through ‘low lying reeds’ would soon find themselves truly landlocked, caught in shallow waters surrounded by mud and reed and marsh as far as the eye could go. Perhaps they landed somewhere more solid, and wandered on this new, fertile land out into the mists, only to find themselves surrounded by land that was not land, land that shifted and changed as the tides. Perhaps those first settlers are where this memory, this shocking sameness comes from: that moment, when you look up from your feet, and all around you receding into the mists is marsh, marsh and water and no true hope of finding your way out. As if the distance has weight, it rushed down on you and forces you to stand still, and only then do you realise: slowly, slowly, you are sinking into the mud.
I shook off the feeling, and took another step or two, knowing intellectually that the mists created the illusion of distance when there was no true distance. The marshlands here could not be huge, could not be wider then I knew: I had a vague idea, not on paper but rather in my mind, of where I was, and there was no way the marshes could extend the huge distance that a single glance gave away. It would not be at all possible, not if I was still in the same place and world where I had started, and although my mind was wondering - no, there was a backpack on my back, and my belt around my middle, and my wits and intelligence and mind were still with me. This was simply a walk - gone a little wrong. Glancing up, I refused to let my eyes widen and pan to take in the view, rather focusing my eyes on a short, stunted growth, a tree in the distance that would serve as a waypoint before I started to work out which way I should be making my way.
And then my eyes trailed along the ground, finding a path that would work. Already I had little to no clue where I had come from. In this place, forward would be the best way - backwards let to bluff and barrow that had been as alien as they were confusing, not able to reconcile memory with the layout as I had been able to with the village and the headlands. Therein lay the problem. I had been turned about, confused, and sent down into these marshlands, and would be turned around again in this distanceless place. Keeping forward was best. But in order to do that, I needed something more stable then myself with which to test the ground, to make sure I didn’t slip. Not that I would have found myself in much trouble, marsh or no. I just didn’t want to get mud everywhere.
Ancient fears die hard, I found myself thinking, in opposition to my reasoning. I started walking, each pace slow and measured: placement of the foot before the weight being applied slowly, a way of walking alien to the normal way we walk, one that takes practice and application. Twice, no, then a third time, I found myself changing direction and way, always keeping the stunted tree in the corner of my vision. Pace turned into pace and my mind settled into the human and physical and yet blankly contemplative mood that happens, when you’re concentrating so fully on something manual, you can do nothing but think about it - when images and memories come swirling past but nothing truthfully is thought about. I had made good progress towards the drier, harder ground I knew would surround the stunted tree, but it was still paces away, and although my eyes were on it, my mind was not.
I was remembering an incident from when I was younger, without the sepia tones of sentimentality or the red wash of bitterness, but rather simply the flatness of something remembered, far gone, remembered without thought or projected emotion. Memory is a strange place. This place, this Memory, only hurt because if I thought about it I wanted to hurt like that again, and so I did, crushing my chest in an effort to bring up tears. Foot on foot through the marshlands, it’s always difficult to want to crush yourself; every breath is reserved to keep breathing, every thought to make sure I didn’t fall in the water. And without those thoughts, I wasn’t feeling. So the Memory was grey, not quite as real as now but still remembered. It was different. It was easier.
I remembered sitting on my hands in the little garden at Grandfather’s house, on the old swing that he had put on the tree ten summers before my memory, the swing that the intervening eight years and had taken away. I sat on my hands and I remembered that my wrists aches, but I didn’t want to cry, and covering my face could have done it. I had just sent away someone who my mother needed at that point more then I did. There was a strange sound from behind me, through the doors that led into the house, muted on this hazy, damp spring day.
In the marshland, I reached the stunted tree, and rested against it for a moment. The land here was easier, harder, and much tougher on the boot - but there was no real visible route where there were not patches of reflection and ripple, no easy way out of this swampland. So much for ease of travel, a single place to reach, so much for my easy way out of this place. My hand closed around a branch, and my short, still dirty fingernails tapped out a rhythm on the other edge of the branch. Good. Here was a branch that was without leaves or shoot, or even bud, this late in the year, but with no hollowness of rot in the centre. It would serve well enough. Carefully placing my bag on the hard ground, and balancing it against the tree trunk that was going to provide my stick, I retrieved my garden knife set from my bag and set about cutting down through the branch to remove it to the quick and the green of the trunk. This tree would grow next spring, I could see, and the removal of one branch would do nothing to hinder and possibly all to help that. How many springs beyond that it would last I did not know. The elm is a short-lived tree, now, even one in such isolation such as this, always very susceptible to disease and insect work. This area must have been dryer some years ago, but if the water got too much higher, the inside of the thick elm trunk would die and rot away. I wished, obscurely, that I could have found this one the spring before, taken a cutting, and put it somewhere the sea air could have kept it free of disease as long as possible.
