The Wild Places (Penguin Original) (22 page)

By the time I reached the ridge, at over 2,000 feet, the snow had thickened to a blizzard. Visibility was no more than a few feet. The white land had folded into the white sky, and it was becoming hard even to stand up in the wind. I would need to find somewhere to sleep out the worst of the storm, so I cast about for sheltered flat ground, but could see none.

Then I came across a tarn, roughly circular in shape, perhaps ten yards in diameter, pooled between two small crags, and frozen solid. The tarn ice was the milky grey-white colour of cataracts, and rough and dented in texture. I padded out to its centre, and jumped gently a couple of times. It did not creak. I wondered where the fish were. The tarn was, if not a good place to wait out the storm, at least the best on offer. It was flat, and the two crags gave some shelter from the wind. My sleeping-bag and bivouac bag would keep me warm enough. And I liked the thought of sleeping there on the ice: it would be like falling asleep on a silver shield or a lens. I hoped that when I woke, the weather would have cleared enough for some night-walking.

The painter Samuel Palmer and the poet Edward Thomas both knew and loved the wilding quality of darkness. In twilight, dawn and full night, Palmer would walk the countryside around the village of Shoreham, in Kent, where he and a tribe of fellow painters known as the Ancients lived in the 1820s and 1830s. Sometimes, when they walked together by night, they would sing the witches’ songs from
Macbeth
. Palmer’s watercolours and etchings brim with his astonishment at the Kent countryside.

Learning from the work of his acknowledged master, Blake, Palmer developed an artistic language that allowed him to record that astonishment: how leaves seem to dance before the eyes at dusk, or the indigo of early-morning and late-evening skies, or the vast creamy intensity of a harvest moon. To him, even the heavily farmed landscape of Kent teemed with a marvellous wildness, which expressed itself in energies, orders and rhythms. To Palmer, the growth of an apple from a branch was cause for wonder, as were the ripe synchronous patterns of a cornfield in a windy dawn, or the mackerel mottling of moonlit clouds.

Edward Thomas was, from a young age, a walker, both by night and day. In his mid-twenties, when he was suffering from depression, he would often set off on long walking tours, alone, in the march-lands of Wales and England. Like so many melancholics, he developed his own rituals of relief, in the hope that these might abate his suffering, and that he might out-march the causes of his sadness.

He left a record of one of these tours in his extraordinary short book of 1905,
Wales
. It reads like a dream-story or song; an entranced account of the months Thomas spent exploring the wild places of that country - its rivers, mountains, estuaries, forests and lakes. As he moved between these places, he spoke to those he met along his way; he noted down the stories they told him, and the songs which on occasion they sang him. He wrote his book using a wild goose feather he had found on the sands of Kenfig, and cut into a quill pen.

In
Wales
, Thomas exults in the joy of walking fast in darkness, the joy of seeing the summits of the hills ‘continually writing a wild legend on the cloudy sky’ by day. He describes how, at night, the land becomes cast into ‘no colour’, and then how, when the sunlight returns, the world awakens again to its hues. Once, on the winter hills, the temperature falls so low that he has to stop and warm himself in the moist breath of a flock of sheep. And one dawn, having walked in the mountains through the night, he comes to a narrow pass between two peaks, and stops for shelter in a little copse of oak and hazel. The mist has risen from the low ground around him, and in the dying moonlight, he wrote, he sees ‘a thousand white islands of cloud and mountain’.

Up in the mountains at night, Thomas remarks near the end of
Wales
, ‘It becomes clear, as it is not in a city, that the world is old and troubled, and that light and warmth and fellowship are good.’ A year after the declaration of the First World War, Thomas enlisted. He joined the Artists’ Rifles - a large volunteer battalion for the London and Middlesex areas - and was posted first to Hare Hall Training Camp in Essex, where he worked as a map-reading instructor, using the skills of land knowledge he had learned as a walker. In January 1917, he was posted to the Western Front. He wrote to his wife Helen on 29 January, the day before he left England, to say that once he was ‘over there’, he would ‘say no more goodbyes’. From the letters and the journal he wrote while at the Front, it is clear that Thomas often recalled his walking days, and that the memories of those years of openness, and of freedom to move, were a steady consolation to him, until he was killed by a shell-blast on the first day of the Battle of Arras, just after dawn.

Up on the ridge, the blizzard blew for two hours. I lay low, got cold, watched the red reeds that poked up from the ice flicker in the wind. Hail fell in different shapes, first like pills, then in a long shower of rugged spheres the size of peppercorns. Over half an hour, the hail turned to snow, which had the texture of salt and fell hissing on to the ice. I had begun to feel cold, deep down, as though ice were forming inside me, floes of it cruising my core, pressure ridges riding up through my arms and legs, white sheaths forming around my bones.

I must have slept, though, for some hours later I woke to find that the snow had stopped and the cloud cover had thinned away, and a late-wintermoon was visible above the mountains: just a little off full, with a hangnail missing on the right side, and stars swarming round it. I got up, and did a little dance on the tarn, partly to get warm, and partly because if I looked backwards over my shoulder while I danced, I could see my moon-shadow jigging with me on the snow.

