Walking Home (In fading light)

As a family, we gained a reputation for the way our 'short  walks' often turned into marathon hikes which invariably meant staggering home long after dark (usually without a torch). In this week’s episode I reminisce on the lessons learnt, their prescient significance, and living in a culture that does growing old and dying so astonishingly badly.

Journal entry:

24th February, Saturday.

“Cloud cliffs, grey and climbing
 Early spring sunshine
 Catching the stonework traceries
 And Benedictine flint and brickwork.

The hub of politicking and commerce
 Silenced by the wheel-turn of centuries.
 Now trees stand where monks walked
 And daffodils nod in silent prayer.

An hour of gentle talk and laughter
 Among such emerald greens of spring.
 And crows bathe in the Stiffkey brook
 As the wayside flames with primrose,
 Crocus, and snowdrop.

Later, vast flights of wild geese fly south
 Along the coastline.”

Episode Information:

This episode comprises largely of family recollections, but please note that it also touches on the themes on death and dying. 

With special thanks to our lock-wheelers for supporting this podcast.

Chris and Alan on NB The Land of Green Ginger
Captain Arlo
Rebecca Russell
Allison on the narrowboat Mukka
Derek and Pauline Watts
Anna V.
Orange Cookie
Donna Kelly
Mary Keane.
Tony Rutherford.
Arabella Holzapfel.
Rory with MJ and Kayla.
Narrowboat Precious Jet.
Linda Reynolds Burkins.
Richard Noble.
Carol Ferguson.
Tracie Thomas
Mark and Tricia Stowe
Madeleine Smith

General Details

In the intro and the outro, Saint-Saen's The Swan is performed by Karr and Bernstein (1961) and available on CC at archive.org.

Two-stroke narrowboat engine recorded by 'James2nd' on the River Weaver, Cheshire. Uploaded to Freesound.org on 23rd June 2018. Creative Commons Licence. 

Pi

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:44 Journal entry
• 1:43 Welcome to NB Erica
• 2:43 News from the moorings
• 5:18 Cabin chat
• 7:47 Walking home (In fading light)
• 32:38 Signing off

Transcript

JOURNAL ENTRY

24th February, Saturday.

“Cloud cliffs, grey and climbing
 Early spring sunshine
 Catching the stonework traceries
 And Benedictine flint and brickwork.

The hub of politicking and commerce
 Silenced by the wheel-turn of centuries.
 Now trees stand where monks walked
 And daffodils nod in silent prayer.

An hour of gentle talk and laughter
 Among such emerald greens of spring.
 And crows bathe in the Stiffkey brook
 As the wayside flames with primrose,
 Crocus, and snowdrop.

Later, vast flights of wild geese fly south
 Along the coastline.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The wind has now changed, but it is still raw and bitter. The smudge of a waning moon appears as if a sleeve has brushed against it while it was still wet. Two ducks sit on the bank alongside us, hunched figures in the night. Below them, the water shivers.  

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the dark to you wherever you are.

It is not as cold tonight as it has been, but there is rain in the air and there is a damp chill that cuts bone deep. So, come inside and make yourself comfortable by the stove. The kettle is on and the welcome is warm. I am so glad that you could make it tonight. Welcome aboard. 

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

This week, there has been a rough north-easterly, raw and bitter, that has raked the water’s surface into scallops and flung pebbles of rain against the boat. I’ve been grateful of the stoves. But the week has also had an early spring-like feel to it. Up in Norfolk, daffodils, crocus and primrose are blooming in the cloud-chased sunshine. Bullace and blackthorn and cherry plum, froth thick and white along the roadside. Things are a little later here. But the swans are courting again, circling, necks entwined forming serpentine heart-shapes and scattered twigs show the rooks are busy with their nests.

Between the recording of the last episode and its uploading, we had news from Dad’s doctor, to inform us that he was now being treated as end of life of patient and further care was palliative. It wasn’t a huge shock, we had all read the signs and, in some ways, it made things a little easier as we weren’t having to second guess what was happening to him.

However, it does mean that, once more, are weekly and monthly schedules are up in the air and trying to be with Dad as much as possible. In keeping with the adage ‘It never rains but it it pours’ the central heating on the boat has packed up. Normally it wouldn’t have mattered at all, as we use it only in late spring and early autumn, when mornings and evenings are chilly, but it is too warm to light the stove. However, it is essential at the moment, as we obviously cannot leave the boat for three or four days with the stove running. Well, no, that is an exaggeration, it is not essential, but it does make life a hell of a lot easier. It also provides a good way to keep the pipes from freezing during very cold snaps – and of course, this last weekend, when we were away, wouldn’t you know it, but the night-time temperatures plunged below zero!

