‘…the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.’
- from ‘Frost at Midnight’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I have a fascination with death.
Before I go on, perhaps I should qualify this statement a little. I am no Jack-the Ripper in waiting, nor do I harbour any clandestine Pharaonic ambitions to be embalmed in readiness for the afterlife. Although, thinking about it, perhaps I should make arrangements for my rods and reels to accompany me to the grave. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else getting their hands on them when I finally shuffle off my wellies for the last time. No, the deaths to which I refer, and with which I’ve had an abiding fascination for as long as I can remember, are those of the seasons.
The reason I mention this is because I’m witnessing one right now, ambling along the renovated tarmac footpath of my local river toward the estuary. As I write, it is late summer, eight thirty in the evening, and it is glorious, but I know that none of this can last. I know this because, paradoxically, at the moment, the air around me is literally alive – clouds of gnats and other small insects are blooming into the air, setting off the chains of life that hang sequentially from them: birds darting in and out of the scene and even a few bats, out early, flickering in and out of my peripheral vision like the shadow of something half-remembered.
Even the river has started to forget, its slow, pondering course sliding under the trees, past the rocks until the glassy surface is shattered by the sudden rising of a trout slashing at the surface like a sudden epiphany then disappearing again, its exquisite self-tailoring smoothing out its own ripples before the meditative route continues further downstream where the mullet hold sway over the tidal section that meanders finally down to the sea.
Before this footpath and the new section of road had been built further along, this whole area was wonderfully neglected – old factories and portakabins that would once have been filled with overall-clad men, closed up for one final time and abandoned to their own ruin and the adventures of young boys.
The Derelicts
Like that corner of the ancient maps
that said Here be Dragons,
they sat at the edge of our known world,
a lonely corner of a concrete sea.
A place to test your courage by.
Juddering sheet-steel skin
flayed down to ribs
shrieking across the wind
brought us running
to be swallowed whole,
toe-to-heel across the rotting planks,
bricks thudding into a murk
thick with the must of days
totted on calendars peddling oil and tyres.
Some of us would scramble on
alone to reach the furthest dark corners
emerging later with a grand manner,
a faraway look that swatted away
question after question on the walk home
when we left the derelicts to sink
back into their own extinction.
Of course, the fact that this area was largely ignored or, at most, simply passed through on a journey to somewhere else, made it a perfect area for wildlife to flourish all but unhindered. Often, coming back from our escapades around the lake, we were able to crouch unseen in the rushes and watch the occasional fox and, more often, a small colony of rabbits that inhabited the local scrubland. A couple of times a week over an entire summer we would watch them lollop about, imagining ourselves as hunters planning how best to bring down our prey. Should we play the waiting game and set a trap, perhaps? Or should we take the more proactive route, lurking with our pockets full of river pebbles, to emerge suddenly, slingshots whirring in the air above our heads? When we did eventually emerge from our hiding place, they’d instantly vanish into thin air, dispersing like a handful of blown sand.
Then one day, near summer’s end, we ambled up as usual, crouched into position and saw…nothing. Not a trace of a rabbit or anything else. We strolled over to the open area to investigate and almost tripped over something that looked like a discarded sweater in the grass. Only when we looked more closely could we make out a pair of ears sticking out from beneath, then the feet, tossed to one side, and finally the small, neat pile of viscera glistening wetly nearby. “Gypsies,” my father suggested, “or maybe air rifle hunters. Either way, they’re getting rid of a pest. There’s thousands of the buggers in that dockland.” You could have fooled us though, as never again did we see another rabbit in that area.
People are often surprised when I tell them this story, as though places such as this should only exist as they do in landscape watercolours, forever picturesque and untainted by the negative. The truth is that this river and its outlying areas, like all others, sees quite a lot of death in many different ways, my most recent experience of it coming only a week or so ago, a little further along the same path I’m strolling now.
I was startled to see so many people. Normally the weir section of the river is a passing place, a conduit for joggers, dog walkers and beachcombers homing in on a tide retreating down the beach a few hundred yards ahead. A quiet, unremarkable section of water, the only noise usually comes from an occasional “Hello” as I pass one of those people mentioned, or the slop of a wind-chop on the river slapping wavelets up the hulls of the scant collection of bobbing fishing boats moored there, but there was a strange, low hum of chatter coming from a small knot of people that had coagulated around the weir pool at half-tide.
Amongst them was Phil, a friend, who nodded a cursory “Alright mate?” as I ambled up.
“What’s going on, Phil?”
