Among the Summer Snows E-Book

Christopher Nicholson

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'A beautiful book about love and loss, fragility and chance, the wide world and the near world . . . full of intense light and colour, extraordinary glimpses, moving insights and subtle humour.' Richard Kerridge, author of Cold Blood As the summer draws to a close, a few snowbeds - some as big as icebergs - survive in the Scottish Highlands. Christopher Nicholson's Among the Summer Snows is both a celebration of these great, icy relics and an intensely personal meditation on their significance. A book to delight all those interested in mountains and snow, full of vivid description and anecdote, it explores the meanings of nature, beauty and mortality in the twenty-first century. 'This ravishingly lovely book is about thought-snow, summer snow, flight, falling, stillness, memory, loss, mountains, Time, death, survival and everything in between. It is an intense scrutiny of minute worlds, a roaming gaze into the vastness of space, intimate, introspective and questioning.' Keggie Carew, author of Dadland

Leseprobe

AMONGTHESUMMERSNOWS

AMONGTHESUMMERSNOWS

ChristopherNicholson

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First published in 2017by September Publishing

Copyright © Christopher Nicholson 2017

The right of Christopher Nicholson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Photography by Christopher Nicholson

On page 121, ‘Gladly will I sell . . .’ by Matsuo Bashō is fromThe Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches,trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Penguin Classics, London, 1966), p. 60.Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

On page 123, ‘My eerie memories . . .’ by Hugh MacDiarmid is from the poem ‘The Eemis Stane’, in Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid (Edinburgh & London, 1962).With thanks to Carcanet Press for permission to reprint.

On page 137, ‘What can the small violets tell us . . .’ by William Carlos Williams is from the poem ‘Raleigh was Right’, in The Collected Poems, Volume II, 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (London, 1988). With thanks to Carcanet Press and New Directions Publishing for permission to reprint.

On pages 142–43, ‘The Snow Party’ by Derek Mahon is reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, from New Collected Poems by Derek Mahon (2011).

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Book design by Friederike Huber

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN: 978-1-910463-60-4eISBN: 978-1-910463-61-1Kindle ISBN: 978-1-910463-62-8

September Publishingwww.septemberpublishing.org

To Hugh and Helen

1

IF THERE IS still a god, I sometimes think, he is not the great, crotchety being who was supposed to keep watch over us all. That ancient deity has fallen asleep or forgotten us, or he has become distracted by other concerns, or has lost patience with our pettiness, and instead we now have small gods, local gods, each with his or her specialist affiliation, a bit like a vicar with a parish. The river gods drip with mud and slime, the tree gods are long-limbed, spotted by mould, hairy with lichen, the desert gods are thin, shadowy creatures that move in the rippling hazes. The sea gods may be glimpsed like seals in bright water, their sleek, dark, bewhiskered heads appearing and disappearing in the troughs between waves some distance offshore. As for the gods of summer snow, I imagine them as short and muscular, trudging each late spring over the mountains to take up temporary residences in their allotted snowbeds. Deep in the ice, their features set in a disgruntled expression, they squat in silent, blue trances.

I first began to write about summer snow ten years ago. I had a plan for a book that opened in autumn, with the earliest falls on the Scottish mountains, and ended in summer with a walk to a great corrie in which the snow almost never melts entirely. The book went wrong when, a few months along the way, my wife Kitty fell ill. From then on, snow seemed much less important. For a while I tried to continue writing as if nothing had changed, but I could no longer justify the time away from home that walking in the mountains would involve. Besides, so much of what I felt about snow involved delight, and my main emotion now was one of deep foreboding. Before the summer was near its end, I gave up.

This short book, a decade later, is not about grief or consolation, at least not directly. It instead describes some walks to those last snows, the snows of late summer. That section of the old book, as I conceived it, was always the most interesting.

