“This is a good one, Elle. Nice and flat.”
“Yep. We’ll have that one.”
“What about this one?”
“Go on then, we’ll have that one too.”
At some point in the distant past, somewhere miles upstream from our home, the persistent ministrations of frost and rain and heat gradually wore down a seam of rock until, in one final flourish, some landslide crumpled it to earth, shattering it into dozens of smaller rocks. From there, the river picked up the reins and eventually, through flood and flow, saltation and attrition, shifted them all downstream, knapped them smooth and round and rolled them to a standstill just a couple of miles from the sea on a shallow, wide dried-out riverbed, where we were now taking our pick.
Skipping between the rounded pebbles, we scrutinised the various stones for the best specimens, rejecting those that were too spherical or too narrow, sifting through the pock-marked remnants of house-bricks that had also received the river’s attention over the months and years, leaving them looking like desiccated sponges, eventually settling on a small carrier bag full that we prepared to cart back to the garden.
The ‘AFAN VALLEY ANGLING CLUB. NO CANOEING’ sign erected across the river hinted that there are those who don’t see this as somewhere merely to pass through, but as somewhere to linger awhile so I took a minute or two before leaving. Looking around, I noticed how much the scene had changed with the recent sun. The same weather that had dropped the river levels and allowed us to come and gather our stones had allowed myriad colonies to spring up like miniature fiefdoms on the small islands dotted here and there: yellow flag iris; daisies; purple loosestrife, all nestling together on their tiny, multicultural Zanzibars, a sight made all the prettier for the fact that all of this would be swept away in the autumnal spates.
Once home, the real work began. With an almost military precision, my daughter laid out an array of small brushes, paints and a pot of water, then set about transforming them, tongue poking from the corner of her mouth as she dipped then re-dipped the paint brush and brought the watercolour pictures to life one by one – a beach, the house bathed in sunshine and backed by a blue sky, then another of the house surrounded by a night scene, a black sky full of stars.
“What do you think, Dad?”
“Beautiful. Let’s leave them to dry.”
A few hours later, as I was lifting the gear from the shed ready for the night’s fishing, Elle, decked out in her pyjamas, stepped out into the garden to check on her handiwork just as the light was beginning to fail. There they were, dry now and beautiful in their little details. “Look, Dad. The daytime picture was the right one earlier, but now the night time picture’s the right one. One for each part of the day!” We both looked up involuntarily but there were no stars yet, only a pale arc of moon that… “What was that, Dad?!” We watched, silently, then there it was again, again now and yet again, slashing over us. The bats were out, and in full hunting mode already. “That, my lovely, is a sign that it’s time a certain little someone should be in bed.”
I’ve had to slow down as there are no streetlights out in these rural back lanes. Aside from the windows of a few scattered country pubs, the only significant light on this leg of the journey comes from the lamps positioned to illuminate the church of St. Mary Magdalene in the village of Kenfig. Perhaps unnecessary but, in its own way, quite beautiful, there is just enough light to pick out the crenelated tower, balancing itself against the darkness at its base from which it seems to rise like a beacon, often as a staging point on early morning journeys homeward after long and tiring night sessions.
This makes me think of a story I was told recently by someone whose friend had put their son to bed one night, saying “I’m going to turn the light off now, but don’t panic because mummy and daddy will be just downstairs”, only to be told:
“No daddy, you’re turning on the dark.”
For twenty minutes the boy’s parents waited outside the door, ready for the expected invasion of ghouls and boggarts, but as their son fell asleep, he never made a sound.
The bats are still very active, as they were earlier, swishing in and out of my headlight beams. I don’t know what the bat mortality rate is where cars are concerned, so I take my foot off the pedal a touch more. I prefer by far to fish after dark, but in these lighter summer months the available darkness shrinks to a small six-hour strip wedged in between great chunks of daylight, making me like a stickleback in a sun-shrunk pool. I am also very aware that I share this little bit of darkness, hence the decision I made on my new headlamp, which arrived today.
Although it’s from a very reputable manufacturer, it’s not one of their flagship products. It wasn’t a monetary thing that influenced my decision – one of those über-lights would have cost me only around twenty pounds more than the model I plumped for. The reason for my choice was light output – I wanted less of it.
