Once

by McNeillie, Andrew

  It was not quite this far up that we once cowered, in torrential rain, driving sheep out from their shelter, to take shelter ourselves like animals under the overhung hag, from the knifing rain and the wind behind it, wet through just about, for all our defences; and cold, and the weather on ahead lowering and livid. Then, feet turned to clay, the men agreed to beat the retreat and we turned back, all that way out, and all that way back. It was a ruined day, home by mid-morning and wondering, as I wonder yet, why did we not go on? ‘He that observeth the wind,’ goes the lesson, ‘shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.’ I adapted it this way in ‘Glyn Dw^r Sonnets’:

  That morning we got in under the hag

  overhang below Clogwyn, a sheep-shelter

  tagged with wool, and took stock, huddled there,

  as the rain drove home its attack, over bog

  and rock and wilderness of Wales below,

  the day still young and we already

  miles on our way, a raggle-taggle army

  of foot, with more than the worst to go.

  Owain, Maredudd, the old man, and me:

  a mere boy in their company, voiceless;

  on that cold, wet, mean March march to try

  our luck up there (with a March Brown?),

  but even they got cold feet (god bless!)

  and began to weigh up the march down.

  Too much marching? Not this day though, not this day of days. Now we’re up on the level of the bluff, Cerrig Cochion – the red rocks – on our right; Clogwyn yr eryr – eagle crag – on our left. Here the track is puddled earlier in the year and the puddles full of frogspawn. Here you gain your first view, if you only knew it, of the black cliffs of Dulyn, away beyond, at the very head of the cwm, 1,747 ft above sea-level, between Y Foel Fras and Y Foel Grach. But the Black Lake itself is not to be seen, and not to be seen until you are all but upon it, unless you climb high on the crag above Eigiau and the day’s clear.

  You are eager, your appetite whetted now. But I’ll keep you waiting. You must learn patience on the lonely mountain. You must remember Job and his comforters. You must learn to wait and to watch the vacant day as it closes round you and becomes you, in your ten-year-old’s dream. Until you are inside this place, and it is inside you, and nowhere else, and your mind is empty of all but what becomes your senses. This way you will come to see what’s otherwise not there. As year succeeds year, this way you will find faith in things alone. I had an eye? An eye had me.

  You’ll mark where the sandpiper rose, above the stream, and where it landed, and work out where its nest is likeliest to be, and find it, and find the wheatear with her clutch in a hidden cup of grasses, under a lip of stone, and the meadow-pipit with the cuckoo’s egg under her doomed breast, her rapid heart, in a little clump undistinguishable from any other little clump; and you’ll know there’s a trout quietly feeding, feeding invisibly, in that plunging pool, beside the boulder where the dipper dips himself dry, after diving for caddis larvae. You’ll divine it as at the wrist of your being. You’ll become a naturalist without study, by nature, first nature, second nature. I had an eye? I was an eye without a voice. Nature is rude and incomprehensible, at first, said Whitman, but don’t be discouraged: it holds divinity enveloped in it. Divine it. It holds you, and you only knew it, bare-forked as a divining rod as you step into the religion of landscape.

  Here at the ultimate gate we face our freedom, like the freedom of the open road. That old lie that we were everywhere born free will awe your ten years here before the mountain backdrop.

  Now, if you wait here long enough you’ll see four figures at a loose distance from each other, way down below in the valley, hot and bothered, following the stream in July. They’ve come from Rowlyn-isaf where they parked this morning. They thought to economise on effort and to reach the lake sooner than you and I. But look at them. They are already hammered, having joined the stream at Rowlyn-uchaf. They’ve fished the low pool at the little dam. They’ve fished, or one of them has fished, the lower reaches. There’s no dissent in the ranks. But all recognize, coming up from the trees, struggling to keep to the path of the stream, that a mad decision was made. Someone had blundered.

