Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: forest walk

all of Switzerland

At the top of a very high hill yesterday, what in Holland or Denmark would be called a mountain, with a view over all of Switzerland ~ so it seemed ~ my friend taught me to peel dandelion stalks so that they spring into pretty green silvery curls. Behind us a family with very young parents were playing hide and seek. They had built a fire and the father, when we showed up, was juggling with three sticks. As we sat on our sedentary bench facing the green nation, he sprinted round in front of us and flung himself panting on the ground, his eyes gleaming, intent on the figure of his youngest daughter who was counting “eis, zwöi, drü, vier, füf…” Our legs and the legs of the bench blocked him from her and pure animal concentration blocked him from us. It was as though he didn’t see us. My friend gazed down the length of his back then flung her spooling dandelion out into the green. “We used to play that when we were children, too,” she said to me.

May 7, 2013
you are wild, you are free

Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and we talked for a while about stinging nettles, and daisies. After that I walked for maybe an hour and didn’t meet anyone else nor their dog. Except for five shadows lurking on the other side of the river, sifting back and forth mysteriously in front of a huge raging fire they had built. The flames were leaping high and the mound of wood they’d set fire to was tall and triangular. This was under the long high roof of a storage shed thatched with bark tiles. Not thatched, exactly. I thought about the impenetrable Swissness of things, imagined the secretive signals by which they would have arranged they would meet up. A train went past a long distance away and at the same moment up on the hillside someone unseen let out a huge, scarifying shriek: the kind you let rip when the forest is all around mystifying you with its trees, and the sun won’t last much longer, it is time to be heading home to the domesticated landscape but for these few moments you are you, you are ancient, you are wild, you are free.

May 4, 2013
horsegrass

I met a horse. This horse had several large brown friends, in white socks, a kind of uniform they wore with insouciance, all of them living apparently in a big barn with straw trodden into its stained concrete. Horse life is boring, I suppose, when it’s under a roof. The horse fixed me with his eye as I was rambling by the river and compelled me by a kind of horsenosis to climb the hill and face him. We stood and stared at one another. I thought of the apple core I had thrown away in the brush. I told him, I haven’t brought you anything because… I didn’t know you were here. Somehow the horse or the grass itself put in my mind the idea that there was fresh green grass spurting everywhere plentifully out of the ground, only – he demonstrated with his head, ducking under the rails, and he had to do it twice before I got it – in a ring around the fenced enclosure all the grass was eaten to the nub. Poor horse. I said, “Would you like some grass? You can have some,” and bent to rip it. Laid my hand flat and offered it to his big lips and teeth. He showed me by knocking the stalks on the rail it is preferable to tear off the woody stems and clots of dirt. I should have thought of that. Next clump I harvested, I tore the stems across so he could eat the whole bundle, which he did. The other horses pawed impatiently at the rails. What stops them from jumping the fence? Only politeness, I imagine. I’m home now, hearing people moving about upstairs and the surprising bleat of sheep and throaty clong of sheep’s bells from a garden with no house in it, two houses away. I can see an Ikea stool belonging to the next-door children and the blooming wild plums on the far side of the river that grow in clumps and look like smoke. It’s growing dark now and the Indonesian lamps inside the house make yellow splashes on the scenery.

April 21, 2013
following a stick

My arms are full of scratches from traveling among the trees along the river. It’s interesting how so much of what we see is due to attention. A woman passed behind me as I was crouched in a mossy hollow this morning, poking the water with a stick, and until she was almost on top of me I did not see or hear her, though I could hear in her voice she’d seen me. A dozen stick-lengths away, on the water, passed a long pointed boat filled with army recruits. They were wearing bright orange life jackets and looked like ducklings. By remaining quiet and focusing on my bent stick, dragged by the green current, I stayed hidden though my white t-shirt and dirty orange sneakers must have been in plain view. I used to think of mindfulness as awareness of everything. Now it seems more like acceptance, and focus. There will often be a train clattering over the high arched bridge. There will often be an opal drake, steering absently in the water as though floating on his back. And presumably every leaf, every petal of the shower of gold blossoms overhanging the narrow path has its own sensation of the feeble sunlight trickling through the branches.

April 18, 2013
the river path

I ate my muesli on the river path and watched red insects furred with a fringe of legs investigating the slowly-rotting wood. The boatshed is held up by two felled but still rooted trees. The motorway roars a few hundred metres south, it carries a siren past. I saw a speedboat race upstream and then, twenty minutes later, return, in silence, with its engine cut: they were travelling sideways, simply letting the water bring them. As I watched, the man took his eyes off his wife’s hand on the tiller and folding his arms like a well-cared-for corpse he lay back full length in the bottom of the boat. The peace of people’s secret ambitions. After a long winter of empty skies the trees are full of song. Overnight I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s heartfelt but wry essays about the murder of migrating birds. I honour him. There should be many many more ducks and birds on this river, my friends say, at this time of year. What we have made very little resembles what I know of life. Sitting in a mossy hollow feeling a speckle of sun on my shoulders I realize I have taken refuge in the countryside and may never go back. Spend the rest of my life foraging round them and dwelling in the treetops like an airborne burrow: a nest ~ I imagine visiting cities like a honeybee to carry the gold dust away on my very many legs, darting in and droning away again, making a child’s drawing of a flower.

April 14, 2013
switzerland

My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away from the glaring new terraces with ancient trees felled in front of them to afford the new tenants a view; and concentrate instead on the mountains behind, the green meadows, the velvet of moss in the crannies of birches. I was tired from the eleven-hour train journey from Berlin with too many suitcases full of books. We saw a tree felled by a beaver, its stump whittled to a pencil point, its inner flesh fresh and not yet yellowed. We saw a man turning handstands on a promontory, again and again, his feet falling in front of him and his white shirt dousing his head. We saw a lamb curled in the grass and chewing very slowly, its expression consumed with a kind of passionate ecstasy that made us laugh again over dinner, hours and hours later.

On our walk my friend waved to a nearby hillside and said, You see: that’s Germany.

April 13, 2013