The mountaineer Gaston Rebuffat identified a retreat from the real as under way fifty years ago, in his memoir
Starlight and Storm
. And Rebuffat knew the real. He had spent his life in mountains by night and by day. He had bivouacked on north faces, in rock niches, in snow holes, and walked and climbed in all weathers and all hours. Starlight and storm, for Rebuffat, were indispensable energies, for they returned to those who moved through them a sense of the world’s own forces and processes. ‘In this modern age, very little remains that is real,’ he wrote in 1956.
Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind, and the stars. They have all been neutralized: the rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast, and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell . . . But what a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet! Up there he is surrounded by silence. If there is a slope of snow steep as a glass window, he climbs it, leaving behind him a strange trail.
After an hour’s slow walking, I reached the flat-topped final summit of the ridge. Leading off it to the south-east was a steep little ice couloir, only twenty or thirty feet long, curved up at either edge, and sheeny with clear ice. It led down to a saddle and a small lower top. I sat down and heeled my way to the rim of the couloir, then luged down it, using my feet as brakes, striking ice chips with them, and feeling the cold black air crack against my face as I slid, so that it seemed as though I were passing through shattering plates of ice, until I slowed to a halt. Then I cleared some space among the rocks of the outcrop, pitched my bivouac, and tried to sleep.
Before sunrise I got up, stretched, stamped my feet and blew into my cupped hands. Then I walked over to the hard drifts of snow on the eastern side of the outcrop, and cut a snow seat, in which I sat and watched as dawn, polar and silent, broke over the white mountains.
The first sign was a pale blue band, like a strip of fine steel, tight across the eastern horizon. The band began to glow a dull orange. As the light came, a new country shaped itself out of the darkness. The hills stood clear. Webs of long, wisped cirrus clouds, in a loose cross-hatched network, became visible in the sky. Then the sun rose, elliptical at first, and red. I sat and watched that dawn, looking out over a land which was and was not England, with the cold creeping into me, and the white mountains receding into the white sky. For reasons I could not determine, it felt quite different here, on this snowy peak, from the summit of Hope: perhaps it was just the proximity of houses, towns, people, only an hour or so away from me, or perhaps the magical otherworldliness of the night walk, whose beauty I knew I would never forget.
About half an hour later, the sky was a steady tall blue. I stood up, feeling the stiffness of the cold deep inside the joints of my legs, but also the early sunlight warm on my cheeks and fingers, and started to descend the mountain. As I got lower, the land began to free itself from the cold. Wafers of ice snapped underfoot. I could hear meltwater chuckling beneath the hard snow billows. Here and there, yellow tussocks of grass showed through the white. I was walking out of winter.
From a black rock wall spilled a waterfall which was only part frozen: a hard portcullis of ice, beautifully mottled by dark figures of thaw, and water falling from it. The water’s turbulence was surprising and swift after the night world. I stood for a while watching it, and then drank from the stone cistern it had carved out beneath it, and snapped off an icicle to eat as I walked. Nearby, I found a gourd-shaped hole in a rock, in which water had gathered, and frozen. I pried at the edges of the ice, and found I could lift out the top two inches, revealing clear water beneath. The ice was as thick as the glass of a submarine’s window, and I held it to my eyes, and briefly watched the blurred world through it. Then I drank the sweet cold water beneath it, and set off down the mountain, picking my path through the steep uneven ground.
The shoreline forest, as I came back through it, was busy with bird-song. I felt tired, but did not want to sleep. Near the head of the lake, just downstream of a small stone-and-timber bridge, where the river widened, there was a deep pool, glassy and clear, banked by grass.
