Three fine things, circles, and a poem

As a former narrative therapist specialising in storytelling, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that we’re narrative beings. But what people don’t often understand is that all the best narratives take the form of circles, not straight lines. In this wild place where we live and croft, our lives are tied up with the circles of the year in a way that is hard to explain to people for whom the seasons are an add-on, almost a fashion accessory. But it’s not just about the seasons: there are other things that recur at certain times every year that we wait for, even depend on. And so this morning it was a particular joy to rediscover three cyclical things that have become very important to me: the first goose egg of the year, laid by the eldest of our beautiful Roman geese; the first pair of oystercatchers of the year, down on the beach, and the first lapwing circling over the headland. Because, as we become older, each February brings both a sense of anticipation and a small lurking fear that grows each year as the number of extinctions on this planet grows – that one year February will come and the oystercatchers won’t.

I’ve lived for many years now in places where oystercatchers are a regular feature of February and a signal of the return of the light. But lapwing is new; lapwing for me came with our move here, two years ago, to Lewis. And now that the lapwing has returned, for weeks to come my early morning walks on the headland with the dogs will be punctuated by their wedge-winged circling in the skies and their constant warning cries. And underneath them the darting oystercatchers, each protecting their own nesting site.

It was particularly appropriate that the first lapwing should arrive on the birthday of my husband and the other half of Two Ravens Press and EarthLines, David Knowles. A couple of years ago in South Uist he wrote a poem about lapwing. Here it is.

Lapwings Against Cloud

Downsun from sunset
small flock of aldiss lamps
tapping out
blinking out of battleship grey
at this, their frequency and pause
wings high before beating
their message. Just this
is lapwing, over.
This is lapwing, over.
This is lapwing.

David Knowles

David Knowles’ first collection of poetry, Meeting the Jet Man, was shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council First Book of the Year Award in 2009, and a poem from the collection was Highly Commended in the 2010 Forward Prize.

Why storytelling has any relevance at all to ecoliterature

You’ll be seeing quite a lot of references to storytelling in and around the EarthLines project; some of you may be wondering what, if anything, it has to do with ecoliterature. Especially given that it springs from an oral rather than a written tradition. Well, there are a number of reasons for it, and we’ll explore them over time in this blog. One of the main reasons for my interest is that I believe that the future of good ecoliterature is multidisciplinary in nature: that inspiration comes not just from other writers but from philosophers, anthropologists, artists, and storytellers… (Among others, of course.) When I talk about storytelling, I’m not talking about storytelling for children, or even storytelling as entertainment for adults. I’m talking about a kind of storytelling that penetrates into the heart of who we are and how we see ourselves. And especially, how we see ourselves in connection with the rest of the world.

That’s the kind of storytelling personified by Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth and Story (http://schoolofmyth.com) and by what he has to say in his book A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness. I’ve reviewed Martin’s book for the May issue of EarthLines magazine, but thought it made a good introduction to the whole issue of why we think storytelling is important. So here’s the review now, below.

Sharon
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Martin Shaw gave up a three-album recording deal with Warner Brothers to live in a tent in the Welsh mountains for four years, during which time he learned to live outside in ‘the kingdom of wood lice, badgers, elder, nettles, brambles, roe-deer, and ivy that gave feral lectures endlessly into my fool ear, the shattering cold of the waterfall that was a morning shower, [while] bellowing out ancient stories from the black hills of Wales, the source of the stream.’ If there’s a better qualification for a rites-of-passage wilderness guide, let alone a storyteller and mythologist specialising in initiatiory experiences, I haven’t yet found it. Martin is now based in Devon, and runs the Westcountry School of Myth and Story (http://schoolofmyth.com) in between teaching in the US, UK and Europe and serving as a visiting lecturer in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Leadership Programme at Oxford University.

A Branch from the Lightning Tree explores the relationship between myth, story and the wild in prose that is beautiful, poetic and vividly alive. It’s a book that is both entertaining and scholarly, and if you like your Barthes, Derrida and Heidegger leavened by Trickster and Baba Yaga, then it’s a must-read. The heart of Shaw’s thesis is that we have forgotten how to be wild: we have exchanged the old longing, the old call to a deeper knowledge of the world for ‘a trance state, engineered by clumsy media spells’. And so the essence of this book is a rediscovery: the psyche’s journey from the civilised world back to the wild. We can, Shaw tells us, regain a Culture of Wildness through rites of passage, through necessary initiations into the wild that is still within us. And we can be guided through this process of initiation by myths and stories. ‘The heart of ecology is mythology,’ Shaw says. ‘With this in mind, it’s possible we could re-vision through story a kind of curious genius that wraps us back into accord with the great tapestry of earth. In short, we could remember what story we are actually in.’