As I worked to free the branch as painlessly as possible from the trunk with my knife, I started to become aware of sounds around me. Somehow, it started as a generalised sound increase - the drip, drip of water onto water, the occasional slosh, crinkle as grasses parted due to wind or small animal movement under the water or on the mud - all seemed to increase, somehow. Still, I kept my attention on the stick I was freeing from the elm, but every shred of hearing I had was reaching out. Small things were moving. This, I knew, was a sign that something big was moving as well, disturbing things around it as it went. Not that I hadn’t been a city boy for years, now, unused to the open spaces and the wildness still: the rule was one that applied to life as well as to animals and small sounds in natures. If everything small seemed suddenly upset, it was because there was something big to be upset about. I could hear and feel the movement around me, some sense of something impending, and it all seemed to be flowing away from a space, somehow, a space behind me and to the left, a space that seemed to bend the marsh’s life around it like ball bearings on a loose rubber sheet.
It was closer in on the left now, and I was down to the thick greenness at the centre of the branch. The problem was, you see, that my knife had no real serrated edge. I was very aware that my back was turned to whatever or whoever it was that was behind me, and moving closer bit by bit, the space of - of silence widening step by step. I sawed and stabbed and swung at the piece of wood that separated the very middle of the branch, trying desperately to make it through to the softer, drier piece of branch I knew I could twist off and take up, against whatever it was.
Now the silence of things that had stilled or gone away was all around me. My left shoulder blade itched, along a line I knew I had a scar from an accident when I was young. I felt the knife edge sink through the last vestiges of green wood, twisted and pulled the bark away, and with ready hewn staff in edge, twisted around.
The silence was a youth, standing a meter away from me. Seeing him was not precisely what I had expected. Somehow, it made me examine the fact that I was holding the elm branch in my hand, in a good balance stance, as if I was about to launch into combat. The man had piercing green eyes. Or it could have been the colour of the muddy water, somehow, green and enflamed with whatever was beneath the mirror exterior of those eyes. It was not precisely what I had been expecting (and I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, not at all) but somehow, although this boy-man did not warrant a large stick, he did warrant worry.
“Lost?” this man-boy asked, easily.
He had black dark hair, low over his shoulders, stray strands brushed behind each ear. He had the tousled kind of look that I would have personally have killed for - my own hair in at that length ending up either being stuck out all sorts of different directions, if it wasn’t laden with something to drag it down. “Not precisely,” I answered. I revised his age upwards when I saw he had stubble, if short cropped. I’d thought at first seventeen, now - twenty, perhaps. There really was something very unsettling about his eyes. “Who are you?”
The boy slung his own walking staff from his shoulder, a motion fluid and easy. “I want to know - why are you here on this land?”
Somehow, the question, with his stick stuck sharpened and shod point first in the mud, did not precipitate a game of ‘I asked first’. My mouth opened to start an explanation - walker, lost, charting the area for conservation work agreed with the town council - when my mouth rebelled and betrayed me once again, launching into something I did not want to say. I did want to say it, of course. Simply that perchance for saying things that were not conducive to an easy life was too deeply ingrained, now. “Somewhat difficult to not be touching it,” I said, lazily but quickly, “boy.”
His eyes narrowed, and suddenly fear blossomed in a sharp spike down my back, from the selfsame scar down my shoulder blade to my coccyx.
My mouth spat into action again. “I should ask you the same question.” For a pair of eyes quite so narrowed, I could see fire there. I could imagine the fire in those eyes, deep and huge, so that somehow standing in front of him, I was as small as a gnat to his huge, deep pools of eyes, grabbing me and forcing me under the muddy water, a giant, eyes among men that were as flies, eyes, so very huge, so very overpowering.
I snapped out of it. He blinked at me, slowly. “I own here. What are you doing here?”
