The Importance of Being Idyll

In 1925 Boni & Liveright published Hemingway’s collection of short stories “In Our Time”. It features some of Hemingway’s earliest works, including “Big Two-Hearted River”, a two part short story.  Both are simple stories. A solitary protagonist, ‘Nick’ takes a fishing trip and we follow his journey as he leaves the burnt out signifiers of civilisation behind, to find a remote river in Michigan, where he camps and fishes for trout. There is little trace of Hemingway’s muddled gender politics or Christian metaphysics. Both stories are deep meditations of how we relate to nature and the sense of rebirth it provides. Spiritual rebirth, which society and all its distractions struggles to bring forth. It speaks to the importance of being alone and being alone in nature. 

Hemingway describes the unnerving feeling of leaving civilisation and gradually becoming acclimatised to the wilderness, what it’s like to hook a fish, how the taut line feels alive, the sense of oneness, the abrupt feeling of the line going slack when it breaks. He describes the currents and undulations of the river, the way light behaves upon the water depending on the time of day. He captures the character of the river, the snags that endanger his potential catch. He writes about coffee being brewed on a makeshift stove and the importance of a good cast iron skillet used to cook bacon and biscuits. He writes about coffee being used to make gravy to accompany grits. He catches some trout, and loses a big fish. That’s it. I find it perfectly (and I mean that in it’s most perfect sense) evocative. It exemplifies a great truth when it comes to writing about nature, it is a character as much as any other protagonist. 

Growing up I was lucky to spend most of my time outdoors. My grandmother managed a retirement home for Latvian ex pats, nestled deep within the Herefordshire countryside. It was a large Georgian estate with a mid-sized lake at the bottom of the grounds. Overgrown and unkempt for the largest part, save for a walled garden that housed an orchard and various vegetable patches, all of which supplied the residents with most of their provisions. The old morgue, long defunct, was re-purposed as a cellar housing multiple barrels of sauerkraut (a prominent part of any Baltic diet), alongside a healthy inventory of local beer (another prominent part of the Baltic diet). The cool subterranean temperature of the morgue initially ideal for preserving corpses, was also the perfect environment for controlling lactic fermentation, especially in the warm summer months.  

Close by are the wild Black Mountains of Wales and the Malverns of Worcestershire. Looming on the horizon, ever present, they represented true wilderness, a boundary to the rolling fields and valleys. Herefordshire was a forgotten county back then, it still is to a degree. As a child, I enjoyed that sense of being forgotten, it was like stepping back in time. Childhood favourites, such as the Hobbit, felt tangible, a sense that the slightest modulation of reality could bring them to life. 

I now realise how lucky I was to have those experiences. Many people will never get to enjoy the outdoors as I have; untethered and free. The deep connection that comes from learning the character of a landscape, to sit in that landscape as seasons shift from austerity to bountiful, from overripe decay to overwhelming rebirth. To be so still, that wildlife starts to go about its business without care for your presence and if you are truly lucky, inquisitively ask what you are doing on its doorstep. 

For the most part of my career I have been distracted by London and I never went looking for nature in the city as I always had my perfect Herefordshire idyll to think upon. Being a bartender here there was plenty socialising to be done, especially in my mid twenties. There was also plenty of traveling and I have been lucky to venture as far afield as Mexico and Australia, all thanks to my profession. Indeed on a few occasions, deep in the remote mountains of Oaxaca, I have felt that same sense of being forgotten, of being apart from civilisation and that sense of stillness. 

I think the pandemic has changed the way we relate to nature. Something old in our lizard brains (with the deepest affection for lizards of course) has stirred. Personally it was a saving grace. Like everyone, the pandemic has caused me a huge amount of stress both in a personal and professional sense. At the height of my exasperation, my fiancee Megan had the wisdom, as only she does, to book a camping holiday in Scotland, Loch Chon in the Trossachs to be precise. Rather gamely and due to the fact that I shamefully cannot drive (at least legally that is), she took on the driving responsibilities. At this juncture, I must add Megan is from New Orleans and this was her first time driving in the UK. After a short flight and stay over in Glasgow, we picked up our rental car and set off. 

There is a beautiful village named Aberfoyle, you arrive upon it just before Loch Ard, the precursor to Loch Chon. It is here, that upon the taking a rather severe left turn into the village, that the sharp corners of pavement, ungracefully decided to blow out both the tires on the left hand side of the car. We safely pulled into a cul de sac and out of harm’s way. I won’t go into the details of our fourty-eight hour stay in Aberfoyle, as we dealt with useless breakdown insurance, only to say how wonderful and welcoming everyone in the village was. Megan is now a de facto member of the village Facebook group and is regularly kept abreast of any pertinent developments. I hope that we have the good fortune to break down in Aberfoyle again at some point. 

Before we departed Aberfoyle and as we waited for the local garage to fix the car, we decided to take a scenic walk along the river Forth. As we walked along the path, past the cottages, into the fields and further into the green mass of pines and spruce, I started to notice meadowsweet in bloom, first by the heady scent of tonka bean and hay, then it’s big white bouquets. Then came the alexanders, elderflower and ground ivy, accompanied by the most perfect new shoots of Douglas fir, which upon nibbling burst with pink grapefruit and Amalfi lemon. The rest of our time in the Trossachs followed suit as we attempted to catch one of Loch Chon’s elusive pike, cooked our meals on an open fire and spent our evenings talking about all manner of silly things, aided by several glugs of Old Pulteney. It is in these moments that time resets, priorities become revised, essentials considered anew and the flimsy canvas of the tent becomes a perfect fortress within which to spend the night. 

Lately I worry about the future of such experiences. I worry about the influence of political lobbying and who has access to nature, that the outdoors is becoming carved up in our ever increasing wealth divide. That access to the outdoors is no longer seen as a basic human right, no matter your income or social status. I worry about access to nature becoming a luxury commodity and not a common right. In a recent article published by the Guardian, it was ascertained that half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population, with corporations increasingly becoming custodians of large swathes of the English countryside. Further to this our right to roam is increasingly under threat by new legislation, making trespassers out of gentle ramblers, who are now vulnerable to prosecution. I worry that landscapes we think of as bastions of wilderness, such as the Scottish highlands are actually scenes of devastating ecological collapse, remarkably low in bio-diversity, nothing like their old forested selves. I worry that if we communally cannot experience the wild, we will forget what it looks and feels like. That in losing all this, we are losing part of ourselves in the process. 

I believe, as with most modern socio-political ailments, information is the key to fighting back. In particular books have a role to play in this fight. Books are difficult to hack for starters, and provided your book is published by a reputed publisher, the veracity of its research will have been verified by an editor and more importantly a legal team. In that spirit I recommend two books: The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes and Who Owns England by the superbly named Guy Shrubsole. Further to this, I fervently believe that the hospitality industry has a deep responsibility with regards to highlighting what is happening to our landscape and the impact of farming and fishing upon it. 

Finally, as I sit here writing this, the first days of spring are upon us and sunlight is streaming through the window (much to the dog’s enjoyment, having recently discovered the joys of sunbathing). So get outside and find the wildest place you can, if you live in London there are more than you know. I highly recommend the old filter beds in Leyton, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Walthamstow marshes or Hampstead Heath, amongst many, many spots. It’s these places that showcase the resilience of nature when given half a chance. If these enclaves of biodiversity can thrive in the middle of a city, such as London, there is hope for our countryside, we just need to give nature a chance.