Non fiction

You are not a train

> Step off the tracks

> A train line is a highly functional thing:

Mapped out in the mind, considered and planned, before being laid out in reality.

It is a channel to carry human traffic between human places.

> A necessity, concerned with efficiency:

The perfect train line is smooth, flat and straight. That they are forced to bend, curve and tunnel through hill-sides is an inconvenience born of geographical and historical inconveniences; uneven topography or the joining up of ancient and unplanned human settlements.

Train lines are rational systems designed, in algebraic simplicity, to get us

from

a to b

Train lines and roads loom large in both our mental landscapes and our depictions of the landscape. Measuring only metres across, even the widest roads are easily hemmed in and subsumed by the surrounding landscape. Yet the thick, disproportioned coloured bands of the travel map infiltrate our deeper ideas and sense of the land, at once dominating it and shrinking it.

The modern nations we have built are urban and well connected. They are lands of concrete, brick and steel, not grass and woodland. As an ongoing project, modernity relies upon overcoming obstacles to the flow of goods, people and information. From the turn-pike of the eighteenth century and the rail road of the nineteenth, to the fibre-optic broadband cable of the twenty-first; all are in essence conduits to aid these flows between human beings separated by time and space.

The implications of this rationalising logic for our sense and knowledge of the wider landscapes we claim to inhabit are subtly profound. Plot your movements over the last year on a map of your home town or county - the area in which you spend most of your time – and you will most likely be met with an abstract dot-to-dot connected by thick, well-travelled bands. We are a people of islands and channels carved into an incidental landscape that we have reduced, by default, to a superfluous hinterland. In the hyper-human world of the town and city, this logic is extended. Complex transport networks, compacted into tiny regions, speed individuals from block to block, unit to unit, reducing the divisive evils of time and space still further, easing the human business of economic and social transaction.

I live in a rural and sparsely populated corner of a densely populated, urban nation. It is one of the few places in the country where it is possible to feel a true sense of space. It is possible to stand on a hilltop, overlooking miles of countryside, and barely catch sight of a road or building. Yet this too is a thoroughly humanised landscape. Not only have the hills been shorn of their indigenous woodland and the land chequered by the patch-work of intensive agriculture, but the pattern of human settlement has given rise to disconnected communities of varying size, joined up by thousands of miles of track and road.

Even when not physically walking out in it, the countryside confers on us its benefits visually: the dramatic sweep of a valley seen from a bedroom window, a pleasant corridor of trees lining the road into town. Views are inherently democratic, available to anyone who can see. A view can be spoiled by a crudely placed building or road, but it cannot easily be obscured or covered up over a wide area, stopping the eye from taking in all it can; public and private alike. As such, open views of the natural landscape can instil a heightened sense of attachment, perhaps more akin to ownership, within the minds of the people who inhabit them. The actual space these individuals physically occupy and move in may be small, but their visual awareness of the landscape fills in their own psychological map and helps satisfy the need to feel a wider regional connection.

Yet this sense of connection is, by its very nature, a facile one. A pleasant view is a dangerous thing, not least because it so often pacifies a sense of exploration and curiosity about our local environment. Worse still, certain views of the landscape become shared reference points, replicating experiences over and over again, from one generation to the next. This needn’t just mean the wooden bench at a popular beauty spot, but even the views from roads or paths travelled along every day for years by individuals and in many cases for hundred of years by successions of local inhabitants.

Driving along the back roads to a local market town, I was struck by how fixed my sense of the area I called home was. I had no real idea where the fields and hills that lined the route led, having never bothered to step out into them. The interior sights and workings of large pockets of forest, so comfortably nestled in my memory and so, I thought, familiar, were in fact totally unknown. This assumed familiarity, this ingrained complacency had rendered these places unknowable. This had become a virtual landscape, a two-dimensional theatrical backdrop that could not be moved in.

My failure to breach the walls and step out into this landscape was borne of a chronic lack of curiosity and a blindness to the potential value of exploration. Why would I want to negotiate the awkward scrub-land by the river? Why would I bother to climb the hill behind my house to see what lay behind the blank shield of conifers - that dark green band that warned of finality? These, after all, were the pointless places, the boring places where one simply would not go. Moreover, what impertinence to spurn the adequate provisions already made for the local walker; the pleasant footpaths ringing the nearby reservoir, or the planted woodland, bustling with dog walkers on Sunday afternoons. But these were not the places I now wanted to explore, not least because there was nothing there to explore. As places in their own right, they were established and nurtured. More than that, they were over-nurtured, over-loved by a million leisurely footsteps. Their terrain had been made infertile and nothing I could plant there would grow. I now wanted to know the places in between. The ignored places. The nowhere places.

