As long as the rain talks (I will listen)

JOURNAL ENTRY

24th August, Thursday 

"We drop down the hill
To field-edge and thistledown smoke.
A moorhen scatters at our approach
Leaving only a fading trace in the water.
Maggie methodically sniffs the undergrowth
While I search for gold in the clouds.
A bee crawls into a hole in the bank.
Evening."

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

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

It's a fairly still night. The canal mirror flat and silvered. Earlier we watched bats flit and dive in the gloaming among the trees opposite us. Rain has come and gone. Puddles form where the towpath has become deeply rutted and the night has the scent of freshness.

You made it! I was really hoping you'd be here to share this night with us. Come inside for a while, there's a very special and warm welcome for you.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

Tonight we are moored under the anthracite plumes of Lombardy poplars. They're a darker shade of black than the stretch of night behind them. Like thin tongues of shadow-flame reaching up across the sky. The Five Poplars. It is one of our favourite places to tie up. A spot of quiet amid the noise. It is where I set the meeting between the little girl and the heron in my story The Christmas Heron. I can imagine the soft, steady tread of Dolly the horse on the towpath, the whisper of the towrope against the rushes and horsetails, as she pulls the laden boat under the bridge, rounds the curve and on into the distance. As for the heron, well there are plenty to be found here; cat-still and the colour of unsettled clouds. Yesterday an electric spark of kingfisher blue darted in looping flight along the canal edge.

The fry have been rising, making the canal surface dance with tiny rings. There is good fishing here.      

This week each morning and evening, the geese are beginning to gather in trailing chevron skeins. It’s a familiar and homely sound, but with it also comes a sense of restlessness and movement. Their flight calls are siren-like and I find it difficult to resist their invitation to join them on the wing.

The rooks have also been gathering in larger and larger and larger groups – attracting their jackdaw cousins. The magpies rattle and cackle their welcome from the hedgerows. The once sleepy sheep-field is transformed into the excited confusion of chatter of a school playground on the first day of term.

In last week’s episode I was talking about how it has always struck me that there is something very different, odd even, about the month of August. That sense of being a month out of time. This week, I read the Country Diary column on the Guardian website. This week it was written by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett – who quite incidentally also taught for a while at the university where I work. I’d like to read you the closing paragraphs. It is a beautiful piece and its title sums up perfectly what I was wanting to convey last week:  ‘It’s a pause between seasons as the skylarks fall silent.’

[READING]

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

AS LONG AS THE RAIN TALKS (I WILL LISTEN)

Summer rain. We have had a lot of it this year – in the UK, at least. It puts me in mind of my child hood summers. I know the cliché is that the summers of our youths were always gold with warmth, but it is not really how I remember them. Oh yes, there were plenty of golden days of sunshine, playing in the garden under the resin smelling pine, clambering up the lilac tree to make a tree house (of sorts) and coming down absolutely coated with green dust. But I also remember towering clouds that dragged their skittering shadow-feet across the valley and up over the patchwork of arable fields on the other side. I remember too the rain. Leaning out of my window, perched high on its red tiled slope, watching the rain trickle and flicker in shining snail-trails down into the guttering. Marvelling at the little patch of concreted path by the gate under the tree and how it never ever really got wet. Even though the sky sobbed drenching deluges that pattered and spat upon the front lawn and flowerbeds until the drainpipes gurgled and Mum rushed out to ‘save’ the washing, clutching great armfuls of sheets while gripping a toothy-rainbow of coloured pegs between her teeth.

One time, I can remember grabbing one of Mum and Dad’s umbrellas and crouching beside the little pond at the top of the garden. It was the first time that I remember being entranced by rain drops on water and the sound… that sound of rain on the taught fabric of an umbrella. It captivated me for a long time. It captivates me still. All my world of games and toys (and they were myriad) were nothing to this. Their calls to me fell silent in that one moment. My world of childhood primary colours and noise seemed to dissolve away and I stood in the doorway of an altogether more entrancing and intoxicating world that could make the very depth of my being still with such energy and vibrancy. The sight of concentric rings playing across the stilled surface of the pond. Each, perfectly round until they merged with another. And the sound rain makes when hitting water. I was too young to make connections, but now – especially having re-read Mum’s account of the time aboard the Kathy – I understand a bit better. But then, it was just something that seemed to still me and still the world in which I had found myself. Summer rain. The pirouetting dance of water and rain and light. The sound rain makes when it hits the water. A strange unmusical music – rhythms I have yet to understand. But most of all, it was how it made me feel. That I could sense something far deeper than simply process the stimuli through each of my five senses: What I could hear, see, smell, touch, and even taste – though nothing is quite like the taste of raindrops on your tongue.   