But I am impinging on a topic for a future episode I have planned that answers a couple of questions that Lee sent me – so I will stop there!   

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

WALKING HOME (IN THE FADING LIGHT)

Do you remember the walks we used to have, Dad?

Scatterdells, Whippendell, looking for orchids on Roughdown Common, bracken-scented Ashridge? The amber and blue mists of Tolkienesque Chorleywood common, Tring Reservoirs, the Apostles Pond in Chipperfield woods, the rushing River Chess at Chenies, The dolphining spine of Ivinghoe, the kite-soaring slopes of Coombe Hill.  

The four of us, loosely strung out along the footpaths and winding lanes like a broken charm bracelet. In my memory it was often damp, the air leathery with mushroom and wet wood, perhaps at-times edged with a nip of early frost, and the light dimming and the wintery sky, softened with a hazy mist, turning salmon pink and then rose. You and Mum, chatting together. You with your wooden camera case. Mum clutching her copy of Keble-Martin. Wendy and I lost deep in our own silent worlds. Soon darkness will fall.

We had a reputation, among family friends and relations, that any walk with us would involve coming back in the dark, with no torch, and crossing at least one muddy field in the pitch black! They never really learned though, did they? Even in your older years, when you had moved up here to Wells, and you and Mum took Don and Joan for a quick stroll down to the beach dunes and then ended up having to race the oncoming tide by ploughing through the sea-mud with Don still wearing his meticulously polished city-brogues!

I think Donna only felt truly part of our family after we led a youth group on a circular walk in Devon. Even though it was clearly marked, being conscientious, we decided to go round it together first. However, to my eyes, the beginning was much more climatic than the end and so when it came time to actually taking the youth on it, I decided that it would be much better to do it backwards, in the dark, without torches. The route was very rugged and involved a lot of clambering, and then we were on higher ground. Getting a sense of direction and where we were, I recognised a large boulder that I had spotted and made a note of on our practice circuit. As we walked up to it, it got to its feet and ambled off to join the rest of the cows a little further down the hill.

Our family walks always tended to be a little like that, a quick diversion to explore something new or the choice of a slightly different path, and they would end up being just a little too long. Walking back home in fading light, foot sore and stiffening legs.

It wasn’t that our walks were designed to be marathons of endurance. We climbed Snowdon a couple of times, and the trail from Llanberis seemed to be endless, but our goals were never really notable; not when compared to the lists found in walking guides or Sunday supplements.

High Cup Nick – Teesdale – became our family codeword for a mammoth walk. 

But I suppose the one that epitomises all of this was on our family holiday in Wales and, I think, shortly after arriving at the cottage we had rented, we decided to take a stroll up the nearby mountain, The Drum. In all honesty, I don’t remember too much of it. I think I was around 8 or 9, and I do remember, long rising flanks of windblown tall grass, white sky, a group of mountain ponies, their manes wild and flailing. There is a photograph of me. Although it is high summer, it is cold. I am standing awkwardly on a featureless rise of ground. My hands are behind my back, as I am wearing a pair of socks on them as we did not have any gloves with us. Where did those socks come from, Dad? Whose socks am I wearing?! It was one of those times when what looks like a short distance on the map turned out to be much longer – actually, I am not sure whether we even bothered with the map. We saw a high point and thought, ‘let’s walk to the top, savour the views, and blow away the cobwebs before teatime. It was one of my first introductions to the false summit and the siren call of high places that draw the unwary ever on. 

What I do remember was that the walk ‘home’ (or to our holiday cottage) felt never-ending. Even when we had at last reached the front door and keys were being found, I remember that I kept walking on the spot. Mum asked what I was doing, and I replied that, “I was worried that if I stopped walking, I would never be able to start again.” Apparently, I curled up in an armchair and fell soundly asleep and didn’t wake up until the next morning.    

Yes, most of our walks, tended to culminate in long walks home, trying to beat the failing light. Tired legs and the pooling darkness of dusk.

Of course, there was always tea waiting to be eaten. Sandwiches, or in winter, toast and the crisp tang of celery sticks that we would bite on and dip the end in a little eggcup of salt. The proper season for celery is when you have to draw the curtains closed for teatime. It still feels wrong eating celery when it is daylight outside. There were also special times, when we had tea in the front room. The fire would be on, the radio on – Sing Something Simple (it was ALWAYS Sing Something Simple) – or even better – we would play our records and we’d all read our books while we ate toast and cake, and outside the gloaming grew thick and dark. 