But what precisely does myth bring to this process of returning to our wild selves? ‘We are each a strange container of unique experience, a castle full of erotic chambers, dust-filled cupboards of old bones, great halls with unending feasting, small towers of arcane literature, and balconies from which heartbroken lovers hurl themselves into the moat. All this is going on inside us all the time. Poetry and myth are divining tools that dip into these waters and dredge it to consciousness, giving it form.’ And indeed, that is precisely the transformative power of myth and story.

In all the best stories, initiation is never a comfortable process. To be initiated we have to sever ourselves from the comfort and security of what Shaw calls the Village – the ordained track – and head off down the Road of the Forest. We need, he tells us, to go into the darkest wildest woods, to climb the unclimbable mountain … we need to become the Wanderer. ‘To find an authentic centre we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost.’ And so Shaw’s initiation is a kind of vision quest: a journey into the heart of the wildness that lies within each of us – because wildness is not just a place to visit, but something inside ourselves that is in desperate need of nurturing. In other words, we need to become familiar with our own depths to be able to look at the natural world and see it as it is, to understand our deep need for wildness, ‘to recognise its mirrors’.

But to Shaw this necessary psychological process of journeying back to the wild is not just a question of heading off  into the wilderness, and not even just about the journey that you find yourself on once you’ve embarked on your quest – it’s very much about what you bring back with you when, inevitably, you return. About how you integrate yourself back into the community. This is critical because we have, Shaw tells us, become addicted to Severance: we find it easy to leave things behind, to move on, but we’re much less good at negotiating return. Because Shaw’s aim in this process of personal rewilding is by no means to remove us from the world, but precisely to show us how to live in the world while at the same time living with the newly discovered wildness inside of us. It is about integration. ‘Wildness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civilisation but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from a moonlit lake. It will wear a suit when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. Its sensing-nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns …’

A Branch from the Lightning Tree is by no means a book just for storytellers – though if a storyteller is what you are, you’ll find Shaw exhorting you to be a specific kind of storyteller – a ‘Griot, a Seanchai, the Cunning Man or Woman, Bard, Skald, Trouvere, Minnesinger, Ashik … a “Myth Teller” … This is little to do with external theatrics and everything to do with a new way of seeing.’ This is a book that can be read by anyone interested in why myth and story are important, by anyone interested in experiencing the Culture of Wildness that they can help us find our way to and through.

Guest post by Ian Hill: ‘Changing the rules: Rebecca Solnit and Kathleen Raine’

A reflection on the work of Rebecca Solnit and of Kathleen Raine, by regular guest contributor Ian Hill (http://www.printedland.blogspot.com/)

In my sitting-room at home, in the bookcase beside the chair onto which falls natural light from the window, is my collection of books about place: some nature writing, some travel writing, psychogeography and environmental activitism; the categories meld into one another with a satisfying imprecision. 

What strikes me about these books, however, is how few of them are by women. I believe that this does not simply reflect my taste, and it certainly does not reflect the abilities of women to write about these subjects; rather, I suspect it reflects an assumption which equates environmental writing with science, with the known and accountable, with that which can be measured and proved, and which favours a kind of anthropocentric bullishness which asserts a hold over the natural world. In Granta magazine’s 2009 volume on The New Nature Writing, only two of the eighteen contributors were women.  Even now, some of our most popular books on the environment are a version of writing-as-collecting, a reduction of the world to that which can be pinned on the page like antique butterflies. From Gilbert White to David Attenborough, we are in thrall to the belief that all will be known, all will be quantified. 

The exceptions to this generalisation are the bright stars in the firmament: the books which make us wonder, but which leave us with as many questions as facts. Writing which truly exposes the incongruities and uncertainties of the natural world is a rare beast, and is not easily classified into sub-genres of ‘travel writing’ or ‘nature writing’. It is, for me, writing which also leaves the longest impact, glimmering like a bright light burned on the retina.