Lighting is one of those areas in which angling, sea angling in particular, has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. In this, the gilded age of Information Technology, a world in which we are assured and reassured that bigger is always most definitely better, headlamps have been pimped up and souped-up – the norm is currently standing at around two hundred lumens which, when put into perspective, is enough to light up a large portion of the lane behind my house. Browsing the internet recently, I stumbled across a light that claimed an eye-watering light output of nearly two thousand lumens. In our current eco-society much is rightly made of pollution – rubbish in our streets and how to deal with it through recycling, the pollution of our waterways; and the newspaper headlines reflect this accordingly. Even noise pollution occasionally rears its head and stabs its way into the odd page four story of the tabloids. But light pollution seems, in a twist of irony not lost upon me, to remain in the dark.
Plants aside, light is not essential to our survival. If we were to take vitamin D supplements to compensate for the lack of sunlight, we could survive indefinitely without it. There would, of course, be some disruption to our Diel cycle – the natural rhythm between diurnal and nocturnal activity – but this wouldn’t prove too much of a problem; just ask those living in the Arctic Circle how they cope with a night that is three months long.
This is, of course, slightly depressing. We need that balance, to know, like that boy in the story I was told, that day will follow night and spring will follow winter, and this is the way it has always been. But thanks to the single-minded obsession with advancement kick-started by the Industrial Revolution, we are suffering from the effects of a three-hundred-year hangover, swinging well past the equilibrium mark and lasering off into the distance. Man said, ‘Let there be more light’, and it was so.
Apparently, each time I stand out in my garden and look up into the night sky, I am able to see somewhere in the region of two hundred stars. Were I to do the same thing in an open, isolated rural area such as a sizeable country park, if I had the patience to count them all, I wouldn’t stop until I reached a number in the thousands. The main hindrance to my doing this, though, is the fact that there are less and less places in which to actually do this.
If we were to drift momentarily into orbit around our own planet, we would truly witness the full extent of our addiction. Where should we go first? Maybe we’ll hit the boulevards of Las Vegas, allowing ourselves to float past its strip joints and casinos, our wide eyes transfixed as those of a tiny creature on the tendril of an angler fish. This city in which most of the establishments actually omit the majority of their natural light and contain no clocks in order to prevent gamblers from thinking about the time of day and, therefore, realising they have a life outside gambling, uses billions of candles worth of light every week.
Not to your taste? A little gaudy maybe? Okay, let’s try somewhere with a little more low-key glamour. Now we’re taking a slightly more leisurely stroll, peering in through side street windows at the faintly dipping candle lights and chiaroscuro ambience of Parisian bistros and cafés, meandering gently down the avenues until we suddenly arrive at the Eiffel tower, its beams reaching out from its tip into the middle of a black infinity as dark as any deep sea ocean trench.
From this viewpoint it quickly becomes obvious that there are few places on earth that serve as the last hiding places of true dark; most of the planet’s surface resembling a giant switchboard. In fact, it seems to have become such a problem that some scientists have begun to sit up and take notice, resulting in the International Dark Sky Foundation, an organisation whose mission statement is
“to preserve and protect the night time environment and our heritage of dark skies”.
The foundation takes its work very seriously indeed, seeking the true sanctuaries of dimness, setting up protected areas of darkness with heavy controls on lighting. But why go to all this trouble? To this, I would reply: ‘Why not?’ Sometimes, an answer is not needed; sometimes, the darker it is the clearer things can become.
Even our beaches, so often the dark fringes of our island home, are now under attack. Step onto many beaches now and the signs are already in evidence that a battle is taking place. The reflections of the lights which intersperse the promenades are cast down upon the wet sand, elongated, the natural and the synthetic uneasily merging in the livid orange-yellow scars so that walking down to the surf line can occasionally look like you are kicking through the embers of some huge bonfire.
Even those beaches nowhere near residential areas are under attack, and anglers are the vanguard of this assault. Calling out to a fellow angler during a night session on any local coastline is likely to result in the retinas being scorched from your skull as the full beam casually sweeps across your face.
The lamp I recently purchased, in comparison, has a maximum light output of ninety lumens, as well as two other settings of fifty lumens and a miserly three lumens. What could anyone possibly do with just three lumens of light? It is a well-known fact to anglers that a full moon, hanging high and bright in the sky, can put the fish down or, at the very least, make them very tentative to bite, limiting a close-in bass or sole session to a few skittish plucks on the rod tip at best. It would, therefore, stand to reason that a beam of light resembling the landing of the Starship Enterprise would lead to a blank session.
Rather than taking the fight to the darkness I much prefer to set up a base camp of light and let the dark envelop me. There is nothing quite like the hiss of a petrol or gas lantern, a pie sat on top, warming away. To react to a bite is to step out of the circle of light into the unknown beyond it and to fetch something back out of the blackness, more of a careful salvage operation rather than a full-frontal assault.