And now, that time has come again. The long walk home as the darkness begins to fall. A Tenebrae darkness, the sheltering darkness of the night behind the night. Feeling that familiar seep of heaviness in your legs, the hot rub of heel and sole with every step, and miles still to go in the shadows of the gathering night.  

Now, the day has at last grown old, Dad. I know that you know it. You have said it already in a hundred little ways. And the daylight is beginning to fade. The shadows grow long and dark, melding and deforming the known, the familiar.

It’s been a long walk, hasn’t it, Dad? We’ve been to some good places. Seen and done wonderful things. Laughed so much that the tears fell. Felt the warmth of the sunshine and our beating hearts. And, however, reluctantly, as we have had to do so many, many, times before, we have had to turn for home once more. True to form, perhaps it feels just like a little too long a walk, but then the best ones, the ones we fondly remember the most - High Cup Nick, the Drum, Jack Scarr, that last walk that you and I and Penny took along the beach and over the dunes to Holkham bay. Even though the sky is darkening towards the east, those spontaneous diversions, those fox-trails we followed not knowing where we’d end up, were worth it, weren’t they. Even though the exhaustion has set in, and the daylight is dimming. Once more, for one final time, we’re here together, you and me, Donna and Wendy and Andrew, even Mum – in her own way - walking back home in the fading light.   

I know you feel so tired, and the anxieties that can pour into this world, once so familiar, but now filled with shifting shadows that distort and make strange the world that we once knew. And so, I know you must feel a little lost, alone, and so far from home. But we’ve got this, Dad. Try not to worry or be afraid. The time has come for me to find the way home, just this once. As you have done so many, many, times for me. Times when the darkness has pressed in and all I could do was follow the long stride of your footprints. You always found the way, but now, it’s my turn – and that is how it should be. Don’t be afraid of the darkness as it comes. I will find the way back home.  

In this closing light of gathering night, shadows shift and change. Disorientating, confusing. It is so easy to feel lost in a familiar landscape, where what is safe, trusted, comforting lurches and tilts in alarming ways. Nothing seems quite what it once was, Our relationships dance and whirl in unthinkable, un-imagined ways. For in this fading light, we see each other differently. Our relationships alter, shape-shift, roles swap about and swap again. Father-son, son-father, two men in company with each other, looking for home in a dark world.  

Perhaps this dimming light plays tricks with us, or perhaps it just helps us to see things as they really are, but this last year it has become easier to see below the surface of the man to the younger you. I have always been proud to have you, as my Dad – perhaps that is something you never really knew – but now I can glimpse the young boy that must have always lived deep within the man. That cycling shifts in our roles strip away the years and I can recognise how like the young you the young I was. As you cared and protected the young me, I can now do that for you.

And I think I can glimpse how much your mother, Chick, and father, Grampie, must have loved you so much. As you lie, a little figure, propped up by pillows in your nestling bed, I see you, through Chick’s eyes, busying around the house, keeping a worried eye on you and Grampie, coming in from work, popping his head round the door, as I do, “How’s Michael doing?” And in doing so, I can feel the deep well of how much they loved you, that was mirrored in your deep love for us.
 
 Is this what the process of dying does? It gently eases away those hardened carapaces that we have spent our lives constructing. Shells that protect the tiny, vulnerable us that hides inside us? The roles we have chosen, and the ones that have been chosen for us. The armour of adulthood that we have nurtured to stop the things that hurt and to cover the wounded parts of us. Is, in our dying, the stripping away the layers for us to emerge in all our undefended core of our unadorned humanness once more. Perhaps we should have lived a little more like that, hold onto that stage a little longer. Then these undoings wouldn’t feel quite so perplexing, so awkward and alien. It wouldn’t feel so much like the unravelling of a life, just the revealing of one. Is this the purpose of the dying – to prepare us for death – the apocalypse (in its original sense) of the true self – distilled into the fragile vulnerability of who we truly are. It is as if there is a need to leave this life in the same state as we entered it - only our true selves can take us into the sweeping waters of the Great Unknown. The chrysalises of our making have outlived their usefulness. Once more we are set free to be who were born to be.

