Skytrails

By Leonard Yip:

Kruger National Park, South Africa
June 2019

We spend the day in search of lionesses – all afternoon in the jeep, through the golden dust clouds of the Sabi Sands, out onto the low bareness of the bushveldt at the height of its winter. 

Jess, our ranger at the wheel of the jeep, tears off-road across brambles and dirt ditches, stopping every so often where bush gives way to sand. The Shangaan tracker with us, aptly named Advice, dismounts here: tracing the padded footfalls of the big cats in that pliant, wind-dusted earth, ghosting into the acacias and re-appearing again with a new set of directions in which to chase.

We never do see the lionesses that day, but the journey back to the lodge is marked with a quieter wonder. The sun sets and sinks and kisses the earth in fire, composing the leafless branches of fever trees into sharp silhouettes. Dark shapes of elephant herds in the distance move along the horizon line. In between the cold clarity of moonrise and the sun’s final dip beneath the Drakensberg mountains, there is a moment that seems to hang long and suspended in the clear air. Unprepared for the quickness of nightfall in the bush, I crane my neck upwards and the oncoming dark smothers me in its sudden descent: an entire sky dissolving to black.

Staring into its enormity, I lose my sense of perspective as it settles across the ends of the veldt. I sit in mute, fearful mesmerisation, this vast and unknowable thing erasing scale and obliterating our field of vision. Landmarks disappear and the roads before us are swallowed up into an inky chasm. My stomach lurches and I feel like I’m falling, leaping upwards into the infinity of everything I do not know. I reach reflexively for the guardrails of the jeep.

This uncanny, reversed vertigo clears only when the stars wink themselves into existence. The shapes of the veldt resolve themselves again faintly by the pinpricks of light. Cloud-like, the galaxy begins to pattern itself across the sky, looking for all the world like a rippling reflection of the road below us. Jess slows the jeep and leaves the lights dead. She and Advice teach us to navigate by the stars, locating the Southern Cross, mapping a southward bearing from where its lines bisect along the axis. They tell us the stories and folktales of the Shangaan bushmen – that the Milky Way is thought to be the trail walked by the spirits of their ancestors, and how a girl once threw the sparks from an ember’s core deep into the night sky, where they gathered into the constellations that guide the sojourner and the wayfarer home. 

Sat there listening, I am amazed at how acts of imagination become so closely tied to acts of pathfinding. I think of how writers and etymologists have followed the origins of the word ‘learn’ to the Old English ‘leornian’, meaning ‘to get knowledge’. The imprint of its lilting consonants and rolling vowels on our tongues trails even further back to the Proto-Germanic ‘liznojan’; to find a track. Learning, then, carries the same sense as following a track, making known the unknown through the tracing of one sand-swept footprint at a time. Even across cultures, how we make meaning of the world so often finds its way back to the very act of finding a way – galaxies becoming ground, stars turning to soil, walking and tracking as learning and understanding. Garnette Cardogan once wrote that ‘walking is, after all, interrupted falling.’ His words spring back to my mind as Jess and Advice map out the night sky for me, the resonance of trailblazing disrupting my sensation of upwards descent.

Advice turns on the searchlight, and the beam lances hot and bright ahead of us. The jeep trundles along the trail home. The air goes wild with the noise of the bush coming to life, and hyenas navigate by lone stars rising to their shadowed kills. Somewhere, lions roar into the night.

***

Leonard Yip is a Singaporean writer with an interest in landscape, people, place and faith - and often the intersections where these meet. He recently graduated with an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature from the University of Cambridge, and his work can be found at leonardywy.wordpress.com. 

Irreplaceable – an interview with Julian Hoffman

We are extremely pleased to hear that Julian Hoffman – longstanding friend and contributor to Elsewhere: A Journal of Place – has been shortlisted for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation. Julian has been shortlisted for his book Irreplaceable, in which he visits habitats around the world that are under threat and which is described on the Wainwright Prize website as being ‘not only a love letter to the haunting beauty of these landscapes and the wild species that call them home, including nightingales, lynxes, hornbills, redwoods and elephant seals, it is also a timely reminder of the vital connections between humans and nature, and all that we stand to lose in terms of wonder and wellbeing.’

To mark the shortlisting of Irreplaceable for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation, we spoke to Julian about his book, the places he visited and the people he met, and the work that is being done and needs to be done to prevent the further loss of such special and important places.