This is certainly true of Rebecca Solnit’s work. Each of her books is a wunderkammer of ideas and reflections, a meander through ideas and reflections that is more akin to a walk through the back streets of an unknown city with an eccentric friend. She is often described as a cultural historian, but her work transcends boundaries so brazenly, so recklessly, it is unclassifiable.

What struck me about Solnit, however, when I first read A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is her willingness to follow trains of thought not knowing where they might lead, to pursue ideas and connections for their own sake, and to present us with conundrums and questions that do not sit neatly with our desire to quantify and account. “Science is how capitalism knows the world” she observes in the middle of a lengthy digression on Yves Klein, and I find myself grinning with the sheer audacity of the assertion.

Solnit has probably crystallised my ideas as a writer more than anyone else I have read, not just in her style, but also in the way she approaches her subject: tangentially, with a sense of awe and wonder. It is an open-mindedness which I also see in the poetry of Kathleen Raine, although these two exceptional writiers are from different generations, different continents, and write in different styles. What unites them, for me, is they way that they change the rules of our limited perceptions of the world around us.

Kathleen Raine brings a humility to her writing which creates the impression that each of her observations is left as a gift between writer and reader. Message from Home captures this sense perfectly, sharing the bond we have always had with the natural world:

Do you remember, when you were first a child,
Nothing in the world seemed strange to you?
You perceived, for the first time, shapes already familiar,
And seeing, you knew that you have always known
The lichen on the rock, fern-leaves, the flowers of thyme,
As if the elements newly met in your body,
Caught up into the momentary vortex of your living
Still kept the knowledge of a former state

I came to Kathleen Raine much earlier in my life than to Rebecca Solnit. I was handed a photocopy of her poem Heirloom, and I can recall still that sense of twenty-something bewilderment at the sense of magic and mystery, the willingness to suspend judgement in the presence of beauty and wonder. It is a poem brief enough to quote in full:

She gave me childhood’s flowers,
Heather and wild thyme,
Eyebright and tormentil,
Lichen’s mealy cup
Dry on wind-scored stone,
The corbies on the rock,
The rowan by the burn.

Sea-marvels a child beheld
Out in the fisherman’s boat,
Fringed pulsing violet
Medusa, sea gooseberries,
Starfish on the sea-floor,
Cowries and rainbow-shells
From pools on a rocky shore,

Gave me her memories,
But kept her last treasure:
‘When I was a lass:’ she said,
‘Sitting among the heather,
‘Suddenly I saw
‘That all the moor was alive!
‘I have told no one before.’

That was my mother’s tale.
Seventy years had gone
Since she saw the living skein
Of which the world is woven,
And having seen, knew all;
Through long indifferent years
Treasuring the priceless pearl

Sometimes books tell you what you already knew. Sometimes, just occasionally, they offer you a confirmation of a sense or a feeling which you didn’t even know you had. “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” asks Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  It reminds us of a necessary humility in the face of a world too complex and marvellous for us to understand. I cling to this this sense of hope, this openness to magic and chance, and go out again into the beautiful world.

Ian Hill

Weather

We are told by the older residents of our local crofting townships that this autumn and winter have been the worst in living memory here in the Outer Hebrides. Wetter and windier. It’s true that we seem to have been battling gales since October, and the already boggy ground has been sodden for months. In November, on our personal blog, I wrote a post, The Gods of Days, in which I talked about wind and suggested that there was little point in living in a place where the dominant weather was wind and rain, and then sitting indoors and complaining about it when it was windy and raining. Of course, a lot of wind and rain has happened to us since November … and a couple of normally hardy friends are now jumping up and down and demanding that I recant and admit that wind and rain is a terrible thing and that I wish it were mild and sunny like everyone else does.

At one level there ’s no question about it – I’m tired of battling the wind and sloshing about in the mud when it’s time to feed the animals and walk the dogs twice a day, because this has to be done whatever the weather. I’d be ecstatic if a few mild and sunny days happened along, and I’m eagerly anticipating spring like everyone else … but the truth about weather, about our relationship with weather, is very much more complicated than that.

The point about weather is simply that it can’t be divorced from place. Weather is an intrinsic part of the character of a place. It’s not just a question of weather being what happens to you every day when you are in a place: it goes much deeper than that, in a number of different ways.

