15th February 2008

The thing is, we get the point more quickly when we realize it is we looking rather than that we may not be seeing it.

John Cage: Lecture on Nothing

you who hurry toward leviathan woods,
you who walk into the gloom of clouds and mountains,
fasten up your raincoat, damn it.

Miyazawa Kenji: Traveler

Although I consider the soaring eagle to be a good omen for the day, I’m kept grounded myself by Miyazawa’s words as I make off up the hill from the loch. Even after noon, as this is, there’s pockets where that frost painting of bracken – a silvering outline of each brown dead frond – is evident, along with the woodland floor’s resistant crunch as I walk.

It’s axiomatic that if you go looking for the woodlands they’re not there; just the trees. Once you’ve given up looking (& a lifetime is too short) then you arrive. Here, against the backdrop of the loch, with split rocks from which moss’d ferned birch & oak spring up like woody fountains; among litters of lichened twigs, broken from boughs by storms, it’s easy to get caught up in the detail of the trees. Individuals: oaks with their leaders neatly snapped by gales, long fallen limbs debarked, each showing twists of growth round on itself; a triple stemmed ancient sheltering a holly. Out of the burn’s gorge rise hazels all keeled at ninety degrees to the slope, rising at right angles to that growth & bifurcating, a metre round, mossy, stretching for the light away from the always shade of the gorge. An ivy winds round a young oak, with its choking climb upward. There’s triple stemmed oaks, double stemmed oaks, rarely a straight singleton stem.

Slowly, I realise, as I follow deer tracks through all this, brushing spiderwebs from my face, that there are open spaces in the canopy (even though the leaves are still only buds, the twigging above can be dense) & that in fact, I’m looking at a sort of parkland or savannah brought about by intermittent grazing. I’m seeing the woodland. I give a little shake, moving with the dance of gnats in the afternoon sun in one such opening; I notice the flitter of small fragile-as-dust buff coloured moths. & there: even a red admiral butterfly fresh from hibernation, with its erratic zigzagging flight.

Among the oaks in this are hollies, which may or may not have started as infill among them. Sometimes hollies may predate oaks. Just on a small rise is a quartet of old fellows among the heather & fraughàn, bracken & ubiquitous moss, rising to ten feet up the oak boles; higher up are small ferns, perhaps the hard fern, Blechnum spicant (though my ignorance extends to ferns as well). These old hollies are almost within touch of each other; one’s a five stem with a stem dead, the next has three stems with two dead, the remaining two have healthy twin stems. They’re like broken toothed oldsters anywhere, sharing a rueful joke at the expense of youngsters around them. At their swollen bases is another indicator of spring coming from below: tender fresh leaves of wood sorrel, which is truly delicious & less vinegary now than at any other time throughout the year.

Birch & oak are indiscriminate in sheltering, here & there, juvenile sitka spruces, their seeds probably brought by wind or squirrel from the forestry plantation to the west. A small winged creature lands on my hand as I lean contemplating the mossy decomposing lines of trunks & rootplates. A dead oak takes at least a century to disappear completely, so these must have fallen at least fifty years ago, though the moss blanketing may have speeded up decomposition by a few years. There’s a young oak, maybe fifty years old, liberated into the light by the fall of these prostrate forms, perhaps; but like any crone, bent backed, growing three feet up, then at right angles to that, then straight up again. In the hummocks & tussocks of sphagnums (how I’ve tried to identify them; always I come back to: it’s a sphagnum, never further) there are birches sloughing their skins like any adder, along the lines of dead limbs all the way down to the floor. Moss seals & heals the lowest cracks; other birch branches from the same trunks are vibrant with new growth buds. The dead limbs, stripped of bark demonstrate clearly the twists of slow spiralling plants following sun clockwise. Scabs of lichen everywhere. Growth in, around & on everything, sap driven, moss softened, rain nourished. As many dead as living; as many wounded as healthy. A slow war of attrition with weather, browsing & life itself, even, especially, in February, bristling crawling & packed brimful on the woodland slope.

I walk & walk in pasture-woodland’s own reverie, until the sky is streaked with cirrostratus over the eggblue of morning & noon gone & the sun moves toward a Morvern evening to the west. There’s the rumble of high flying unseen jets; gossamer catches the low light finding its way under the heavy limbs. Oakwoods found & lost. I’ve been looking & seeing all along.