And so began explorations to break free from entrenched routines of movement; missions to cut across, stumble through and strike out into my neglected landscapes. Only the most skeletal of plans - the selection of general direction - was acceptable. Roads or pathways could be followed for initial convenience, but sooner or later they had to be abandoned in pursuit of whim and instinct across fences and streams, hedgerows and trees. These expeditions would take patterns of the land, mind or eye as their guide, not the patterns laid down by other people. My memories of that first summer of walks are of the sharp prickle of brambles on the backs of my legs, the twang of barbed wire, uncomfortably overcome, and the nervous bending of branches that threatened at every attempt to snap back in my face. These were childish meanderings, often taking me to inconvenient dells and river banks, and returning me home decorated with mud and grazes. But purposeful and economical movement is something that we grow into and something that calcifies our attitudes and approach to our physical environment. Returning home in such a state could only be a small sign of success.

But if my intentions had been to step out and learn, more importantly to feel, something new about the place I thought I knew as home, I soon had to accept the irony that nostalgia was an equal, if not more potent impulse, than earnest curiosity. This was not a nostalgia for an idyllic rural childhood spent climbing trees and camping in forests – that after all was not a childhood I recognised as my own – but a longing for something simultaneously immediate yet just beyond my reach, a longing for something in the making. These were my university days, when I led a double life divided into chunks of just two or three months and separated by hundreds of miles. Aware of the transitory nature of each stay and with the prospect of an uncertain future in unknown places ahead of me, I felt compelled, almost obliged, to eke out as much as I could from home, milking every square metre of the landscape for experience: creating memories. In enhancing my appreciation of home and its rural beauty, this cycle of separation and reunion had helped shatter the stale block of complacency and ambivalence I had developed towards home.

But, like a pathogen grown immune to certain drugs, so the mind grows accustomed to once potent tricks and thought processes. I was running out of time and space and my growing familiarity with the landscape of home meant I could no longer bend them so easily to my will. No longer was it so easy to lose myself for a few hours in wind-swept fields or pine-dead denes, under the fractured light of the canopy. Curiosity, it seemed, was exhausting novelty, in a land I was getting to know too well. Too little exploration of our local environments and we remain trapped, hemmed in by past experience, running in dusty grooves cut in the past. Too much, on the other hand, and we risk unravelling mystery. Looking out over a landscape - a mountain range or a sprawling cityscape – the urge to explore and to know is understandable and natural. Yet such views derive much of their value from possibility, from adventures and experiences that could be had, from imagining what lies concealed, undiscovered. There is beauty in the enigma of a dark clump of woodland nestled at the bottom of a valley, secure and contained by itself, concealing its inner machinery, inviting yet warding off intrusion. Views inspire the imagination in ways that physical exploration threatens to jeopardise.

On a recent visit to the woods near my grandparent’s old home, a place I had not been to since childhood, I found myself torn between the nostalgic urge to look back, to revisit this landscape and attempt to revive past experience, and a fearful desire to keep away, not daring to compromise precious memories. What struck me most upon my return was how commonplace the surroundings seemed. Once novel, idiosyncratic features – a fallen tree, a wooden bridge – so much a part of the mystical fabric of this place, now seemed unremarkable examples of a generic woodland environment. Twenty years of walking in forests had shifted my mind from the particular to the general. Walking back, as if to sign-post this cooled perspective, this unsentimental familiarity, a National Trust information point announced the name of the forest and detailed its history for the benefit of walkers. That the place even had a name came as something of a surprise. From my earliest years to this unnerving reunion, I had known it only as ‘The Woods’, the definite article confirming the singularity, the unique value of the place. I quickly forgot the name on the sign.

> Exploration comes at a price

It demands a trade-off between innocence and experience.

Be it the innocence of a landscape from our distant past, or the pristine mystique of possibility held in a view from a window, stepping out risks unsettling delicate, often hitherto unknown, relationships between place and mind.

> Unsettle your world

Movement in the modern world is tightly defined and restricted. When a new train line is laid, numerous factors are considered in its location to ensure maximum efficiency. For humans, as for all animals, movement requires energy and must be purposeful, taking us to where we need to be. But train tracks creep beyond the station walls, up the road to work, up the garden path, around the park, continuously ferrying human beings from stop to stop, zone one to zone two, point a to point b. The world between hangs forgotten, skirted around, observed only from behind glass. It is an exhibit we have lost interest in, grown dusty and crumbling with neglect. We must learn to derail ourselves and re-inhabit the dark forgotten corners that lie outside, beyond our self-imposed limits. Our sense of home, of our personal world, needn’t end at the front door, or at the end of the garden, but can extend to the streets and fields and grass-lands we choose to stake a claim to.     

> Step off the tracks

(A slightly different version of this piece was originally published in Liebaby --  formerly at www.liebaby.net)

Tom Barker