Interview by Paul Scraton:

Elsewhere: One thing that strikes the reader even before you sit down to get stuck in to Irreplaceable is the diversity of places you visited in the course of your research? Was there one particular place that can be seen as a spark for the project, and how did you come to selecting the places to visit for the book?

Julian Hoffman: The spark for the entire book was the Hoo Peninsula in Kent. Slotted between the Thames and Medway rivers, this extraordinary span of glorious marshland, tidal creeks and ancient villages was threatened to be turned into Europe’s largest airport by a proposal championed by London’s then mayor, and now British prime minister, Boris Johnson. The development would have devastated the peninsula, eradicating a massive expanse of protected bird habitat, as well as levelling three entire villages and their 13th century churches. It would have stolen so much of what makes the place so special. But what inspired me to write specifically about the plight of that threatened place was the resilience, bravery, passion and persistence of three people who were doing everything they possibly could to save this home ground of theirs for the benefit of both human and wild communities. So that was the beginning, the Hoo Peninsula; and that day in the company of these three residents was the day when I suddenly understood what loss in the natural world meant. Because so often we measure loss numerically, through so many acres of destroyed woodland or meadow, or by how many millions of breeding birds have vanished from the skies of Europe. But through the stories of these people, and the complex, interwoven beauty of the place and its wildlife that they introduced me to, those numbers became real, visceral and relatable. They were suddenly transformed into the vibrant reality of lands, waters and lives that would be ravaged by the project.

After that, I realised that to approach the issue of loss in the natural world, and more importantly the potential for resistance to that loss, required a global perspective if I was to do it justice in any way. Because these issues affect human societies and nature across the planet. I also wanted to document as many varying habitats as possible, because biodiversity and the flourishing of communities are utterly dependent on a spectrum of functioning ecosystems. So I followed up stories of threatened islands, coral reefs, mangrove forests, tropical jungle and tallgrass prairie, while also consciously investigating what urban nature and green places mean too. And finally, the other important criteria for selecting the threatened places was my desire to trace their stories in real time, exploring them alongside the brave individuals and communities seeking to protect them. Which meant only writing about those places still actively threatened, where no final decision had been made regarding their future. Sadly, this also meant that some places I’d originally intended to include in the book had to be left out because they were destroyed before I could even get to them. These are places that exist solely in memory now for the human and wild communities that once knew them.

Elsewhere: Some of these places are very small… perhaps even unknown to people who live within a couple of miles of them. Can you give our readers a sense of why such places are so important and, as in the title of your book, why they are Irreplaceable?

JH: It didn’t take long to realise that the size of a place bears little relationship to its depth, or to the quality of connection fostered there by people. Our attachments to place can be founded on the small and intimate as easily as the expansive and remote. And for a world in which more than half its human population is urbanised, it’s critical that we pay more attention to small green spaces in cities and local suburban sites. In some respects, it’s taken us a pandemic to recognise just how essential these unsung places are. A recent survey by the Campaign to Preserve Rural England revealed that over half of respondents said that during lockdown they had a greater appreciation for how important local green spaces are for a community’s health and wellbeing. And yet these are precisely the kind of places that are at greatest risk of being destroyed, regularly threatened with being turned into car parks, luxury housing and commercial interests. And with the British government’s new slogan of ‘Build, build, build’, the situation will only get worse, when green spaces of enormous importance to local people will be regarded as expendable and sold off for development instead of being preserved for the benefit of the wider community. Between 2007 and 2014 alone, only four of 198 applications to close allotment sites were rejected by the Secretary of State. So even though allotments are absolutely protected in UK law, the other 194 were destroyed. And with their loss, as with any loss of green space in a city, nature suffers another shrinkage of real estate in which to dwell alongside us, and that world of potential connection close to home, where we often first come into contact with nature, is further eroded. And critically, for those people who lack access to green spaces further afield for socio-economic reasons, these small, unsung, nearby places are often vital for their wellbeing.

Elsewhere: One of the words we’ve heard a lot in recent years has been the idea of “wilding” or “re-wilding.” What role, if any, do such projects have in the struggle to save endangered places?

JH: I think rewilding is critical to the return of natural abundance. By leaving space for vital, elemental processes to regain their fluidity and wild expression, we enable a greater flourishing. And just as importantly, between rewilding and what in North America ecologists call ecological restoration is the opportunity to right some of the wrongs and heal some of the wounds we’ve inflicted on the world’s lands and waters. To rethink the direction that our neo-liberal economic and political systems have taken us, recalibrating our value of what matters in the process, so that the healthy functioning of ecosystems and the prospering of wild communities is part of our everyday deliberations when considering human wellbeing. 

