SHIFTING SANDS

 I was saddened, though hardly surprised, when authorities in California confirmed that the remains found last weekend by a couple of hikers on Mount Baldy were those of the actor Julian Sands.

 

He had set off on a solo hike on January 13, in severe weather conditions and hadn’t returned. 

 

Media reports seem to say Sands was both a walker and a climber, and although of course you can be both, I think people are generally one or the other.  Some of the paths on Mount Baldy look pretty terrifying to me but it does look like hard walking rather than full on mountaineering.

 

Conflating the climbing/walking dichotomy still further, Sands once said in an interview, ‘Climbing mountains, a lot of time people who don't climb mountains assume is about this great heroic sprint for the summit. And somehow this great ego-driven ambition. But actually it's the reverse. It's about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It's not so much a celebration of oneself but the eradication of one's self consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony hopefully with your environment.’

 

I suppose in the end we all become one with the environment, Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

 

DANCES WITH DAFFS

 It being the beginning of March I found myself walking in Suffolk, at the very southern 

edge, along the river Orwell, in Pin Mill and Shotley Gate.

 

The first bit of the walk – in fact on a patch of land belonging to the National Trust - was suitably woody and bucolic.  Along the way I came across these – and have even managed to identify them – Daldinia concentrica:

 

They’re not edible, and not in the least psychotropic.  In fact and the reference works say they make ‘great kindling’ which seems rather a waste of a mushroom even if it’s not edible.

 

The second part of the walk was more or less industrial looking out from Shotley at Felixstowe which I gather is often very much busier than this:

 

And I was thinking about Pauline Oliveros and her notion of deep listening.  In the woods there were a lot of bird sounds – most of which I couldn’t identify though I’m pretty sure I heard a woodpecker.  There was also some distant droning, either from something on the river or traffic the A12 which wasn’t a million miles away.

This is Pauline Oliveros, apparently in some woods:

 

Shotley probably had some sounds of lapping water but mostly there was noise from the tankers being loaded and unloaded across the way: deep thuds and the occasional metallic clunk. 

 

In both places there were daffodils – these near Pin Mill

 

these at Shotley – I am very fond of plants in tyres:

 

Of course I thought of the Wordsworths.  Interestingly, or not, it was evidently much later than the beginning of March when William floated on high (or in fact walked) and saw the daffs that inspired his poem. Sister Dorothy was with him of course, and she wrote about it in her journal of April 15^th(1802).  There may have been a delay before she wrote about it, but surely not a month and a half. On the other hand, by his own account, it took William a couple of years to get round to writing the poem.

 

Dorothy wrote, ‘When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.’

 

You know, I’m quite naïve in matters of daffodil reproduction.  I always imagined the bulbs proliferated underground.  The idea that seeds floated ashore was quite a new idea to me.

 

This is a picture of Dorothy and William from Look and Learn magazine.  Dorothy seems amazingly happy with that rake.