Low along the Fox Paths

JOURNAL ENTRY

11th July, Tuesday

“A quarter to midnight.
 Lying in bed and listening
 To the drum of rain
 On the cabin roof.

All day I have watched the dark
 Clouds boil in the cauldron
 Of the west.
 Storm heads tower
 In castle greys.

Maggie and I stood
 On the hill with no name
 Watching the ragged veils
 Of cloud-tear
 Sweep towards us

It falls like brush strokes
 Played on a snare drum.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It’s been raining all day. The sky is so heavy with cloud, twilight seemed to fall about 5 o’clock. Even now, sweeping curtains of rain thrash the canal into a hissing, seething, witch’s brew of bubbles. The ducks and moorhens keep to the offside bank – where there is sufficient overhanging vegetation to offer them some relief from the battering rain drops. The thick bed of rush, speared with loosestrife, shimmers slick with silver in the darkness.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the dark to you wherever you are.

I am so pleased that you could make it. It's a foul night to be outside. Come in out of the rain and the wind. We are warm and dry; the kettle is on and the biscuit barrel is full. Welcome aboard. 

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

One of my most favourite pictures from my childhood days is theillustration by CF Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird Book What to Look for in Summer. In the foreground stand the proud purple-mauve bells of foxglove among pink campion and blackberry. A clouded yellow butterfly is poised midway between some few stray heads of timothy at the field edge. In the background a farmer stands on an empty trailer pulling green tarpaulin over a newly cut stack of haybales. The sky above is slate blue-grey. The wording alongside the picture reads:

[READING]

I spent hours with that picture and the spell it wove for me. What is it about sunshine washing the landscape with light under an angry black sky? I have thought of it often this week. Golden warm sunshine has flooded the meadows while above trains of ominous dark clouds, the colour of heron’s wings, have been piling across the sky from the west. From a high vantage point, you can see telltale threads of rain falling on eager fields to the left and right. The base of the clouds looking as if the sleeve of God has accidently brushed against and smudged a charcoal drawing. It’s been a week of living inside Tunnicliffe’s painting. Cumulus raided skies that beg for kite and rook action. I find them exhilarating and utterly beautiful.

Sometimes the rains have come. Sometimes hard, once or twice accompanied with a growling rumble of thunder – though nothing much. At other times, we remain dry, and the clouds pass on overhead pressing on eastwards.

I’m grateful for the rains and for the rolling cloudscapes. High summer and the lush, rich, greens still remain – although the natural arboreal hardening and darkening of foliage is becoming more evident. Gone the spearmint freshness, now the mature forest shades dominate.

Nettles are buttoned red with ladybirds and each step flushes clouds of moths and lacewings. The hedgerows are spangled with butterflies; ringlet, fritillaries, commas. Now come the fruit: Bramble, haw, hip, and sloe. Some already beginning to blush with their autumn colours, but most still in their glossy infant greens. The apple trees are producing a nice showing, but there’s as yet very few plums forming. Nevertheless, all the signs suggest a bumper harvest is on the way.

We are now almost in the holiday season. The canal and towpath both becoming significantly busier. It has posed a few challenges for us. Completely unexpectedly, Maggie has come into season. She was actually booked in to be spayed last Monday. However, we noticed last weekend the unmistakable signs of a dog in season and contacted the centre through whom the booking had been made. They cannot (or prefer not to) do the operation while a dog is in heat. It’s not too much of a problem as we have now registered Maggie with our vets and booked her in with them. However, it has left us with an unforeseen challenge of giving Maggie her much needed exercise while keeping her away from other dogs as much as possible. When on the moorings it is not too much of a problem. All the other boaters know about our predicament and help to keep a wide birth, but now we are off it again, it is not so easy. Particularly as the towpaths can get very narrow. Dog walks are now planned with the meticulous care of a special forces’ covert operation. Finding possible mooring spots also now includes ‘Do you think there is a dog in that boat just down from us?’ Most owners are pretty good, but there are one or two who just let the dogs roam unsupervised.

What has been really good (and continuing in the rather expeditious timescale of our dealings with Maggie to date) is that we have now formerly adopted her. There seemed little point in continuing with the fostering arrangement when she seems to be settling in so perfectly and that both Donna and I adore her to bits. So now, legally, there is the three of us aboard the Erica, Donna, Maggie and me.  

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

LOW ALONG THE FOX PATHS

Cutting long and slow through the tall grass along fox trails and badger paths. Meandering routes of bent grass and snufflings that follow logics too complicated and too simple for my comprehension. All I know is that these paths sing of wildness and will take me to places of aloneness where I will not be disturbed. Another route crosses by the tall rust-pitted stand of sorrel. It’s narrower, less defined. It is more of an impression, than a trail. Like the indentations left behind on a writing pad when the top sheet is torn off. On a whim, I move down it. I like the idea of following an impression – something not quite corporeal. It’s almost as if I can follow the intangible thoughts of another soul. Not their footprints or snuffle marks, the spoor, the foil, that is grist to trackers, but the decisions, intentions, desires, reactions inside their head. The trail dog-legs past some thistles. Images flit through my head. Fox, badger. Possibly not, it is not defined enough. And yet, it could easily be. The earlier track was clearly well used, the equivalent of a sheep trail or those made by humans. What is it about following the tracks of someone (or something) that has already been before us? In unfamiliar or potentially hazardous terrains, they make sense. But I watch people, like the page of good King Wenceslas, doggedly follow these trails. Perhaps, we are just afraid to step off the path. We are so used to being aware that, in most cases, this is not our land. We don’t belong here.

