The Sixth Winter - 200th Episode (Reflections on canal-life - 1)

Tonight, we’re celebrating our 200th episode while enjoying our sixth winter aboard the NB Erica. To mark the occasion, I’m looking back at how the watery path of canal life has reshaped our lives, sometimes in unexpected ways. So, settle in as we ponder the intricacies of synoptic weather charts to the quiet, unique qualities of living on the water.

Journal entry:

24th January, Saturday

“A silver sun
 Leans on a lonely wind
 Casting hard light
 Upon the world.

I can taste
 Winter in the air
 It’s old and it’s brave
 Unheeding of complaints.”

Episode Information:

For our 200th episode we begin our short series on looking at different aspects of life on water. 

In this episode I read a section of my poem “A Narrow Path.”

With special thanks to our lock-wheelersfor supporting this podcast.

Susan West
 Ana McKellar
 Susan Baker
Mind Shambles
 Clare Hollingsworth
 Kevin B.
 Fleur and David Mcloughlin
 Lois Raphael
 Tania Yorgey
 Andrea Hansen
 Chris Hinds
 Chris and Alan on NB Land of Green Ginger
Captain Arlo
Rebecca Russell
Allison on the narrowboat Mukka
Derek and Pauline Watts
Anna V.
Orange Cookie
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

The intro and the outro music is ‘Crying Cello’ by Oleksii_Kalyna (2024) licensed for free-use by Pixabay (189988).

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

Piano and keyboard interludes composed and performed by Helen Ingram.

All other audio recorded on site. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:27 Journal entry
• 0:54 Welcome to NB Erica
• 2:03 News from the moorings
• 9:43 Cabin chat
• 14:56 The Sixth Winter
• 32:30 'A Narrow Path' by Richard Goode
• 35:54 Signing off
• 36:11 Weather Log

Transcript

JOURNAL ENTRY

24th January, Saturday

“A silver sun
 Leans on a lonely wind
 Casting hard light
 Upon the world.

I can taste
 Winter in the air
 It’s old and it’s brave
 Unheeding of complaints.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It’s a night of south-easterlies blowing bullish and growling down the canal, bending reeds flat and rattling the rushes. Blasts of rain pebble the surface of the water. The sightless sky is blind of stars and moon.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the wet and windy darkness of a night deep into January to you wherever you are.

It is so lovely to see you, I am so pleased you could make it. I was hoping you’d come. It’s muddy and cold out here, so come inside, the stove is warm, the cabin cosy. The kettle is about to sing its welcome and I have refreshed the biscuit barrel. Mind your head on the hatch on the way in, and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS

Locally, the weather has an uneasy feel to it, of late. Erratic, on edge. Neither one thing nor the other, as if caught in some internal argument with itself, or maybe it’s just that its mind is elsewhere. After all, everyone has a lot on their mind recently. Temperatures spike and drop, almost daily. One night it was -7° here, the next night it was 11°.  Breathless days, are the next day followed by growling skies and ripping winds. I've been looking at the synoptic weather charts. I like synoptic charts. When I was a lad, we used to cut them out of the Evening News and stick them into scrap books. Unwieldly volumes that smelt of old glue and newsprint, and the rough type of paper that made the tips of your fingernails itch. Loads of little inked pictures, stuck askew, with fingerprints and bits of fluff and the mandatory collection of dog hairs, all with the United Kingdom tattooed with the lines and swirls of warriors fighting the hordes from Rome and the imposition of its brutish civilisation. There was always a little blank space to the left – the elbow of the Atlantic – where the interesting stuff was occurring. The tight circles, and heavier frontal lines (like those that ran across my palm, banded with dark triangles and semicircles. I don’t think I had any idea what it all meant. I just liked the weighted-feel of the books in my hand and the thought of something on the edge of knowing happening out to sea.

Nowadays, Synoptic Charts seem to be everywhere (if you tune your algorithms right). But now, they are coloured angry with purples and reds, oranges and a shock of green. ‘Another attempt to deliberately scare us’ I read someone somewhere on the internet complaining. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that whoever it is in charge thinks we need a little more help in understanding the sweeping jumble of lines, or maybe they get the feeling that after decades of monochrome, we still like to have lots of colour on our screens now.