I had the grace to blush, I think, aware of the flush across my cheeks in the dampened air. “Oh,” I said, and then struggled to think. Suddenly, my voice wouldn’t think for itself. It was a little lost now: it wanted an answer, how to approach this slight social problem, one that sharpness wouldn’t fix. The feeling was familiar. I brought something up in my thoughts, something that a just moment before hadn’t seemed so important. “Conservation. Surveying the land around the village, for the spring.”
His eyes went narrow again, for a moment. “Not here, you’re not.”
I decided it might be best not to argue, being that after a little considered thought. My job had not started yet, I had not been given any sort of jurisdiction yet, I did not know the layout of the village yet, and I did not know precisely where you are. “All things considered, sir,” I started, no little effort given towards not sounding sarcastic, giving the man-boy (giant) the chance to leap in with his name.
He said nothing, even his silence somehow laconic.
“I wouldn’t mind a pointer to the way out,” I finished, somehow feeling even more lame then usual after one of these bouts of social embarrassment. I would continue to land myself in these situations, I knew without any rancour whatsoever. My own fault, in so many ways. The fact that I had to deal with my own embarrassment and stupidity was one of the few things I could not feel bitterness about. It seemed wholly anti-productive.
He pointed with his staff roughly behind and to the left of me, and without another word, turned and traipsed back into the misty haze.
I was aware at this point that I was a little anxious about the idea that I might be lost. It was, after all, ridiculous. If I avoided the cliffs I would eventually run into the road, or one of the roads leading down to one of the other villages along the sea. There simply was nowhere much else to go. The village, on its strange peninsula, enclosed and somehow claustrophobic when I was young, was not so isolated. My pace had picked up, I had to admit, by the fact that in an hour and a half I had reached somewhere I did not remember so well. As such, eventually I would find somewhere I knew, or a road that had signs, and then I would be able to find my way home. Or if too far, I would call on my mobile (providing, of course, that other villages did not seem to have the blanket that made even reception from Orange a tricky business) and get myself a taxi home. No harm done or possible.
I then stepped from one bit of hard turf, onto another expected stone, and then onto something a little more wet. My boot went in further then I expected. Water - no, not water, but something infinitely more deceptive, something you couldn’t see as well, but could reduce or kill pace just as effectively: marsh. Once more, mist was swelling around me, somehow jelly-like and pressing, not hard to the touch but still somehow confining. I moved back the weight onto my other leg, as to pull myself free from the mud’s sucking pull.
There is something that mist does to you. Perhaps it is purely a memory of mine; perhaps this is something primal, complete, within everyone with the imagination and the strangeness to touch a deeper memory within. You make that first step into marshland, and you end up looking down, at your feet, trying to find your balance among the water, and to make that balance complete, you’ll step from place to place, for a couple of minutes continuing, trying to find some sort of place to stop and breathe and think about where you’re truly going. Perhaps our first ancestors who stepped onto these stores, from the west, found themselves navigating around the peaks that are now the isles of Scilly, into the deep marshlands that are now drowned Lyonesse off the south western coast. Boats, travelling up ‘rivers’ or through ‘low lying reeds’ would soon find themselves truly landlocked, caught in shallow waters surrounded by mud and reed and marsh as far as the eye could go. Perhaps they landed somewhere more solid, and wandered on this new, fertile land out into the mists, only to find themselves surrounded by land that was not land, land that shifted and changed as the tides. Perhaps those first settlers are where this memory, this shocking sameness comes from: that moment, when you look up from your feet, and all around you receding into the mists is marsh, marsh and water and no true hope of finding your way out. As if the distance has weight, it rushed down on you and forces you to stand still, and only then do you realise: slowly, slowly, you are sinking into the mud.
I shook off the feeling, and took another step or two, knowing intellectually that the mists created the illusion of distance when there was no true distance. The marshlands here could not be huge, could not be wider then I knew: I had a vague idea, not on paper but rather in my mind, of where I was, and there was no way the marshes could extend the huge distance that a single glance gave away. It would not be at all possible, not if I was still in the same place and world where I had started, and although my mind was wondering - no, there was a backpack on my back, and my belt around my middle, and my wits and intelligence and mind were still with me. This was simply a walk - gone a little wrong. Glancing up, I refused to let my eyes widen and pan to take in the view, rather focusing my eyes on a short, stunted growth, a tree in the distance that would serve as a waypoint before I started to work out which way I should be making my way.
