The Wild Places (Penguin Original)

by Macfarlane, Robert

  Late that afternoon, Roger and I reached the furthest seaward point of the Ness, the point at which the coast crooked and the peninsula began its slow sharpening away southwards. The sea had thrown up a ten-foot-high rampart of wet shingle. We scrambled down it, the stones hissing and slithering under our feet, and walked along the tideline for half a mile, picking up pieces of wood, comparing flints, finds. We discussed the driftwood, tried to imagine the story of each stick or shard; where it had floated from, which river had washed it down to which sea. Roger could tell the wood-type of each curled or flattened piece: a waterlogged oak plank; an ash shard that had the brittle texture of cuttlefish bone; even a rare spiralling cherry bough, weathered to a silky silver-grey, like the handle of a well-used implement.

  We made a little woodhenge out of the driftwood: a rough circle of poles and spires, pushed down into the gravel - a homage to Derek Jarman’s driftwood garden on Dungeness. Our henge would last as long as the next high tide.

  Then we sat, watched the sea and talked. I told Roger the story I had been reading of a ‘ghost forest’ that had been discovered on the eastern coast of Greenland in the 1950s. A young glacier had sheared away volcanic crust to reveal a stratum of 100-million-year-old sandstone, embedded in which were the fossils of long-dead forest: seeds, leaves and bark imprints - the spectres of persimmons, walnuts, sycamores, tulip trees, even eucalypts and breadfruits. A six-man expedition had been mounted to investigate the fossils: the scientists sailed a ‘small fine schooner’ into the remote bay, across ‘a cold grey mirror of water that was sprinkled with icebergs in surrealist shapes’, passing through ‘eerie arctic twilight’. It was the kind of mission I wanted to be called up for, I said: ghost trees, the tropics haunting the poles, adventure, ice . . . A month or two earlier I had given Roger a book called The Great American Forest, by Rutherford Platt, and he had brought it with him to Orford. He got it out from his knapsack, and read a section he liked about chlorophyll and the colours of autumn forests: how the great flaring, which looked like death, was in fact just a sign of the trees hunkering back for winter, ready to go through the sap cycle again.

  The shingle rampart behind us locked off the rest of the world. There was only the steep wet gravel to our west, and the sea to our east, brown and frightening. Fast, fat, stone-heavy waves plunged aggressively, and the big wind filled the air with cold spray. I could hear only the detonations of the waves, gravel spattering like bullets, and the wind’s steady roar. A single sailing-boat, visible through the haze, marked the edge of the known world.

  Perhaps we should not have been surprised by what we found out there, sitting on a concrete housing near the lighthouse. It was a tiny shelter, a little cabin a foot or so high, made of broken bricks and hunks of concrete, with a loop of coat-hanger wire sticking from its ceiling, and a gap for the front door. There was no clue as to who had made it, or why, but the impulse to have done so was no mystery. It was a shelter, however rudimentary and scaled down, for this unprotected front-line space.

  At evening, as the sun was low and red in the sky, we crossed back over the River Ore, and into the woods and fields of Suffolk. A single mushroom-cloud of cumulonimbus dominated the eastern sky, and it was soaked in the red fission light of the late sun.

  Some time after our day on Orford Ness, Roger became unusually withdrawn. He stopped writing as regularly, and he spent increasing amounts of time alone at the farm. We - his friends and family - thought it was the effect of his book, which he was close to finishing, after so many years’ work on it: that he had gone into hibernation for the final stages. I went over with my friend Leo to see him, to find out how he was, and to see if I could help at all with the book. He cooked lunch for us, but did not eat himself: he had lost his appetite, he said - probably the pressure of the work. When Leo and I went for a quick swim in the moat, he stayed on the bank.

  Two weeks later, Roger began to slur his speech, and to hallucinate that visitors had come to stay at Walnut Tree Farm, when he was in fact alone. He was taken that night to hospital. A scan revealed an aggressive tumour on the front left lobe of his brain.

