by Tom Cox
I’d walked past the woodyard numerous times and was dying to find out what went on in there. I only had to look through the gates at the giant logpiles and headlightless old vans to want to write a vast, epic work of fiction set within its boundaries. But you never know with a woodyard: you could pop your head inside and get a cheery welcome in a cloud of sawdust, or it could contain a dog who will bite off one or both of your testicles. Fortunately, when I finally got the chance to visit this one – through Dave, who in a bit of serendipity or perhaps mere logic in a world where woodsmen tend to stick together, was friends with its owner, Alan – in March 2017 it turned out to be delightful. Alan is seventy but says he will continue working with wood ‘until I drop dead’. He leaves the actual tree surgery to his son and grandson now but is on the receiving end of a relentless campaign from his new partner to get him to spend less time at the yard. ‘She won’t win,’ he told me. I asked him what it was he did there on an average day. ‘Just playworking, really,’ he replied, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I love it.’ When I arrived, he was standing on top of his tallest logpile, doing something I assumed to be very important and which I worried about interrupting. Now it occurred to me he was probably just enjoying the unalloyed pleasure of picking up and holding logs, as men have done since time immemorial for reasons they can’t fully explain.
When Alan used to get home from the woodyard, his wife, who passed away six years ago, was able to take one sniff of him and detect exactly which kinds of trees he’d been working with. ‘Douglas fir was always a dead giveaway,’ he said. When she worked in the office, she’d chuckle to herself watching Alan on the security camera as he wandered out into the woodyard and walked in circles, trying to recall what precisely he’d gone out there to do. His stocky smiliness and combination of being dozy yet very good with tools reminded me of my late wood-loving granddad Ted. Alan’s first tree jobs had been straight after school, when he worked for what he called ‘a hard, deaf bugger’. In those days there were no Kevlar-stuffed chainsaw trousers or gloves, and when the first helmets came into use in the trade his boss would call anyone he saw wearing one a ‘puff’. Despite his absent-mindedness, safety-scorning guru and lack of protective clothing, Alan, like Dave, has never been seriously injured, although his son suffered multiple fractures of the pelvis and a collapsed lung when working on a beech at Totnes Showground. Alan’s most dramatic tree experience was the time the branch of a fallen elm that had been wedged up against a concrete kerb twanged him dozens of feet through the air. ‘They told me that when I landed, my feet and nose were half-buried in the ground, but I can’t remember any of it,’ he said. He offered me a cup of tea. ‘I’ve saved you the clean mug,’ he said. ‘You don’t want this one,’ he added, showing me another mug, white but stained totally black inside with the remnants of a thousand dark drinks. ‘That’s what my boys drink out of. Never wash it. They don’t care.’
Alan told me I had to keep an eye on the time for him as he was scheduled to go what he called ‘rock ’n’ rolling’ that night in Newton Abbot. He said he was not good with time, did not let the concept of it trouble him much, an attitude which had historically made him a deficient capitalist but been beneficial to his stress levels. As he showed me around the yard he looked a little wobbly around the shoulders, but I sensed that if you ran at him from a great distance, he’d stay vertical on impact: solid, immovable. All these qualities, I thought, were very treelike. ‘You’re a tree,’ I told Alan. ‘I’m a tree,’ he confirmed. I’d witnessed a few of the modern biodynamic hippy farmers in the area chuckling in the village pub about Alan’s no-nonsense approach to felling, but he clearly cared deeply about his leafy patients. A few years ago a bloke from Torquay had asked him to come over and remove a walnut tree from his garden. Alan examined the walnut, which he found to be in rude health, and asked why the bloke wanted it removed. ‘It’s casting a shadow over my barbecue,’ he replied. Alan told him there was nothing wrong with the tree and refused to take it out. ‘A few months later I drove past the house and saw it was gone,’ said Alan. ‘Broke my heart, that did.’
The woodyard sits in a cool dell, and Alan loves the wildlife there, which proliferates but quietens down after heavy rainfall, when water gushes down the beacon and the area floods. ‘Lots of badgers and deer and rabbits and squirrels here,’ he said. He shook his head with a woodsman’s ruefulness. ‘Bloody squirrels. Tree’s worst enemies.’ We walked to the gate, and I admired a 1950s Airstream van with a few vital components missing from it. ‘That project’s been on hold for a while,’ said Alan. ‘Before my wife died I’d been meaning to sort it out, take it down to Portugal, see the proper old country there. Maybe I still will.’ I asked him what it was about that area that appealed to him.
‘The sawmills, I suppose,’ he said.
