Tag Archives: nature writing

Flocking

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Yesterday morning, the dog and I rowed upriver in our little row boat. Let me be clear – I rowed; the dog imagined herself Elizabeth I on the royal barge. There wasn’t a cloud in the deep blue sky. Movement away to my right – to the southwest – caught my eye. High in the sky, a flock of birds was flying northwestward in a V formation. They were too far away for me to know what they were; besides, my knowledge of birds is poor. I knew they weren’t geese or ducks, which I associate with V formations. They were smaller and their flying movements were different. They looked black against the blue sky; then again, they might have proved a different colour up close.

After I had been following their path for a short while, the V broke down as the lead birds turned back, through their companions and left across my field of vision, the whole flock following suit in what looked like a more disorganised formation.

I looked farther left, beyond the flock, and saw a lone bird flying in their direction and, behind it, farther left still, another flock of about the same number as the flock that had originally caught my eye. I was transfixed by what happened over the next few minutes.

The two flocks flew in the direction of one another and then both, as if sensing some danger or lacking confidence in the encounter, turned around and flew away from each other. Only the lone bird between the two continued on its direct path from the flock to the left to the flock to the right.

Both flocks turned again, got a bit closer, turned away again suddenly. On and on this went – two steps forward, one step back – with only the lone bird remaining true to its course.

When the two flocks appeared to be only metres apart (but I am a poor judge of distance at a distance), the flock to my left put the brakes on once more and turned back, all except three, who continued forward to join the lone bird, still on its mission to reach the flock to the right.

That was enough because, on the next flight forward, the two flocks came together and appeared to seamlessly intermingle. I could no longer tell which flock was which. As one, they turned and proceeded on the original flock’s northwestward path. Double the size, they formed a V or a W, constantly reshaping as I watched them disappear beyond the hills.

Were they one flock that had become separated? Were they two flocks with one intrepid individual that thought they should be together? Did that individual recognise family or friends? I don’t know. All I know is that for those few minutes I was mesmerized.

We are not alone

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These mornings it’s too hot to walk or run. I open the car door and the dog jumps onto the back seat. I drive a couple of kilometres up out of the fishbowl of the village, over the hill and down into the next valley. At this hour, the dog and I are the only domesticates. But we are not alone.
I head for the trail that runs west along the tributary, following it towards the point where it joins the great flow of the main river. The hills rear up all around – the bare grey bedrock, the golden sunburnt undergrowth, the twisted olive and almond trees. Above, like a cutout backdrop, the sky, so tangible in its blueness – surreal, unreal, real.

A rustle in the undergrowth and I catch a brief glimpse of a blackbird. A butterfly, statue-still on a dead leaf, flutters to life, suddenly surprising the dog. Sound and movement – the one indistinguishable from the other – reveals a snake, sluggishly departing the patch of path where it’s been indulging in a morning sun bath. It slithers up the hillside, its tail disappearing under an asparagus bush.

I leave the trail and descend to the riverbank. The dog, ahead of me, turns back and tilts her head, asking if are we going to swim or stay on the path. ‘Go on,’ I say, and I hear her splashing into the water even as I am still gingerly picking my way through the brambles, getting snagged on my shoulder and on my hip, and popping a couple of blackberries in my mouth.

I step out of my shoes and take my dress off over my head. As I step down, feeling the water on my toes, my eyes are drawn upwards to the towering hill on the other side of the river, beyond the narrow floodplain. I hear hooves on rock and see movement. I’m transported back more than twenty years to the Kivalliq, to an evening when I sat on an esker at dusk and heard a chorus of clicking behind me. Before I had a chance to turn around, I was engulfed in a sea of caribou – does and bucks and calves – their hooves click-click-clicking as they gently snorted and snuffled their way past me. I didn’t move for fear of frightening them. I sat and I saw and I heard and I smelled and I felt them. Now, on this little riverbank on the other side of the world, I hear the click of hoofs on rock as a small herd of four slender female deer and two calves high step up the hill.

I fully immerse myself in the warm water that is so refreshing after the heat of even this early hour. I cross the river, the dog swimming alongside or leaving me to swim alone, and coming back to me again. I hear a splash to my right but see nothing. I focus on that patch of river, treading water for twenty, thirty seconds. My concentration is rewarded. A 30 cm silver fish throws itself out of the water, for the briefest of moments suspended in the air, the sun reflecting on its glistening silver side. Then ‘splash’, it is gone. Another thirty seconds pass and it reappears – same arc, same glistening body, a few metres further along its journey.