First: weather shapes a place. The Outer Hebrides are what they are precisely because of centuries of wind and rain. The land is boggy, treeless, hard, pared back to the bones and vivid precisely for that reason. It seems like an obvious point to make, but it’s surprising how often people come to live in the Outer Hebrides and start to long for periods of hot dry sun. Hot dry sun isn’t the Outer Hebrides, it’s Provence, or Tenerife. And I mean that literally: the weather IS the place, not something superimposed on it. The Outer Hebrides IS wind and rain, rain and wind, and more wind and rain. If you can’t love wind and rain, you can’t love the Outer Hebrides for what it really is, and then it really isn’t a very smart place for you to live. And if you live in a place and won’t go outside because you hate what that place is, then there’s a very strong argument indeed that it’s not a healthy way to live.

Second: weather is what you walk in, as well as landscape, when you walk in a place. It isn’t something that happens to you as you walk on a surface: it’s something much more than that. Recently I’ve been reading acclaimed anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book of essays, Being Alive. There’ll be a review of the book in the May issue of EarthLines magazine, and Tim has agreed to write something new for us for the November issue. One of the many things that struck me about Tim’s perspective on the world is what he has to say about weather – that expressed exactly what I’ve been struggling to say. Here’s a flavour:

To inhabit the open is not, then, to be stranded on a closed surface but to be immersed in the incessant movements of wind and weather, in a zone wherein substances and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings that, by way of their activity, participate in stitching the textures of the land.

Landscape is constantly being transformed by weather. Think of the difference between a range of mountains covered in mist, and the same range of mountains in the glare of the  sun at midday. In the former case, the mist isn’t something you can just extract from the mountains, as if there’s some permanent reality underneath that is represented more truly by the second case. The mist and the mountains merge, and create something that is entirely different to those experiencing it. Mist, wind, rain – they’re not things that interfere with the reality of a place – they are the place – they bring the place into being.

The weather, in short, is ‘the world’s worlding’ – to adopt Heidegger’s expression – and as such it is not a figment of the imagination but the very temperament of being.

And so how can you divorce yourself – dissociate yourself – completely from the weather of a place? True, there are some types of weather that are more comfortable than others – though I have always had an odd affinity for wild windy, rainy misty places – to the extent that I’ve had severe reverse seasonal affective disorder when living in climates that are warm and sunny year-round. One of my favourite kinds of weather here is the slightly misty, very gentle continuous drizzle – or ‘broom‘, from the Gaelic - that pervades the entire landscape on a wind-free day. It’s soft, gentle, and to me it epitomises the spirit of this place more than any other weather.

The ground on which we stand is a zone of formative and transformative processes set in train through the interplay of wind, water and stone, within a field of cosmic forces such as those responsible for the tides … Sea and land are engulfed in the wider sphere of forces and relations comprising the weather-world. To perceive and to act in the weather-world is to align one’s own conduct to the celestial movements of sun, moon and stars, to the rhythmic alterations of night and day and the seasons, to rain and shine, sunlight and shade.

I think Ingold has it. If we can’t inhabit the weather-world that constitutes the place where we live, then there is a very strong argument that we’re not really, to return to the title of his book, ‘Being Alive’.

Sharon Blackie

Guest blog: Reading the Cards, by Nancy Campbell

Nancy Campbell is a writer and printmaker. Her publications include ‘After Light’, ‘The Night Hunter’ and ‘How to say I love you in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet’. In 2012 she will be working with Siglufjörður, a small fishing community in northern Iceland, to record the changing marine environment. www.nancycampbell.co.uk

Reading the Cards

There is a card game which differs from pelmanism in that every card is different and from solitaire in that there can never be a conclusion to it. As a child I was given a shabby nineteenth-century deck; down the generations the packaging had been lost and the cards were held together with a rubber band of comparable antiquity. Lacking its original case and any rulebook, to this day I have been unable to discover its name, or whether I played it as the maker intended.     

The fifty cards, slim and furred with age, depicted not hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds but whimsical landscapes. One showed a magnificent medieval fortress; another, boats on a lake bordered by palm trees; and still others, sublime mountain ranges. Yet whatever the scenery, there was always a road on the horizon, along which a tiny carriage was driving.     