  The first part of Roger’s treatment was at the hospital close to my home. I went to see him there each day that he was in, felt hot-eyed, talked brightly. It seemed impossible at that time, to me as to all of Roger’s friends, that the cancer would not ebb away. Roger’s unstoppable vitality would simply overpower the disease.

  This did not happen. Roger became progressively more ill. There was difficult and exhausting medical treatment. There were long periods of befuddlement, and shorter periods of clarity, and in one of these periods of clarity I saw him. We spoke about some of the journeys I had been on since he had fallen ill, and about Wildwood, which he had finished only a few weeks before his diagnosis. He told me about oak trees; how when one of their number was under stress they would share nutrients via their root systems. It was a measure of his generosity and his devotion to nature that, even when so near to death, he could still speak unjealously of the ability of trees to heal themselves. I told him about the birch trees I had been climbing in Langdale, how whippy they were, and how, if you found a young tree slender but strong enough, you could climb to its summit, and allow your weight to bend the tree’s tip over and down, so that it deposited you lightly upon the ground from which you had begun, before springing back up to the vertical. Roger asked me to get his copy of Robert Frost down from the shelf, and to read out Frost’s poem ‘Birches’. It ended:So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

  And so I dream of going back to be.

  . . . I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

  And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

  Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

  But dipped its top and set me down again.

  That would be good both going and coming back.

  One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

  The cancer killed Roger appallingly fast. Five weeks before the equinox, I drove over to Walnut Tree Farm to see him for what I knew would be the last time. He was sitting in the kitchen, and was unable to raise himself from his wicker chair. I bent to give him a clumsy hug, and was shocked to feel how thin he was within his old green jumper. His partner, Alison, his son Rufus, and his friend Terence were there too; they had been taking gentle care of him for weeks. We all sat together in the kitchen, talked, drank tea. When the others moved off to do jobs around the house, I sat alone with Roger for a while, held his hand, spoke a little. I gave him a stone that I had found for him the previous month, on Embleton beach in Northumbria: it was a pyroclast, grey basalt ringed with what I thought was red serpentine, and it had been spewed out by the volcano complex whose eroded roots now formed the Cheviot massif. This was once lava, I said as I passed it to him. Roger held it in his hand, and rubbed his thumb over its rough side, to give himself the answer of a texture. A cricket clicked along the edge of the old biscuit tin that sat on the table. He fell asleep, and I left the room quietly. On the way home, I stopped the car in a lay-by and cried.

  Three days afterwards, with Leo and another friend who knew Roger, I travelled by train to the North Norfolk coast: past the ironstone reef that rises near King’s Lynn and gives the walls of the older houses a rusty colour, and then out to Holkham Bay. We swam in wild waves at dawn and dusk, saw a marsh harrier hunt over the whin, and in the evening we read out the pages from Roger’s book that described his adventures on that stretch of coast. That night, we slept in a clearing in the pine forests which run down almost to the sand at Holkham. I spent half the night in a hammock that Roger had lent me, and half of it down on the thick soft needle carpet, where it smelt of sap and resin.

  Roger died six days later, at the age of sixty-three, still in the house that he had built around himself thirty-eight years earlier. He had never worn anything but used clothes, so I turned up for his funeral in shabby brown cords and a jumper with a hole in the shoulder, to find everyone else in sui
ts and black ties. After my initial horror, I realised it didn’t matter at all. His oldest and closest friends, several of whom he had known since childhood or university, spoke movingly about him. There were readings from his letters and from Waterlog. The coffin was cremated with a swatch of full-leaved oak branches upon it. Loudon Wainwright’s ‘The Swimmer’s Song’ was played as the coffin rolled through the velvet curtains, and the congregation wept.

  In the weeks following the funeral, I could not shake off a sadness, close to depression, at Roger’s death. Grief played its tricks: I kept forgetting he had died, thinking for a second I could ring him up to ask him something, or call over to see him. I had known him for fewer than four years, but friendship with Roger did not seem to follow the normal laws of time. ‘I want all my friends to come up like weeds,’ he had once written in a notebook, ‘and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don’t want the kind of friends one has to cultivate.’ That caught it exactly. Spontaneous and unstoppable. Roger had not just loved the wild, he had been wild. Not in the austere and chastening sense I had once understood the wild to be, but natural, vigorous, like a tree or a river.

