Walker in the Storm

The thunder mutters louder and more loud
With quicker motion hay folks ply the rake
Ready to burst slow sails the pitch black cloud
And all the gang a bigger haycock make
To sit beneath – the woodland winds awake
The drops so large wet all through in an hour
A tiney flood runs down the leaning rake
In the sweet hay yet dry the hay folks cower
And some beneath the wagon shun the shower

                                                John Clare

Getting soaked to the skin is usually the pivotal moment of any walk, one way or another. On the track from Eynsham Road to Cumnor the soaking, complete with a battering from coin-size hailstones, was over in just a few minutes. The water found out every weak spot in my waterproofs. But I didn't mind that much. It made a change from stifling heat and because it was a summer storm it didn't get particularly cold. And it marked a profound change in the way the landscape looked.

A storm had been coming all day. I had been playing cricket until early evening with my daughter and some friends in the field where they were going to camp, and the clouds to the southwest had piled themselves high. Thunder sounded and sounded, and eventually the clouds started to flash irregularly with lightning. But the rain didn't come, and the heat hugged itself ever closer to the skin.

I've spent quite enough nights under canvas, and am especially unenthusiastic while still within walking distance of my own bed, shower and sofa. So as the others started up their barbecue, I set off on the eight miles or so home. It wasn't whether I would get wet, but when. I had a faint sense of echoing the walks back home or to college taken by "Oxford men" in the past, such as Matthew Arnold and Edmund Blunden. Arnold's "Scholar-Gypsy" is the "one that got away" in that he never returned to a conventional life, going into a kind of orbit around the city.

But rumours hung about the country-side,
       That the lost Scholar long was seen to stray,
Seen by rare glimpses, pensive and tongue-tied,
       In hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey,
               The same the gipsies wore.
Shepherds had met him on the Hurst in spring;
       At some lone alehouse in the Berkshire moors,
       On the warm ingle-bench, the smock-frock'd boors
Had found him seated at their entering,

But, 'mid their drink and clatter, he would fly.
And I myself seem half to know thy looks,
       And put the shepherds, wanderer! on thy trace;
And boys who in lone wheatfields scare the rooks
       I ask if thou hast pass'd their quiet place;
               Or in my boat I lie
Moor'd to the cool bank in the summer-heats,
       'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,
       And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills,
And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats.

Sometimes it's easy to forget what my predecessors knew, that footpaths are open at all hours of the day (with the prepositional caveats that you might fall in, off, down, over or through things once it gets dark). A good, long evening walk "in the country" is a rare thing - I saw no one on the paths I took except those in cars - though that might have had something to do with the storm.

If a walk as the sun is going down is interesting, one when the storm clouds squeeze the light down across the land is something else. July is anyway one of the best times in England to be out late, as the red and orange part of the spectrum pushes through and strikes the dry, seed-heavy plants that fill the fields.

In some ways I hate to wax lyrical; about these fields of corn and barley, as they are a desert for all forms of non-crop life even though they provide so much food, and look so beautiful before the harvesters drive on. These fields I walked took all their light "slant" as Emily Dickinson might say. Overhead was a great bruise, the clouds all knuckle imprint, but west was blazing and each stem glowed.

Further up, it was no longer "orient and immortal wheat", but the truncated stalks of maize, matured before the usual harvest season, and now cut down. With the sky, with the sunset, with the severed stems, with the frazzled earth, I found myself in a landscape coming to an end - both in the sense of the exhaustion of the soil and of the coming schism in the sky. It was no coincidence that the birds were silent.

After the storm struck I could see nothing for a while. Then afterwards the sun came out though the rain still fell - a "monkey's wedding" in South Africa, apparently. Each raindrop streaked down, a string of ephemeral jewels immediately replicated. The sky had gone from being a black weight to grey-blues and purples, seeming to rise from the land. Freed from the clouds' hold, the sun's colours stretched across the redder end of the spectrum again, and picked out the uncut heads of crops in precise, recurring detail. These great spreads, seemingly stitched by infinitely patient hands, were scored by the lines of hedges, the pawprints of trees. Their greens darkened by the evening light looked deep enough to swim in.

My boots squelched with every step, and slipped in the clingy Oxfordshire mud. I knew these fields were over-fertilised, covered in pesticides, and that the soil was being drained of organic matter - I saw great cracks where the preceding dry weeks had split the ground apart. But it remained beautiful.

The tone for the rest of the walk was set by those opening miles. As the rain eased, birds came out - a kestrel, goldfinches. Butterflies and bees followed - though often at the lips of Himalayan balsam flowers. I passed through Happy Valley and saw a view of Oxford's stones glowing, as they always do in a long twilight. Then I crossed the A34, where the water had already evaporated under the friction of cars.

Walkers before me would have known well the inspiration of striding through the sunset hours. I suspect that they'll also have known the pleasure of bringing aching legs to your own door and sitting comfortably to watch the gathering night.