The charts are animated now too. You can watch the isobars python and twist, the climate constricting into what, right now, looks to me like grimaces or the furrowed brow of a frown (from worry or anger, I don’t know – we’re good at supplying both). And lately the isobar dance has been frenetic. Anticyclones clashing with cyclonic air masses, sinking troughs of lows biting away at highs. The climate, like a fist clenching, knuckle white, and then releasing. The jet stream writhes and flicks like a burnt snake dragging hot and cold air across the country with each contortion. Flexing: It looks angry – but maybe that is just me.

Weather alerts flash on and off on my phone and tablet, a succession of little yellow triangles, some amber, one or two red, but never for us here (not yet, at least). Beyond the obvious, they simply confirm to us what we have always known. To some, it bears out what they have been feeling with their skin, and what they smell in the air different scents that attend different types of weather front. Through long years of being sensitive to the elements, have come to know – almost instinctually now, through their close experience of living alongside the weather, adapting to it, changing plans to suit, aware of its foibles, but, more importantly, aware of its broader rhythms and cycles, its seasonal dance, the careful balance upon which all life depends. And now aware that there is something out of kilter, the certainties that can no longer be depended upon. Worried at where these trends are leading. However, for others it is all just another sign of how soft people have gone these days. The ‘I walked to school in 6ft snowdrifts’ and ‘It was so hot in ’76 I got sunstroke’ brigade. For still others, they’re proof of some deep political and ideological conspiracy and that that the world, climate included, has gone woke and hijacked common sense and economics.

And I look at the swirl of lines and loops, flex and writhe, and wonder. Another alert pings on my phone. Possible danger of flooding nearby. But then, I know that already. There is often a scent in the air – slightly metallic – like opening a tray of steel cutlery that hasn’t been opened in a while. And there’s a special quality to the light.

Two moorhen fuss and worry across waterlogged grass. Alder leaves lie heavy and oily on the grass with the air of abandoned beauty. The wind kicks up again. The isobars are tightening. Not cold, so much as friendless and hunting, seeking solace in the wrapping embrace of tree and horse, boat and human. It’s enough for me to turn up my collar and be glad that I have remembered my hat. A squadron of geese fly low overhead, the songs of colder lands in their feathers. They catch a gust of wind, their wings fan, and they rise on the glorious crest of it, and together abruptly veer almost 90 degrees west and scorch off along its leading edge. The sight strikes me as being quite wonderful. Reading and riding the winds that I can only see as rippling palm-lines on the palmistry of the weather charts of my youth.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THE SIXTH WINTER (REFLECTIONS ON CANAL-LIFE – 1)

Night falls. The record that has been quietly playing stops and the boat fills with that type of soft silence that you can feel in your chest as it seems to wash through your veins. Steam curls in whispered whisps from the mug of tea that is sitting beside me. The lamp gently swings on its hook from the ceiling. Its shadowy penumbra rises and falls in fluid tidal movements upon the cabin walls. The coal settles in the grate. A gentle rattle like a large animal is turning in its sleep. For a few seconds, orangey-red flames flare and lick. And then settles back down to the glow of crimson lake and cherries. I should get up and turn the record over to play the B side, but I suddenly lack the energy – or perhaps the will – to do so. I feel swaddled in the sleepy lethargy of a winter’s night in a warm boat. Besides, the silence is nice and plays a different kind of music – soul deep. I look out of the window, but the darkness has turned it into a mirror. I know that there is the ash tree out there, the one that the magpies and goldfinches love – and the cormorant too, when the fishing gets too wearying. And now, its fingers capture stars and miss-placed galaxies too faint for the eye, and, if it is lucky, the sickle of the moon. And there will be moorhens out there too, strutting under brush-cover, worrying over everything they see and do. Knowing they are there, is enough. And so, I sit without moving, captured in stasis; content to let the winter night wrap around the boat, to watch the steam from my mug find its curling path around the cabin and to let the silence settle. This is what winter is about. A time to let the silence from within to first introduce itself and then to find a way to dance with the silence without.

