Once (15 page)

I became consciously a survivor, a scavenger, pausing to gather tinder, dry heather stalk and bits of wave-washed wood and other combustible waftage, jammed under rocks. Where did it come from? It was hard to imagine. But there was always a supply, though it thinned out through the season. I looked ahead to the brew and the baked-bean feast. I looked ahead to fire and warmth. I looked ahead to these things as I lay in bed waiting for my father to rouse.

Or as I listened to the wind and rain at my bedroom window, I feared the day and lamented my fate. There seemed no middle way between lamentation and hope, fear and hope. On cold days the action in fishing kept you warm. Fire was the only other thing that might, apart from a brown trout rising to your cast. But how long must I wait? I would try to read the day ahead on the ink-wash air of dawn, what my great-grandfather called the ‘carry', as we left the house, whether it would be wet up there or cold, or fair, and as we drove towards the Conwy revise my opinion.

When we moved to live under the Wooded Hill you could see the mountains from the house, even as you brushed your teeth, and through the week take the measure of your doom as Sunday approached. But you could never be sure, for a sudden change of wind direction might bring rapid and icy rain, as the clouds crash-landed on the mountains, or peat-soft soddening drizzle, as the mist rolled down, fuming. So low it might fall it could seem as if it rose from the lake. Then every sound was hugely amplified, every sheep-bleat or cough, every bird-call, and the tumbling and dashing of water roared. These were the mood-swings of god. Once on such a day I watched an immature peregrine falcon stoop and stoop on an immature herring gull, dashing it into the lake, and dashing it again as it rose, playing with it, cat-and-mouse, practising, for how long I do not know but it seemed all morning.

But once at least, after a day at Caw Lwyd, I saw the real kill, and benefitted from it:

 

All day fishing there I waited as much for its shrill
kek-kek-kek-kek

kek-kek
and scimitar soaring overhead as for the dimpling fish below.

How the day might plod on otherwise, the water hypnotic,

light falling like manna, and all slap-happy in the rocks.

Every plane and facet of wave-mirror and cliff-hanging

edge of expectancy, pitched there, in and out of the dream.

What sense trying to address the future? Whatever it contains

won't include us. The art of waiting its métier as mine.

Once as we came back on an autumn evening, weary for the road,

school to face in the morning, homework not done, down one raced

in his scholar's gold rim glasses, and tear-smudged eye from too much study,

and thumped a grouse into the heather. Then, wings winnowing

and alarmed
kek-kek
for cry, it shot away, leaving us its prey,

the bird warm where we found it, severed from its head.

How much out of ten might I get for that? At fourteen, mind-wandering,

learned only in the progress of the clock, in a world beyond time.

 
As we drove and as we marched to the Black Lake, I would be thinking of my favourite corners, and the one I loved best of all, the tiny northwest bay, right under the cliffs, fed by little streams, from waterfalls down the black rockfaces.

In time when I could spend the day on my own this is where I'd head, and I'd not pause at all on reaching the lake, but say goodbye to the men, and hike as fast as I could, and then come upon it quietly, slip into it, as if it was as natural for me to be there as it was for the dipper bobbing on a rock in the middle of a steep and gushing streamlet, or for the sudden peregrine, flashing its crescent across the sky, and crying
kwaahk-kwaahk-kwaahk
and
kek-kek-kek-kek
, as it soared breakneck to disappear among the precipices.

The peregrine was the rarest of sights in the 1950s,
DDT
having soared up the food-chain, at the top of which it perched, knocking off contaminated pigeons until the peregrine could no longer reproduce. I longed every day I was there, for a sight of it, or failing that to hear its cry. I'd crane my neck the moment I heard it for just a glimpse of its lightning – the ‘foreign hawk': ‘Hebog Tramor' as the Welsh name has it, and as I once called a poem about seeing the peregrine in Manhattan's Upper West Side:

 

Once the falcon fell from hearing,

from the top of the food chain,

as the DDT rose in its bloodstream.

And man held his dominion

over the world below.

The falcon could not hear the falconer.

But the centre held as once its talon.

Where did the falcon go?

Like a people uprooted forever

and no store set until too late?

I used to crane my neck to see him

thinning the mountain air

and marvel at the way he'd sheer

two steep seconds off the moor,

quicker than you can say fate.

Now I crane to see him again

spiralling round the ‘God Box'

centre for world religions in New York.

In Welsh ‘the foreign hawk',

as if looking for a way in.

 
But other bird presences at the Black Lake laid claim to me too and held me spellbound: the raven rolling overhead calling
cronk-cronk
; the ubiquitous wren, weaving its bold story, in and out of every nook and cranny, and declaring its regal heritage, singing to itself, with the loudest and most piercing song, big enough to deafen a mountain; or the melancholy ring-ouzel in its clerical bib with its
rat-a-tac-tac-tac
warning, its hellfire sermon; and the dipper – in Welsh
aderyn du'r dwr
, the blackbird of the water – again submerged on the spill of golden gravel where the little stream falls into the lake, the dark waters limpid when the light is right and the wash of waves small, the dipper dining, on caddis larvae. I could find myself so close to it – find myself indeed – I could see its little rusty bib, like the blush of rusted iron in granite in those mountains.

The dipper shares its call and song with the wren: clink-clink, tap-tap-tap, as of two pebbles struck together rapidly, and then the quicksilver warbling. So if you hear either you must turn to be sure which one it is. In Welsh the dipper shares its name with the ouzel – the blackbird of the water, which is unusual in a language so tending to specificity in naming. Then the stonechat, the wheatear, the meadow-pipit... the cuckoo on the skyline.