That there should still be any snow in Britain during the summer is strange. Summer is a season for easy living, a time of bees and foxgloves, roses and honeysuckle, light clothes and gentle breezes. Yet snow, a little snow, survives in the Highlands of Scotland. It does so not on the tops of the mountains, not like the bright white crown that sits on the head of Mount Fuji in Japan; this snow is much more obscure, hiding in isolated, difficult-to-get-to places under cliffs and crags, in clefts and corries away from the sun. Here the crystals gleam and glitter, shadow-bathing, hanging on to their essential selves. Some collections of snow are small caches of melting crystals, but others are as big as football pitches. It is their depth that really astounds. They can be as much as ten or twenty feet deep. Deeper, even. Higher.

Whenever I come upon one of these big snowbeds I do so with a degree of incredulity. That snow should still be here, so much snow, in the heat of the year, is enough for my mind to stand back amazed. The snow is counter-intuitive; its existence challenges the usual idea of what is possible. Then the amazement begins to give way to something less easy to define, a complication of thoughts and feelings.

Within this complication, among much else – curiosity, admiration, melancholy, elation – is uncertainty. The uncertainty of summer snow is part of its attraction, without a doubt. If I merely wanted to look at snow, any snow, if there was nothing more to it than that, I could go to the Alps. It’s the lateness of the snow, the rareness of the snow, the improbability of the snow, that draw me up to the Highlands. The idea alone puts me on edge. Will any snow still be there? What will it be like? How big, how small?

I also know that walking to summer snow, especially in the early part of any walk, is good for thinking. Something about the business of walking, of gaining height, of negotiating uneven ground, something about the rhythm of walking, opens up my mind in an unusual way. This doesn’t happen on an ordinary mountain walk, not to the same degree; the fact of the snow is critical. Perhaps, again, it is a matter of edge, but I think that I think better. I think about snow, but I also think about other things, and I even find myself thinking about thinking. When I reach some snow, if I reach some snow, I have an extra surge of mental energy. After leaving it, on the latter part of the walk when I am more tired, my thoughts tend to be old ones that I’ve run through before. Later, when I’ve recovered, I start thinking again about what I’ve seen and felt. A long period follows, in which all this beds down into memory.

One afternoon a few Octobers ago, a friend happened to ring with news of snow falling in the Cairngorms; there had been a report and photo in the Aberdeen-based daily, the Press and Journal. The first snow of the year. I was by the seaside in Kent, and as I browsed along the beach the sky was blue, the air soft and balmy, the light so sharp that every pebble was picked out in perfect focus. A herring gull – lemon legs, quizzical eye and blood on its beak – jeered over the decaying carcase of a porpoise, while the Channel waves turned and broke with the consistency of cream.

A forecast suggested that there might be more snow over the next week. On a whim I drove up; stayed the night in the Borders, and then drove on. From Perth northwards, I found myself scanning the dark, whale-like bodies of the mountains ahead. At last, as I came past the village of Kingussie and looked beyond the golden birches that lined the road, I sighted a paler mountain, draped in a cobweb. Since it was a good ten miles away, and since a cloud, also pale, hung on the shoulder of the mountain, the web might have been part of the cloud, or even a hallucination; but as the view expanded to include other mountains, I knew it could only be snow. A long road took me far above the treeline. A shower drifted towards me, and snow began to fall in little polystyrene-like beads that melted on the warm glass of the windscreen, and scurried over the tarmac. The clouds, low and heavy, lifted to open a gap through which a red sun shone, slanting a light that gilded a distant drape. It was late in the afternoon, and when the sun sank and the light grew grey, the snow seemed to float above the darkening land.

First showers like these are the opening passages in a long account. As the autumn advances there are further falls on the mountains, some light and tentative, others longer and more determined. Much of this early snow melts, but then the wind shifts to the north-east and winter closes its jaws. Now the snowfalls are heavier and more frequent. The snow spreads itself over the mountains, filling troughs and hollows, submerging rocks and boulders. Nothing melts in the cold air; the burns are frozen hard, even the cliffs are encrusted with ice. Around the new year the weather turns damp and soggy, and a small thaw begins to set in, but by now the snow is so well entrenched that it holds its ground. A few days later there is an immense blizzard. In late January and early February more storms follow, and the snow grows ever deeper until some point – maybe March, maybe April – when a southerly wind asserts itself. Then comes the big melt, and suddenly the mountains are no longer white but piebald. A final storm brings more snow, but after that a larger and more comprehensive thaw takes place. If you were to watch the disappearance of the snow over the Highlands accelerated into a matter of hours, on a speeded-up film, it would be like seeing lights dimming and going out on a dark night. By midsummer there are hundreds of pieces of snow left, but by late summer only a few are still shining. These are the last snows, the survivors.

