On Gossamer
In lieu of other words...
It wasn’t called wild swimming back then; it was just something the adults did. Most of the adults, my step dad, his friends, jumped in, swam wild throughout the long summers at Linceter.
But not my mother, not us, brown women it seemed, did not swim.
We: mother, me, sister; a trio of brown on the bank, must have cut a strangeness into the landscape. Menhirs waterward. Stock still in descending order of height, taliswomen for those afloat, protection for their watery journeys.
Amos went in feet first.
His head bobbed to the surface, then made a playful Ottery turn, lay on his back, sun raining down on his toes, now just breaking the surface.
Amos. Moss.
Allowing the easy current to pull him downstream.
I, meanwhile, all silence, fraught, broke the feminine line, edged nervously to the bank, through the stickiness of cow parsley, tacky on my shins, and watched as the river took him off toward the bend.
Saw what I was losing, witnessing him float down the river.
Me, so dry on the bank; him, so wet in all that green.
I’d never had a special appreciation of wildlife. I was not someone who picked up and cuddled shrews or took injured mice home, placed them carefully into a cosy shoebox and fed them droplets of milk, not at all.
I didn’t have a name for writing about nature either.
I was not an Amos - Moss, a Violet, a Lark or a Hen; I was an Angela.
Truthfully, though, I feared the mice and the rabbits and the hares and the shrews and their sudden movements, their quick eyes. I feared the cattle in the field, and even a gentle doe would have me jump in fright.
My fear shamed me. Hot, embarrassed cheeks as I made it through a rambunctious gang of bullocks to the safety of the stile. “They’re more scared of you than you are of them”, no consolation, just adding to the feeling that my desire to be in a relationship with the more-than-human realms must be a mistake, some kind of genetic error.
I mean, how can you pen a pastoral if you don’t find an easy comfort with wild things? How clearly can you sketch out the landscape of a nature book when all you have is a hankering after the light swording through rain clouds or an inexplicable glee, a rising triumphant laugh out loud at the spring green fields revealed after rainfall?
People like me were not seen in nature either. We were not found in fields, the first footfall on tall summer grass. We were not the campers discovered, turning in surprise with broad smiles in wood smoked forest clearing.
No, we were the people found in high streets, walking unevenly over cracked paving stones pushed up by the roots of the Plane Trees.
Brown women who stayed dry on the bank, looking pensive, while others swam wild, did not write about nature.
But then I found running.
For many of my running years, I stuck to the road to keep time, to measure my distance, to give me a sense of safety and legitimacy. The road would congratulate me at 5k, at 10. Its markers were red ringed signs. Metallic and formalised.
Beyond the road, though, my attention was often drawn to a woodland or over to a cornfield. The compulsion away from the road became more intense the more I ran the same route.
On one particular route, I’d run past an old watering hole on the rise to the village of Labessonié and suddenly wanted to plunge my face into the green of it.
Not drink, just kneel at its side and experience the ecstasy of instant cooling, my sweat smashed against the still waters, a close encounter with its worms, its flies, its eggs.
I didn’t.
One day, I found my feet trotting me beyond the watering hole, down toward the leat and into a shaded, damp tangle of undergrowth. Each step took me further and further from what I had known as my markers.
A few days later, I found myself running with the growing excitement that today I would dare to leave the road.
I realised I wanted to leave and not know where I was going: to leave the road, to leave the track beyond the road, to leave the beaten path after the track and find myself unable to distinguish my way back.
Weeks later, I discovered that I had a nervous thrill at leaving the track now, turning to look behind me and save for fresh crushed bark, bright yellow and breadcrumbed, save for briars left dangling in the cotton of my clothes, realising I was completely unable to recognise the route I had taken.
Each run took me further away, my steps quiet and careful not to stir or shake that which I ran through.
One morning, I turned to witness the scene through which I had passed, apparently untouched by me. Where once I’d only seen the path I had so self consciously tried not to tread, now all I could see were the many criss crossing byways of others.
This view, this morning—so many beings marching routes and covering tracks, all in the one instant—was breathtaking.
Overhead, a goose made its creaking passage off to greet the day. A hollow through an archway of trees invited me back a way I did not know. An outreaching of ferns over there I recognised, or thought I did. Perhaps that had been my point of entry?
And then the morning light did that thing of gifting, for a moment, an unexpected dimension.
As the sun arched its way through the trees, the many ways were revealed to be connected by a bunting of octagonal patchwork, cotton spun, and densely strung, a canopy of gossamer, a frenzy of hovering web, shimmering that I was outnumbered, letting me know that we were this landscape together, bound in silk, as one.