Something in me fell for these birds. My heart in hiding? Every time I saw one it was the first time, as for the trout itself. I couldn't watch them or stare into them too long. They made time fly as much while they sat still as when they flew. The streamlets here filled the sound-scape, folding you in so well you seemed to be contained in a bubble with the birds that came and went about their business, oblivious or careless that you were there, in their dwelling-place, beside the lake's wide eye, its heavenward gaze. A gaze that trafficked in light. Nowhere else except fishing from rocks by the Atlantic have I felt so much caught up by the aura of water. Nowhere until that adventure had I so sustainedly studied durance and endurance and learnt my place in the world.

I became absorbed into the physical intimacy of the place itself more generally, the rocks, the stones, the slabs and cliffs, and the colour in them. They were never black and never grey but the light fell on them differently and the rain washed them, and as the seasons shifted ground, from spring to autumn, the foliage changed hue, and impressions of the place mutated. They mutated by the moment and once you saw that, whether you knew you were seeing it or not, you were more finely absorbed into the soul of the place, and the nursing air and the elements became you.

Not only were there the sounds of tumbling streams and of the wind, but also the bleat of sheep, the occasional cough echoing, sounding almost human. Sheep used to graze on the crag in dizzyingly impossible places. Sometimes you'd see one fall, bouncing once or twice, to its death. Sometimes you'd discover by your nose alone, one that had fallen since your last visit.

All this was something I never felt more powerfully than when my head hit the pillow at the end of the day and for a moment the whole world I'd been in, rolled and plunged about me, as if reluctant to let me fall into the underworld of sleep, or else to ease my fall, with all the sights and sounds in which the day had held me entranced, suspended from the world and its business. It was like falling out of one dream, and into another, in the dark of the night ahead, where other days stir fecund.

So my first love affair began, and like the course of true love, like life itself, it had its trials and sorrows, its heartbreak days, its moodswing frustrations and minor dramas.

 

 
We'll move on. For we have some way to go, some years to travel, round this water and the world might otherwise be over before we get there.

We'd move on, in my first times there, most often by the southerly shore, westward, to the last bay on that southwest side, parted from what became my beloved northwest bay by the highest and most massive cliffs. While my father would climb the spur of cliff and disappear down to ledges where he might fish, I must go by ‘The Eye of the Needle'. This was the narrowest and lowest of passages, with irregular steps, cut out under a huge natural lintel. As to incline, it was hard to get an extended fishing rod through it. As to width, the full bulk of a man, rich or poor, and his fisherman's trappings were a squeeze. The ‘Eye' and its steep steps led you up through the rock, and onto the bluff there, from which you could see the whole lake before you, except that immediately below, where my father fished, invisible but for the flashing tip of his rod or the sight of his darting line, and I would wait up there, for however long he might be, waited and above all stared.

And that would be the way the day went, except where I could get safely down to the water, as soon became possible, the cliffs stepping back and a kind of green and rocky world opening up, to a shallower shore, fed by a stream. But the better fishing lay in the steep small dark bays farther on, leading to the cliffs themselves and their sheer drop into the lake. Here we'd often spend the day, leaving the other shore to Trefor and Ifor. Such was the distance and the rocky nature of the shore, that you could rarely see where the others were, tiny figures not a fingernail high. The place absorbed us, our figures lost by distance and the camouflage of angular and rounded rocks that broke our shapes. And our dreams absorbed us. For long passages of the day, we were so much there it was as if we weren't there. We weren't dreaming, we were the dream. We didn't think. Therefore we were drawn into life.

Here I would look to prepare a hearth and lay a fire in a nest of rocks, for a mid-morning brew, for a lunchtime of
Swiss Knorr
packet soup, and
Heinz
baked beans and little sausages out of the same tin, to put some warmth in us. I liked to have the makings of the fire in hand before too long, and would clamber up where the heather grew, or delve among the shoreline rocks for jetsam, bevelled bits of wood, tinder dry.

Allow that it didn't rain all the time, if you will. But I remember those wet days as if they are recorded in my bones. To think of them reminds me of the way a prisoner ticks off the days of his sentence, one by one. How a plastic cup of soup could seem like manna from heaven. How a stew of baked beans and sausages and lumps of the heavy, dense brown bread my mother made warmed the cockles of our hearts, in the pelt and shiver of the Snowdonian heavens let loose, for a day. These were times I especially loved, in solidarity with my father. I liked to feel myself a boy-man, in tough comradeship, refusing to let hardship get the better of me. My hands would be blue with cold and the undersides of my fingers wrinkled from the icy water off my line and the rain itself. Sometimes on a hard day we'd be restless and soldier back the way we came, perhaps just to get warm, and by chance meet Ifor and on occasion Trefor, or we'd go to join them, brew some tea together, and curse the weather and the day we were born.

 

 
I want you to think it through minutely, minute upon minute, hour upon hour, from a boy's-eye view, first to last, season after season, spring, summer, autumn, year after year.... I want you to imagine how it changed, as I grew older, too, more independent, and more silent, more in my own world, and capable of catching fish.

First catch your trout. So, after an arduous Black Lake apprenticeship, I finally did, in quite spectacular fashion, one very bright late afternoon. The day was an airy one and beautiful and the water full of light, and the radiant rocks sparkling. I fished now with dogged devotion. It was a ritual in which my only thought had become to cast my line to perfection, every time, as far and as thoroughly as I could, all day long, never mind the absence of luck, the apparent futility of it: one must do a thing for its own sake, as best one can. So I do on this page. When a fish rose I would cast to it. But I was unlucky or there was something I was doing wrong, some rhythmic thing about the way I retrieved the fly. Or I got a fish on and lost it.