Although the import of that moment eluded me at the time, it has remained forever with me. It probably still will for as long as I live, burrowing limbically deep within my consciousness. A sheltering memory that has embraced and guided me. For, it was a time when, in one sense through my education and my peers my world was becoming disenchanted; its colours forced to conform to the lines of the spectrum and optical science. Squatting on my heels beside a small pond under the covering wings of an umbrella that swamped me, the enchantment broke back in to the world. Looking back, I can see that it was here that the great unresolved battle within me began. What do I make of a world filled with enchantment in a culture that has chosen to speak in the language of only disenchantment?

Summer rain falling on heavy leaf canopy. Even here under such dense foliage – mostly oaks and ash, but with a scattering hazel and beech – the drops manage to penetrate, so much so I am forced to try to shield the microphone with my hand. It’s just as enchanting though; this deep green leafy cavern through which the silent canal runs, but it is not really silent today. I can feel that familiar tension rising within me. The need to stay dry, to find cover; warmth, dryness. It’s deeply engrained within me, culturally, but also, I think, primally. It makes sense. In a survival scenario, to stand here like this is the worst possible thing to do. The 3 3 3 rule of survival. And yet, and yet. And yet, there is also the compulsion to stay, to sink into this place of somatic wonder. To welcome and embrace the miracle of water falling from the sky that creates such a delicate dance of water and light. The way it pearls along the nettle leaves and along the blades of grass; and how it pools in the little bowl at the base of this ancient ash. And listen to the chime and ring of rain on water. The sensual sweep of rain on my face and the thrum and beat of it against my body. There are times when my body would do one thing while my spirit another. I’ve learnt enough to know that the spirit is better at looking after the body than the body is of the spirit, and so I stay. This is after all my element as much as any sun-filled day.

A little covey of ducks paddle close to the offside bank where the foliage is thickest. At the corner, one sweeps out with strong strokes to the centre of the canal. He pauses, circling slowly. The water around is pitted with rain. What does he experience? What is he feeling? A couple tread water under the overhang. I can only just see them, their summer worn plumage helping them merge with the surroundings. Closer, the rustling movement of some reeds betrays the presence of a moorhen.

The purple rockets of loosestrife flare so brightly in this watery light, so does the matted wool of thistledown. Wild mint and water mint are in profusion along the towpath here, as is the magenta flash of woundwort and the star-field, yellow, floss of lady’s bedstraw. Just beginning to bloom are the balsam lanterns with their almost oriental shade of orange flame. The dulling greens of late summer are once more vivid and glossy. That is the gift of rain – or one of them at least – revitalisation, invigoration. Look, the rain makes everything new again!     

One of the best writers on rain – or at least one who best articulates the way rain makes me feel – is the Trappist monk and sort of hermit, Thomas Merton. His diaries are drenched with references to rain, usually, when he is staying at his hermitage in New Haven, Kentucky [There is a very nice edited and accessible collection of his journal entries relating to nature: When the Trees Say Nothing]

In one entry he writes:

[READING]

When he writes about ‘speech’ and the ‘talk’ of rain, Merton is not simply being fanciful or poetic. There are things that the splash of rain can tell us – if we take time to listen, and if we have ears to hear. 

Tristan Gooley in his wonderful and encyclopaedically informative book The Secret World of Weather offers this superb glimpse into the soundscape of rain.

[READING

However, for Gooley it is the sound of rain on leaf foliage that presents an abundance of acoustic riches. It is what entrances me about this place here. Now. That sound of rain on the thick canopy of oak and ash, hazel and alder. Sounds that evoke in me a depth of emotion that is difficult to explain or describe.

[READING]

When Thomas Merton writes:

[READING]

He (Merton) and Gooley are writing about the same thing – that personal acoustic but also somatic encounter with rain and the messages it conveys to them. They are both doing what I instinctively was doing all those years ago under a huge bat-like umbrella beside the garden pond. Listening to the voice of rain -

I will leave the last word to Merton on his memorable essay on rain, ‘The Rain and the Rhinoceros’ - a piece I MUST read in its entirety sometime.

[READING]

SIGNING OFF

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

WEATHER LOG