“See for yourself, mate”, he nodded down toward the pool. It had been filled to the level of the weir by the incoming tide but hadn’t yet spilled over push on upstream to the level above it.
I watched for a moment, trying to discern something, anything, in the river’s murky soup, before my attention was caught by a dull pewter flash, then another and another, like some erratic monochromatic semaphore, as the arrowhead shape of a sewin twisted and turned and hustled around the pool. At first, I struggled to see what had agitated the fish, until its next flashing turn was quickly covered by the glide of a fleeting, dark shadow.
Only two days before I had been startled by this same shadow while perched on a rock next to a mirror-calm sea. As I focused on my line dandling between the rocks in the tide, a large black head rose slowly like a dark moon only a few feet from where I was sitting and, in the low light, it took a little squinting before I made out the whiskers and huge eyes watching me intently from where the seal bobbed placidly as it took a break from its breakfast hunt.
And now here it was again, flickering in and out of solidity as it fell into a strangely beautiful but obscene dance with the sea trout it was chasing, looping outward then arcing back time and again so that, to those of us privileged enough to be watching, it seemed they might spend eternity locked like that. Out and back, out and back, then, at last, it was done.
The water flared, then dulled.
The tide pushed on.
A lot of the onlookers, particularly those unaccustomed to seeing such things, muttered words like “sad” and “shame”, in that way that someone might tut at television images of a pride of lions eating an antelope. Such is life…and death, I felt like saying. Lives end as days and seasons must end too, but I caught the words in my throat, knowing that they would probably sound trite, so I left it alone, thinking it ironic that these people could be so moved by this one death, the most natural thing in the world, when all around them, the hugeness of the summer’s expiration was beginning to play itself out.
Although Keats accepted the coming of autumn as something of a sombre occasion, heard when “the small gnats mourn”, I find it difficult to see anything as being less than positive amongst all this change and decay. When it comes to Romantic poetry, my sympathies have always fallen more with Wordsworth’s “…sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind,” his recognition that there must always be this balance, that without the bad against which to measure it, we can never fully appreciate what is good. If the old adage It’s always darkest before the dawn has truth to it, then so must the inverse: before the darkness there must be a final spectacular flare of life and colour, as though the world had considered the options and had finally come to be at peace with the change that it knew must come.
Sometimes, that change is more rapid in coming than others. I’ll know it when it does happen, following the lapsang souchong aroma through the house to the back door, to be greeted with a much stronger smoky blast of air and a distant crackling sound. Around half a mile to the left of the house, a mountain fire will be sweeping the slopes of Mynydd Dinas, a low, creeping blaze that pares everything right back as it goes.
There’s no danger of course; well, not to us at least, sitting on this side of the River Afan that separates us from the mountain (or hill to be more accurate, as it’s some 150ft short of the 1000ft required of a true mountain) but for those few living across its slopes they must by now be used to the almost annual evacuation, the firemen stringing out across the slopes, doing their best to protect these properties and beat out the blaze.
It’s often difficult to track these fires to their source: sometimes it is as simple as the wanton mindlessness of arson, at other times it may be a plastic bottle or a fragment of glass. Such small details, often overlooked, are always a reminder of that friction when habitation meets nature, a friction that can occasionally flare up beyond all control.
Walking the mountain’s bare slopes after such a blaze is always an otherworldly experience akin, I imagine, to looking out upon a post-apocalyptic landscape: scorched earth, bare gradients and a blackened, charred sense of desolation hovering over everything.
Weirdly, though, for all this apparent negativity, there is always something positive to be taken from it. The clutter of bramble and fern, gorse and heather have been tidied away, opening up the view in all directions, and all those nutrients in the soil will ensure that through the next year, this mountain will sway with life in greens and yellow and purples once again.
This year there has been no fire, but all around a million little deaths have already begun. The mountain’s slopes have been resplendent these last few months in its subtle summer plumage, but looking up this morning I noticed that the heather’s purple hue, too fragile to last, has already begun to give up the fight and recede into a blanket of browns, leaving only the sparkling pin pricks of the gorse flowers to burn on and the fierce orange pyracantha berries on my way to work to hint at those streetlit mornings that are just around the corner. The bright bulbs of blackberries are bursting from their thickets as if in an early apology of abundance for the lean months to come; the trees are preparing for their abandonment by both the birds and the foliage that now screens them behind its defiant last blaze and even the sky has lost its impetus, sinking into an occluded palette of yellows, blues, reds and oranges that run together and bleed down toward the earth, mirroring the leaves and making it difficult to know where the trees end and the sky begins.
Without doubt this is a season nearing its end, and it is beautiful.