These views were not self-contained vignettes. I could join each card to any other, because, however unpredictable the inclines and settlements at the centre, the road reached the edges at the same point on every one. Aligning these extravagant geographies, I made a cardboard continent. The passengers in the little carriage can scarcely have felt a jolt as they crossed from Alpine pass to desert dune; however far they travelled, they never had to fear dropping over a precipice or reaching a closed border, for there was always a card in my hand, ready to lay down to prevent their vehicle rolling into annihilation. And, sure enough, there the carriage was, pictured on the next card.      

Not all explorers are so fortunate.

Later I learnt to play with language: juxtaposing letters; shuffling words within sentences; diverting the reader’s passage. No sequence of chromolithographed cards could represent the world as vividly as these alphabetical arrangements. Yet last winter, travelling in Greenland, I found myself surrounded by scenes that none of the cards had prepared me for, and which even my language was barely equipped to describe.     

The Arctic landscape is forged from water. Glaciers advance, churning a path through basalt cliffs, and thunder into the ocean. The fast ice creeps across the bay, extending the shoreline by a mile and more, only to vanish on a stormy night. In calmer weather icebergs drift with the tide, forming protean mountain ranges on the horizon; as their peaks crumble, they turn to restore their balance as slowly as dreaming sleepers do.      

The inhabitants of this mutable landscape speak Kalaallisut, or Greenlandic. Their daunting words express concepts that other languages tiptoe around with a phrase but, when spoken, the suffixes are uttered so softly that an untrained ear cannot hear them. Verbs accrue morphemes, while nouns tend to disappear. It was once customary to name people after objects, but since a taboo forbade reference to the dead, the favoured objects were repeatedly renamed. The power of such words is not diminished by their absence from the vocabulary.     

Longing to make sense of these silences, I borrowed an early Greenlandic–English dictionary from Upernavik Museum. I found the bowdlerised English definitions almost as puzzling as the original Kalaallisut; several corrections in a contemporary italic hand suggested that the dictionary was fallible. On seeing akiatsianga – officially defined as ‘take hold (of it) together with me’ – amended to ‘carry me, please’ I wondered what circumstances had led an amateur lexicographer to discover such an error.

The early history of Kalaallisut is unwritten; records begin with the arrival of Danish missionaries in Greenland during the eighteenth century. The Danes set down Kalaallisut in the Latin alphabet while asserting sovereignty over the land and establishing Danish as the language of administration. In contrast with other Eskimo-Aleut languages, Kalaallisut does not use the Inuktitut syllabary. The orthography of the language was still being debated when my dictionary was printed in Copenhagen at the start of the twentieth century. Today the alphabet contains eighteen letters, although only twelve are used at the beginning of words. A few cards create a winning hand for those with the courage to play them.

Greenland achieved a degree of political autonomy with the establishment of Self Rule in 2009, and once again Kalaallisut became the official language of the nation known, in its own words, as Kalaallit Nunaat. But government recognition does not guarantee survival. In the same year, the United Nations culture agency designated Kalaallisut ‘vulnerable’ and predicted that Avanersuaq and Tunumiit oraasiat, the North and East Greenlandic dialects, would disappear within a century. (Qavak, a South Greenlandic dialect, is already extinct.) While many Greenlanders adopt the languages of international culture and commerce, climate scientists have noticed that Kalaallisut catalogues the Arctic ecosystem with empirical precision. Can the environment survive without the language? Can the language survive without the environment?    

 Nancy Campbell

Is nature writing too nice?

I never much liked the English Romantic poets; even as an English literature-obsessed teenager, forced to write dreary essays about Wordsworth and Keats, something about them always made me want to spit. (But then, I was always more inclined towards the likes of Moby Dick than ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.) It’s not that I didn’t or don’t admire much of what the Romantics stood for: I do. It was absolutely necessary to provide an intellectual and artistic alternative to the increasing mechanisation of thought and rationalisation of nature in the wake of the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment. 

What I can’t tolerate is the way some of them executed it, and here Wordsworth (especially in his later years) is arguably the worst culprit. Faced with the growing understanding that however many nice poems you write, ‘nature’ isn’t all pretty daffodils, Wordsworth retreated into depression, and then decided that nature was probably subordinate to humanity after all, in the ongoing search for transcendence which none of these writers could seem to leave behind. So much Romantic writing is filled with talk of nature’s ‘sublimity’ and so much moralising nonsense accompanied it – and it can be argued that this only succeeded in further enhancing duality – the very division between man and nature that they set out originally to heal. They run the risk of putting ‘nature’ so far above human capability that in fact nature becomes God – something to be aspired to, but never attained by mere sinful humans.