The dog has had enough of swimming. She goes to the riverbank to torment frogs. I imagine them hiding in the rushes, laughing at her foolishness, laughing at their ability to hide from her. On mornings when the tide is high and the water comes up to the rushes, I hear one or two of them plop into the water. The dog never gives up. She also never catches one.

In addition to the frogs, she likes to vigorously roll around in the silt and sand on the riverbank, turning her white fur a dirty brown, gathering up a collection of grit to deposit in the house later.
When I finish swimming, I step into my shoes and walk for a while in just my swimsuit, drying off before I put my dress back on. There’s a pool of water under the bridge, close to where I’ve parked the car. I’ve seen this whole valley completely submerged but now, at the height of summer, the river has dried up, leaving pools of varying sizes and depths. This one by the bridge is the first and the biggest, occasionally reconnecting to the tributary when the tide is especially high.

I search for a stick to throw so the dog will go in for a final swim to wash off the grit. Before I throw the stick, the pool is still – not a ripple, not a breeze moves it. From the corner of my eye I catch a glimmer. I look down. A crab the size of a saucer, iridescent silver and blue, scuttles along amongst and finally disappears under a rock near my feet. I’ve seen surprisingly large fish in this pool, and snakes, and schools of smaller fish, but I’ve never seen a crab here before and I’ve certainly never imagined there would be one so big. I am in awe.

I throw the stick far out into the middle of the pool. The dog, delighted, swims out to retrieve it. When she brings it back, she drops it and walks away; it is her way of telling me she doesn’t want to play this game anymore. We get in the car and come home.

80. Skyscape

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The morning started out sunny and warm. We’d planned to spend the day on the beach but, as usual, we slept in too late and spent half the morning in our pyjamas, drinking tea and chatting around the kitchen table. By the time we were ready to go out, close to lunchtime, it had begun to cloud over.

For our tardiness we were rewarded with this incredible skyscape, the dark grey clouds reaching out across the sea, the rain falling in a sheet a mile or more out to sea. I thought it was coming towards us, that we’d get soaked even as we set the picnic out on a towel on the beach. The rain shower moved from west to east, appearing to approach, but instead moving away to the southeast over Galley Head.

By the time we’d finished our picnic, the sky had cleared and we were warmed by the sun. The sea was inviting but, in the few minutes it took to change into our swimsuits, another bank of clouds had rolled in, another shower of rain fell to the south and we were chilled by the wind as we braved seawater that was the coldest we’d experienced this year.

But as quickly as those clouds came, they went again, and again we were in the sun. And so it was for the afternoon, the mood of the sky changing by the minute, tempting and teasing us, and delighting us with its constantly evolving shapes and colours.

70. This close to Dublin?

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Last Saturday, I had six hours to kill between an airport pickup and an airport drop-off. I thought about what I could do with our friends from Lithuania, to give them a taste of Ireland. I didn’t want to take them into the city – that’s one version of Ireland, and we’d done that earlier in the week. I thought Howth might be nice. And then a friend suggested the Howth Cliff Walk. I’d never heard of it, but my friend had done it a couple of times and had only good things to say about it. So, I did a bit of research, saw that the car park where we could start the walk was less than 30 minutes from the airport, and decided on that for our ‘taste of Ireland’ day out.

I’d only been to Howth once before, years ago on the Dart with Julian, and then only for about an hour. There were a number of routes we could take on the cliff walk and, after consultation with the girls and our visitors, we decided to tackle the longest and most difficult walk – the 3 hour, 12km Bog of the Frogs walk. And what a walk it was.

We parked the car (for free) close to Howth Marina
I was delighted to see that Yeats had lived here for a time.

I couldn’t have imagined that there would be such a varied rural landscape so close to the city. I mainly took photos along the coastal portion – as we walked along the coastal path on top of the cliffs, with yachts from a sailing club flying past and practicing manoeuvres, a fishing boat dropping lobster pots, and herring gulls, kittiwakes and cormorants swooping high or flying low over the sea. At times, the grey sea blended into the grey sky, creating a mesmerizing horizonless seascape.