  I was one of those you can see, the boy, the one delaying to fish, hurrying on to fish. Let me assure you, it was a day of endurance almost as bad as any I ever knew, boy or youth, and I knew some bad ones by then, if many far worse days since. But I loved to fish the stream. It was more manageable in scale than the Black Lake for me, and more immediately varied in feature. You could read it. You could hunt it. Except for the odd stretch or reach, it was nowhere bland. So I didn’t mind the slog and the staggering over rocks and in and out of bog-holes, on and on and on for more than half the morning, a close morning too, that July, nagged and buzzed by flies.

  * * *

  Now, on this first day, just as we didn’t follow the stream from below Rowlyn-isaf, we won’t cross the yawning valley as logic might cry out that we do, but keep to the old quarry track. A few steps on beyond the gate in a shallow puddle, you’ll find a ten-shilling note. Who lost it? When? Yesterday? This morning? The men made much of it and gave it to me. It would become a little talking point through time, holding that wet blustery morning forever in my mind. But who made the track and why? Who laboured to build the walls, those at the lake that scramble up little short of vertical, demarcating what? Keeping what from what? For whom? Who whom? Who were those men who laboured up here, for what reward, but the reward of being, in the wilderness, speaking together in Welsh, singing Welsh things, belonging, however exploited?

  In a commonplace as old as the hills, it is often said writing is like walking. The two are joined at the hip. It was said of Henry David Thoreau, whose ‘Black Lake’ was ‘Walden Pond’, that he could write nothing if he kept indoors. Anyway, pen-in-hand, I’ve paused here at the gate longer than you know, a little oppressed by the next leg of the journey. It was a way we quite soon abandoned, for the shorter diagonal cut across the valley, down and up, and so much quicker, you’d wonder why anyone ever went off up the track, the incline steepish at first then gradual, the way long towards Melynllyn, the Yellow Lake: yellow, shallow, yellow with light, as Dulyn is black, and lively with fish at evening. Here on the way home we’d sometimes pause to fish the evening rise, after the Black Lake had proved unyielding, or to pick bilberries, and be plagued by midges, or both. The way back – let’s consider it now – was hard and longer after a blank day. I would in my first years trail behind the men from weariness and have to make up ground.

  It was on such evenings, maybe as we came fishless from Melynllyn too, the men might air the idea of trying our luck elsewhere next Sunday. I always liked the idea of elsewhere, and I’d speak up in favour. But they paid no heed to that. I had no say in anything at all. No more than I do now, except as to what goes on here, on this obscure page. And what say is that exactly? (Nothing you can do to alter. Think what you like.) But I loved the views of other ranges and the idea of other lakes beyond them. I could only believe luck might be better there. But then they’d talk themselves out of it, or during the week reverse their decision to go to Caw Lwyd, Llyn Conwy, or Llyn-y-Foel.

  So conservative were they I can only remember going to any of these other lakes two or at most three times each, out of how many possible Sundays in any given season, down all those years? It wasn’t that they were creatures of habit but they’d found and kept their vocation. As befits a novice, I wavered in mine. I especially liked it up at Llyn-y-Foel with its punishing climb up into the shadow of Moel Siabod. You must remember we didn’t regard ourselves as mountaineers or hikers: we were fishermen and we wanted to fish not to climb, to conquer peaks or to sight-see. Our sightseeing was of the best, being blindly undertaken and incidental to a greater purpose. I’m sure that’s true of the mountaineer too. Absorption in purpose soaks up most. I don’t think, therefore I am.

  Llyn-y-Foel is as light and airy a water as the Black Lak
e is dour and dark and easier to fish because easier to negotiate. What’s more I caught fish there before I did at the Black Lake, lankier, lighter, more silvery trout than those at Dulyn, and how they lightened my heart and turned my head. But as I said we rarely strayed. We soon came back to the true quest and test and trial, our vocation and our deepest love and love-hate. Where you have still to find your way, to see the light.

