Common Ground

by Rob Cowen

  From the old railway northward the earth is battle-scarred. Cracked trees slump as if contemplating the bone-white heartwood bursting from their bodies. The air has ripped through the hedges along the lane, slashing and tearing as it scattered felled limbs, snapped sticks and shredded young foliage everywhere. Another fizzing clicking sound cuts the air, this time from over the fields. It is an electricity pylon crackling from its high triangular crown like a giant insect scratching its mandibles. In a dip in the farmland to the north, a copse grapples with the vanishing wind in a final skirmish. Then the earth falls quiet again. I stand below the pylon listening to its alien song as evening drifts over the wounded land, softly, a shaken sheet floating down onto a bed. I’m wondering how anything can have lived through it when the tumbling notes of blackbirds pour from the holloway and wood. Then, louder, flung up towards the milk-moon above, the long hu … hu-hu-lo-hooooo of a tawny owl.

  Fast forward. We are back in the Antenatal Clinic. Once again we take a seat on the line of smart red chairs. This time our hands are spread over Rosie’s swollen bump. Our disinfected palms and fingers feel the fluttering kicks and movements from within. Opposite me, the owl is still Blu-tacked to its wall, solitary in that broccoli tree stuck between the noticeboards. How long it’ll be there, though, I’m not sure; a toddler turned loose by his exasperated and heavily pregnant mum is having a good stab at tearing it down. ‘Me-me,’ he says, dragging at its corner. You said it, kiddo.

  Among the many fantastic shapes and colours that make up the bird world, tawny owls do look remarkably similar to us – the two-legged vertical posture, the rounded head, the big eyes, the binocular vision, the cheek-like face and that beak projecting downward like a little hooked nose. Even the white-grey tufts of down around its face could pass for an unkempt moustache on an old general. These resemblances, of course, explain why they’ve been elevated into the realm of soft toys and grace our furnishings, clothes, bags and wallpaper. It’s vanity. We’re rewarding their human cuteness. The subconscious connotation is an old one, the Disney view of nature as something we can master, adjust and appropriate. Something just like us. In many instances this may be true, but watching birds of prey up close or the proximity of a birth or death forces us to think differently: we engage with nature directly, emotionally, microscopically, at the level of atoms, cells, blood, flesh and bone. We briefly see under its skin and witness its contrariness, its randomness, relentlessness, ruthlessness and beauty.

  Sitting with my hand hovering over my unborn child, I feel none of the indestructibility that gives our species its hard edge and cynicism. Rather, I’m acutely aware that we are as susceptible to fickle fortune as every other living thing. In a heartbeat or baby-kick, all of our modern disconnection can be stripped back to its opposite. We seek reassurance; I hold Rosie’s hand. And there it is: the hand, the arm around the shoulder, the soft kiss on the forehead, the inner voice you find uttering a silent prayer in a hospital waiting room. We often forget, but this is nature too.

  ‘Now, would you like to find out the baby’s sex today?’ Rachel asks, closing the blind as Rosie lies back and rolls up her top.

  ‘No, I think we’ll wait. We’d like a surprise.’

  ‘Good,’ says Rachel. ‘I think that’s nice.’

  Lights. The dashboard fires up. Another flight, this time over familiar ground. The probe circles, perches and listens. Rachel talks throughout this time, listing body parts as though reading the shipping forecast – brain: good; arms: good; shoulders, ribs and pelvis: good. She pauses occasionally to measure or make notes, and then turns the monitor around. Everything is discernible now in that black-silver sea: fingers, feet, hips, a little nose, knees. I can see its body flex and reform in amazing detail as the noise of the heartbeat pounds fast and strong, like thundering hooves.

  ‘You have a very healthy happy little baby,’ Rachel says eventually. ‘Would you like a photo?’

  I fold the printout into my wallet, a cocoon for the little one.

