A European kingfisher appears to be tobogganing down a boat’s mooring rope.
All photos the property of SM Shanley ©Trespasserine2020
If I’ve said it once i’ll say it again: nature is back with a stealthy, healthy whimper. While Rome burns, Gaia fiddles a melodic tune. For literary effect, to assert that nature is back with a bang! as opposed to a mere whimper might hit harder, but it would defeat the point, for it is humanity that creates big noise. Nature is as nature does, and what it does while a quarter of the planet is housebound, while international trade experiences historic levels of supply chain disruption and slumped productivity, is to go about restoring a dynamic balance with quiet purpose. As house elves set about sprucing up the house during the dead of night when all slumber, watching spring assert itself while trade, commerce, and human bustle sleeps is a spectacle worthy of praise. Question remains: when we all wake up, how soon before the house is reduced to another ransacking?
Of course, I’m not the first to notice this wondrous upturn in our fortunes. People stop by the boat and remark how they’re beginning to notice things they hadn’t before on their daily stroll through the countryside. That obsolete word wildlife is even making a comeback. They notice the sky turning from wispy blue-white on a good day a deeper shade of aqua in the absence of belching fumes. They notice the stars return to cityscapes after a lengthy absence. They stop and notice birds do their courtship thing where before they just zoomed past. In short, more and more people are diverting their attentions away from servicing the machine of unenlightened human progress and toward natural events so revered by their forebears. What’s more, they like what they see.
The turning of the seasons becomes all the more apparent when the hatches are battened down. Human sensory organs realign themselves, from toning down the din of normal working life to tuning in to the rhythms of the living planet. Now i know that stuck in a megalopolis of high rises as far as the eye can see poses a challenge to the notion that pandemic lockdown has an unexpected upside that might even outrank the pandemic itself in vitality and importance. Half the world, nevertheless, still lives within range of what could be nominally called ‘the countryside’. Those multitudes are getting out (well they certainly ain’t wasting the opportunity where i am, which I take to be fairly typical) and some are pleasantly stunned into silence by the very act of silence. Have you heard the countryside now the internal combustion engine has been locked in the garage? Nature dislikes a vacuum, as ecologists like to emphasise, so in place of the universal background drone of cars from roads never further away that a mile (in the U.K., anyway), nature has come up with this novel scheme. It’s called keep producing the sounds of spring that never completely vanished, but rather were drowned out for generations by the vandalism of urban noise. So long, Range Rover Discovery, hello skylark or coal tit.
Few are disingenuous enough to really think that all supply chain distribution has stopped, that the tens of thousands of articulated lorries that deliver the length and breadth of the land have simply given up the game in the face of Covid-19. Most are painfully aware that the lorries are still doing the business so that fools like me can continue to enjoy Sicilian wine and Chilean avocados. Having said that, those delivery runs are sure as hell quiet at the moment. Never in all my years, have I heard the sound of total silence as i have blanketing the hills of West Wiltshire these recent weeks. It’s a thing to marvel at. To know that the world would go on without us. That the world doesn’t really need us, if only to process its complex interconnected workings in our complex interconnected human minds. I’m not even convinced that if we disappeared completely, or at the very least had our numbers severely curtailed, something else wouldn’t evolve soon enough with the ability to record and document phenomena in this world.
Lockdown will come to a close. Names of thousands of mainly elderly folks, ages with my beloved parents, by then will have filled death certificates. But in spite of the appearance of a population impatient to return to exactly how things were pre-pandemic, I think you’ll find that when the doors open again many (well, those in more favourable social and geographical positions) will privately bemoan the end of a peculiar phase in history when, instead of forging ahead on this unsustainable resource-greedy path we’re doomed on, we stopped a while and listened in to the heartbeat of the Earth. It was a very agreeable heartbeat and not one plagued with our hypertensions. More than anything, the resurrection of nature didn’t feel the need to announce its homecoming with much pomp or fanfare. It thrived all serene and dignified. While all this flourishing of life was happening behind the media wall of panic, some of us were alerted by a little voice in our primitive mind that said, ‘i feel good because the world seems to be repairing itself much quicker than anyone ever imagined.’
Of course, industry will once again crank up then overheat. Humans will continue to work against natural ecology – and ultimately their own long-term survival, proving even more of an aberration than any other species. Population in the cruelly-titled Developing World will explode like the algal blooms that human industrial pollution creates. Oceanic dead zones will reappear like necrosis on human skin. But all that planetary destruction will be okay because at least scientists cracked Coronavirus. Next year at this time, dissenting voices might whisper to other dissenting voices, ‘why can’t we have a pandemic every year?’
Declaring a pandemic month each year (without the concomitant death involved) could present hitherto unthought of opportunities. This could be our very own month of Ramadan, when so much comes to a halt during the day so that one may reflect on God (or nature, given that they are one in the same).
The resurrection will not be televised.