Not surprisingly perhaps Nietzsche couldn’t much tolerate it either, referring to “The insipid and cowardly concept ‘nature’ devised by nature enthusiasts ( – without any instinct for what is fearful, implacable and cynical in even the ‘most beautiful’ aspects), a kind of attempt to read moral Christian ‘humanity’ into nature – Rousseau’s concept of nature, as if ‘nature’ were freedom, goodness, innocence, fairness, justice, an idyll …”

Fortunately for the future of British ‘nature writing’, antidotes to all this sublimity came along in the form of DH Lawrence, Ted Hughes, RS Thomas – poets for whom nature simply WAS, and did not need to be more than it was, or to represent any features that humans could superimpose on it. More on all that later, no doubt, on this blog.

And yet, and yet – so much of the ‘nature writing’ we see today still falls right into the same trap. We have seen it very clearly recently, in so many of the submissions we’ve received for our forthcoming ecopoetry anthology. Except that now, what is curious is that the poems which are focused on ‘poetic moments’ of admiring pretty daffodils are matched by poems that can only be described as self-flagellating guilt dumps. We aspire to an ecopoetry – to an ecoliterature – that moves beyond all of that. None of which is to say that guilt isn’t appropriate when we look at what we’ve inflicted on the planet – and none of which is to say that there isn’t still a need for very fine poems that celebrate the beauty and mysteries of the natural world too. But what we really long for is writing – whether poetry or prose – that connects the two conflicting responses to the natural world and then moves on. What we need from ‘nature writing’ is to replace it with genuine ecoliterature – literature that doesn’t just acknowledge, but that actively embraces all the contradictions and discomforts inherent in our relationship with the natural world – those contradictions which surface in all of our genuine attempts to reconnect. 

Sharon

Henry Williamson: Tarka the Otter, read by the River Taw

We are grateful to Tim Halpin, who is one of the contributors to the May issue of EarthLines Magazine, for saying that we could ‘steal’ the rather unusual reviews from his blog, Read by the River - subtitled ‘Book reviews on location’. Tim has a new take on book reviewing: ’I don’t read books just anywhere. The location has to be appropriate somehow. Maybe there’s an obvious connection between the setting of the novel and the place where I read it. Maybe there’s a connection with the author. Maybe there’s an obvious disconnection (I doubt I’ll ever get a chance to read a book about the Arctic on location, so why not tell you about reading it on the train, which is where most people will read it anyway). Maybe, if it’s a really absorbing book, it doesn’t matter where you read it.’ We hope you’ll enjoy Tim’s reviews as much as we do … and here is the first of them: Tarka the Otter.
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North Devon is all Tarka country now: there’s Tarka Tennis, Tarka Housing Association, Tarka Holiday Park, even Tarka Chimney Sweeps. But, to my shame, I’ve never read Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, despite having lived in Devon for years. So I’ve come to one of my favourite spots on one of Tarka’s rivers, the River Taw, to finally read the book.

I parked at Chapelton Station, on the Tarka Line, and walked across a field and over a footbridge to one of the best wild swimming spots on the whole river. In summer, at least. As I look for a good place to sit and read, a buzzard erupts out of a nearby tree. He struggles to find a thermal on a grey second of December, and instead lopes over to another standard hedge tree, his wings beat long, sullen strides. The khaki brown river is full. When I was last here I sat under the bridge with my legs dangling in the water, squeaming as small fish nibbled my feet. Now, a fallen ash tree that has been swept down the river is jammed in front of the bridge, pinned between two of the bridge’s brick supports. The noise of the river slowly crushing and stripping the corpse is not quite loud enough to drown out the sound of the wet A377 or the nearby timber merchant. I can’t even imagine an otter swimming here now. I settle down with a picnic blanket and Thermos flask next to the chainsawed remains of a tree trunk, and begin.

Something that Williamson does very well is give the reader a different perspective on the countryside. I’ve read that whilst writing he would crawl about through the grass, to get an otter’s-eye view. But even in the first chapter, the narrator goes further, describing different perspectives of time on the river. The river can remember the 300 years of a now-dead oak tree’s life, and knew rumours of the Roman occupation. A water vole hurries breathlessly to clear out its nest hole. My favourite measure of time (a bit later on) was when Tarka found an egg and “ate it before the shadow of a grass-stalk had moved its own width on the bank” (35).

