The battles for spring

Spring BC (Before Cuckoos)

The transition from winter to spring can be marked by a single voice, the first to come in through my bedroom window. In winter the robin’s delicate sorrowing cuts open a frosty dawn but by early March, when the rising sun crests Baosbheinn, a song thrush breaks open the dark. Even in the teeth of a howling gale, there he is. Other birds must wake to his voice and for a while, shrug off his calls for the day to begin, just as I so often do.

The song thrush is canny. He perches at the top of an old hawthorn that has grown up-and-up evading the side-to-side work of grazers and browsers. The hawthorn is granted additional height and the song thrush extra advantage because the old ‘tree’ sits atop an ancient river terrace. From here his songs echo around the valley, announcing the day and promoting the hawthorn to others.

The rising dawn chorus of early spring builds and strengthens often through appalling weather. This year both singing and spring have faded in and out in the face of a barrage of storms from the north-west and icy blasts from the north-east. Weather has reflected the national mood music, playing out against a growing clamour for the ending of lockdown and return to ‘normal’, or something close to it.

The storms and squalls have been almost apoplectic, yet in their rage, magnificent. They have distracted me from waves of distress at not seeing my family. The Worsley diaspora is far flung and the grandchildren are growing fast. Missing a birthday is sad for all of us, missing so many has been very hard to bear. But the ‘wild’, unruly changeable weather has helped. Being mobbed by gusting winds filled with hail and bitter cold is cathartic.

Still unable to walk in high places, I’ve watched storms and lesser squalls run down the Minch from the small cliff-top near our croft. There are times when I have felt more alive being battered and scraped and deafened standing there than on a summit with extraordinary views.

The battle between winter and spring is retold time and time again in cloud type, wind speed and variety of precipitation. As Beira, the Queen of Winter, tries to retain control of the world she empties her arsenals and we are swept up in cloudbursts, snowfall, hard ice, thunder and torrents of wind. Each time she is pushed back by spring she is weakened and her next effort has less bite. But this year, the battles have been bigger and stronger, the grip of winter longer and louder. Checkerboard skies – light, dark, sun, snow, light, dark, sun, snow; windchill -7°C and wind gusts Force 10; spring-winter-spring-winter-spring. Ticker-tape seasons as well as weather phenomena.

Many storm cells and squalls have been formidable, the resulting vistas of sky, sea and land sensational. Updrafting clouds, towering snowstorms, fast-moving hail showers have dwarfed our most iconic mountains. They have recrafted landscapes and reduced land and people to mere fragments. What I think of as important and powerful becomes unsettled and insignificant under such skies. Normality unravels. I am humbled by the elementals and understand what it means to be powerless. Yet storms are participatory. I am not just experiencing them, we are interacting. I am not merely feeling their power there is an energy exchange of the most potent kind. We are made of the same stuff, these storms and me, elemental, emotional, physical, chemical – fundamental.

And yet I have found solace in storm watching and experiencing the extremes. My own losses and longings are given succour. I fling my stresses and angst into the snow and know they will fade away as the snows melt. I shout out love for my family into a gusting wind and know it will be carried to them.

Then, all energy expended, I look about for signs of spring. There – myrtle buds beginning to open, here – frogspawn in the bog pools, there – a bee emerging from the bare earth. The aromas of winter – cold, ice, wet rock – are exchanged for the perfumes of spring – damp earth, myrtle, gorse.  The air itself is scent, sound, light and motion. I’m reinvigorated by the alertness of living things, the readiness to move, to expand, swell and bloom. There is such aliveness in the storm clouds as they rush by so how is it possible for even more to remain behind once they’re gone?

Spring’s vitality comes from the willingness of other living things to share their life force, their energy. Once the storms have passed, even though I miss them, the sudden rush of spring-ness, of shared joy at birdsong, flower-bloom and green sap rising, ignites us all. This burgeoning growth reminds us that we are all part of the same interconnected whole, part of a living web that spans the globe and stretches from deep beneath our feet into the highest reaches of the stratosphere. For me, the sense of shared existence, of entanglement with all forms of life, includes the storms and violent squalls, as much as the blooming of hazel catkins and hot mustard-yellow gorse flowers along our riverbank.

Spring CE (Cuckoos in Erradale)

For a time I was jealous of reports of an exceptional blooming of blackthorn. The flowering seemed to occur in the long spell of cold that struck almost all the country. There were pictures on social media of its blossom in heavy snow and some remembered tales of a “Blackthorn Winter”. I have strong personal ties to blackthorn. My father had a very knobbly walking stick cut from an Irish blackthorn during a ‘late’ winter by the faerie, and gifted to his grandfather, “when such things were allowed”. There is no blackthorn in our small valley though it may well have grown here once upon a time when faeries lived in Erradale.

Finally, the snow and ice fizzled out although high storm clouds continued to build in the mountains to the east. Several times we sat out in warm sunshine and watched thunderheads build rapidly over Baosbheinn as Beira continued her rule in the heights.

Then, one day through a small tear in the clouds, spring simply poured in. And all around this small place it danced to the tunes of cuckoos.

I heard the first cuckoo of the year a little after dawn a few days ago. His voice was reedy rather than rounded – perhaps not surprising after so great a journey to find us. Now, there are cuckoo panpipes washing back and forth around the valley. Now, the weather is sensationally spring-like. Calm and still, dazzling then mist-shrouded; lavender, greys and pale translucent rose followed by hot yellows and radiant blues. The fields and hills are still winter-pale and brittle-brown; grasses are only just beginning to rise up through the mosses and matted old growth of last year, but everything is singing.

This is a hyperboreal spring that at long last is beginning to look like a Mediterranean summer.

All around me are layers and layers of birdsong. With my eyes closed I try to pick out and identify individuals, just as a ‘birder’ would. Instead they blend and become a musical stave in my mind, perhaps two, braced together in a grand staff. Each bird’s song is a jumble of notes but they fill the air above the river with complex music and spill out across the meadows.

And then, through all the jumbling songs… cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.