At lunchtime, we wound our way down to a small stony beach and, after a delicious picnic (if I do say so myself), we quickly changed into our swimsuits for a quick dip in the sea. The water was warm and we all could have stayed there all day. But we were only half way through the walk and our friends had a plane to catch to Lithuania in a few hours.

A dip in the sea here after lunch was glorious.

The path soon brought us away from the sea, up through birch woods and then up the side of a hill overlaid with blanket bog and heather. That took some effort and, for twenty minutes or so, we barely spoke – our chatty group focused now on getting up the hill and controlling our breathing. But that ended too and then, after a brief foray across a busy golf course, it was downhill all the way and back, once again, into the middle of Howth village.

It was a delightful day out. Just the perfect weather for a walk, a swim, a picnic. The other walkers we met were friendly and chatty. And, despite advice to the contrary on the cliff walk website, the trail was clearly and frequently marked.

I think it would be lovely to do it again.

63. What if it’s poisonous?

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Our Lithuanian next door neighbours are visiting. Egle tells me they have spent the summer in Lithuania foraging for and eating wild mushrooms.

The very thought of eating wild mushrooms scares the living daylights out of me. Julian used to forage for mushrooms. I ate them once or twice, but never enjoyed them, too scared that I was going to die. I used to tell him, ‘If you’re still alive in 24 hours, I’ll try them then.’ The only wild mushrooms I’ve ever eaten with confidence are the giant puffball and the chicken of the wood, because no other species can be mistaken for them.

But while I’m scared, I’m also envious that my friends have the foraging skills to distinguish edible mushrooms from poisonous ones.

This evening, we went walking along the canal in Edenderry with Alisa, who’s been foraging for mushrooms with her parents in Lithuania. As soon as we set out on our walk, my daughters descended on the hedge, stuffing blackberries in their mouths as fast as they could pluck them from the brambles.

‘What are you doing?’ Alisa asked, concerned. ‘How do you know they’re not poisonous?’

I had to laugh. There I was, worrying about the safety of her family’s foraging in her country and here she is, worrying about my family’s foraging in our country. Maybe we all know what we’re doing after all, foraging foods we’ve known since childhood. Before long. Alisa was alongside my girls, searching for the juiciest blackberries she could find.

60. Digital nomad

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Only a few short years ago, this summer would have been impossible. But here I am, over fifty days since I left home, and barely a day of work missed. Laptop, wifi, Bluetooth; Word, Zoom, Google docs. These are the tools I need to work anywhere and at any time. In between all the fun summer activities – visiting friends, Wimbledon, Pride, museums, hikes, and on and on – I’ve been beavering away at work. Making space at the kitchen table at Mammy’s house, spending days in public libraries, in friends’ spare rooms and office spaces – I have been working away to pay the bills and fund this wonderful summer.

All summer I’ve been ghostwriting, editing and providing other writing support for clients in South Africa, the UK, Europe, the US, Canada and China, fitting in an hour of work here, a couple of days there, a weekend, an evening, whatever time I can find. It’s been challenging at times, as I’m not following my usual routine of working at my desk, on my lovely widescreen monitor, while the girls are at school. Instead, I’m working from an old laptop, in a variety of different places, at various times of the day, and with all sorts of distractions.

Technology that was almost unimaginable twenty years ago, clunky and clumsy ten years ago, intermittent and expensive even five years ago, is now ubiquitous, easy to access and easy to use. Even with a barely hanging in there laptop, I can work wherever and whenever I want.

I am privileged to have a job that allows me to choose when and where I work, and equally privileged to have access to the tools and hardware that allow me to work in this way. I’m one lucky summer digital nomad.

56. The Guillamine

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It’s a beautiful evening, warm and sunny, and the plan is to go for a swim at The Guillamine out in Tramore. Niamh and her family regularly drive the few miles from their house in Waterford city out to this cove where the swimming is good and, towards high water, you can jump from a high concrete platform into the sea.

There are a lot of people there when we arrive. Far more than I was expecting. Men and women of all ages, with a steady stream of people going down the narrow concrete steps from the car park and back up again.

When we get down to the swimming area, the sea is turquoise and there must be 50 or more people in the water. Niamh’s husband and son go straight to the diving platform.