  But that’s all to come. Tonight I go down to the wood again. The tawny owls’ nest has survived the storms, for the male is out hunting early again, bringing food to his mate as she incubates their eggs. Setting up my binoculars on the pine stumps, I try to picture the embryonic owlets tucked up there in the tree and think about their chances. It wouldn’t be wise to get any closer, though; tawnies are famously vicious in their defence of the nest and known to attack dogs and humans if they stray too near. Such protective spirit is a fairly short-lived instinct, however. Their parents will care for the young birds for two or three months after they fledge then, around August, the juveniles will disperse to find a place to call their own. If they fail to find a vacant territory, they’ll quickly starve or, in weakened states, fall victim to predators. Nature will take its course. No hospitals, medicines, warmth or love to intervene.

  I leave them to it and walk back over the crossing point, heading for town to buy groceries for dinner. I carry that call with me and think about how lucky I am. As Edward Thomas has it in his poem ‘The Owl’:

  All of the night was quite barred out except

  An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

  Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

  No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

  But one telling me plain what I escaped

  And others could not, that night, as in I went.4

  THE UNION OF OPPOSITES

  I

  The day of the spring equinox is marked by a last, late, unexpected rush of snow falling soft and heavy under the cover of night. Nothing alters human consciousness so entirely and immediately as waking up to a different land outside the window. ‘A change in the weather,’ wrote Marcel Proust, ‘is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.’1 And he was right. This morning feels strangely hallucinogenic, like some prankster has spiked the municipal water supply. By nine o’clock everybody’s attempts at getting to work have been abandoned. Men lean into wheel-spinning cars helping return them to garages. Neighbours who’ve barely exchanged two words before lock arms and creep along Bilton Lane, their faces fixed in smiles. The talk is of schools closing, train cancellations, road closures. A day off.

  Parents drag sledges over a crisp white countenance, carrying muffled cargos of toddlers down towards the edge-land. But there is no edge-land today. Rural and urban have become briefly inseparable regions. There is only white earth and a dish-rag sky drifting with a few final flakes, like the aftermath of a pillow fight. Garden, yard, fence, farm, road, field – all are buried. Psychological barriers similarly forgotten, strangers surge together over the old railway and into the meadow, unaware of exactly where they are. It doesn’t matter; all the earth is theirs. Children scream at the sight of space and wade into snow, eager as sailors reaching the shallows of shore. Dogs bound after them, barking and biting at scalloped waves. Unsteadied, they are oddly fawn-like. Robins and chaffinches strike up from hedges and a wind blows through the belts of distant pines, twisting their tops so that they appear desperate to look. Birds, trees and sky congregating for a spectacle: the people returning to the land. This is common ground again.

  The scene that unfolds is dreamlike, out of time, refusing to fade even as the day yawns and reaches for its glasses. Snow brings an ecstatic calm, the same high, lightheaded buoyancy you feel after crying. Although cold, the air is clear and mistle thrushes burble from the wood’s edges. Irrepressible, nimble-footed, life dances over the fields in the delicate notes of birds and a dazzling searchlight sun. Beneath drifts, lolling green tongues of lords-and-ladies – Arum maculatum – lick away at the snow; young nettles, Jack-by-the-hedge and soft swords of grass tickle this crystal skin. I crouch down against an oak tree at the meadow edge and let the sun’s rays fall across my face, sending me into a pleasurable dizziness, a half-trance. This is the hour, the glimmering union of seasons. Everything testifies to it.

  Judging from its width, my guess would be that the oak is around 250
years old. Easily the oldest I’ve found here. A survivor. For a moment I wonder at how many red squirrel drays and wryneck nests it’s held across the vanished centuries. Maybe wildcats scratched claws down here among its adolescent roots. Today its choirs are in full voice: wrens trill, there are the bicycle-wheel squeaks of great tits and everywhere pours with the thick flute-notes of blackbirds, like blood flooding back into numb limbs. The exodus from town is unstoppable and the meadow throngs with people. Hands red raw, children roll up the snow in creaking channels to make the bodies of snowmen, leaving deep trenches behind them. Their brightly coloured coats and hats bob as they squeal and dip in and out of their burrows. I squint into the glare and imagine time slipping back to a late-August afternoon when the oak at my back was an acorn. Instead of the snow, I’m watching families harvest the plaited-hair spikes of silver-gold wheat. Boys and girls are tracing ancient patterns over these fields. We’ve all been here before, sweaty, bent and hacking with hand scythe and sickle, cutting callous-forming avenues through whispering stems, reaping, rolling and stacking sheaf. For a moment I’m part of another union, a brief and rare return to the earth for us landless masses.