I appreciated the effort that the moonlight had made to reach me. It had left the sun at around 186,000 miles per second, and had then proceeded through space for eight minutes, or ninety-three million miles, and had then upped off the moon’s surface and proceeded through space for another 1.3 seconds, or 240,000 miles, before pushing through troposphere, stratosphere and atmosphere, and descending on me: trillions of lunar photons pelting on to my face and the snow about me, giving me an eyeful of silver, and helping my moon-shadow to dance.

I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountains across the valley were iron. The deeper moon-shadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost. Where I had been lying on the tarn, the ice had melted, so that there was a shallow indent, shaped like a sarcophagus, shadowed out by the moonlight.

To the south, the mountain ridge curved gently round for two miles. It was as narrow as a pavement at times, at others as wide as a road, with three craggy butte summits in its course. To the east and west, the steep-sided valleys, unreachable by the moonlight, were in such deep black shadow that the mountains seemed footless in the world.

I began walking the ridge. The windless cold burnt the edges of my face. These were the only sounds I could hear: the swish of my breathing, the crunch my foot made when it broke through a crust of hard snow, and the wood-like groans of ice sinking as I stepped down on it. I passed an ice dune which was as smooth and glassy as the sill of a weir. My shadow fell for yards behind me. Once, stopping on a crag-top, I watched two stars fall in near parallel down the long black slope of the sky.

When I came to a big frozen pool of water, I took a sharp stone and cut a cone-shaped hole in the white ice where it seemed thinnest. Dark water glugged up into the hole, and I knelt, dipped my mouth to the ice and drank. I caught up a handful of snow, and patted and shaped it in my hands as I walked, so that it shrank and hardened into a small white stone of ice.

Where the ground steepened, I moved from rock to rock to gain purchase. On the thinner sections I walked out to the east, so I could look along the cornice line, which was fine and delicate, and proceeded in a supple curve along the ridge edge and over the moon trench, as if it had been engineered.

Several small clouds drifted through the sky. When one of them passed before the moon, the world’s filter changed. First my hands were silver and the ground was black. Then my hands were black and the ground silver. So we switched, as I walked, from negative to positive to negative, as the clouds passed before the moon.

The human eye possesses two types of photo-receptive cells: rods and cones. The cone cells cluster in the fovea, the central area of the retina. Further out from the fovea, the density of cone cells diminishes, and rod cells come to predominate. Cone cells are responsible for our acute vision, and for colour perception. But they work well only under bright light conditions. When light levels drop, the eye switches to rod cells.

In 1979, three scientists, Lamb, Baylor and Yau, proved that a rod cell could be tripped into action by the impact of a single photon. They used a suction electrode to record the membrane current of pieces of toad retina with high rod-cell density. They then fired single photons at the retinal pieces. The membrane current showed pronounced fluctuations. It is agreed that this is among the most beautiful experiments in the field of optics.

It takes rod cells up to two hours to adapt most fully to the dark. Once the body detects reduced light levels, it begins generating a photosensitive chemical called rhodopsin, which builds up in the rod cells in a process known as dark adaptation.

So it is that at night, we in fact become more optically sensitive. Night sight, though it lacks the sharpness of day sight, is a heightened form of vision. I have found that on very clear nights, even at sea-level, it is possible to sit and read a book.

Rod cells work with efficiency in low light levels. However, they do not perceive colour - only white, black and the greyscale between. Greyscale is their approximation of colour: ‘ghosting in’ is what optic scientists call the effect of rod-cell perception. It is for this reason that the world seems drained of colour by moonlight, expressing itself instead in subtle but melancholy shades.

The brightest of all nightscapes is to be found when a full moon shines on winter mountains. Such a landscape offers the maximum reflection, being white, planar, tilted and polished. The only difficulty for the night-walker comes when you move into the moon-shadow of a big outcrop, or through a valley, where moon-shadow falls from all sides and the valley floor receives almost no light at all. The steep-sidedness of the valley is exaggerated: you have the sensation of being at the bottom of a deep gorge, and you long to reach the silver tideline of the moonlight again.

To be out by night in a forest, by a river, on a moor, in a field, or even in a city garden, is to know it differently. Colour seems absent, and you are obliged to judge distance and appearance by shade and tone: night sight requires an attentiveness and a care of address undemanded by sunlight.

The astonishment of the night-walker also has to do with the unconverted and limitless nature of the night sky, which in clear weather is given a depth by the stars that far exceeds the depth given to the diurnal sky by clouds. On a cloudless night, looking upwards, you experience a sudden flipped vertigo, the sensation that your feet might latch off from the earth and you might plummet upwards into space. Star-gazing gives us access to orders of events, and scales of time and space, which are beyond our capacity to imagine: it is unsurprising that dreams of humility and reverence have been directed towards the moon and the stars for as long as human culture has recorded itself.

Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side-effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.

The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.