That’s not for me. Without my glasses, I’m quite lost. I can’t really see where I am and, because I’ve never been here before and there are so many people here and it’s noisy with people splashing into the water, I suddenly feel overwhelmed and scared. I hold into a railing, with people asking if it’s ok to go past me. I let them pass. Niamh is in now, and Lily, and I momentarily think I should just turn back and wait for them up by our towels.

Lily swims back to me and tries to convince me to get in. But I don’t like this. Not one little bit. And why am I here? And this is not for me. Niamh swims over and suggests I enter the water via a hand rail. But I’ve already tried that and I couldn’t do it. She convinces me to try again.

It’s my eyesight. That’s the thing. Because I can’t see anything clearly beyond the end of my nose, I am figuratively, if not yet literally, out of my depth. I follow Niamh’s instructions, and now, in an instant, I am in and swimming away from the shore, away from the gentle waves breaking against the rocks, away from the hoards of people lining up to enter and exit the water.

And it’s glorious. The water is cold, but not too cold. Clumps of bladder wrack float past, dark green and slimy. The saltiness of the sea buoys me up with little effort. How could I ever have thought I didn’t want to be in here? I feel alive alive alive. I think I want to come back tomorrow.

50. Geography

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The deep history of Ireland is written in its landscape. In Donegal, the waves crash against the coast, turning cliff to cave, cave to arch, arch to stack, over aeons of time, crashing endlessly; cliff, cave, arch, stack, each a moment in its transformation into what it will become. Imagine speeding this erosive action up, so that these millions of years, tens of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, can be seen to pass in a time frame that is comprehensible to creatures as short-lived as us.

Or maybe those aeons of time – the mere blip in the history of the universe that it took to transform cliff to cave to arch to stack – is too vast to comprehend. How about a shorter time frame? From Donegal, we drive inland, through the u-shaped valleys, the hanging valleys, the cirques, the scree, the ribbon lakes of the most recent ice age. Shorter time, easier to grasp. 20,000 years. 50,000 years. Time when our ancestors, not yet here, lived and loved and laughed and adapted to (or failed to adapt to) the changing climate. The landscape here is barren, in hues of grey and purple, still in its post-glacial youth.

Down through Monaghan, the road winds through what the glaciers left behind as they retreated in a warming world. Now, we are getting closer to our time. Only 10,000 or 9,000 years ago. The blink of an eye. The drumlins, those hills of glacial debris, all sloping together, like eggs in a basket, their blunt stross ends facing back northwest in the direction of the retreating ice, their more gently sloping lee ends looking southeast to a warmer world. The drumlins are bright green farmland now, criss-crossed with hedges, stone walls and fences. Cattle and sheep graze on the mineral rich grass. We have made them our home.

From the drumlins we drive across the eskers, the long collection of the Eiscir Riada, dried streams of glacial melt water that left behind the stone and sand and gravel that we drive along and extract and graze our animals on.

And now I am home. In the Bog of Allen. The raised bog, so similar and yet so different to the blanket bog I walked across in Donegal. This too is a remnant of the last ice age, the trapped melt water with no escape from the depression at the centre of the island. As the world warmed, trees grew and died and grew and died, over 10,000 years. Heaney wrote of the bog

Missing its last definition

By millions of years.

They’ll never dig coal here,

Only the waterlogged trunks

Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Our ancestors lived here, buried their dead here, punted their boats here. Archaeologists have found hoards of gold buried here and urns of butter still edible after 5000 years.

In the blink of an eye, we have ripped up the Bog of Allen. Heaney was wrong when he wrote ‘The wet centre is bottomless.’ In my lifetime, we have reached the bottom – digging, extracting, exhausting. And what did we find there? An earlier history told in seashells and calcified rock. From a time before. But to comprehend that, we must step back from this moment, to look across millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years.

48. Weathering

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We had already decided to stay an extra night, to hole up here, in a house on a granite cliff, on the far northwest coast of Ireland. Better than running the risk of driving across Donegal and down through the country in the middle of a storm. We’d drive to the shop, get in supplies for the extra day.