It’s a complex and emotive issue, and there are purists and non-purists to further complicate matters of rewilding, but what is fundamentally exciting about the prospect is how it offers the chance for imaginative leaps to be made, reconnecting us to species, landscapes and places that have been thinned of so much of their meaning because of our intensive industrial, agricultural and extractive practices. Actions that have led us to a world of separation and estrangement. But enormous possibilities for restitution exist, like the Kent Wildlife Trust’s plan to bring bison to within walking distance of Canterbury to aid in the creation of woodland habitats and their multitude of ecological niches. Or like the fantastic community rewilding projects that are taking shape in Scotland and elsewhere, bringing together landowners and individuals with varied backgrounds and interests in the pursuit of a more inclusive and wilder landscape. It’s not the answer to all the issues, of course, and many of our richest seams of biodiversity, such as wildflower meadows, which have declined by a devastating 97% in the UK since the 1930s, are critically dependent on human influence, but rewilding should be seen as one of the many major tools we have to reanimate the planet’s green and blue spaces. And just as importantly, it’s imperative that we simultaneously rewild the heart in a way that makes kinship with other forms of life a natural part of being human.

Elsewhere: What struck me when reading Irreplaceable was how the stories of these places and their futures were deeply interlinked with the people committed to defending them. Can you share something of what it was like to meet such people and also whether what you saw and heard from them changed your own feelings about endangered places?

JH: From the very beginning of the book I wanted people to be at its heart. I think the separation between people and nature can sometimes be replicated in nature writing and film-making that either actively seeks to exclude humans from the scope of the work or creates an artificial island of fecundity, reinforcing not only a distance between species but also a false narrative about how well the natural world is doing. But with Irreplaceable I wanted to make the interconnection between people, wildlife and place a fundamental aspect of the story. Because in order to repair this world of wounds, in Aldo Leopold’s stark phrase, we need to deepen that weave. And what I discovered in my journeys to threatened places, where I sought out ordinary residents as much as ecologists and conservationists, was the profound capacity we have for attachment with the natural world. The people I met there – taxi-drivers, soldiers, teachers and nurses – were actively enlarging the idea of home while trying to defend a place of importance, so that it included the more-than-human in its embrace. It was a deeply moving experience for me, but also wonderfully joyous, welcoming and inspiring being in their company. They showed me that positive, transformative change is possible.

Elsewhere: And have you heard back from any of them as to how they feel about the book?

JH: Yes, I have. And each time it was a really emotional experience after all the anxiety of wondering whether they felt I got the stories they’d entrusted me with right, which often included their own personal worries and vulnerabilities too. But the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Last November I was involved in an event for the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust on the theme of trees and irreplaceable ancient woodland and they’d invited the group of people I’d spent time with who were doggedly seeking to protect the ancient woodland of Smithy Wood, with 850 years of continuous wooded history, from being turned into a motorway services off the M1. I hadn’t seen any of these people since 2015 when they shared their stories of this woodland with me, and although we were now in a concrete venue in the middle of the city you could still sense that intricate world of trees and leaves and roots around them. And by sheer coincidence, that was the same day that we learned that Smithy Wood was most likely to be spared. And it reminded me that although four years had passed between our meetings, while I had been writing about other threatened places in the world, their fight to save that irreplaceable ancient woodland had carried on throughout that entire time. So it’s been an incredible honour getting to know such resolute people.

Elsewhere: So often it feels like positive environmental stories come down to the commitment and hard work of individuals or small groups. What do you think governments and other institutional bodies need be doing if we are to stop the loss of the places you write about?

JH: Firstly, and most importantly, to listen. I was amazed by just how many people in my journeys felt a connection to the natural world and green spaces in one way or another. And yet their concerns are largely ignored. The almost complete lack of attention given to environmental issues in its broadest sense during election campaigns and debates is a sign of how low down the list of priorities it is for most politicians. For many of them, particularly on the right, though by no means exclusively, the philosophy of perpetual economic growth is hardwired into their souls. They can’t see around it; neither what it costs in terms of other measures of wellbeing or how it’s a trap, a hamster wheel you can never escape from. All you can do is keep building, extracting, devouring. None of which is a destination in itself, just a way to keep the wheel spinning sufficiently that you can convince yourself you’re actually going somewhere. But listening to others’ concerns, especially when they don’t conform to your vision of the world, and absorbing exactly what scientists are saying about the devastation that climate change and biodiversity loss will cause, is absolutely imperative. And if they won’t listen, then it’s up to us as citizens to be far more pro-active when it comes to voting for parties and politicians who will.

