A Familiar Place

My mind was like the silence:

An equivalence of peace.

 

Norman MacCaig

 

The night that I looked into the eyes of the deer was ten years ago. As my feet carry me down the same old path from the moor to the pine woods, I tread now through an ocean of familiarity that tugs me this way or that with its tides of memory. Where shall I go today? There’s no longer any way from here that I have never gone. I walk through a misty sunrise, a winter blizzard, a night beneath gimlet stars. My feet press in mud, kick pollen from heather, slide on glassy ice, caress the warm green grass with bare skin. In places where I used to walk young pine trees now stand taller than I am.

I’ll go my favourite way today. The way no-one else ever goes. Not around the woods but through them. All the way through to the river which pours freshness into me, then up its length to the bridge and back along the path.

Still I wonder at the names this place might have for itself, but I’ve finally succumbed to that most human trait of pinning names onto familiar places and things. I might as well name the ocean waves, but there you go. Perhaps names are a fair exchange for all they have given me.

In the clearing that opens up beneath the moor I step out as quietly as possible to view Old Faithful. There stands the granny pine in all her grace and splendor – the tree that was crowned by the fogbow all those sunrises ago. Today she is lit by a hard edged winter clearness that traces white along her black branches. She’s old and glorious, with the panoramic view of the mountains rising up beyond the shadowy green layers of the forest.

I cross through the clearing by way of the deer trail that leaps over the muddy pool (always great for animal tracks), weaves its way through the wettest of ground and then climbs the dry lump of a drumlin that whispers to me about ice and upheaval in times gone by. I step over a fallen tree trunk (this one has ‘always’ been fallen) and follow a faint trail to a copse of ancient pines. The trees here are old and grand – spacious down below and massive up top. The ground is saturated with dead branches, squirrel chewed pine cones and needles. Through the litter and the green stalks of blaeberry goes the trail. At the edge of the trees is a perfectly flat piece of soft mossy ground I call The Bed.

This is one of the places I pitched my tent on one of those nights on my sunrise pilgrimage, and sometimes I like to stretch out here for a snooze, or a daydream. I drop my bag into the heather and lay down with a sigh, feeling my body settle into the contours of the ground, feeling the tension of my arms and legs release. The perspective of everything changes, and I have absolute leisure to study the trees rising above me and the sky beyond. White and grey fluffs of cloud drift overhead through the sunlit branches, a zephyr of wind caresses me and I feel the forest is a great ship drifting along beneath a sapphire sea. Is it the clouds moving or the forest? But by rolling my head to the right I see the answer in the solidity of the Cairngorms, standing on their side next to a vertical horizon. Winter’s cloak is on the mountain tops, blazing white and black in the sunlight. Braeriach is hiding from me today behind a curtain, but I can see its feet sticking out. Water trickles through a stream somewhere under my ear. I feel tiredness begin to seep away into the soil, my heart lifted. The thrill of mountain country is in me again. When I rise and look around, I see with renewed clarity.

At the foot of The Bed is a view framed by two trees. Between them I can look out across the clearing to where the ‘Sylvestris’ live on the other side. They are a family of pines: Mum and Dad in the middle and the kids to the sides. Dad is grand and proud, Mum elegant and graceful with a flowing crown of green. I’ve taken their portraits many times from here. I see them in every season; in mist, in rain, in sunrise and sunset reds and blazing white snow. The kids are growing up – already losing the uniform cone shape of young pines, growing into the fullness of their individuality. Just to the right of the Sylvestri family are the Mad Lads. Four gurning and twisted pines who hang around in a group. They are all called Scot and they’ve got a lot of growing up to do. They act hard, but inside they’re just big saps. I see them with a flash of golden mist, beams of shadow and the flutter of woodpecker wings.

I am deeply in love with this place. Like the poet Norman MacCaig in Assynt, I don’t want to possess this place, but to go on offering myself up until it possesses me. All I can offer it is my presence. It gives me much more in return. In every step there are a thousand things of wonder.

My abilities to dawdle are prodigious. Other landscape lovers may fix their goals on a peak or a distance to be covered, but I am never happier when given a few hundred square yards which I can explore for hours. I leave a long trail in the woods, but it is twisted like a ball of yarn. It’s a testament to the patience of my wife, and the love she herself has for the world, that when I turn to her during a walk with that slightly sheepish smile and shrug of the shoulders, she knows and understands that I need to stay right here and look at this particular tree. For how long? I never know.

With my sight and body refreshed I start forward again, oh so gradually. For some people it’s torture to walk slowly. This pace would be agony I dare say. But not to me. I have a settling peace in me and my legs do not want to hurry, do not want to make sound, and do not want to carry me forward any faster than the ruggedness of the ground suggests I go. My feet vanish among the long grasses and stalks between the rocks, and rest there.