  We had shared adventures, and there would have been others to come, but for the cancer. A night stake-out of a badger in Thornham Woods, near Walnut Tree Farm. A trip to Cumbria in the coming autumn, to climb and swim and give a joint lecture. At some point a journey to Australia, where we had both been invited to speak. When the invitation had arrived, Roger had wondered if we could earn our passage out to the Antipodes as oarsmen on a quinquereme. I hadn’t been sure that we could.

  I tried not to grieve too much: to do so seemed somehow to deny the worth of Roger’s extraordinary life. But I still could not rid myself of a sense of waste. I had wanted to know Roger as he aged into his seven-tiesand his eighties, for he would have grown old, properly old, so superbly. He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth. Everything he owned was worn, used, re-used. If anyone would have known how to age well, it would have been Roger.

  One night after his death, feeling morose, I read back through our correspondence. His e-mails were sharp, erudite and always inset with beautiful little field-notes, told for the joy of telling. His letters, which he preferred to write by hand, would often be accompanied by a poem, or a leaf or a feather; once a bunch of tiny teasels for Lily. One passage from the correspondence stood out, evoked Roger and his world instantly. It was the spring before his diagnosis, and he was in excitement about new arrivals at Walnut Tree Farm:Fox-cubs here, under the shed just beyond the shepherd’s hut: the one that’s invisible because under an enormous hedgehog of brambles. They are well-grown now and at dusk or dawn, frisking on the flattened grass, somersaulting, vaulting, tumbling as I watch them from my chair in the hedge. What spring means to a fully wound fox-cub!

  The next day, someone wrote to me to say that having heard about Walnut Tree Farm, from the obituaries that had been written about Roger, she had added it to her ‘list of imagined magical places’. I liked that very much, liked the idea of Roger’s home becoming somewhere magical even to people who had never been there: part of the wild maps they held in their minds.

  13

  Saltmarsh

  The autumn equinox was close, and a northerly wind blew down across the east of Britain from Scandinavia, carrying with it cold temperatures and migrating birds. Through the blue skies were arriving fieldfares, mistle thrushes, redwings, starlings, rooks, lapwings, coming in from Siberian river deltas and Finnish forests. They arrived with the Arctic trapped in their feathers, landing in gusts on the newly ploughed fields, or flying overhead in chattering companionable groups. Raptors came too, singly or in pairs: sparrowhawks, peregrines, leaving their boreal roosts, moving south as the Arctic coasts became too cold for them, and the polar sea began to grow its bark of ice. As I walked home one day, a sparrowhawk came past me at a low glide, then rose up to the branch of a glossy laurel tree across the road. It perched there for perhaps half a minute - barred tigerish chest, airman’s helmet of grey-blue feathers, burnt-yellow eyes - then pushed off the branch and sculled out of sight, leaving the laurel tree shivering.

  As the bird migration got underway, I decided to travel south-east, out to the clays of the Essex coast, where woodland and field frayed away to saltmarshes, and the saltmarshes gave into miles of shining mudflats. Out there I would be able to watch the moving birds, and I hoped the journey might somehow help me shift the sadness of Roger’s death, which I was finding impossible to shake off or even lessen. It occurred to me, too, that the mud would complete the mineral dissolve of my journeys: begun on hard rock, in Essex they would reach the softest and most yielding substance of the archipelago, its tidal muds.