Life, so they say, can be stranger than fiction. This fact, or rather this fiction, can be evident in everything from the unexpected to the plainly weird. We see it when we view the world as a stage full of actors, props, scripts, and backdrops. You only have to cast an eye back to Macbeth (life…the poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage) to know that even the Bard agreed with me on this score. Life as theatre; landscape as backdrop; weather as atmosphere. It’s hard sometimes to frame even the most staid human life without the injection of a little dramatic licence. The actor’s role may be minor, his input stuttering at best, but life being theatre the director can always throw in a little squall of wind and rain from the rafters to enliven the backdrop, as well as to defy Shakespeare by making life signify something instead of nothing.
The unnamed stage director – the identity of who or what is behind all this is a question for the ages – has seen fit to sprinkle onto his now dreary play that pixie dust that might help pick up the pace. With the play in a lull, and with not a great deal to stir the protagonist into something approaching life, attention turns to props that fill the backdrop so as to crank up the drama. In a near-perfect mirror image of one man’s life and its fictional mise-en-scène, the backdrop outside my window more than compensates for a dearth in action on stage. Outside an ill wind throttles trees, horizons are blighted by the murk of an uncertain present time, and what falls as rain falls always. In the theatre of fiction, even there they’d struggle to keep up with the scene out there.
The same rain that hath come, goes not. Like a burrowed cancer it refuses to yield. I thought the apocalypse was the sole bringer of incessant rain. In the Blade Runner an ecocide caused by meddling Man has bruised the sky such it bleeds rain unceasingly. In Apocalypse Now, Marlow’s painted face is washed unclean by a tropical downpour as he creeps upon Colonel Kurtz to deliver the bloody coup-de-grace. In the Old Testament, God sends the almighty heavens to wash away the sins of Man, but not before Noah can construct an Ark of salvation for the innocents. How wrong can a man be? This is no apocalypse now. This is an island but not unto itself. Rather, it sits on the edge of a vast, churning ocean of grey. That ocean has a big old surface area and on that surface the water temperature is creeping up such that the water cycle is heating up. More prone to evaporation in the warmer winter months, more driven by a stronger Jet Stream, the quantities of rain are becoming prodigious. The frequency of this natural event has gone from what is sublime – a thing of beauty when rain comes only when rain needs to fall for plants to regenerate and for rivers to replenish themselves – to what is absolutely ridiculous.
Here in this region of England’s SouthWest, it has rained practically every day since the end of September. I thought these meteorological conditions were the preserve of film noir, graphic novels, and dark, sinister fictions. But no. Life, as we know it here, has emerged stranger than fiction. And like the strangers no longer welcome to Brexit Britain 2.0, the strangeness of seeing rain every day for months on end, well, let’s just say the wet has outstayed its welcome, too.
How has it come to this? Speaking personally, not eighteen months ago and I was positioned at the edge of a vast empty quarter where life was also stranger than fiction. There, the rain fell so infrequently we assumed it had been engineered to make its annual appearance on National Day. Some said the Air Force existed purely to seed constipated clouds that refused to precipitate. When it fell, it took more airborne dust than water with it. Touching earth, the drops fizzled before withered roots had the chance to prosper, though now and again flash flooding would send cascades down parched valleys, turning the deadened mountainsides green with a Lazarus resuscitation. Fast forward eighteen months, the inverse has become the new norm. Different place, same old shit. An Age of Extremes is where we are at. Over here, we’ll soon need the Red Arrows to disperse the clouds just to reassure a benighted people that there is a sun somewhere in the sky.
These are funny times indeed. How rare that you can travel the world in search of extremes only to come back ‘home’ and find conditions you’d struggle to find even in India during the monsoon. All of October, all of November, December, January, and now well into the third week of February. When will it end? Can the clouds deliver so much without respite that the land can take no more? Once rivers have burst their banks and storm drains froth and bubble like the blood-soaked mouth of an Ebola victim, where can all this water go? It seeps underground into vast subterranean chambers and hidden river systems until all the caverns are drowned and the soil beneath our feet starts spouting little springs in the oddest of places. And still the developers buy up the last remaining acres of cheap land on floodplains where they lay their flimsy foundations to sell onward those dream homes that would be better-suited built with a hull, a prow and a stern ready for the inevitable. And still we refuse to advocate the slow and humane replacement of burgeoning human populations with tree saplings that nature anoints into magnificent sponges whose roots drink their fill and much more. Life is indeed stranger than fiction.
There was a time before us when Gaia (the living, breathing skin of the Earth) posed the greatest challenges to life on Earth while providing the greatest answers to them all. It threw everything at itself and then brushed it off. Every action had a reaction, which was beautifully synergised. Mother Nature led a three billion-year dynasty of dynamic equilibrium. I don’t know if we are capable of such balancing acts. We stand on the high wire but only to teeter on the brink. This weird weather would indicate she is growing ever impatient. Sensing our human shortcomings, will natural forces wrest back control? Will she return to lavish the sunlight on these dark, soddened corners? When again will fiction take back its claim to be stranger than life? I’ll tell you when. Only when Man goes back to what he does best, writing strange fiction, will nature go back to what she does best, writing the beautiful story of life.
The Blind Salamander 