My constantly turning head observes the colours and shape of the light. I hold a tree branch against the gorgeous light of the sky; then turn a willow tree around by turning myself, watching the lucency of the light as it catches just one or two softly lit leaves. I stop to adore the raindrops dangling from birch twig tips. Back the way I came, the hillside is wooded with birch trees tipped with orange caps of leaf, like dwindling orange candle flames, the last of their summer foliage. All of this in a few yards, and every yard just as rich. Do not rush. But when I lose sight of the snowy hills, I do feel the urge to hurry through the trees until I can see them once more.

 

Through deeper, closer sections of wood I press on to reach the river, which is announced by its gentle roar and the promise of bright space and light through closely packed pillars of wood. By trial and error, or in this case, trail and error, I know exactly the right line to take through the trees so as to arrive at the best spot. A sweeping bend in the water with a bouldery brown beach, and the conical peak of Carn Elrig framed perfectly between the banks. Here I watched the snow slip from a branch and fall through a sunbeam for the first time, the crystals of ice in a sparkling curtain as they illustrated the path of light. Here I ‘swam’ with a gasp and a big scream in the purely clear and acutely cold water, the pain blissful as I emerged and flolloped from rock to rock in desperate search of painless footing, almost hysterical at the sight of myself, naked and flailing around in the woods. Skinny malinky went to the river, skinny malinky had a great shiver… fortunately this is one of those places that almost no-one knows about, and I don’t need to be modest.

 

The water of the river that passes me here rises high up in the mountains beyond the tops of the trees. For mile after mile it drops, cascades and runs down, picking up pace and volume. Its journey from the mountains to the sea is total. It can’t skip over any part of the path. It sees everything, touches everything on its way from the airy mountain sides to the peaty banks of the shady forest. It shapes itself around each stone and twig – takes on an inverse of their forms. Under sun and moon it flows and drifts along. Without the slightest effort it washes into everything, always seeking the easiest way. Every nook and cranny of a boulder, every crevice of its banks is touched and known. It transports pieces of one place and fits them in as new pieces of another. Unhurried, it does all this. So I am fascinated by its touch, its sight and its sounds. It has its own beauty when it moves, and when it is still it reflects the beauty of everything else around it, hides itself under a reflection. It makes space for me, waits patiently when it must, gives life where it passes, responds only with teasing joy if you should try to strike it, and yet still it will carry the mountain away. The ultimate power of water is in its gentility and patience. By these characteristics, it touches everything in the land.

There’ll be no swimming for me today though. I’m too much of a wimp for the cold, and instead return to the path. I continue along the track through an area that was planted rather than naturally seeded. The trees here are densely packed and ramrod straight, shutting out most of the light. Above me though is a strip of bright sky, and I love to crane my neck back as far as I can, and continue to walk along the path, keeping to it by staying in the middle of the light. From this unusual perspective the tree tops seem to bob and rise their way into my vision, then collapse and fall away behind. I keep my eyes fixed to a cloud high above. The sky seems so vast when viewed this way.

 

I reach the iron footbridge that spans the river, and continue a little further upstream to a beautiful clearing beside a foaming bend in the water. Here is the perfect place to sit – a slanting granny pine that grows right beside the water. Its root bole is huge and swollen, forming a living seat at the base of the trunk, and the trunk itself is at the perfect angle to recline, with a little groove in the jigsawed bark that fits the curve of my spine as comfortably as soft grass. This is the Reading Tree, and I’ve whiled away many an hour here with the song of the river in my ear, lost in words of nature. Sometimes I wonder if the tree grew to fit my back, or if my back grew to fit it. The place and the person growing into each other. Either way, it feels like a place I am supposed to be. Everything about it fits me as perfectly as the wood at my back, or as neatly as the water fits in the river.

 

I stopped there for an hour or two to watch the light pass across the forest. Coming and going, colour and shadow pulsating, separating things and blending them together, the sunlight plays games. Every brightening flood as the sun steps from behind the clouds on to the front of the stage brings a surge of pleasure, closed eyes and an upturned face.

When I returned to the top of the moor I saw everything now looked so different to when I stepped out into the clearing this morning. A steely grey cloud was bearing down on the hill, drawing filaments of rain that from a distance look like dark air. At the horizon a contrasting bright blue patch of sky glowed bright through the girders of the trees. The colours of the world were darkened and powerful. I waited and watched, and in a trice the cloud had passed over and was darkening the far end of the glen ten miles away.

As I turned to finally leave a car pulled up. A window slipped down and a hand bearing a camera appeared. Then the window was back up, the car turned and gone. The man did not so much as set foot outside. He gave nothing of himself, and I am sure in return he got nothing back.