And then my eyes trailed along the ground, finding a path that would work. Already I had little to no clue where I had come from. In this place, forward would be the best way - backwards let to bluff and barrow that had been as alien as they were confusing, not able to reconcile memory with the layout as I had been able to with the village and the headlands. Therein lay the problem. I had been turned about, confused, and sent down into these marshlands, and would be turned around again in this distanceless place. Keeping forward was best. But in order to do that, I needed something more stable then myself with which to test the ground, to make sure I didn’t slip. Not that I would have found myself in much trouble, marsh or no. I just didn’t want to get mud everywhere.
Ancient fears die hard, I found myself thinking, in opposition to my reasoning. I started walking, each pace slow and measured: placement of the foot before the weight being applied slowly, a way of walking alien to the normal way we walk, one that takes practice and application. Twice, no, then a third time, I found myself changing direction and way, always keeping the stunted tree in the corner of my vision. Pace turned into pace and my mind settled into the human and physical and yet blankly contemplative mood that happens, when you’re concentrating so fully on something manual, you can do nothing but think about it - when images and memories come swirling past but nothing truthfully is thought about. I had made good progress towards the drier, harder ground I knew would surround the stunted tree, but it was still paces away, and although my eyes were on it, my mind was not.
I was remembering an incident from when I was younger, without the sepia tones of sentimentality or the red wash of bitterness, but rather simply the flatness of something remembered, far gone, remembered without thought or projected emotion. Memory is a strange place. This place, this Memory, only hurt because if I thought about it I wanted to hurt like that again, and so I did, crushing my chest in an effort to bring up tears. Foot on foot through the marshlands, it’s always difficult to want to crush yourself; every breath is reserved to keep breathing, every thought to make sure I didn’t fall in the water. And without those thoughts, I wasn’t feeling. So the Memory was grey, not quite as real as now but still remembered. It was different. It was easier.
I remembered sitting on my hands in the little garden at Grandfather’s house, on the old swing that he had put on the tree ten summers before my memory, the swing that the intervening eight years and had taken away. I sat on my hands and I remembered that my wrists aches, but I didn’t want to cry, and covering my face could have done it. I had just sent away someone who my mother needed at that point more then I did. There was a strange sound from behind me, through the doors that led into the house, muted on this hazy, damp spring day.
In the marshland, I reached the stunted tree, and rested against it for a moment. The land here was easier, harder, and much tougher on the boot - but there was no real visible route where there were not patches of reflection and ripple, no easy way out of this swampland. So much for ease of travel, a single place to reach, so much for my easy way out of this place. My hand closed around a branch, and my short, still dirty fingernails tapped out a rhythm on the other edge of the branch. Good. Here was a branch that was without leaves or shoot, or even bud, this late in the year, but with no hollowness of rot in the centre. It would serve well enough. Carefully placing my bag on the hard ground, and balancing it against the tree trunk that was going to provide my stick, I retrieved my garden knife set from my bag and set about cutting down through the branch to remove it to the quick and the green of the trunk. This tree would grow next spring, I could see, and the removal of one branch would do nothing to hinder and possibly all to help that. How many springs beyond that it would last I did not know. The elm is a short-lived tree, now, even one in such isolation such as this, always very susceptible to disease and insect work. This area must have been dryer some years ago, but if the water got too much higher, the inside of the thick elm trunk would die and rot away. I wished, obscurely, that I could have found this one the spring before, taken a cutting, and put it somewhere the sea air could have kept it free of disease as long as possible.
As I worked to free the branch as painlessly as possible from the trunk with my knife, I started to become aware of sounds around me. Somehow, it started as a generalised sound increase - the drip, drip of water onto water, the occasional slosh, crinkle as grasses parted due to wind or small animal movement under the water or on the mud - all seemed to increase, somehow. Still, I kept my attention on the stick I was freeing from the elm, but every shred of hearing I had was reaching out. Small things were moving. This, I knew, was a sign that something big was moving as well, disturbing things around it as it went. Not that I hadn’t been a city boy for years, now, unused to the open spaces and the wildness still: the rule was one that applied to life as well as to animals and small sounds in natures. If everything small seemed suddenly upset, it was because there was something big to be upset about. I could hear and feel the movement around me, some sense of something impending, and it all seemed to be flowing away from a space, somehow, a space behind me and to the left, a space that seemed to bend the marsh’s life around it like ball bearings on a loose rubber sheet.