On the way back from Alan’s I passed the remains of the holm oak that had come down on my phone line. It had been so vast that although a fair portion of its stump still stood, its demise had changed the shape and angles of everything: the surrounding, smaller trees, the tall hills in the background, a formerly reticent allotment wall, now bolshie. Dave had told me that when a big tree like this comes down in a storm, it’s often not just the work of the wind. In this case there had been several other factors: the build-up of catkins at the top of the tree, several days of heavy rainfall leading to accumulated moisture and heaviness in the catkins. An hour or so after the holm oak fell, just as I was becoming cognizant of the fact that it had taken out all the modern forms of communication available to me, a policeman knocked on my front door to say a 999 call from my property had been recorded. I said that was impossible, as I had no working phone, but he asked to come in anyway, presumably just to check I didn’t have anyone tied up at gunpoint in my cellar. He seemed satisfied, especially after realising I don’t have a cellar. When he left, I walked to my garden gate, passing the spot on the concrete path where, earlier that morning, my cat Ralph had deposited some vomit which had since been eaten by a gull. I opened the gate and walked to the top of the hill past the tree and called BT from my mobile. What ensued was the following conversation.
ME: A tree’s come down on my phone line.
BT: OK. First we have to check if there’s a fault on the line.
ME: There is. It has a huge tree on it.
As can so often happen when you’re dealing with telephone and Internet companies, I soon became trapped in a labyrinth of bureaucratic computer-says-no nonsense, and a farce developed, raging on for a lengthy and precious period of my life. I was informed on a couple of occasions by BT that their engineer was on site fixing the problem but, being on site myself, I was able to confirm that this was untrue. I wandered back up to where the holm oak had crashed down and parted some large nettles and fronds surrounding it but did not find the BT engineer beneath them. With each succeeding call, I started to get a stronger sense that I was experiencing a classic example of linesplaining. With no mobile phone signal to be found in most of my house and garden, I spent several not unpleasant days cut off in every technological sense. One morning I also ate an apple. I felt like I was getting a very minor insight into what it would be like to live as a horse.
When an engineer finally arrived I told him about the police incident. He seemed unsurprised. The engineer said that when phone lines earth, they often automatically send a call to the emergency services. I could not help dwelling on the image: the holm oak had lived a grand life, through the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution and series one to twelve of The X Factor, and must have known its time was nigh, but as it breathed its last it was still desperate enough to call the emergency services for help.
‘Maybe it was trying to get hold of Special Branch,’ said the engineer. He told me that the damage the tree had done to the line was now repaired and my phone and broadband were once again functioning. ‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘It’s all a bit of a moot point.’
‘Oh really? Why’s that?’ I asked.
> ‘Your line was already more or less buggered. It had been chewed to ribbons by all these squirrels around here.’
8
BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT
The small lido where I swim during the summer months is unheated and when I arrive is often empty. When I first used to get in I’d lower my torso into the water very gingerly and wince a bit, but in more recent times being semi-naked and immersed in cold water has become such a normal state for me I throw fuck to the wind and hurl myself right in, barely noticing the chill. I take a little while to get going, not just because I’m warming up but because my first couple of lengths necessitate several detours, as I rescue the handful of bumblebees that are invariably flailing about upside down on the pool’s surface. If the bees are near the edge of the pool I do this with a cupped hand beneath the water and a gentle scooping motion that I hope will not hurt the bee or result in a sting, but sometimes when the bee is more centrally located I will return to my clothes pile and fetch an espadrille or a flip-flop, hold it aloft while swimming one-armed, then use it to lift the bee out of the water onto the concrete slabs at the side. If anyone who lives in the flats near the pool is watching me from their window, this must look very strange. This man is very committed to his latest piece of performance art, I can imagine them thinking. He believes he is all alone, unobserved, but he still goes through with it in such a serious manner. It is sad yet kind of admirable.
A lot of people might think it slightly unhygienic to swim around in the company of insects, but I regularly push the envelope of my aquatic interspecies social life into far more perilous bacterial territory. Last summer, on the hottest day of the year, I swam in the River Dart with my friends James, Bea, Monika and Helen. ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ we said to each other as we bobbed about in water much warmer than the lido, the smell of a barbecue drifting over from the shore and an early-evening sun winking through the boughs of the oaks overhanging the bank. Then we got out, towelled ourselves dry and watched in silence as a Jersey heifer lowered itself into the shallows and released a huge, hot jet of piss into an area only a few feet from where we had just been doing breaststroke.