This is the sixth winter we are spending on the Erica. My mind can’t quite comprehend it. It doesn’t feel like that, I even had to write out all the dates to check the arithmetic, and it’s true. Six winters and going into a sixth spring. I suppose that is why I have been looking back so much. Contemplating life on a boat. That and the fact that, nearby, we have welcomed two new boats to this transient little community. Both sets of owners are liveaboards and both totally new. The most recent, are right next to us. A small family who came in the gloaming on a freezing night a couple of weeks ago. They’re lovely and have a wonderful can-do make-do-and-mend spirit. They appear to be used to roughing it a bit, but it is their first time on a narrowboat, it must have been hard. One of our other neighbours, while we were trying to coax frozen water out of the water tap to fill their tanks, laughed, “Well, if you can survive this night, you’ll be able to survive anything.” There was an element of seriousness behind the smiles. I woke in a panic in the middle of the night remembering that I hadn’t shown them how to turn on the gas – there are multiple stopcocks on a boat and unless they are all working to the same tune, you’ll not get any gas. But they did survive and with smiles. They’re doing well. There’s a steep learning curve and one that, no matter how much you think you have prepared for, can still take the breath and, at times, good temper out of you. Every boat is different. Even advice – no matter how seasoned and carefully given, doesn’t always fit the shape of the problem that you are facing.

So, perhaps it is not surprising that my mind is falling back to the time when we started that learning curve and when we began to face our first winter – which, I seem to remember as being very cold outside – that was the year the boat got locked into the ice and it sang – and VERY hot inside the boat!!      

But also, maybe it is because of a question that Lee in her cabin in the Colorado Mountains sent me around November time.

Lee wrote:

“I just started playing your very first episode again, and this time around I have noticed something new. You begin by explaining that this podcast is primarily to talk about how your move onto the narrowboat has impacted you and Donna "physically, emotionally and mentally," and about "the changes that we find in ourselves and our attitudes to the world around." I've realized that although you talk about your "conscious decision to slim down and live a little bit more closely to the elements," I don't recall you actually discussing in depth that first question, about the ways your move onto the boat changed Donna and you and how you look at the world. I think that would make an excellent episode.”

It's a good question and Lee is right, thinking back, I don’t think I have overtly answered it. I know, in the first couple of years, I was a little reticent about explicitly talking about these as I felt that it was a little too early to make any definite statements – beyond, what you might have picked up in some of the episodes. However, this is after all the 200th episode of this this podcast and possibly now, enough time has gone past to allow me to make – at least a tentative – try in answering them. However, there is a caveat – we still both feel as if we are starting out (I will explore this in a minute) and we certainly do not feel as if we are seasoned and experienced with canal life. That learning curve has a habit of biting back and when you think the curve is shallowing to hit you with a particularly steep incline. I – and think Donna – still view myself as very new to this type of life. So, with that in mind:

How has life aboard the Erica impacted us physically, emotionally?

Let’s take ‘physically’ first. I am tempted at first to say, not much; certainly not quite as much as I had expected – or even hoped for? However, thinking it through a bit more carefully, and I would have to admit that this is clearly a more physical type of life than living in bricks and mortar. The problem is that it has really become normalised and a lot of what we do, we do without thinking much. Lugging and emptying heavy waste cassettes is a good cardio-vascular workout, that even now leaves me panting when I get to the top of the hill. Doing the water, heaving coal bags and Calor Gas bottles in and out of the boat is also quite physical. I think it is just that it hasn’t quite measured up to the mental image I had of working on my six-pack lifting lock gate paddle and pirouetting with a sailor’s ease across the lock beams, etc. etc.! I certainly don’t feel as fit as I hoped (or even expected) to be after six years on the boat. I think some of this is psychological. By now, both of us had expected that we’d be continuous cruisers by now – and although we travel as much as we can, it is quite restricted and therefore, the opportunity to hare up and down long flights of locks has been fairly limited (what a shame I hear some of you cry!). And I also do think that, if I am honest, I probably am active (and possibly fitter) than I was when living in a house. I do remember the first four to six months after we moved aboard to being constantly stiff from climbing in and out of the boat and lugging heavy weights around, hopping onto the roof to do various jobs up there (or simply sit and watch the world) – not to mention having continuous bruising on my forehead from whacking it on door frames and overhead lockers! I also remember that by 8 o’clock in the evening being so dog-tired from being out in the fresh air that I slept as sound as a log. Although I am finding that I need to work exercises for balance and flexibility, I only really get that stiffness when I am having to crawl around the engine bay. So, as far as the physicality of this type of life is concerned, I think it has become normalised so much into our routine that we don’t really notice it or the good that it is doing us. We’re now both in our sixties and are becoming aware that our bodies don’t quite behave in the way they used to. Signs of aging and for Donna years of being a nurse and the effect that has had on her back and joints, are beginning to show. That is not a huge problem and is entirely natural, but from a psychological perspective it does sort of offset the positives. Therefore, if I slightly rephrase my answer is that I think that living on a boat has kept us fitter than we probably would have been if we had stayed on land.    