When given the proper respect, true darkness can really show its colours. Centuries ago, sailors would stare aghast and fall to their knees in fear and reverential awe as Saint Elmo’s Fire clung to the tip of their mast, making it glow like a spectral finger pointing heavenward. When the first primitive exploratory expeditions of mankind struck into the far north, they must have thought the world was coming to an end as they watched Aurora Borealis flicker out across the sky.
Once, I had such an encounter myself, though the circumstances were perhaps less in the tradition of romantic discovery. It had been one of those fantastic August mackerel days, the barometric pressure riding as high as the tide at dusk, and not a breath of wind stirred anywhere. It was one of those days that just seem to come together, peaking at dusk in a striped frenzy.
Everyone had a bag full of fish for the two ‘b’s – bait and barbecue, and I was relaxing with my grandfather and a neighbour, lounging around and making the odd cast into the sea which, by now, mirrored the black of the sky. We had not planned to stay so long, so had brought no torches, but were compelled to stay by the evening’s slow inky slide toward its end.
After maybe half an hour of tea drinking and chatting, I decided to have a few more casts before breaking down my tackle for the night. I leaned back, gave the string of tinsel lures a flick and caught my breath as they hit the water with a luminous plop, flinging droplets of comic book radioactivity everywhere. I had never seen bioluminescence in action before and watched amazed as my line fizzed through the electric water, finally pulling out the string of bright green feathers like a colour-filtered special effect from a sci-fi film.
Looking back, I wish I could say that I spent few moments committing this minor miracle to memory, jotting down my thoughts or maybe even snapping a few pictures as I marvelled in wonder at this lovely natural phenomenon, but I was thirteen years old and didn’t have a camera, so…quickly, I propped my rod against a rock, unzipped my fly and peed copiously over the side of the breakwater, chuckling to myself as though watching a display on Bonfire Night, and shouting “Look at this!”
Equally, I wish I could say that the shouts and reprimands of outraged adults floated at me across the air, but a minute later my grandfather, neighbour and a string of other stragglers lined up, faced the water and unleashed the fourth of July.
Would this sudden burst of light have been so appreciated or even noticed, had there been a battery of headlamps and petrol lanterns illuminating the pier? Maybe the joy came from the fact that I had been craving a little illumination all along – looking for the one thing to brighten up that evening, but hadn’t realised it until it had, quite literally, splashed up in front of me.
All I know is that now, entering the residential outskirts of Porthcawl, this sudden presence of streetlamps and house lights is something of an annoyance after the peaceful darkness of the journey here.
My home town is situated in such a way as to be located between the surf beaches of the Gower peninsula so loved by Clive Gammon, and the rough ground of Ogmore Deeps, Witches Point and beyond meaning that sometimes, when I set the scale sliding to decide where to fish, I can often fall on a shadier middle ground somewhere between the two, where surf beach conditions give way to a rockhopper’s paradise. In terms of fishing, this can often throw up a few unexpected surprises.
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At last, here is a sky to do justice to Elle’s painted pebbles: gin-clear, and filled to the brim with stars, so much so that I don’t know what to do with them all. Aside from a handful of the better-known constellations like ursa major and draco remembered from a passing boyhood fascination, they simply look like an endless shimmering expanse of moon-silver desert sands to me; enough, apparently, to outnumber the Earth’s actual grains of sand ten times over though thinking about such amounts begins to boggle me.
Still looking up, I lift the box from the car, showering grains of sand everywhere – into the air, down my neck, in my eyes. Perhaps there are more grains than those scientists thought after all. Over the years, I could swear I’ve gradually shifted an entire beach in the boot of the car. After I’m long dead, they’ll discover somewhere beneath my garden a seam of sand laid down as a deposit over the decades.
Interesting as all this may be, I’m not so much bothered about the numbers than the fact that I’m finally able to look up and marvel on such clarity, one of the plus points of fishing a very dark beach with the low levels of light pollution.
How things will pan out tonight I don’t know. Perhaps my leanings toward shadow will pay off and I’ll manage to pull a fish or two from the water, lay them upon the beach like a wet footprint left glistening where some selkie stole up the beach and disappeared into the darkness.
And if they don’t? Well, never mind; there’s always, the return along those country lanes, the odd badger, fox or bat flitting through the beams, and the light of Saint Mary Magdalene to guide me on my journey home.
Serialisation of ‘Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon’ by Simon Smith (with permission). This book is published by and can be purchased from Cambria Books HERE
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