Elsewhere: In a book like yours, where the situation can so often seem desperate, it can be hard to find hope. But I found Irreplaceable extremely hopeful even if not every struggle will be successful. Did you feel hopeful after writing this book and how do you feel now?

JH: I remember right back at the beginning, just after experiencing the Hoo Peninsula in 2013, wondering where the trajectory of the book would take me. Would it be a deep dive into grief, or an angry rant about the destructive power of capitalism? Would it be an elegy, or a tome of hopelessness? I really had no idea back then how the journey would unfold, but it didn’t take long to witness and recognise the enormous potential and capacity for positive action when people stand up for what’s right. When people work in cohesion on behalf of something bigger than themselves, uniting around an idea, a place, a wild species. This is what I came to call radical hopefulness. When the word hope is understood not in a passive context, which is what we all commonly do, but as an active verb. A verb that makes change possible solely by acting on it. So, yes, I remain hopeful, in the sense that I experienced what is not only possible on my journeys but actively happening in communities throughout the world right now. During the dark days, these are the stories I hang on to.

Elsewhere: As great fans of your work, from your writings for various outlets (including Elsewhere!), and your books The Small Heart of Things and Irreplaceable, the last thing we need to know is… what’s next?

JH: Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say! Like countless people around the globe, my plans were upturned by the pandemic. Which meant the book I was intending to write had to be shelved, at least for the foreseeable future, as the journeys, stories and interviews I’d pinned it on could obviously no longer happen. But in the wake of that disappointment, as I had a spring and summer at home instead of one on the road, a new vision for a book took shape. It’s called Shelter, and while not specifically about the pandemic it of course has everything to do with it. The idea emerged out of that need to stay in place, but also from an urgent sense of solidarity with other forms of life seeking to dwell in safety and security. For the past two winters, up to 14 wrens have roosted on especially cold nights in a long-abandoned swallow’s nest above our front door. To have them that near to us as we slept, and to watch them drop out of that shelter at dawn each day, often into a world of swirling snow, and then return at dusk from separate directions, has been one of the most extraordinary and enlarging experiences of my life. Just as they were departing their shelter for good in early spring we were entering our own due to the pandemic, so the book is really about living in a shared world – our mutual, fragile and astonishing shelter we call Earth – a personal exploration of wild lives nearby and how we might go about creating the psychological and emotional space for co-existence. 

***

Irreplaceable: The fight to save our wild places is published in paperback by Penguin. 

The Quarantined Photographer

By Stuart J. DuBreuil:

Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard...
– Gretchen Rubin

My time in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks was inspirational. The abundance of wildlife, in their own unique habitat, far exceeded this photographer’s expectations. Now, like most of us, for the last several weeks I’ve been in self quarantine with my wife at our townhouse in the west end of Richmond, Virginia.

So, what’s an amateur wildlife photographer to do? I found that while I couldn’t venture out to find the animals, they kindly came to me. Or rather, I discovered that they had always been around, but that I just hadn’t seen them. Isolation has taught me to slow down and observe my surroundings. As it turns out, the backyards, front lawns, and surrounding grounds and airspace in the neighborhood is teeming with wildlife. 

We have a bird feeder on a pole in our backyard, just beyond our deck. We fill it with black oil sunflower seeds, approved by the National Audubon Society – you know, the good stuff, that the birds love. It attracts cardinals, robins, finches, sparrows and other birds I haven’t identified yet. It also attracts squirrels and chipmunks, who can’t get to the feeder directly because we have a conical guard on the pole that prevents them from climbing up.  But the birds are generous. While they are feasting at the feeder they also flick out seeds onto the grass and deck so other creatures can share in the banquet. 

I witness this activity daily from inside the house, behind the sliding glass doors that lead to our deck. I will peer through the vertical blinds so I won’t frighten off the wildlife, and then take my photos through the glass door. Recently, I’ve found that I can walk out onto the deck, and if I walk slowly with no sudden motion, I can photograph the creatures without scaring them off. 