  Perhaps those old enough to remember might carry this moment with them through largely room-bound futures. Dispersed into offices miles from here, the dim recollection of it may manifest sometimes in a bright wash of spring sun falling accidentally across a desk. Pausing, eyes will look out through the glass and feel a sense of belonging to a larger world. Or when old and alone in a nursing home, a window opened a crack for air may fill the room with the smell of swelling life and fresh snow. That aged child will sense the union of seasons again, close their eyes and escape through the gap.

  Such golden moments pass, evaporating into air, melting into earth, leaving only that which we carry with us. It’s midday and already the faint watermark of a moon is imprinted in the milky blue to the east. Children are rounded up, brushed down and carried back along the old railway, placated with promises of chocolate and TV. They cease struggling and slump dull-eyed on shoulders. Time’s up. The drug is wearing off. Conversations dwindle. Laughter ceases. I see why. Combined with the heat of the sun, their relentless industry has revealed divisions again. The gardens, fields and roads are exposed; snow has melted off the walls and fences and been stacked into gritty piles; enmeshed wires and concrete stanchions are uncovered. This is mine; that is yours. Shut the gates and doors. Slowly the town reabsorbs its populus, sorting and separating down freshly shovelled driveways, sluicing from minds this morning of freedom, turning thoughts to urgent bills, unanswered emails and phone calls. And I can feel this gravity too but I resist and remain, here beneath the oak. The day has something more to show.

  Later, I’m walking with a wilful sense of trespass through the wood and up into the fields. There is that same smell as when you rub dock leaves on bare legs. The sun has faded large tracts of snow; the land is blotched by wet wheat gleaming with an unearthly light. Out of one patch, a hare emerges. At first I assume it’s a rabbit until it rises tall, sniffs and hoists those long, Indian-ink-dipped ears towards the sky. Framed by the chequerboard town and purple-white of distant moors, I watch it hop in a circle then fling itself towards the field edge, through a blackthorn and out of sight. Most memorable is its coat: the gingery dun of high summer soil still brushed with the grey flecks of midwinter camouflage. The hare, the common hare: a hybrid, a union of opposites running through the edge-land.

  The man who encounters the hare

  Will never get the better of him,

  Except if he lay down on the ground

  The weapon he bears in his hand

  Be it hunting-staff or bow

  And bless him with his elbow.

  And with sincere devotion

  Utter this one prayer

  In praise of the hare.2

  Winter and summer. In the wheel of the year, these are the most distinct seasons, the opposites. Everything about them is contrast: darkness and light, cold and heat, life and death. Winter even looks like the photographic negative of a summer day. Where these meet in the spring and autumn come days of union. You find flashes of both extremes. Falling snow becomes foaming blossom; rain is suddenly refracted by bright sun; morning frost fades into water-colour evenings of peach and pale yellows. Balance is everywhere, and not in some wishy-washy sense. I’m talking planetary equilibrium.

  The word ‘equinox’ derives from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox (night) because in the northern hemisphere these are the moments in March and September when day and night are roughly the same length. Briefly the sun sits exactly over the equator and the tilt of our planet’s axis is neither away from nor towards it. The north and south poles stick straight up and down, like a cocktail stick through an olive.

  We live in a world where the shift from dark to light is nothing remarkable. It is a constant process. The switching on and off of electricity falls to fingers countless times a day and we conjure heat at the touch of a thermostat. At hundreds of miles per hour 35,000 feet up we move between hemispheres, passing from winter to summer in minutes. It makes it hard to conceive of the impact the spring equinox held in earlier times. To eyes long tired of merciless winter, a strengthening sun returning to banish the darkness was a supremely powerful moment. As the icy crust split, destruction gave way to re-creation. Land was miraculously fertile, fecund and full of energy. The equinox saw the arrival of a resurrecting light and, to a species dependent on earth and animal, it simply meant survival. Understandably we sought symbols that embodied this sequence and associations flowed and formed. As is our habit, we needed to identify and name the unknown, to give it shapes and representatives. Among all the candidates one creature was a front-runner. Widespread across the northern hemisphere and thriving with the birth of farming, the hare leaped into our consciousness and imagination.