Mid-morning, Katie called from the bathroom, ‘Is someone using the water out there?’ The shower wouldn’t heat up. A minute later she appeared wrapped in a towel. ‘The shower’s stopped working.’ Our trip to the shop in Dungloe delayed, we spent the next half hour trying to work out the source of the problem. The safety switch on the electricity junction box kept tripping. By a process of elimination, we realised that certain plug sockets also weren’t working. Michael stood on a kitchen chair, flicking switches on the junction box. ‘Shit. There’s smoke coming out of it,’ he said suddenly. I unlocked the door into the terrace in case we needed a speedy exit. My sister has survived two house fires – one in Ireland, one in Spain – both due to junction box fires, so I knew what could happen next

We ran around, unplugging and turning off lights. The smoke didn’t develop into anything more. Time for a sit down and a chat and decide what to do. It was Sunday morning, a bank holiday weekend. So calling out an electrician would be expensive and possibly not resolve the problem in the short term. Better to leave that til Tuesday and a normal working day. The house belongs to Michael’s aged aunt, so we didn’t want to bother or worry her when, at this moment, nothing could be done. And, the storm was still on its way.

We decided to ride it out here, without electricity. The girls raided the house for candles, torches, matches, while Michael and I figured out how to set up the ancient gas barbecue in a sheltered corner out the back of the house. Our shopping plan changed, as we considered what we could eat in the absence of electricity. We charged our phones as best we could during the drive.

When we got back from the shops, we went for a long walk across the island, still no hint that a storm was on its way. Michael lit the wood burning stove in the house and fired up the barbecue out the back. Up at this latitude at this time of year, it isn’t fully dark til 10:30. We sat chatting by candlelight til close to midnight. Michael was last to bed, leaving only a single (and safe) candle burning in the bathroom.

The wind woke me up around 5am, the back of the house, where I’m sleeping, creaking in its path. I was up at 7am, no longer able to sleep, keen to see what the sea looked like. I’m sitting here now by the big window that takes up half of this little house. Waves smash huge and white against the islands in the farther distance. Closer in, the sea is choppy, with gusts of wind dancing across its surface. A group of cormorants sit on the sea just down from the house, being tossed this way and that. The occasional seagull soars on a current of air, feet splayed as it attempts to land on firm ground

I’m glad we stayed. The lack of electricity gives a Wuthering Heights feel to this storm. We’ll leave later today or, more likely, tomorrow, whenever the storm has passed. All I’m missing is my morning cup of tea. For now, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the stormy sea.

47. Ukaliq

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In late 2000, I’d already been working as a volunteer teacher at Levi Angmak Elementary School in Arviat, Nunavut, for some months. Kip Gibbons, one of the teachers who had befriended me, offered to show me how to sew my own mittens. She sent me to the Northern Store to buy ukaliq (arctic hare) fur. I duly went a couple of evenings later and bought two ukaliq skins. On Saturday, I went around to Kip’s house and we sat on her floor, where she helped me to cut the pattern and showed me how to stitch the parts together.

I’ve never been much of a crafts person, so I was delighted to be making my own mittens. It was probably -20C or -25C as I walked the snow-covered streets back to my house a few hours later, proudly wearing my new mittens. I would wear them for years, and still have them today, although there isn’t much call for them in southern Spain.

On the Monday after I sewed the mitts, I wore them to school. In the school foyer, I met Peter 2 Aulajoot, an older teacher, who was always friendly and jokey with me. He chuckled when he saw my mitts. I hadn’t cut them badly or sewed them poorly. But Peter 2 noticed something that I hadn’t. While the fur on my left mitt was mostly white with a little smattering of black, the fur on my right mitt was mostly black with a little smattering of white. They looked completely mismatched. How could I not have seen this?

From that day on, Peter 2 always called me Ukaliq – arctic hare. A few other people picked it up too, but it wasn’t a name I was commonly called. But I liked that name for myself. I’d always loved hares, always got a thrill when I’d see them in Ireland. Now that I was in Nunavut, I saw them more often – including one that lived out past the reservoir and seemed as tame as a pet bunny.

I’ve carried that name – Ukaliq – with me ever since, making the frisson of excitement I feel whenever I see a hare all the sharper. So, yesterday when Michael said, ‘There’s the hare,’ I immediately turned to the window. And there she was. At the base of a granite outcrop beside the house, ears up, alert. She paused, nibbled at a hind paw with her teeth, hopped along and then sat, ears back, looking out over the sea.

I was in a state of awe and nostalgia and joy all mingled together, remembering Peter 2 and Kip and that ukaliq by the reservoir and the person I was twenty-five years ago.