My next door neighbor, Scott, is also a keen observer of wildlife. He is working from home, but seems to have plenty of time to look out the window and spot interesting things going on. He will text my phone to let me know when he sees something that I may want to photograph. He told me about the  robin’s nest under his roof gutter, nestled on top of the curved section of the down spout. I was able to get some shots of the mother robin feeding worms to her baby chick. 

He also texted me about two other baby birds that were on his back lawn. One managed to fly up onto the brick wall that divides our yards. I carefully followed this tiny creature’s journey as he plopped down onto our deck and walked across towards the other side of our yard. I was outside, taking lots of photos, until he disappeared into heavy foliage. I spotted him squeeze through a small hole in the wooden fence leading to my other neighbor’s yard. Looking over the fence, I could see him meet up with a larger bird, who I assumed was his mother. I’m not sure what type of birds they were, but it was rewarding to see the reunion.

This is only a sampling of the drama that plays out daily in our yards. Sometimes it is life or death. I once saw one of the neighborhood cats on top of the brick dividing wall staring intensely at something on the other side of my deck. There was a chipmunk backed up into the corner against my house and the other neighbor’s brick dividing wall. Suddenly the cat pounced, and in the blink of an eye he had that chipmunk trapped in his jaws. He hesitated for a second and then bounded straight up the brick wall, prey in mouth, and was gone. 

By far the most amazing spot by my neighbor, Scott, was outside his front door steps. He texted me to look outside at his front steps railing. There, perched on the black wrought iron railing, I saw a magnificent hawk. It must have been 15 to 18 inches long including the long gray and black striped tail. I had never seen one like it before. I later identified it as an adult Cooper’s Hawk, with it’s reddish-orange barred chest and legs and gray back feathers. The head was capped black, and the eyes were bright red. I grabbed my camera and starting snapping away, hoping he wouldn’t fly off too soon.

Turns out he was not skittish at all, like the backyard feeder birds. In fact, it looked like he was poising for me. With his extremely flexible neck, he moved his head to see in any and all directions, while keeping his body perfectly still. He looked left, right, up, down, and behind and down so the head disappeared completely!  When he got bored with that, he flew off the railing onto my front lawn, startling me, so I stepped backwards. From there he pranced across the grass like a runway model, as I snapped away, hardly believing my good fortune. Then in an instant, he flew off.

My neighbor and I would also scan the skies for large birds flying by, like the Turkey Vulture or Blue Heron. Capturing birds in flight with the camera can be challenging, but I’m getting better at it with practice. Scott noticed that a Blue Heron flies over our houses twice a day, in the morning and in late afternoon, going and coming from somewhere close. I’ve been able to get a few good photos of the bird passing overhead. 

The life and death struggles of wildlife can remind me of what’s going on outside our little oasis. My wife and I are among the lucky ones. We’re healthy, retired senior citizens and we’ve so far been able to escape the harsh reality of getting sick, like so many others all around us. Just a few blocks down the road is an elder rehab center that has lost over 50 people due to the COVID-19 virus. We try not to forget them, nor the brave medical professionals who care for patients every day while putting themselves at great risk. Quarantine time has given me the chance to slow down, observe, and reflect on what’s important in life; and for that I am grateful.

***

Website for Stuart DuBreuil and Yoko Gushi

Here were giants...

By Fiona M Jones:

This is a mountain-range on Middle Earth. Twisted folds of rock, precipitous cliffs and narrow hidden glens. Deep caves below, where live the things that hide from the light of day. Confronted with this massif you must scale it or negotiate, at your peril, the subterranean pathways—

OK, it’s a tree stump in a cow field. It’s still epic. By its girth it must have been a giant, shrugging off the centuries, a thing that lived until it had forgotten how to die. This one’s the largest in a widely-spaced row just outside the southern boundary of the Pitfirrane golf course, along from the prisoner-of-war base. 

Somebody, at some point in the mid-to-late 1900s, must have looked at these majestic trees and decided to cut them down. Every one of them, levelled to knee-height. I wonder where the hundred-tons of wood went—how much was burned, which gates and roof-beams came from these. And when. These tree-remains have stood for decades, rotting hollow and silvering, mossing on the outside, concealing who knows what of rodents and invertebrates. 

Perhaps this row of giants would all have fallen by now anyway, succumbing one by one to wind or lightning, untidy in their dwindling. Trees should be tidy, someone must have said; and untidy trees are only worth their wood. 