True, all I’m really looking at is a mass of countless refracting particles and an unpicked fretwork of light, but to bring science into the picture and think in such ways now would somehow sully this lovely evening. I defy anyone to stand and watch such a sunset as the one that I’m confronted with now and not feel at all moved. I have literally watched hundreds of these over the years, from dozens of different spots along the coast and hills around my home town, but this one stands out particularly, beautiful to such an extent that this riot of hues has focused me intensely for the time being, on colour.
Dylan Thomas once wrote the line
‘Once, it was the colour of saying…’
a statement that at once blurs the boundaries between thought and speech, the real and imagined and all that they conjure up both on their own and together, but for my own purposes I would alter this to
‘Once, it was the colour of angling’.
Every angler, whether they realise it or not, will at some point translate their fishing into colours, not to the point where it’s glaringly obvious, or even perhaps realised at all, but to the point where it is ever present, a persistent indefinable something that creeps into the background every time they think of themselves with a fishing rod in hand, so that this particular colour will, in turn, draw in everything else like a magnet - sounds, smells, shadows and colours all cascading into the imagination in one collective sensory image.
Thus, for some, the deep, rich tones of racing green will forever catapult them immediately to an overgrown secluded pool, in turn firing off the smells of damp vegetation and rotting undergrowth; maybe the purupup of a moorhen begins to perforate the air and the skin begins to rise in goose pimples at the coolness of a deeply shaded swim barely accessible where it lies tucked between towering stands of reeds that part to reveal slivered glimpses of a huge carp silting the margins with a slow, dignified swish of its tail.
Or perhaps the colour is a mottled grey glimpsed momentarily in the drab surface of a supermarket car park, before immediately transforming into a scarified, rocky, cod-infested outcrop laced with the chill tang of salt spray, pierced by the skriking of gulls and thrumming to the deep THOOM of the tide smashing like a persistent siege engine into its base.
Even if you’ve only ever fished once in your life, the bright yellow of summer sunshine or the turquoise of the sea from which you pulled that thrashing mackerel will, inevitably and irrevocably, lodge somewhere deep in the brain so that some part of you will forever associate with that colour. For me, that colour is white.
In a few weeks from now, we will have weathered the worst of the early equinoctial storms that are already beginning to sweep in, the clouds will be whisked aside like a magician’s cape and suddenly, the sky will be pierced by a big pale gunshot that showers splinters of white everywhere. The Hunter’s Moon will have arrived.
To many this is a time of depression, the darker months switching them into a kind of mental hibernation mode, but I differ. I’ve always been one of those who prefer dusk to dawn, autumn to spring. Perhaps, as I’m relatively young and, hopefully, have a few decades to spare yet, I am allowing myself this indulgence while I can. Revisit me when I’ve another twenty years under my belt and perhaps the reverse will be true.
For now, though, the autumn/winter season is a time of quiet indulgence, when the world holds its breath in anticipation and stops to think. Everything begins to empty – the trees of their leaves, the skies of their birds and the streets of people, and the world is effectively zeroed so that whichever way you turn you are confronted with a hundred thousand cold, gilded edges and one huge empty clean slate.
For centuries, human beings across the world have prepared and waited for this point in the calendar. All those other sdpartan, portioned-out waxy impostors in the skies of previous months were forgotten, and for all manner of indigenous peoples from Native Americans to Europeans of all derivations, the period between the Harvest moon of September and October’s Hunter’s moon arrived to mark its significant point in the year, a major temporal staging point in life’s journey. Traditionally, this would be a time when harvests were gathered in and livestock slaughtered in readiness for the coming months of hardship. Whole villages would gather en masse in the fields and drills, the children taken out of school to gather in the harvest, working through long days and on into the nights, the light from the big full moons and the relative lack of darkness between sunset and moonrise allowing for longer working hours, the process being best described by Longfellow in his poem The Harvest Moon:
It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighbourhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendour rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the labouring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer’s close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.
Living in a time of convenience and plenty, the importance of harvest time doesn’t quite hold the same life-or-death significance for me as it did for many in Longfellow’s day. The only Kilner jar in my house is the one upon the desk in my study, that brims over with an odd assortment of pens rather than some variety of hedgerow preserve, yet somehow, despite the disappearance of Harvest Home, the season’s “mystic splendour” endures, the endlessly repeating symbolism still remaining as significant to me as it did to my forebears, and so I prepare carefully, as did all generations before me, to pass through the gateway to winter.
Whereas their preparations would certainly have included butchering stock, salting and smoking meat, gathering in crops and grain and the cutting and storing up stocks of firewood, mine are all of an angling nature.