  But let me first take you the diagonal way to all but to the lake, before we resume, so that you’ll know it, and make up your own mind when you come this way next. I mean to fill that world for you before we arrive, taking the three approaches we attempted in our time. There are of course still others, from over the top: but that day in my later youth, when I came over from Aber in a mist and along Anafon shore, I never found the Black Lake but found myself footsore at last in Bethesda, as if in the Bible, though not at any pool, or sheep gate, with no paralysed man, or Christ to cure me of my weariness. Bethesda, Bethel, Nebo…. So many Biblical names in that country of my birth, out in the wilderness.

  It seemed momentous the morning we took the plunge, across the valley. I suppose that was only because I was so young. It’s all because I was so young. Just as now it’s because I’m not. I remember my trepidation, a sense of risk, as the old man set the angle of our attack. How the ground plunged and sprang and ran with water in deep clefts, heard before seen, in the thick grasses and mosses, the small occasional heather, of the long slope below Clogwyn Maldy that wanted you to descend quicker and more immediately than you meant to, so that you had to keep correcting your way, among the outcrop rocks, the flashes of bogland, the exhausting one-leg-shorter-than-the-other tilted terrain. Here sometimes we’d see a herd of mountain ponies grazing up ahead. Here one morning we found the skull of one in the bog and then all its skeleton scattered, dispersing. When we came back we brought the skull and jawbone home with us, a trophy in the stone ‘potting shed’, grinning pale horse of death, under the Wooded Hill.

  On such an evening, making our way to the red rocks, we’d notice what a fastness those red-tinged rocks were, like a ruined fort, and because red (with iron), they looked as if the sun was setting on them even when there was no sun visible to set. They looked like something in an Arabian waste, a high place from which to way-lay infidel travellers. But we were of the true faith. We passed in safety protected by the trout-god, high in his mountain kingdom.

  But onward and downward now, there was the head of the cwm to aim for, and the little rectangle of firs, of larches beyond Afon Dulyn, to keep in mind, to steer by. These trees had been planted it was said as an experiment to see how they’d fare at such an altitude, in such a place, to prove some or other theory about an ancient Cambrian forest. The better your angle of descent the more reasonable your ascent from the stream would be, in the last haul through the high moraine, the massive scattering of glacial rocks, some as big as houses, my father liked to say. And where to hit the stream but where it is easiest to cross, by the sheepfold, as it spreads out and becomes shallower and slower among the littered remains of the moraine. Here there was a slippery plank to cross by, like something in the Himalayas bridging a torrent, and we walked it, wobbled it, if the stream was high, with some sure risk of slipping off, on a wet and blowy day.

  Now you are eager for the close. But it is chest-rasping this last haul up through the winding way, deeper and deeper into the boulders, towards the lake, in its looming gloomy black cauldron. You might want to halt awhile, half way, and take a breather. But the men won’t. They’re like a horse that has wind of home. It’s all they can do not to break into a canter. They can scent lake-water in the surging air.

  * * *

  But now, rewind please. Don’t think you’ve escaped to cast a line before us. Back up here on the cart-track we are already at the abandoned quarry near the Yellow Lake, where it rides full of light, under the summit of Foel Grach. Connected in some way to the abandoned workings, there was a small stone building by a stream. We called it the mill-house, and I believe it once milled stone, ‘hone’ stone – strange white soft stone on which you could sharpen your knife or the point of a hook. ‘Melynllyn Hone Quarry’ the map says. I never understood then quite what workings there had been. The map says many things. Settlement and Settlement in the most desolate spots. Whose Settlement? And when? Are these places where the Druids dwelt, ready to perform their lakeshore rituals, in the territory between the areas called Caerhun and Dolgarrog?

  Way below us, water from Melynllyn spurted out through a broad-bore pipe, and down a splashway into Dulyn, and down the steep last climb to the lake, which we could now see, we’d step over miniature sleepers, and between old narrow-gauge rails, in places where these had not yet decayed entirely, rusted or rotted away. Quite close underfoot here and there you could hear the water gushing down between the lakes, through great cast-iron pipes. Now and then part of the pipeline might just break the surface.

  What was that labour and what were the lives it commanded? What days? What talk? What stories? What pay? What nights and where were they spent? After a day’s work what time to get home, what time to return in the morning? What Wales and whose? None of it on record, and oral memory of this place lost to mind?

