The Screes: Freeze Thaw Cycles
‘When people go forth to see the world, they are sometimes in search of beauty.
If beauty is the leading object of their search, they need not go to Wastwater.’ Thomas Walton, 1824
The almost imperceptible eking
out existence of water beneath ice.
Gauche slightness, struggle.
From the summit ridge of Whinfell,
Sellafield’s towers looked dreamy
in the afternoon haze.
Like a small nuclear township.
10,000 employees. As important to the area
as I disagreed with it.
I decided there and then.
When I grow up I will live
in a small cottage by the sea.
The half-life of dreams.
One way – dancing turbines.
The other – lines of upside-down blurred trees.
We draw the transparent water different shades
but always blue.
A pick-up truck drew to a stop
and the driver wound down his window.
‘Which one’s the summit?’ he asked.
We were surrounded by summits
and I was photographing the second highest
of them all.
I pointed to Scafell Pike,
as was required of me,
and felt really grateful that I hadn’t been an idiot about it.
The slightest breath of air.
Sufficient resistance.
How substantive slipperiness can be.
The car park had been quiet
and everyone had looked at each other sideways
as if to ask -
Should you be here?
Should I?
Should they?
Took a wander to the pay station
but didn’t have change so didn’t pay.
How long will it be before you look me
in the eye?
I wonder.
Before you hold me?
Before I can watch that character on this TV screen
shake another person’s hand without wincing?
Pandemic as shifting matters.
Falling. Consolidating and accumulating. Scree.
To speak of ‘sternness’ and ‘sterility’. Degradation.
Inside the dismembered body of scree.
To know the mountain better than itself
as a failure of listening.
Took another photo
of another Herdwick sheep
for want of company.
Was she smiling?
I’d been allowing the remorselessness
of a solitary lockdown to eat at me,
had spent the last good hour chewing upon myself,
as had become too commonplace.
The sheep ruminated the undergrowth,
her jaw grinding my self-doubt diagonally side to side.
Of course, she didn’t give that twig of heather
about me, and neither should she.
Scree as scree deposited on scree.
My shadow is long, tall, dark and handsome:
talus deposits and bones.
Hadn’t expected the outcrops of yew tree,
growing amongst the boulders.
Had expected to prove the guidebook wrong
and of course was wrong about this.
The interminable rocks were less
solid than my own imagination
snapped ankles phone calls emergency
something about how disaster
breeds imagined disaster?
They say that 50g of yew sap
will kill you straight
and I’m not going to try
and prove them otherwise.
Across the water, Middle Fell
became a reflected water island.
I wished to swim in water earth.
I wished to feel warmer than meltwater.
I wished to swim in your
‘whole new world of images in the water!’
The treachery of talus blossom.
Moss. Ice Stone.
The games we used to play.
Surrounded by a host of the country’s
finest mountains including Great Gable,
Yewbarrow and Kirk Fell, Wasdale is also
home to England’s highest, Scafell Pike, at 978m.
This spectacular landscape is riven by steep,
fast -flowing rivers and streams all leading into Wastwater,
the cleanest and deepest lake in England, plunging to depths of 72m.
It’s not called the Vale of Water for nothing!
To Wordsworth I say:
I am not afraid of fatigue. Might I resist.
To the interpretation board
I say hello.
My best offering of morning.
What’s the difference between
a shadow and an echo?
Incidental silence. Dark rises quickly.
Nearing sunset.
Reflecting on the reflected view
in the still surface of Wastwater:
Yewbarrow
Kirk Fell
Gable
Up above, even the jagged profile of the Broad Stand
crags looked friendly in the soft late afternoon light.
To say the weather has been kind.
To say the sun is shining as a matter of mind.
I stopped to watch it sink below
the far horizon.