I sat on the grass, and watched light crimp on the water’s surface, and flex on the stones that cobbled the stream-bed. I lay flat on the bank, rolled up my sleeve, and reached down to the bottom of the stream, where the water was weaving and unweaving the light, and picked a white stone, hooped once round with blue. I sat on the bank, holding the stone, and tried to list to myself the motions that were acting upon it at that moment: the earth’s 700-miles-per-hour spin around its axis, its 67,000-miles-per-hour orbit about the sun, its slow precessional straightening within inertial space, and containing all of that, the galaxy’s own inestimable movement outwards in the deep night of the universe. I tried to imagine into the stone, as well, the continuous barrage of photons - star photons and moon photons and sun photons - those spinning massless particles which were arriving upon the stone in their trillions, hitting it at 186,000 miles-per-second, as they were hitting me, and even with the stone still solid in my hand, I felt briefly passed through, made more of gaps than of joins.
I took off my clothes and waded into the water. It felt as though cold iron rings were being slid up my legs. Dipping down, I sat in the water up to my neck, huffing to myself with the cold. The current pushed gently at my back. I listened to the whistles and calls of a farmer, and saw sheep streaming like snow across the green fields on the lake’s far shore. In an eddy pool a few yards downstream, between two dark boulders, the curved rims of sunken plates of ice showed themselves above the surface. The sun was now full in the eastern sky, and in the west was the ghost of the moon, so that they lay opposed to each other above the white mountains: the sun burning orange, the moon its cold copy.
In the first years of the nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell into a depression deeper than any he would experience in his long and depressive life. Sick in body, and in love with a woman who was not his wife, he was brushed by what he called ‘the dusky Wing’ of melancholy.
He was at that time living in Keswick in the Lake District, and it was to the wild land surrounding his home that he turned for solace. He began to walk: alone, for increasingly long distances, regardless of the weather, and sometimes at night. Starting in the summer of 1802, and extending through to the winter of 1803, he went on a series of wild walks, each lasting several days, moving between the waterfalls, woods, crags and summits of the surrounding fells. He carried a green oilskin knapsack, into which he packed a spare shirt, two pairs of stockings, some paper and six pens, a copy of the poems of Voss, some tea and some sugar, and an improvised walking-stick, made by stripping the besom from a broom. As he walked, he studied intently the patterns made by the landscape: the behaviour of falling water, the cloud structures in the storm skies, the eddies of leaves disturbed by wind.
There was no obvious logic to the routes Coleridge chose to walk during that restless year: he went, on the whole, where inclination and chance took him. But one preoccupation does emerge out of the haphazardness - a fascination for waterfalls. If there was any purpose in his mind, it seems to have been to join up the waterfalls of the land around him; to walk between what he called these ‘great water-slopes’, and so make a waterfall map of the ‘wild Heart of the mountains’.
Turbulence calmed Coleridge during these months. Storms settled him, the tumult of waterfalls stilled his worries. One day, up on the summit of Scafell, he was caught by a ‘Thunder-shower’, and took ‘imperfect Shelter’ in a sheepfold. He hunched behind one of its stone walls as the thunder crashed exhilaratingly about him. ‘Such Echoes! O God! what thoughts were mine! O how I wished for Health & Strength that I might wander about for a Month together, in the stormiest month of the year, among these Places, so lonely & savage & full of sounds!’
On another day, in a ‘hard storm of rain’, he moved between several of the ‘water-slopes’ of the Lake District: Lodore Falls, Scale Force, Moss Force - waterfalls which he knew would be ‘wonderful Creature[s] . . . in a hard rain’. Reaching Moss Force, he found it in full cry, ‘a great Torrent from the Top of the Mountain to the Bottom’, and, watching those ‘great Masses of Water’ gout after one another into the chicane, they seemed suddenly to Coleridge to resemble ‘a vast crowd of huge white Bears, rushing, one over the other, against the wind—their long white hair shattering abroad in the wind’. Lodore Falls appeared to him like ‘the Precipitation of the fallen Angels from Heaven’. Some days later, still exhilarated, he sat in Greta Hall in Keswick, and wrote a letter to Sara Hutchinson describing his adventures. ‘What a sight it is to look down on such a Cataract!’ he exclaimed, ‘—the wheels, that circumvolve in it—the leaping up & plunging forward of that infinity of Pearls & Glass Bulbs--the continual change of the
Matter
, the perpetual
Sameness
of the
Form
.’