As I get to the end of Chapter One, I realise that I’m having more trouble than usual falling into the book world. It has begun to rain gently, and there are now engineers working on the Tarka Line, as loud as the train, when it passes. But more than both of these, it is the river that’s hindering my imagination. The real river seems to be acting as a barrier to the river in the book, not letting me imagine otters swimming about placidly in the standing waves, eddies and debris. This is somewhat disappointing; not at all the result I’d expected.

Rather than raw fish and eels, I brought a flask of sugary coffee, which I drink whilst waiting for the rain to pass. It wouldn’t do to go getting library books wet, not even this one. I stare at the river, but see no sign of otters, or any other water creatures for that matter.

Williamson’s anthropomorphism is beautiful. Usually I can’t stand that sort of thing, but here it seems based on such close observation that instead of pretending the otters are like little fishermen with moustaches, it helps me see the otter’s behaviour in my mind’s eye. In fact the book is helping me a lot more than the Taw is, to imagine otters.

A duck! Finally an animal! I was beginning to think the river had been poisoned or something. A kingfisher! ‘Halcyon the kingfisher sped down the river, crying a short, shrill peet! as it passed the holt’ (22). A flash of electric blue and the shrill peet! was all I saw of this kingfisher too. But it did feel like a connection between my Taw and the river in the book. I shift position to get more comfortable.

As I carry on reading, I’m starting to understand what’s stopping me from wrapping myself up as much as usual in the book. Tarka’s family have just escaped the hunt and sought sanctuary in a new pond, where a dog otter is picking over the feathery remains of a drake it has just killed. Tarka finds the half-dead frog that the drake was eating as it was attacked, and takes it to a thorn bush planted by a lark beside the pool. All the while, the drake’s mate and her brood of ducklings look on in fear from a patch of bulrushes, which themselves were dropping pollen to make a yellow film over the pond. It’s a violent but beautiful snapshot of the pond’s ecosystem, painful but not cruel (the only cruelty comes from the humans with their gins and cries of Tally ho!). I look up from the book, the red line of the text still burnt into my cornea as I gaze at the green, green, green of the riverside. I’m a total alien here. The river is another planet, and I can hardly even breathe the atmosphere. The sawmill by the A377 screams with every new plank. Wrapped in bright red GoreTex, I feel less connected to the river for reading Tarka by the Taw than if I was curled up by the fire at home, pretending. The real world is constantly ridiculing any attempt at empathy. It’s like a play where Brecht’s ‘forth wall’ is constantly being broken. And it’s sad.

To put it politely, after sitting for two hours on a not-quite-waterproof picnic blanket, I need to stretch my legs. As I stand up, three pigeons explode from a tree on the other side of the river. I walk to the soft riverbank, down where the cows go to drink, and a cock-pheasant that had been hiding in what was left of the dead reeds flees noisily. Almost every animal I have seen this afternoon has been trying to escape from me. Tarka’s intimacy with the other animals, even his contact with those he hunts, makes me feel more alien by comparison. Instead of enjoying a day by the river, I feel like I’m walking through a village fête firing a Kalashnikov into the air.

I start reading again, and soon start to understand what else is making me feel uncomfortable. Williamson describes much of the action from the point of view of a bystanding animal, an owl watching as the otters find a new place to stay after one of the family is killed by an iron gin, a grey wagtail catching insects in the evening as the otters swim downriver. It gives me the feeling that I’m being watched. Perhaps this paranoia is exacerbated by my not really wanting anyone to see me here. I’m not actually on a footpath, though I’m not doing any damage, and reading by the river in the middle of winter might look a bit weird. I’d rather not face the awkwardness. Though I would love to be able to explain myself to the wildlife.

I’ve only read forty pages when I decide to pack it in for the day. My feet are getting painfully cold, and although it’s only 3pm, it’s dimity. I certainly want to continue reading Tarka the Otter. Williamson’s writing is engaging and not at all what I expected. But I think I’ll finish it inside, or at least in the summer. Don’t expect this book to bring you any closer to nature. In fact, I found it drove me further away.

Tim Halpin was reading Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson, publishing as a Penguin Classic in 2009 (first published 1927), on loan from Barnstaple Library, where there is a rather good Henry Williamson collection.