A world obscured

Fog, ice, and herons

Last Sunday, the world was blurred, a soft vellum eclipsing the details of modern life, the fine lines, the finicky details of things. The fog had not shifted in two days, though sometimes it was pinkish towards the ends of the days, and sometimes it brightened, the suns beams struggling down, hazy and diffuse.

The fog was particularly beautiful that day because the world was also white with frost, which had not thawed in days. Frost grew on frost, its tiny intricate crystals lacing every branch, like icy geodes making miniature worlds fit for ice queens, places where a tiny superman might hide his kryptonite. I take pictures, and faint blurs of things in the whiteness, blank spaces. I think about incasing things in wax, about encaustic art, as I periodically do, to capture the feeling of fog, the vagueness, the peace.

The golf course was majestic in its loneliness, the familiar trees obscured and rendered in otherworldly beauty. The sounds of humanity, the shouts and the traffic, are muffled and dimmed. Even if there were golfers here, I wouldn’t be able to see them. Is that why I love to walk in the fog? Because it eclipses humanity, leaving only those nearest in view?

In the dusk a spotlight winks on. Man finds a way, I think to myself, absentmindedly stumbling into a strange new sound. whump-whump-whump. Wingbeats. Something big- a heron! The sound of a startled heron drainage ditch. I do not know why he is in there; it is not a usual place for herons. Maybe. I can’t say I’ve run many heron checks on the drainage ditches to be honest. He flies off, rests on a tree, irately taking off again when I come too close.

I catch up to him a third time, sitting in a storm broken oak. I take a picture that will later make me laugh; the silhouette of a heron is a shapeless thing, an angry triangle on a single stick for a leg. I creep closer, but he sees me and, furious at my impudence, flies laps around the lake shrieking dinosaur shrieks.

There are no ducks at the lake, no bickering coots or moorhens. Just ice, and a single crow walking stiff legged on it, apparently delighted at his new domain.

Only crows should perform this feat. Someone human tried it last time it froze, and the outcome was predictable; there was a patch yesterday where the ice had not formed; it’s covered today but there must still be a weak spot. I try and think of the word for when warm upwellings of water caused a hole in the ice. It’s somewhere deep in the recesses in my mind, another lifetime when I was an oceanographer and my field area was the Antarctic. I try and remember, but it’s not there. It bothers me.

I move on. The hole wasn’t made by upwelling water anyway. It was probably made by swans. I think the swans are at the end of the lake, but it could be imagination, white on white on white.

The water still trickles out by the bridge, but has embalmed nearby vegetation in a shell of clear ice. It looks like a nature documentary about the cairngorms, or somewhere in Russia, somewhere cold.

I walk on to the silent woods, where only two days later I will walk in the sunshine with the sound of wheezing great tits in my ears, a future I could not predict in sub zero dusk. Polynya, I think to myself, as if a part of my brain is a faithful librarian that has been dutifully searching in the archives, walking through the book stacks of fusty volumes before returning hours later with the required information. An upwelling of warm water that creates an ice hole is called an polynya.

Workings

Work has resumed:

Also, I was working on some secret experiments that didn’t go very well, hence the secret. If they’d gone well I would be showing you the results going ‘look at my new technique, I am a genius’. Sadly, I am not.

Findings

This was the week I found out I am old. I know my age, of course, but there’s a definite difference between younger me and now. This week I went to the introductory talk for a research trip my son hopes to take in Honduras. I went with trepidation because I was pretty sure I was going to be horrifically jealous. A once in a lifetime trip to Honduras? Yes, please!

Actually No, thank you. Turns out I’m no longer at an age where I’d actively pursue flying to the murder capital of the world so I could walk up a mountain for five hours with a backpack in 35°C temperatures to spend a week living in a tent that might flood, using a trench as a toilet, and avoiding snakes. The research sounds amazing and there was a time when I would’ve jumped at the opportunity, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t go if it were free and there was WiFi, but I certainly wouldn’t be paying 4 grand to see what kind of amazing tropical rashes I could develop. He’ll be wanting sponsorship, I’m afraid; the trip isn’t till next year so there’s a lot of time to save but it’s a charity and you are supposed to raise money.

I consider my research trips formative experiences and I’m very excited for my son to have this opportunity, but happily I see myself as fully formed, so not in any particular need for formative experiences. That doesn’t mean I don’t need a little refining; it is the time of year for refining after all. I learnt this week that a habit doesn’t really stick until you become identified with it, so one way to be more successful with resolutions is to imagine an ideal version of yourself.

For instance, while I was having a second cup of tea this morning I realised Ideal Deborah would instead have drunk a large hydrating glass of water. In fact, she did that an hour ago and is now in her ideal kitchen (nicely organised because her ideal family doesn’t fling everything back in the draws incorrectly) making a weeks worth of healthy snacks while doing the laundry. To be honest I’m not sure the visualisation is going well, because I’m starting to hate Ideal Deborah. She seems a bit of a nob; reminds me of Julie Squires, a neat looking girl in primary school that always had her hand up and answered the questions correctly. Even if there was a game that involved no skill, like guess the number of jelly beans, Julie Squires won it. There was nothing wrong with Julie except my mum would say ‘why can’t you be more like Julie’, so naturally I thought she was an arsehole.

Ideal Deborah puts the healthy snacks in matching containers and labels them neatly because Ideal Deborah has a label maker; I buy a label maker, which is probably the only step I am going to make towards being ideal.