In the letters, poems and journal entries that Coleridge wrote over the course of those months, we can see him beginning to think out a new vision of the wild, a vision which at times approaches the level of a theology. One idea above all emerges: that the self-willed forms of wild nature can call out fresh correspondences of spirit in a person. Wildness, in Coleridge’s account, is an energy which blows through one’s being, causing the self to shift into new patterns, opening up alternative perceptions of life.
Unmistakably, the wild land of the Lake District acted for good upon Coleridge. As he moved between the crags and cataracts, over the fells and the moors, and through the pathless wilds, a sense of joy - joy, the ‘beautiful and beauty-making power’ as he had longingly called it during the dark spring of 1802 - began to seep back into him. Walking over soft mossy ground on the slopes of Red Pike - ‘a dolphin-shaped Peak of a deep red’ that rises to the south-west of Buttermere - he gave ‘many a hop, skip, & jump’. Up on the mountains that year, he found not the ‘Darkness & Dimness & a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly Lord over us’ which had characterised his depression, but instead a ‘fantastic Pleasure, that draws the Soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind!’
The cold clear weather held for the day after my night walk over Red Pike. I had been reading Coleridge’s letters, and so, inspirited by his vision of a waterfall map, I set off in the late afternoon for a valley south-east of Buttermere that held a long series of waterfalls.
I neared the waterfalls at dusk. Crows wheeled over the crags that flanked the valley, their backs showing an unexpected silver as they caught the last of the light. The land boomed with stillness. Standing water and moving water alike were frozen. Grass crunched brittlely underfoot. Here and there were big sycamores and oaks, their leaves candied with frost. Ice lidded the puddles on the path. I tapped at one with my foot, and the ice fractured like a mirror, falling in angled shards into the dry hollow beneath. Always to my left was the frozen river, the dusk light glaring off its ice. In such circumstances, the eye was grateful for any movement or colour: the faint indigo of the dusk sky, or a crow flying straight up the valley, black and intentful against the white land.
In this valley, that runs roughly from north to south, the river, gathering its water from the surrounding hills, falls 400 feet over the course of a mile, in a long cadence of waterfalls, rapids and pools. The river’s action has bored millions of years down into the hard Ordovician rock to create plunge pools which froth when the water is running. In high winter, though, the river can freeze. That evening, the pools were plateaux of ice, finished with a white ceramic glaze. The rapids had set into a smooth milky flow, as though they had been photographed on a long exposure. The waterfalls had hardened into complicated bulbs and fists. Between the rocks on the river’s banks, blue ice gleamed in webbed lines. Where the river dropped down over a rough ledge of worn rock, it had frozen into a glassy curve.
I had come to the valley that evening because I loved the river, and because I wanted to watch cold night fall from the valley’s head. But as I walked further up the path, it occurred to me that the frozen river was itself a track: that there was no reason why on this rare night I could not use its glowing surface as my way.
Just north of a set of rapids, I stepped on to the ice, and began to move upstream, against the flow. In places where air had been trapped in the ice’s making, it depressed gently, white cracks streaking radially out from beneath my feet, the ice settling down into its own narrow spaces and chambers, so that it seemed as if I were leaving wide stars when I walked. Where the river’s slope steepened, I leaned forwards and steadied myself, using hands and fingertips to gain purchase on the ice, feeling the florets of this solid water. At the short steeper falls, I moved from rock to rock where it was possible, and where it was not, I went to the angled banks of the river, and found a way up there, before returning to the ice.
By the time I reached the lowest of the main falls, where the valley kinked round to north-north-west, the light was candling only the rowans which leaned from the upper crags. The valley had set into silver, black and white. The cold air burnt as I breathed it down into my body.
Up near where the falls began, on one of the last plateaux of ice, at the foot of a crag, I lay down and put my ear to the river’s hard brim, and I could hear dark loose water glugging somewhere far beneath the surface. And when I put my eye to the ice and gazed down into it, I could just see formations of rods and quills, which caught the last light and concentrated it into bright spines and feathered cones, and between them I could also see numberless air bubbles, which in their silver chains resembled constellations.