  How many steps have I taken now, how many more than the men, I can hardly bear to think, and every obstacle of rock or boulder, so much more to me to negotiate than to them. Next, it is a dizzy descent, taken at a slow steep step, and, approaching from the south as you are, by now you’ve glimpsed a corner of black water. And what time is it? And is there a breeze enough in that great cauldron, and are the fish on the move?

  * * *

  So this was it. This was Dulyn. This was the Black Lake.

  Before me stood a rocky bay, the inky water in it joppling in the wind. So black it seemed unreal, this narrow southeast bay that runs up to the dam and overspill, with a small island of rocks in it. Round along the shore to the left were the remains of a boathouse of sorts, its corrugated iron roof all but rusted away, its timbers broken and caved, and no boat anywhere. I always wished it housed a boat still. There was said to be a boat across the little bay, in the little pump house under the slope opposite. The shepherd used to talk about it. But I never saw it. What a thing to steal it.... The idea of rowing out on the black waters in a small boat excited my imagination, and unnerved me too.

  How I wished there was a boat to complete the picture, to swell the adventure of setting out. How much better the fishing would be, drifting towards those little bays, and along otherwise inaccessible shores. How scary it would be too, with a kind of vertigo to dizzy you, the lake being so deep, the black crag looming so high overhead. And when there were clouds blowing you’d not know were they moving or was it the crag. Who knows but you might feel compelled to slip overboard, into purgatory, just as up there on the crag you might be overcome by an urge to hurl yourself over the edge.

  Behind me rose the steep way we’d descended and the gush of water from the Yellow Lake as it came slattering out of the pipe, to swell the Black Lake, provided a constant backwash to the immediate sound-scape. Farther to my left a few yards away rose a high crag and cliff and walls of stone and a lower terrace that stepped down to the water, steeply into the lake, forming a little bay within the larger bay, and a precipitous point of rock at which you could not round the lake on foot.

  Underfoot were rough grasses and rocks and stones, in-between big boulders. Then all about a cacophony of lesser sounds and great, the enveloping sound-warp of the place. But though the place enveloped you in this way, its unrelievedness was so overwhelming it held you at bay in yourself too. It shut you out. It shut you in. It took you a while to acclimatize, always, to find the balance between inner and outer that is the dream-state where the world’s your own.

  After the exertion, you cooled down physically. Only on a rare summer day might you still feel warm after halting there a minute or two. I learnt the meaning of cold up there in my young bones. I learnt to ge
t used to it and to endure, endure the cold rain, rain that might fall all day, with only a rare break if any. And rain at that height in the mountains is as cold and hard as granite. No concessions were made for me. None was possible, however many years I carried on my head.

  What had I expected? I had heard so much about the Black Lake but I didn’t hear anything like this. I had only known that it was, what? I hadn’t known anything at all. It was a name merely, a word that in English was two words. I was a small boy. It was my father coming home with fish. It was the mountains and it was arduous to be there. But now this was what it was. The day began here, the quick day in the slow year of boyhood.

  We set to, the men eager to begin and to disperse, my father greedy to drop a cast on virgin water, down in the little bay, out to the nearby point, round which you could bend a cast a yard or so, if the wind blew in the right direction and you were skilful. It was a spot where trout might be taken. (Where I once had two on at the same time, and lost both as Ifor tried to help me swing them ashore.)

  My father had no after-you manners, no etiquette but first-come-first-served, as long as he was first. The others knew it in him. They knew their man and took no heed. So they waited for him at the end of a long weary day when he refused to admit defeat, last to leave last served, and he would cast and cast and cast into the evening, intent on showing us how to rise a fish. When by now all our thoughts were of home. As often as not he’d succeed, as if by sheer will-power but it was a combination of uncanniness and skill.

  Up until then I had never cast a fly in earnest, except, up at the source of the Lledr. But I was thoroughly drilled in setting up and what flies to try, and so I too set to, the tea-boy still ten years old.