I generally prefer to swim further upstream than this in the Dart, beyond the South Hams towns of Totnes and Buckfastleigh and their sewage plants, where it’s easier to convince yourself that the water is clear and pure and blank out the fact that there might be a decomposing ram wedged between two algae-shined rocks just seven or eight hundred yards around the corner. I have given more thought to these issues since my first year in Devon, when, as an almost certain result of overzealous river swimming, I developed a urinary tract infection right out of the top drawer of Satan’s tallboy, which subsequently degenerated into full-blown prostatitis. Early on a Saturday last July I traipsed a couple of miles north from the moor’s edge along rocky banks, past half a dozen canoeists, an elderly hippy couple sitting on the bank hand in hand and a lanky Rapunzel-haired girl with a feed bucket calling to three ponies, until finally I was alone next to a deep clear pool of black-gold water. I stood on a natural granite platform around twenty feet above the pool’s surface and envisaged the hidden jagged underwater rock that would slice mercilessly through my thigh muscle, leaving me stranded and bleeding as the cold, unforgiving moorland night thundered down. Then I thought, Ah, to hell with it! and jumped in anyway. In my defence I had previously done a reconnoitre of water depth and underwater rock location because, contrary to what some of my recent swimming missions might have suggested from a distance, I largely enjoy my life and do not actually wish to die before my time.
The current in the pool was benign, but when I swam up to the waterfall at the top end I realised that I was no longer moving forward and got a sense of what a formidable monster its force could be on a harsher day after some customarily heavy Devonian rainfall. As I walked back to the car and dripped dry in the sun and breeze I felt a cold electricity in my fingertips, and my entire body seemed to have a coating of dark, magic renewal, as if it had found something in the water that reminded my body what it really was, before all this distraction we tentatively call being a person. I returned home, faffed for a while in a delusional attempt to work, then got in the car and headed to the sea to swim some more. A mild but spectacular fret came in over the cliffs as I arrived, giving the Gammon Head rock the appearance of a smoky sea volcano. A sensible person might have turned back, but I have done various bits of research into being a sensible person over the last couple of decades and decided it’s not for me.
Over the last year or two I have become slightly addicted to swimming, and nobody is more surprised about this than I am. The last time I was addicted to swimming was between the ages of six and nine, when, over summer weeks that take on a quality of endlessness in my memory, I would dive repeatedly into an Italian swimming pool under a fierce sun and transform with great alacrity into a small sinewy human Brazil nut. My dad, reliving a Mediterranean childhood he’d never had, would dive beside me, no less boisterously, then play energetic games of table tennis against Germans and Italians and Austrians on a table down some steps behind the pool. ‘OOH, YOU BASTARD,’ I’d hear my dad saying to Germans and Italians and Austrians, as I got ready to dive into the pool again. ‘GOOD SHOT.’ These Italian holidays are such a large, powerful part of me that, any time I’m now in the lido and I get water up my nose, I am dizzied by a time travel stronger than that evoked by any smell. With this arrives a dramatic feeling of ambivalence. On the one hand, I have swimming-pool water up my nose, which is never pleasant; on the other, it’s 1983, I am back in Tuscany, nobody’s ever expressed an emotion via a GIF, I’ve spent the morning listening to Remain in Light by Talking Heads and I am about to eat earth’s greatest pizza for less than what you would now pay for a pencil. All people have years when they are more them than they are in other years, and 1982, 1983 and 1984 were all years when I was very me. This is probably a big reason why I swim. I also like the way it has changed my body, without me having to go within a mile of a gym, which is something I would rather pan-fry one of my own internal organs than do.
You have to be careful about saying this stuff nowadays, when technology has opened up whole new virtual corridors for fitness boasters to strut down, flexing their biceps and sticking their squat-toned rears in your face. People nowadays want to hear that you are abandoning your responsibilities to your body and bingeing on doughnuts and a six-pack of extra-strength budget lager. They do not want to hear that you are getting fitter than you have been for years, and they especially do not want to see a blow-by-blow record of it. So I will leave my fitness bragging at this: I feel better as the skinny slightly wiry person I’ve been since swimming a lot than the slightly skinny not all that wiry person I was before. I don’t think it’s for everybody, and I don’t even find skinny slightly wiry people especially attractive myself. Do whatever you want to do and don’t let a stranger dictate how you live your life. Eat some fried stuff with cheese, maybe? It’s nice.
I hesitate to call what I do wild swimming because I’ve always thought that’s a bit like calling lawn mowing ‘wild vacuuming’, but I do sometimes call it wild swimming because lots of people do, and joining in makes communication easier, and I think it would be needlessly intransigent of me to completely boycott the term ‘wild swimming’. Like a lot of people, I first attempted some more adventurous swimming in earnest after reading the inspiring book Waterlog by Roger Deakin, the late nature writer who lived only a couple of miles up the road from my house, across the border from Norfolk into Suffolk. Deakin won me over with the freedom of his writing and lifestyle, describing muzak as ‘chlorinated music’, and by being the first person apart from me I had come across who used the word ‘endolphins’ instead of ‘endorphins’. But perusing the excerpts from my diaries in 2010 and 2011 that centred around the indoor pool where I had been swimming; however, I can see that there might have been more than just Deakin’s prose nudging me out into open water.