I can remember years ago in the Brecon Beacons - or Bannau Brycheiniog as it is now more properly called – and balancing on a tortuous and spiderweb thin trail that snaked across an expanse of tussocky moorland. I was trying to ‘dead reckon’ my destination and was getting incredibly frustrated by the way his trail kept veering off my bearing, and then thinking, “Why on earth am I doing this?” It was dry, the ground hard, all I was doing (apart from getting frustrated) was creating an erosion scar, and so I set off as arrow straight as I could get. It was fun, but it also felt – to begin with, at least, sort of wrong. Sometimes we need to become the master of our own path and take responsibility for it. Even then I kept finding myself from time to time falling into step with the thread like tracery of trails left behind whenever they aligned with my direction of travel. The footprints of others seem to exert a magnetic pull on our consciousnesses.

‘Desire paths’ is one of the names they give to these unofficial trails that suddenly develop. They are the bane of urban and town planners, short cuts between the official paved paths, often cutting corners, leaving compacted muddy scars across the grass and I’ve seen some even cutting through flower beds. Academics, like Su Ballard, Zita Joyce, and Lizzie Muller, have even gone so far as to describe them as a presenting a “record of collective disobedience.” The official definition (for this unofficial term) is that they prescribe the shortest routes between A and B. Outside the built environment they can be much longer. Connecting hamlets and villages. Threading a way to some desired destination – paths forming across fields to church, pub, and school. More recently, they connect shops and other local amenities.

Another name for them is ‘social trail’. It nicely reflects that tendency we have for following in other people’s footsteps. We can, of course, try to be rather pompous about all this and decry this human habit as indicative of most peoples’ lack of imagination, initiative or gumption. Not thinking for themselves – no better than cows or sheep. Sheeple, happy to unthinkingly go with the herd. How many times I have heard that term being used recently! But that would be unfair and attempting to deny our very humanness. We are social animals – even introverted aspirational hermits like me! There are good reasons for it. It is not just how we have survived, but it is just the way we are made. A path made by one is a gift to the whole. The blazing of a lone trail can be viewed as a communal act. Later footsteps deepen and widen the path until it becomes drovers’ ways, trading routes, pilgrimage trails, song-ways for the community. In this way, desires are shared.

Following the footsteps of others, like I am doing here, retreading the desire path of another is an intrinsic part of our nature – and the nature of most other species too. No matter how strange and even daft if appears, the lone starling cannot but help to sing out when he finds food – even though it will attract the rest of the flock and he will have to spend the rest of the time fighting them off. We are not suited to living in isolation, and no matter how romantic and heroic it sounds, ploughing your lone furrow, is a difficult task. Yes, like that time on the golden flank of Welsh beacon, there can be times when finding your own way is important and taking responsibility for the track you make is in order. However, it needs to be a conscious decision that takes us, literally, off the beaten path; walked with an awareness of the landscape and its communities among which we tread. It is not to done lightly (physically, emotionally, or psychologically). It is one of the reasons why the fractured, hyper-individualism – the captain of your own destiny and let all others hang – type of living is so stressful and has created so many social and mental health problems. It is alien to us. It goes against our nature, and, as attractive as aspects of it sound (and fits so neatly with presiding political ideologies), it is not how we as humans work. As Carl Jung has argued, it is precisely those characteristics that we see of ourselves in others that we find the hardest to bear. Perhaps that is why we seem to react so fiercely and impatiently to the social – herd - behaviours of sheep and cows. We see in them, so much of ourselves.         

It’s not just humans that create desire paths. They are what I have been following. What I have been following every time I come here. Often it is the desire paths of the horses. They are easy to follow and each week, each day, becoming easier. Horses – like most animals – prefer to follow the paths of others just as much as humans do. The fact that they have not been made by their own species doesn’t seem to matter. Foxes trot along sheep paths. Rabbits scuttle along badger routes. Earlier this year, not far from this spot, I watched a pair of ducks trotting down one of these tracks. Their bobbing heads disappearing among the tall grass. Desire paths can accommodate multiple and divers desires. They crisscross the field. To me, without apparent aim, but not to them. For I have no real idea what cartographies of desires create this web of trails. One obvious one leads down to a splash pool cut into the canal. There is a web of them all leading to the, by now, rather threadbare earth adjacent to the convocation where the horses love to stand. The object of most paths, though, remain a mystery – to me at least. But I like the idea of following the desire paths of foxes, badgers, rabbits, ducks. Ways indicating purpose and intention: A thought process. A decision made. Signals of sentience.     

It doesn’t really matter that I don’t know what it was that made this ghost of a path, just that it is leading me deeper into a world not my own, but which I can in some small way share and be a part of.  All the time conscious that it is not just geographical distance that I am placing between myself and the human world. It is here I experience something that is difficult to explain. Wendell Berry gets near it in his Sabbath Poem XXII:

[READING]

These ghosts of paths - threading like fading dreams across the field, desire path of foxes, rabbits, badgers and hares take me to deeper places. Reminding me of the complexity of social worlds outside my knowledge or experience. Remind me of sentience that I have as yet to understand. Guided by rising clouds of moths I walk until the way ceases to be a way and becomes a place in and of its self. When that happens, I understand desire paths a little better. 

Sabbath Poem XXIII 

[READING]

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very peaceful and restful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG