dream babies

I dream a house. It’s a hull. Sodden, rotten, windows and doors are just holes. I’m re-visiting: there was a time when I lived here. It’s changed utterly.
To leave, I walk down a slope. It is covered in black slippery leaves. At the bottom of the slope there is a gate, and trees, which are dead. Two saplings have fallen across the gateway. In death they have metamorphosed. Now they are dead babies wearing wedding gowns and lace veils. My companions cannot see this – I am the only one who sees the trees’ alternative form – to the others, they are just fallen saplings.

too late

January 1996. It is my first full day at Newbury. I am running through archetypal English countryside, trying to get to a stand of oaks that has been left unguarded. I am late. Breath catching in throat. Distantly, chainsaws. Then silence.

I find the three huge oaks lying in brilliant sunlight. Centuries-old trees. They are torsos now, limbs amputated and removed.

I touch the uncountable rings in the flesh of the trees. The soft wood is powdery and still warm from the friction of the chainsaw blades.

Ivy and moss sawn through. Twigs and undergrowth sighing, cracking, settling into new, horizontal configurations. Spiders and beetles adjust their bearings and scrabble through sawdust on the ground.

Tears come. I press my cheek against the flesh of one of the trees, and stroke the bark.

I feel as though I am in the presence of a person who has just been killed. Not actually even dead yet. It happens more slowly than that. Like the life is still there, still around the tree, haemorrhaging, almost pulsing, then ebbing or fading like a mist, like an exhaled breath. Gradually.

I sit silently holding the tree in the warm sunshine for a long time. It is a blissfully beautiful morning, prematurely spring-like. Very quiet. The whole place is in shock, it seems to me.

prassocking up to Olivia

The trees are connected by a criss-crossing web of aerial walkways and polypropylene lines. The idea is that if the walkways are good enough, one person can guard several trees at once by suspending him or herself from the lines between them.

I learn to prassock. This is a way to inch up a climbing rope with a harness and a clip. It is hard, and scary but worth it for the chance to scale a huge tall tree with no branches below a height of twenty metres. To clamber shaking into a treehouse consisting of a couple of planks wedged into a V in the trunk and wound round with bent willow covered in tarp.

The wind flaps the tarp continually.

There is a camping stove, with water boiling.

It is weirdly, miraculously cosy.

The view above the forest canopy.

The grey sky.

The tree swaying, creaking. It is huge.

Olivia, my vibrantly gorgeous Italian host, tells me how she uses cloves of raw garlic as pessaries to promote total wellbeing while she is up in the trees.

forest pond

A beautiful pond in the forest, with stepping stones to a camp in the middle. Fairytale. Pushing through branches. Leaf litter. An instinctual hushing, a quietening, a softening of the step.

There is a boy, a giant with dark hair falling in his eyes.

A sense constantly of alert, of waiting, an anxiety; reverence for the place mingled with fear for it, fear of the worst, fear of something inevitable unthinkable.

Unthinkable unstoppable ugly cruel pointless morally wrong practically wrong stupid hateful that this place be destroyed.

That its destruction is planned out, laid out like a battle map. We know the route of the proposed bypass: the protest camps are dotted along it, with outlying trees of especial age beauty or distinction having their own treehouses like masts out on open waters.

badger sett treeclimb

Dawn. January. Newbury. I’m woken by the horn alarum, sounded at the end of the night watch. Huddle muddled under layers and layers of breath blanket sleepingbag sheepskin tarpaulin bender frost.

Have to get up.

Now.

Have to get to the trees before the yellowcoats get there. Out the bender. Dawn twilight. Thick frost. Hot kettle is waiting. That lovely bearded man has the water ready for my tea. Then we’re off at a trot at a canter heading for a stand of trees on the other side of a meadow. Canter turns to a gallop as dawn light becomes daylight. The yellowcoats are coming. The tree I’m about to climb stands over a badger’s sett.

sexy trees link from Annie

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3AEZbWtELQI&eurl=http://www.spiritualcowgirl.com/&feature=player_embedded

urban claustrophobia

Walking from Stockwell tube station to Max’s house I see a perfect visual metaphor for the bleaker side of urban living. A paving slab has been removed and a spindly baby tree set in its place. Where the trunk enters the ground, the whole gap has been filled in with gravel. Over the top of this is a layer of hard shiny lacquer: the gravel has been glazed solid. The end of a hosepipe pokes out through the glaze, so that the tree can be watered. No rainwater will reach these roots.

On top of the shiny glazed gravel, right by the tree, is a dog turd.