But how tidy do you need a muddy field, one you can’t even walk through except after weeks without rain? Even before it was a cows’ field it was only a prison camp. Before that it would have belonged to the original Pitfirrane estate. Someone two or three centuries ago planted a row of saplings for the edge of a road or the boundary of a vista. Most land in Britain has changed its use so many times you’ll find a king in a car park or a Roman bath under a shopping centre. I don’t know what this landscape was when these trees first came here. 

Here were giants, at the edge of this boggy field churned deep with the hooves of cattle. Not much of each giant is left. Enough to house a few families of hedgehogs and mice, and a nation or two of woodlice. If you step on top of this tree stump you still stand upon the roof of a world. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Postcard from... Norfolk

By Rachel Alcock-Hodgson:

On my first morning home I wake up to the wide open view. Morning damp, not quite mist, hangs from the heathery drifts of bare trees beyond the fields. The purple and lichen green of the branches picked out in the golden light. The birds are in full throttle, twirling blackbird song layering over the thrum of wood pigeons. I step out, and begin to try and breathe the fresh coolness in, but it can’t quite calm my jangling brain, or ease the pressure on my chest.

The following days are defined by forcing my thoughts to settle and appreciate small pleasures - walks round the fields, bike rides, sitting in the sun looking out of the window and drawing. I have left the city and work to give myself headspace to negotiate a rush of crippling physical anxiety I had been hit with a couple of weeks earlier, seemingly from nowhere. This gives me the double edged luxury of time to appreciate where I am, but with a mind that I can’t keep on the straight and narrow, and routinely dives off into eddies of existential dread where my future is mundane, monotonous and always pointless.

The peace and quiet that penetrates bit by bit hustles with non-human busyness. I watch the negotiations at the bird feeders, blue tits shuttling back and forth between the feeders and the cover of the big half-pruned bay tree, nuthatches hanging upside down, squirrels making off with as much as they can carry.

Bike ride number one is my first lycra-clad ride in too long. By the house, the air is tangy with salt - surely we are too far from the coast for it to be from the sea? But mum can smell it too when I call her out. Neither of us have smelt this here before. As I ride, the rhythm of the exercise makes space for spring to dawn on me. Heading out of the village, the hedges are alive with jittering sparrows. The views I cycle through are full of wide, wet, ploughed, brown-pink fields, ready to sprout. Rich and solid, something in between the red of Devon soil and the black of Lincolnshire. Kestrels hang, fluttering at the edges. When one swoops low, its red-brown back is a softer reflection of the fields. 

Dense clumps of acid yellow primroses hug the ground, clustering at the bottom of trees on the verges. Near Happisburgh and its red and white lighthouse, there is the hazy, vanilla smell of daffs, and as the road winds and sinks down through sheltered banks, strong wafts of wild garlic. I remember that I love the feeling of battling the wind for miles and miles then turning the corner and my bike taking off and the tarmac starting to hum.

There’s a comfort in navigating by place names I know, not needing a map. Knowing the landscape feels like I am part of it, connected to those who have gone before me and walked the footpaths and lokes that crisscross the fields and squeeze in between gardens and houses.

Buoyed up by this, ride number two starts with us - my dad, mum and me - pootling out into the chill dusk. We are heading towards the landmarks of my childhood, Witton Woods, Bacton Gas terminals, Happisburgh lighthouse.

Even before we had quite set off en famille, mum started to give us a guided tour, accompanying the first pedal strokes with an anecdote about the post-man who’s just driven off and his ‘lunchtime liaison’, then telling us who lives in every house and what lies ahead at every cross-road. Uncharacteristically, and surprising myself, I don’t default to grumpiness (‘I know where we are mum!’), instead letting myself listen. I have the obvious but startling realisation that my connection to this place is not just an innate one with nature, or general countryside, it is also because of the web of community my mum has spent 30 years working hard to create. Resting into the familiarity of place and people, feels like leaning back into a hot bath.

On Sunday, mum and I walk. We end up on the hill above the village in the wind blasted churchyard where my maternal grandmother is buried. Her stone is dull stormy grey. Tall, blunt and asymmetric, conspicuous above the others. It commemorates her achievements in blocky capitals: her Merit award from the Royal College of Physicians, her ‘Dr’, and her specialism, rheumatism, in Greek. Very her. And very different to the usual ‘in loving memory’ and family lists, on smoothly curved and polished granite. 

My grandmother never lived here. Her name is Scottish, via New Zealand, worlds away from the generations of Hannants and Dixons that populate the graveyard. Though her family connections aren’t listed, she is here because this is where my mum chose to be. We sit sheltered on the grass, bathed in warm spring sun and feel held by the generations beneath us. My tangled feeling of family connection and connection to the land all the more significant.