First come the rods and reels. Rod rings are checked over for chipped liners that would shear line in an instant, and their whipping given a thin coat of high build to cover those exuberant hairline cracks of a summer smooth hound session; reels are stripped down, washed, oiled, tuned and loaded with new line, checking the balance of the spools for smoothness of casting, all important when hurling a bait into the relentless headwinds.
Next the rigs: new rigs are tied – the tried and trusted and maybe a few experimental patterns to top up the rig wallets; hooks are renewed, snoods re-tied wherever necessary.
The petrol lamp is stripped down and serviced, mantles replaced, and the tetra can of petrol that will help to run it through those long cold nights is topped up to brimming.
Finally comes the bait. First, I’ll drive a few miles along the coast to dig a few pounds of lugworms ready to be salted and bagged up in twenties as a back-up or to bulk out large fresh worm bait for the cod shoals, then maybe I’ll sneak in a last session on the mackerel if the weather is calm or, as now, I’ll head down to the estuary to gather mussels, razorfish, and maybe scrape out a few sandeels or straggling peeler crabs if it’s been warm enough. When these are done, when “all is safely gathered in/ere the winter storms begin”, then I’ll know I’m ready for the winter season.
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The weeks move on.
Everything sharpens, becomes more focused; a time of clarity and infinitesimal detail in which I’ll sit waiting for a bite and watching the particles of frost feathering out in intricate patterns across the grey canvas of my rod holdall as the bait does its best to re freeze.
From Friday through to Sunday, and occasional evenings in between, looking up through the cloud of steam over the rim of a Thermos cup will offer a view across beaches garlanded with little islands of icy white light thrown out by LED headlamps, and by the warm saffron coloured nimbus of the occasional petrol lantern, pinpointing each angler strung out along the bay like little stations of warmth on a journey away into the dark nowhere. The air becomes so clear and sharp that across the channel the lights of Devon and Somerset twinkle hopefully against the blackness. What do they look like? How quiet are their streets, those little villages and towns tucked in against the cold? Are there any anglers out there on beaches facing me, staring back through clouds of their own breath, wondering about the distant lights of Wales?
Even though language fails across such freezing miles, even though there can be no communication at this distance, those distant, imagined faces and I are linked by what surges alive between us. Beneath the water’s dark calm, millions upon millions of whiting, pouting, dab and, of course, codling will have begun their annual invasion of our inshore waters so that everyone who ventures out to wet a line at this time of year is united by a common purpose. All around this sweep of coastline anglers of Wales and the West country alike are plugged into what flows through the currents of autumn and sustains us through to February, so very far away on the other side of winter’s icy grip.
But all of this is still weeks away, weeks that seem like a lifetime as I watch the sun finally burn down into its own grave behind Swansea to the west.
Still, I’ve waited this long for the Hunter’s Moon, and those weeks will pass quickly enough, as they have through every seasonal cycle stretching back through time, and as they surely must again.
From here on, the autumn will arrive and then pass in stages. Back on the treadmill of work and day-to-day life I’ll barely have time to notice the changes come, stopping only here and there to notice that the trees have altered in appearance or that, suddenly, there seems much less daylight than the previous week, and so the year will have almost slipped by me before I’m wise to it.
I’ve always promised myself that one year, when I finally win the lottery, or when some unknown, distant relative leaves me a million in their will, I will exchange one year of my life for twelve months in Japan. There, I would follow Basho’s trail to the deep north upon which, in exchange for that year and a few “frosty hairs on my head”, I shall take a full twelve months’ worth of seasons, wandering through the spring’s cherry blossom, maybe look for higher altitudes to avoid the humidity of early summer’s rainy season. But most of all, I will allow myself to take back the period from late August through to the year’s conclusion.
I will wait patiently for the calendar to slip on through September. I will wait for the coloured season to make its slow progress from the north, advancing in a slow-motion wave from Hokkaido, then southward through Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu.
I will wait for this wave to break, following it south and taking part in Momijigari, or searching for the red leaves, visiting the most beautiful places where I will stroll down avenues of orange, yellow, red and gold, some of them lit for maximum effect, where, like many Japanese people, I will enjoy being an emperor of such small pleasures. Perhaps one day.
Until then, I will have to content myself with these snatched glimpses taken from my classroom window, my seatbox upon a beach, or a river path like this one where, in the trees beside me, the first leaves give up and tumble back and forth, from side to side in their erratic pantomime, swaying from side to side as though there were another place to land, some other way to fall.
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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