The process of dying seems to be about a stripping away, a reduction. I suppose it is a very human response to shrink away from it, to view it as wrong, to fight it. But that appears to misunderstand what is happening. This is not contraction, a decline, a lessening to become something that is less than what we were before. It is about bringing us to the point where we are more than what we were before, distilled, refined, the essence, for good or ill, of who we really are. Surely that is not something to be fought, but to be embraced.

We have the misfortune of being born into a culture that does growing old and dying so, so badly. How can we make such a hash of something so universal, so part of our existence, so natural? I know you love Dylan Thomas as much as I do, but his ‘Rage, rage, against the dying of the light’ got it so wrong. It was the voice of a young man’s anger confronted with the existence of death, not the voice of one who understands the truth of life. There is nothing unnatural in our dyings. There is nothing wrong about what is happening to you. It is part of the natural rhythm and ebb and flow. Try not to be alarmed, your body is just doing what it needs to do. Listen to it. Trust it as you have done throughout your life. It will not harm you.

The turning in of your world, the diminishing of your interests, your visions, this is part of it, Dad. It is the nature of twilight to foreshorten the horizon, to narrow our fields of view. This is normal and as a natural as flame drawn from the fire or blackbird song at first light. And with it that sense of becoming detached from the world around. Donna calls this process ‘becoming unanchored’ and that is a good word for it. There are other tides, other currents, for you to discover. The withdrawing is part of this.

Do you remember when you were in hospital, and we talked about how Kismus-puss appeared to know that she was about to die? And how she took herself out of the house to the top of the garden, to be alone, and how she made herself a simple nest in the warmth of the compost heap, curled up and gently died? It was my very first encounter with death – although I knew it theoretically, that day I knew that I lived in a world where everything will die. I always thought that that was Kismus’s great lesson for me, but I don’t think that is quite true, for she brought us a bigger important lesson – she taught us how to die.

Since then, I have come across thanatology, the study of non-predation death among non-human lives. This impulse to withdraw, to find a quiet place and solitude, to make a nest, appears to be one of the constants across many different species.

This deep-seated urge to withdraw, this diminishing, this un-anchoring from your world, is entirely natural. To unloose all those knots that tie us here and to seek the solitude. Giving into the impulse to seek the quiet and the shadowed light to find a nest and burrow down in its warmth and protection, just as Kismus did. You are doing it right, Dad. Even in its discomfort and disconcerting foreignness, this is the path not to be feared any more than the seed being broken by the frost, or leaf-fall, or the dying back of summer grass - and I know deep down you do not fear it, but instead recognise its appropriateness and its rightness. Follow Kismus-puss, Dad, she is helping you to find the path home.

And so, we find ourselves at last at the end of a very long walk and night is falling. We all knew this time will come, and now it is here. I know you feel so tired, Dad, and the anxieties that can push away sleep and fill your night-time hours. And how this world, once so familiar, is now filled with disconcerting shifting shadows. I know you must feel a little lost, alone, and so far from home. But we’ve got this, Dad. Try not to worry, close your eyes and let me take the lead. This time has always been coming; when the daylight fades, it’s my turn now to find the way of home.

There is a path in this landscape of no-paths, and I sometimes feel as lost as you must do. I will get it wrong at times, and I am sorry, a misjudged action or word. But please know that it comes from the depth of love for you. Donna and Wendy each have much more experience and knowledge in this than I do, and they too are walking with us, finding their own paths to match your steps. But the one thing, at this point of which I am certain, is that the pathless path that we do find and walk along will be exactly the right one.

 And now the trails of wild geese are calling across the sullen skies and the air is chill with damp. We’re tired and footsore, but there's the glow of lamp-lit windows in the distance, and soon we’ll see the rise of terraced houses, with chimney smoke winding upwards between a wiry forest of television aerials, their roof slates silvered with rain. It’s not far now, Dad, just a little while more and we’ll be home. I’ll walk with you up to the door, but for now only you can walk through. My turn will come, when it is the right time. But please know that I will always be just on the other side of it for however long it takes. I am not far away, as you won’t be from me. Do not worry about me, Dad. I have paths of my own to walk, things to see and a person to become. I too will also have my time of unloosing and un-anchoring and I will be alright. Don't say, 'Don’t be sad. Don't miss me.' For, of course, I will. Parting and goodbyes hurt, and they never really stop hurting. But it is natural and normal. It is what life is.

And so we will walk back home together as the light fades for one more time. And we will joke about not bringing a torch - although secretly glad that this sheltering night is not disturbed by artificial light. And it is as it should be, the end of a very good and very long walk.  

And now it's time for rest.

I'll leave the light on on the stairs ...