  For an animal that spends its existence above ground in all weathers, the ‘brown’ or ‘common’ hare (Lepus europaeus) remains a mysterious and perplexing thing. Usually nocturnal, solitary and almost always in hiding, it is practically invisible most of the year. In winter it seeks refuge in woodland, hedges or its well-concealed ‘forms’ – the shallow scrapes it makes in soil. By early May its activities are lost again among the crops and grasses of arable fields. As such, it appears to belong entirely to the spring, materialising from the substratum and congregating to play out energetic breeding games. Promiscuous and highly productive, it is new life in fur form.

  In several languages the hare is, literally, ‘the leaper’, one who springs up, with the connotation extending to the dawning of being, as much as a new season. In Egyptian hieroglyph the symbol of a hare denotes ‘to be’. It is persistence made flesh. The name of the god Michabo, creator and personification of the sun, regarded as a common ancestor across all Native American people, is a compounded version of michi, meaning ‘great’, and wabos, meaning ‘white hare’. Michabo – the Great White Hare, God of the Dawn.

  Closer to home, over the same parcels of earth I’ve known at sunrise, the Anglo-Saxons worshipped Eostre, the Germanic Goddess of Dawn. Her name changes depending on location – Eostre is Northumbrian dialect; Eastre, the Old English of the West Saxons; Ostara is Old German – but all are thought to derive from the ancient dawn goddesses Eos (Greek), Aurora (Roman) and Ushas (Indian). The eighth-century English monk Bede notes in De Temporum Ratione that before Christianity absorbed Eostre’s name and rituals for its own celebrations of resurrection, April was ‘Eostre-monath’, the dawn month. Some claim Eostre had the head and shoulders of a hare, even that the animal was her attendant spirit, carrying a procession of lights or torches into the world. Others believe this is merely revivalist neopaganism, popularised in the twentieth century. Whatever the truth may be, the evidence of the hare as an early and enduring cultish figure is testified to by its Christian associations with witchcraft. Its demonisation, and later appropriation, by a newer religion tells of an existing position of reve
rence in people’s minds. Certainly by the time of conversion this symbol was too engrained to be lost; it’s tempting to imagine the hare was simply baptised and born again, neutered, turned to chocolate and re-imagined as our harmless Easter Bunny.

  There is also a connection between hares and that other Easter tradition, the giving of eggs, a custom that dates back at least a thousand years. Brightly coloured and reputedly delicious, the eggs of the lapwing were traditionally collected by adults and children and eaten around April, becoming so popular throughout the Victorian period that preservation orders became law in 1926 to protect the bird. This precedent to the modern Easter egg hunt was made easier by the fact that the bird nests on the ground. Much like hares, lapwings prefer fields for their large range of vision, vital for detecting approaching predators. So similar are their habitats that hares have even been known to borrow lapwing nests to hide in. People disturbing a hare might have found a nest of eggs beneath. It’s understandable that they would leap to the conclusion it was the hare that had laid them.

  Despite being a creature of the field, the hare springs up as the hero in many flood myths, including folk tellings of Noah’s Ark.6 The flood itself is, of course, a metaphor for new beginnings, symbolising the world’s resurrection from death – the stormy darkness giving way to renewing light. In some narratives, the Devil tries to scupper the Ark by creating a succession of holes in its hull. Noah plugs each one until, running out of suitable materials, he cuts off the female hare’s tail to use. In another version, it’s the hare’s foot that Noah uses to plug the leak, driving away the Devil in the process. The superstition of carrying a hare or rabbit’s foot for luck persists, but in the story the act kills the animal. God repays its sacrifice by granting the remaining hare on the Ark – the male – the power to give birth.