It was closer in on the left now, and I was down to the thick greenness at the centre of the branch. The problem was, you see, that my knife had no real serrated edge. I was very aware that my back was turned to whatever or whoever it was that was behind me, and moving closer bit by bit, the space of - of silence widening step by step. I sawed and stabbed and swung at the piece of wood that separated the very middle of the branch, trying desperately to make it through to the softer, drier piece of branch I knew I could twist off and take up, against whatever it was.
Now the silence of things that had stilled or gone away was all around me. My left shoulder blade itched, along a line I knew I had a scar from an accident when I was young. I felt the knife edge sink through the last vestiges of green wood, twisted and pulled the bark away, and with ready hewn staff in edge, twisted around.
The silence was a youth, standing a meter away from me. Seeing him was not precisely what I had expected. Somehow, it made me examine the fact that I was holding the elm branch in my hand, in a good balance stance, as if I was about to launch into combat. The man had piercing green eyes. Or it could have been the colour of the muddy water, somehow, green and enflamed with whatever was beneath the mirror exterior of those eyes. It was not precisely what I had been expecting (and I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, not at all) but somehow, although this boy-man did not warrant a large stick, he did warrant worry.
“Lost?” this man-boy asked, easily.
He had black dark hair, low over his shoulders, stray strands brushed behind each ear. He had the tousled kind of look that I would have personally have killed for - my own hair in at that length ending up either being stuck out all sorts of different directions, if it wasn’t laden with something to drag it down. “Not precisely,” I answered. I revised his age upwards when I saw he had stubble, if short cropped. I’d thought at first seventeen, now - twenty, perhaps. There really was something very unsettling about his eyes. “Who are you?”
The boy slung his own walking staff from his shoulder, a motion fluid and easy. “I want to know - why are you here on this land?”
Somehow, the question, with his stick stuck sharpened and shod point first in the mud, did not precipitate a game of ‘I asked first’. My mouth opened to start an explanation - walker, lost, charting the area for conservation work agreed with the town council - when my mouth rebelled and betrayed me once again, launching into something I did not want to say. I did want to say it, of course. Simply that perchance for saying things that were not conducive to an easy life was too deeply ingrained, now. “Somewhat difficult to not be touching it,” I said, lazily but quickly, “boy.”
His eyes narrowed, and suddenly fear blossomed in a sharp spike down my back, from the selfsame scar down my shoulder blade to my coccyx.
My mouth spat into action again. “I should ask you the same question.” For a pair of eyes quite so narrowed, I could see fire there. I could imagine the fire in those eyes, deep and huge, so that somehow standing in front of him, I was as small as a gnat to his huge, deep pools of eyes, grabbing me and forcing me under the muddy water, a giant, eyes among men that were as flies, eyes, so very huge, so very overpowering.
I snapped out of it. He blinked at me, slowly. “I own here. What are you doing here?”
I had the grace to blush, I think, aware of the flush across my cheeks in the dampened air. “Oh,” I said, and then struggled to think. Suddenly, my voice wouldn’t think for itself. It was a little lost now: it wanted an answer, how to approach this slight social problem, one that sharpness wouldn’t fix. The feeling was familiar. I brought something up in my thoughts, something that a just moment before hadn’t seemed so important. “Conservation. Surveying the land around the village, for the spring.”
His eyes went narrow again, for a moment. “Not here, you’re not.”
I decided it might be best not to argue, being that after a little considered thought. My job had not started yet, I had not been given any sort of jurisdiction yet, I did not know the layout of the village yet, and I did not know precisely where you are. “All things considered, sir,” I started, no little effort given towards not sounding sarcastic, giving the man-boy (giant) the chance to leap in with his name.
He said nothing, even his silence somehow laconic.
“I wouldn’t mind a pointer to the way out,” I finished, somehow feeling even more lame then usual after one of these bouts of social embarrassment. I would continue to land myself in these situations, I knew without any rancour whatsoever. My own fault, in so many ways. The fact that I had to deal with my own embarrassment and stupidity was one of the few things I could not feel bitterness about. It seemed wholly anti-productive.
He pointed with his staff roughly behind and to the left of me, and without another word, turned and traipsed back into the misty haze.