In preparation for the trip I spread out my maps of the Highlands and marked black crosses on all the places where I hoped there would be snow. Around Ben Nevis and in the Cairngorms, those were the two main areas. Some snow might lie further north, above Glen Affric, some further south, near Glen Coe, but there would be no snow near the west coast this late in the year.

I intended to stay in Scotland for all of August, but I wanted to keep things flexible. One warm evening I met an old friend. He hasn’t been to the Highlands for many years, and nor is he that keen to go. What attracts him aren’t quiet mountains but hot landscapes, simmering with fertility and colour. My interest in late snow has puzzled him for a long time.

‘A month?’

‘Yes. Unless I change my mind.’

He leant forward. ‘Why might you change your mind?’

‘I might . . . I don’t know. It may rain all month. I may get bored.’

‘But what is it? What’s the attraction?’

‘There are lots of reasons. The snow is often very beautiful, in an odd kind of way. And it’s surprising. It’s surprising that it’s there at all, but it’s surprising in other ways too. It’s never quite what you expect.’

He eyed me. I could see his point: there are, on the face of it, more likely things to be interested in than summer snow.

‘When I first went to Venice,’ I said, ‘I was slightly disappointed. I was disappointed because it was perfect. It perfectly matched the image of Venice in my mind. Nothing surprised me. But summer snow always surprises me.’

‘But you’ve been there before. You must know what it looks like by now.’

‘Not really. I know but I don’t know. It’s always different. Every year is different. And I feel different things about the snow every time.’

‘Okay,’ he said.

There was a pause. I felt a little defensive. ‘I don’t know exactly why I’m interested,’ I said. ‘I am because I am. If I did know, maybe that would be the end of it. Why are you interested in hot places? Because you went on holidays to the Med as a child. I went on holidays to Scotland.’

‘So it’s nostalgia? That’s it?’

‘No, I don’t think it’s that. In childhood things get laid down in the brain, that’s all I mean. I was bowled over by Scotland when I was a small boy.’

‘What if you get up there and the snow’s melted?’ he asked.

‘If there’s no snow at all? Anywhere? That would be interesting, too, in a way. But there’s almost always some snow, at least in August. One snow almost never melts. In the whole of the twentieth century it only melted three times.’

This was my trump card, and he seemed moderately impressed. Then said, in a wistful tone: ‘When I lived near Brighton I had a girlfriend who said that the pieces of dirty old snow by the motorway were like bits of her past that she’d rather not have.’

I was disconcerted by this remark. He was talking about roadside slush, filthy stuff, nothing like the snow in the Scottish mountains.

I pointed out that I wasn’t alone in liking summer snow. In recent years, more and more people in the Highlands had become interested. Admittedly, the numbers were still quite small, but I wasn’t a lone eccentric.

What I didn’t tell him was how concerned I was about my physical fitness; that, not boredom or bad weather, was why I thought I might end up coming back before August was out. It wasn’t so much my age, although I’d just turned sixty, a birthday that no one views with any great enthusiasm, but that ten months earlier I’d had an operation on my lower back. At a follow-up meeting with the surgeon, I’d asked if it would be okay for me to carry a rucksack in the summer. Well, he said cheerfully, it should be. But then he qualified himself. Not too heavy a rucksack. A light rucksack should be fine. Not too much weight. I see, I said.

As if a creaky back wasn’t enough to cope with, I also had a dodgy left foot, a chronic problem under the bones of my second and third toes. This foot had been going on for years, and it had been X-rayed and ultrasounded and prodded and manipulated any number of times. Once there was a definite diagnosis, then a different diagnosis, then no diagnosis at all. Perhaps nerve damage, perhaps a neuroma, perhaps a bursa. It had become a mystery.