We end the day by gardening into the dusk, bonfire cracking and smoking like on the busy Sundays of my childhood. I enjoy the methodical and companionable progress of weeding, listening to the woodpecker jackhammer a hollow tree, and a blackbird’s aria. We stay out until the birds leave and the cooling shadows overtake the warmth of the sun, finally going inside quietly contented with the day. 

***

Rachel Alcock-Hodgson lives in Edinburgh, but has roots in Norfolk. She is a walker, climber, swimmer, knitter, mender of anything, gardener, cyclist and reader. She did an English Literature degree a few years ago, and is getting back into writing after a pause - having realised that it’s an important part of her understanding of the world.

This story was published previously in a different form by Mxogyny.

Definitions: Loke is a Norfolk word for a short, narrow lane. Used in the countryside and towns. 

Podcast: Folk on Foot

By Sara Bellini

“I have forgotten the cold” repeats Nancy Kerr in a song about the ragwort with its “crown of gold” and the cinnabar moth whose life entirely depends on it. It is a song “about climate, about weather and about love”. Her words particularly resonated with me this winter that feels unjustly deprived of cold. 

Later on she talks about the link between nature writing and writing folk songs, the stories that folk musicians carry with them and the landscape that is one with these stories. The beauty of nature and the concept of communality, of sharing the same piece of Earth and looking after it together, appreciating it, being part of it. 

The conversation between singer-songwriter Nancy Kerr and host Matthew Bannister reminded me again why I listen to Folk on Foot. Because through this podcast you get to know folk musicians in their own words and at the same time you walk with them in the places all over the UK that inspire them and they call home. For example you find out that Peggy Seeger has an apple tree in her garden in Iffley and the locals pick the fruits and make apple juice out of it, which sounds just lovely. 

The episode I referenced earlier (and you can find at the top of this post) followed Nancy Kerr along the Kennet and Avon Canal and coming soon in this Season 4 is Frank Turner. In the real world, footage from various podcast recordings will be shown by Matthew Bannister himself at King’s Place, London, on the 14th of March. The Wild Singing weekend is part of the Nature Unwrapped series and features performances by folk musicians and environmentally inspired artists, so have a look at the programme and ticket availability. Meanwhile, as usual, be nice to the bees.  

Wild Singing
Folk on Foot  

Arrowhead

By Katherine Peters:

Arrowhead, named for the lake which lies at the heart of a nameless pinewood, was, for the first decade I lived there, a wilderness. We’d moved from the prairies, driving east until our endless views were obscured by a dark spray of pine. Within days my siblings and I had laid giddy claim. Though the wood was once leased by the Diamond Match Company and slated for development, no evidence existed to disrupt our explorations except the cant marks we came across now and then, a diamond-enclosed D burnt into bark. Cities a remote apparition, this wild tract uninterrupted except for a few hunting camps and peopled by eagle, moose, bear—the center of my world was, for most, the end of the world. 

My parents built our home just about from the ground up. Durable post-and-beam raised out of sixty-foot pines from our acreage; later, profusions of phlox, hydrangea, rose given their concentrated hue by acidic forest soil. From the safety of our cultivated lot, books in hand, woodfire blazing in an old stove, we listened to the loons sounding the dark. 

Over the next years the woods were measured, divided, clear-cut, cheap housing raised at regular intervals to accommodate Portland’s low-income surfeit. A different wilderness emerged, generated by reduced constructions: the effects of economic hardship and limited access to education compounded over generations, and the pain of societal indifference. Social illness could be read in the band-aid consumption and accumulating refuse that seemed to barricade many of the occupants in and the rest of the world out: foreclosures, empty swimming pools, plastic playhouses embrittled by the sun, cars run into the ground, rusty skidoos, powerless powerboats. In school, stories littered the daily periphery, whispered in lunch-lines and recess queues: abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction. My guerilla war with loggers and excavators converted to elaborate daydreams in which, by reconstructing each house I could transform the lives of its inhabitants. Darker moments found me lighting a Diamond match in mind’s-eye, rebuilding from the ground up. Even my daydreams of opulent elsewheres corroded under the glaring realities we encountered in wealthy coastal villages, where facades concealed the same spectrum of human health. 