  I left home on a bright mid-September morning. Another northerly was blowing. A pale lemony sun hung low in the sky, throwing a light that fell unexpectedly hot on the face. There was the vinegary smell of windfallen apples in my garden. Chestnuts bobbed like little mines in park ponds. I drove at first through the landscape of Essex - the poor mocked Essex of jokes and news items - passing chain pubs with pseudo-Tudor frontages, and business parks in ‘Phase II of Construction’: colonies of unfinished corrugated-steel hangars. I counted ten second-hand car dealerships: showrooms of metal and glass, blank-plated BMWs and Mercedes parked in obedient ranks on the outdoor lots, and red and white bunting strung between the arc-lights overhead. St George’s crosses were everywhere, snapping in the wind on domestic flagpoles, or hanging as air-fresheners from rear-view mirrors. Somewhere away to my south, I knew, was the industrial shoreline of Dagenham, and the oil refineries at Coryton, which at night released sudden air-balloon flares and licks of flame from their chimneys. Once I passed a roadside shop selling garden ornaments. Its forecourt was filled with gnomes, and Bambi-like deer, lying at rest with their legs crooked up beneath them. In pride of place at the front of the display was a plaster falcon of indeterminate species, perched on a polka-dotted toadstool twice its size.

  But as I got further east, deeper into the county, away from the main roads and the towns, the marks of this new retail Essex thinned out and fell back. Farmland began to border the roads. A digger dozed up a pile of manure twice its own height, which steamed in the morning air. Tractors gave new naps to thousand-acre fields. Old Man’s Beard climbed profusely through the chain-link fencing on a stretch of roadside. A group of magpies joked in a stand of beech trees. A line of willows leaned out over the road, trailing fingertips over the roofs of passing cars. The density of woodland thickened until it was visible on every horizon.

  Near the village of Woodham Walter, I stopped, my eye caught by the sign bolted to a big zinc gate. ‘Falconer’s Lodge’, it read. I got out, and as if by proof of place, a small sparrowhawk slipped from a hedgerow oak a few yards away from me, and made a concave glide to the next tree along. It stood on a low bough, observing me. It seemed to have orange eyes, and from this I guessed it was an old bird. For as sparrowhawks age, the colour of their irises changes. They are born with pale yellow irises, that darken to orange over time, until, in the very oldest birds, the eye blazes red in colour.

  Falcons, hawks and other raptors had slipped in and out of all my journeys, and now I had come to Essex to hunt these hunters, and to see if wildness existed in this far south-east of the country. I had come, too, on the path of someone who had himself entered into an obsessive relationship with the birds.

  Each autumn and winter, between 1953 and 1963, a man called John Baker tracked the peregrines of coastal Essex. ‘Peregrines arrive on the east coast from mid-August to November,’ Baker wrote. ‘They may come in from the sea in any weather conditions, but are most likely to do so on a clear sunny day with a fresh north-west wind blowing.’ Every autumn, once the hawks had arrived, Baker would follow them - at dusk and dawn, and often for whole cold days - through the mixed landscape of woodland, field, sea wall, mudflat and saltmarsh over which they flew. Baker could not fully explain his fixation wi
th the birds; he knew only that he was committed to a quest whose meaning he did not understand, but whose necessity he could not refute. So absolute was his commitment that, during the months of pursuit each year, he would go almost entirely feral, avoiding human contact as far as possible, keeping to cover wherever he could.

  For a decade, while Orion stood bright in the sky, the peregrines hunted and Baker hunted them. Following the falcons for so many miles, he came to know the Essex landscape intimately: its boulder clays and river gravels, its cricket-bat willows and hazel coppices. He moved, once winter arrived, along ‘the bone-white coral of frosted hedges’, and through ‘black hard winter woods’. He watched small waders - knots, plovers, turnstones - form their palping jellyfish-like shoals in the air over the mudflats. He tracked nightingales from the sound of their singing. He collected beautifully marked feathers: partridge, tern, woodpecker, peregrine.

  Baker became, during those years of chase, an explorer of what he called the ‘beyond-world’: the wild world of birds and small creatures that existed in hedgerows, in woodlands, in the air, and out on the coastal borderlands of the mudflats and saltmarshes. This ‘beyond-world’ was always occurring, mingling with our world of tarmac and cars and pesticides and tractors, rarely more than a turn of the head or a turn in the road away. Most people were entirely blind to this world, but Baker saw it wherever he looked. In his eyes, the Essex landscape - never more than 150 metres above sea-level, only fifty miles from London, heavily farmed - was as inspiring and elemental as the Pamirs or the Arctic.