By the time you realise you must be mad, you’re already committed, and you probably should be. If you were more sensible you would have walked the short way round, along the road, out of the wind. If you were more sensible, you would have got the bus. If you were more sensible you probably wouldn’t be here at all – and where would be the fun in that?
On a day like this you have The Freshes all to yourself…except for the one dog, stick firmly in mouth, head down, shoulders into the wind, resolutely leading its owner towards home. Even wetter than you, the dog-owning man stops, grinning and dripping. “Summer’s finally here,” he laughs. He hesitates as if he wants to talk, and you do too, but really the wind could easily lift either of you into the creeks, so you plod on.
You lose sense of distance, and memory, and the old boat seems further out into the wildness than you remember, but eventually you find her. Waterlogged, but still holding on, barely. Despite the odds she has survived another winter…but you pause to notice how few of her ribs remain upright now, the last wings of them are spreading to rest on the ground. A tired angel. Maybe it will be the summer that finally takes her away. On this wild empty day she makes you think of Viking burials, but she will leave no marks to be unearthed by archaeologists. It’s hard to dig through mud. The ooze, when it takes her, will take her completely, digest her slowly. She will sink and disperse. Perhaps she will regenerate as samphire or sphagnum.
The mud that takes her planks will rot them rather than preserve her one-time elegance. Her robustness. Her fearless-before-the-wave-ness. Her name has already gone, and her living history. The best that can be said is that her passing has not gone unremarked. Does she know, you wonder, that she has caused such pause over so many years, such wonderings? Does she know that songs are sung of her, poems written, tales spun? You want to re-christen her before she finally passes beyond our ken, but more than that you wonder what names she originally bore, what her true story is.
She lies there, aching and giving up, and saying nothing more. It is as if she is laying herself open to the sky and begging: enough already, take me!
But you know that there are others holding her back, wishing her stay, tying her to another season, wanting to come visit again.
On a day like this, it is too wild to be philosophical. Better to keep your footing. To stay upright against the gales means you need to keep moving. The path curves and you are glad to have the wind at your back for a stage…but it’s a fickle wind today, and the path twists as well, and just as you’ve become accustomed to your legs and arms as masts that allow leggings and sleeves to billow out as sails and maybe dry a little, suddenly you’re face on into it again. Head down, glasses rain-dashed and useless…but the waterproofs are holding up. Your skin is warm and dry within – so much so that you feel the need to snuggle back into yourself, as if you were your own duvet.
You are too far out to turn back. And besides, by now you are actually enjoying it…the wind that howls so loud it almost drowns out the fighter jets somewhere up there beyond that heavy grey weight of the sky, weight of the wars, weight of the world. The wind is winning. You are enjoying the way the rain crackles against the hood of your jacket, like static, white noise from an untuned radio, messages from outer space, or just interference. Audio snow. Real flecks of almost hail…ice crystals that never got to be snow, or stones, could only manage to be cold rain.
You walk on. The windmill you’re heading for keeps shifting directional relationship to the path, and sometimes fades from view altogether. You find comfort in the shining white of the row of cottages, just as you lose it in trying to sight St Nicholas’ at Salthouse, the church-light has been ghosted in the cloud that is eating the low-lying Walsey hills. You imagine yourself at sea and needing that light for landward. The wind threatens to take you the waters. And the rain only stops long enough for you to down your hood and allow a breath of wind to cool head and neck before it starts up again.
When, later, you’re asked for words that speak of Spring, you will forget all about daffodils and
bluebells, gambolling lambs and fluffy white clouds…you will think only of this Spring, today, this April, in all its petulance and unreliability, in all its squally tempers, howling gales that sing in the telephone wires and turn chinking mast cables to angry clanging. You will think of yesterday afternoon, when a walk along the quayside felt threatening, as if you might be lifted like an abandoned Spar bag and sent sailing over the expanses of treacherous mud to rest, out of sight, slowly rotting, like an unremembered old fishing boat. You will think of the wind-speed gauge, fluctuating wildly, topping at 50 mph and remember riding motorbikes at twice that speed without being as cautious as you felt at that moment.
On a day like this you feel exposed. You feel so much yourself, that you have stopped resisting the weather and are standing taller into it, smiling with it. You stop to look at the carvings on benches. You take photographs through rain blurred lenses. You remember how this place is in the placid days…how tame it seems…how a bright wide sky can confuse people into not seeing the treachery (yes, that word again, there is no other) that is always here in these creeks and mudscapes, what a shape-shifter this land has always been. It is also more itself today. You are meeting on equal terms on a day like this. Probing and hiding and exposing, both you and the land. And the sky which keeps on coming down to meet you.
The sea is out there somewhere, but cannot be seen nor heard on a day like this. This is a ‘coast path’ in name only.
You know that you didn’t know how much you needed this. To be alone in the wild weather of the wetlands. Memories arise of other walks in other winds and other rains in less appropriate clothing and in relationships that were already doomed, and on a day like today, you know that your resistance wasn’t against the land or the weather, but against all the other stuff…unburdened of that, you can give yourself over to walking out on the berm between the mud-flat creeks and the fresh-water marsh, the rain beating at your cheeks or your back, the wind buffeting you cross-wise or pushing you forward. You stop feeling, you stop thinking, you just breathe it all in, soak it up.
There is a pause when you get close, and you’re back into your mentality and thinking warmth and coffee and who will there be today…and then you see what you’d forgotten: the wide back sweep around the reedbeds, not so close as you thought. But you smile anyway. You remember sunny days of walking here, writing here…but can’t remember what you wrote. You think that maybe this is a day you will remember. The weather and the words, both.
On a day like this, you remember other days like this. You remember Ireland, and Hadrian’s Wall, and the walk down into Beddgelert. You remember walking to school and cycling to work. You remember Iceland’s northern coast and whale-watching that never happened because the captains of ships have more sense than you do. You remember a Winter Solstice, not so very far away, and watching the rain on the pond, a gathering of friends, simply standing quietly. You might even remember the time you squatted down underneath a railway line waiting for the storm to pass. You remember pages too wet to write on, and ink that simply swam away.
Mostly, on a day like today, you grab hold of this new memory. Wild weather in the wetlands. Mostly, you will remember how you only met one other person out in it, and how you both laughed at your own absurdity. That too is an irreplaceable kind of joy.