I returned home last year after a long stint abroad, with an accumulated disarray of remembered objects collected over a decade of travel and curated within me by no order I could name. After years of remote horizons, I was confined suddenly to the network of unpaved paths that, labyrinth-like, encircle the lake through the thickest stands of remaining trees—roads for which no map exists, with street signs that echo and intersect each other in their attempt to bear witness to what they have displaced. Getting lost is a given. I walked the tracks relentlessly for months, in all weather. 

At the same time, my mother was sorting through the objects my grandmother had left behind after her death, reading the tags affixed to each on which she had written, in her close hand, a detailed account of the object’s history, care and storage instructions. The narratives of these travelling objects—paths extending over decades and thousands of miles—intersected largescale events with their keepers’ unseen emotional lives. Garden tools, well-used, in pristine condition; a level in sound working order; a passport for “no country”; a feather blanket filled with prewar down and carried through combat zones. They spoke the private register of political violence: lost homes, wartime flight, immigration, work camps, death camps, mass graves. If they spoke of being marked and hunted, they also spoke the hope of being free. Textually inscribed, each object posed a question. How—now, today—do we take symbols in hand: till an unspeakable past to cultivate our rocky lots. We understood, finally, that familiar stories, told and retold, had formed a set of care instructions for life: collect knowledge because it is priceless and weightless; live sparingly; love richly; conserve resources. The narrative instrumentality that moved compass needle cast its shadow, pointing us uncompromisingly onward, and also to invisible sites of trauma. Inherited texts marked us “From Away” in a community with their own sets of cultural blueprints. They also generated resonances I discovered on returning.  

On my walks, I travelled deeper into the cultural landscape. Unexpected encounters destabilized long-held notions. I met a pastor-turned-carpenter with nine children, the oldest of which had won an opera scholarship. A woman who lives in what she calls the “Keebler House” and edits the local Gazette, for whom Arrowhead is the center of the world in the way it is epicenter of the earthquakes that shake the state. There is the young boy who leapt, rope-swing in hand, from a giant pine by the lake, only to get tangled in the cable and plunged headfirst, arms bound, into the water. And there is the man, referred to distrustfully by many Arrowhead folk as “The Big Indian,” a six-foot-tall crippled war veteran, who dived in and cut him loose, then returned that night with an axe to cut down the pine and himself free of the stereotype. A pack of boys that had transformed the old tennis-court in the woods into a skate park with cement blocks and sheet-wood, for the sheer joy of movement. A little girl who fishes at dusk most evenings from the shore, catching sunfish mostly, scales glittering lilac and silver in the dying light, and kisses them each as they gape speechlessly at her before tossing them back. 

In quieter moments, flashes of returning wildness pierce: the sharp long calls of geese in storm darkness; an eagle diving from a great height over the lake to face me up-close, dark eye casting out his challenge; a hawk in hunt, lifting laboriously toward her shrieking nest, a squirrel dangling in her talons like a paraglider gone wrong; a cyclone of swallowtails drunk on magnesium; water-made diamonds—wind-cut, cloud-sieved. Permeating all, like insight, the clear scent of pine. Nature I had considered lost re-emerged on these walks, relocating me though I travelled the same paths. A world I thought gone—one unowned, fiercely free, writ with love and connection—I discovered displaced within. 

***

Katherine Peters recently completed a dissertation on landscape and literature called “Disruptive Geographies” and teaches at University of Southern Maine. She is currently at work on a series of essays about her travels, as well as a book project. Her work is forthcoming in Canary.

What's On: Nature Unwrapped, Kings Place, London

Chris Watson, recording Orcas, Ross Sea, Antarctica (c) Jason Roberts

By Sara Bellini

This month, London’s own King’s Place launched Nature Unwrapped, twelve months of events revolving around the topic of nature and our interaction with it. The first evening saw artist-in-residence Chris Watson and activist George Monbiot comparing the soundscapes of healthy and suffering ecosystems, featuring music by Ewan McLennan.

The programme encompasses contemporary, classical and folk music, as well as storytelling, screenings and illustrated talks. Some musicians previously featured on Elsewhere will be there, namely Cosmo Sheldrake in February as well as Kitty Macfarlane during the Wild Singing weekend in March, in collaboration with the podcast Folk on Foot. A few events are already sold out, so you might want to book your tickets soon!

King’s Place is a multi-arts venue in King’s Cross dedicated to music, comedy and talks. They host various festivals, such as the London Podcast Festival and The Politics Festival, and their year-long flagship series Unwrapped, which last year was dedicated to women and music.

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