I went again to the lower limb consultant and he gave it a steroid injection. ‘We may as well try. If it works you should be able to tell in a week or so. Where are you walking?’ I mentioned the Highlands, whereupon he gave me a lovely professional smile and wished me luck. I couldn’t interpret his smile, but I didn’t think it reflected any confidence in the efficacy of the injection.

A week later, and the foot felt just as it had done before. Hot and bothersome. Maybe, I told myself, I would be able to walk off any pain, as one walks off a tight muscle; or maybe I should walk only on alternate days, giving the foot a chance to recover. The notion that it might be best not to go up to the Highlands at all did cross my mind, but I rejected it. I was sixty, and if I didn’t go now, when would I? I had no intention of being beaten by a rogue foot.

My son confronted me as I was sorting through gloves and anoraks.

‘How’s your little finger?’

With some wariness I looked down at my hands. ‘Fine.

Why?’

‘Everything else about you seems to be packing up, so I thought I’d check,’ he said.

England in early August – the woods dark green, the wheat light gold, red admirals feeding on blackberry flowers, marbled whites drifting over the meadows. The swifts that nest every year in the church up the lane had just departed, one of the climactic moments of summer. They were travelling south; I drove north. There was a great deal of news on the radio. The latest on the US presidential election, the implications of Brexit, the threat of ISIS, fighting in Syria, terrorism in France. Dear God. The world’s woes.

On a stop at a motorway service station, I drank my coffee and absorbed the scene. As if running counter to the news narrative, there was a sensible, matter-of-fact air to it all. People checking mobile phones, people standing in queues. Families on holiday, wearing shorts, T-shirts, sunglasses, baseball caps. A man in a shiny suit sucking the end of a pen, a woman in a blue tracksuit pedalling an exercise bike in aid of charity. ‘Seriously summer’ read the sticker on the plate glass window. Outside, Britain’s post-industrial economy was on the move. Among so many thousands of people using the motorway that day, I was probably the only one with snow in mind.

It’s true: there are many more likely, more obviously important things in which to be interested. Yet summer snow has preoccupied me for years and years. I’ve wondered if it may be a little to do with the business of writing. The pale screen of my laptop, or the white of paper, as a sheet of snow on which I make certain marks. In idle moments, I’ve even found myself typing an asterisk that reconfigures itself as a snowflake . . .

Still, I don’t really think that writing explains much. More probably, it began when I was six years old and living in a pebble-dashed house on the outer edge of south London. Even then, as a little boy, I felt a constraint in the suburban environment, a sense of life hemmed by fences, roads, traffic, lawns and hedges. That Boxing Day snow came as a liberation. I loved the way it stacked as neatly on the tops of gateposts and walls and fences as if it had been edged by a ruler, and I loved the alternate creaks and crunches when I walked on it and the seething shiver when I pushed against the privet hedge in our front garden, and the flop of sound that a piece of snow made when it fell from a rooftop. I loved the silence, how silent our road was, although I could hear the sharp scraping noises of a shovel as one of our neighbours cleared his driveway, and I loved the arrow-like indentations left by birds’ feet and the bent branches of the trees and the smoothness of things. My sister Clare and I could no longer tell where the road ended and the pavement began, and so we walked on the road, and if a car did appear it was only creeping along, we could easily get out of the way. We swept a space in the yard and put out crusts for the birds, and filled a Fray Bentos pie tin with warm water so that they had something to drink. Within a couple of hours it had iced up. We knocked out the ice and filled the tin again. When more snow fell, the flakes descending in mazy lines, we ran round trying to catch them in our mouths, and later we snowballed Bacchus. He was a rescue mongrel with black fur and brown eyebrows and a white shirt-front, and we loved him. We used to sit in the bath, chanting ‘Who’s the best dog in the world, who’s the best dog in the world? B – A – C – C – H – U – S, the best dog in the world!’