Emotionally – I find that it is often quite difficult to talk about specific emotions ‘Am I happy?’ etc. I am also guessing that you’ll probably be able to gauge this by listening to the podcast. However, I think it is true to say that we are happier here on the Erica than anywhere else we have been. The Erica is our home in a way that none of the other places we lived felt. It feels right here. It suits who we are and who we are becoming. It feels like this is what we have been walking towards – even though maybe we hadn’t realised it. Neither of us can imagine living in any other way. I still sometimes have daydreams of living in a lighthouse on a far-flung island in the Atlantic, or a small hut in a forest, but in all honesty they never last. There is something about being here – so close to this type of nature (despite my initial reservations – I thought I preferred a much wilder landscape).

Certainly, by the time of that first podcast, I was pretty sure that this way of life was pretty much perfect – or at least the closest to perfect that would could get. How it actually worked out following those early months was different. But then dreams always turn out a bit different in reality. I don’t think we had fully realised how much us both being at work would tie us down and restrict us geographically. The longest holiday we could take was 2 weeks and we very quickly covered the radius of possibilities that we can travel. That being said, we also hadn’t counted for a dramatic change in our attitude to the canal. We quickly realised that it wasn’t the number of miles we could clock up or the number of new places we could go to. We both craved, and still do, the isolated spots, the tying up and letting time and the water slip past to their own pace. It was being out on the water that mattered. As my old friend Richard Noble said recounting his cruise, there is no reason to hurry anywhere, when you are already there.

And that, I think, describes us. We still have plans to travel much more and for far longer, and, away from the logistics of work, we certainly don’t feel tied to one spot, or even one area. But we have found happiness and contentment in living with the water life and canal. The fact that we can cycle between favourite and newly discovered spots on an increasingly familiar stretches of a couple of canals (each slowly forming their own name in our family gazetteer) has been a surprisingly enriching rather than diminishing experience. There isn’t a day that goes by, when I am not deeply touched by our closeness to the elements and to the canal and the worlds that inhabit it. The way the water changes temperament according to the direction of the wind, and how its colours change according to the time of day – and the season, and how each year the tide of plant species wash in slow waves up and down the towpath sides. Never quite the same as the previous years. And how summer and winter reflect themselves in the water – the way blossom and then leaves fall and collect and then later ice forms and cracks in the same places, casting the same patterns. I could go on and on, but it’s all this that has become so precious and part of my day-to-day life. The realisation of Blake’s revelation finding infinity in the finite, and what Nan Shepherd recognised in the ‘70s in her Shining Mountain and then was demonstrated so powerfully by Chet Raymo in his The Path: A one-mile walk through the universe. There are wonders at our feet. I slide back the stern hatch each morning, and there it is, I am at the miraculous heart of it all.     

Earlier last year I wrote this – it was for myself, never really intending to share it with anyone – I think I posted a work-through draft on Blusky. But I will share it here:

A narrow path
 Beside still water
 Has become my entire world
 And has teaching enough
 To lead me
 To my deep north.

So, emotionally, I think I am more content or is it happy – no I think I will go for more at home here than I have ever been anywhere else. And I can’t think of anywhere I would rather be (and that goes for Donna too). This landscape of water, mud and nettle bank, heron and rook call, knows me and, in some way, I feel befriended by it. I can’t remember the exact episode or the exact wording, but I think I said in one of the early episodes how I was walking down from the hill above the boat and hear rooks calling and knew I was home. And I didn’t mean it then, nor mean it now, in the sense of precise geographical coordinates, it could be miles and miles from here, on a different navigation surrounding by different horizons, but it is the being, the way of living, that is home. And that is it.   

That I/we feel like this, I don’t think would be a surprise. How it has worked out in practice, though, I think would surprise us. If I was told then that in 5 years’ time we hadn’t managed to become continuous cruisers, I think I would have thought that something must have gone wrong, and our plans had in some way failed. But our plans haven’t failed, canal-life tends to find its own equilibrium and balance for those it supports. It is a wise person who heeds its direction and follows its flow.

The narrow path beside still water, after all, has teaching enough to lead us all to our own individual deep norths.    

(I was going to go on and touch on mental-health and being on the canal. However, it turned into a long topic of its own and so I will save it for another night. However, from correspondence that I have received from listeners, I know that it is something that many here struggle with and so I will return to it in the very near future – either next episode or the one after.)

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG