Following the Sun

by John Hanson Mitchell

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Nice spot. Very nice. Lovely views. Yes. Right.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Well I’ll be off now.”

  He leaped to his feet and started down the trail toward the farm.

  Why he felt it necessary to rush off I couldn’t figure.

  I saw him the next day and asked if he was going up to the moors today.

  “No. Not me. I’ll be staying here. Got me chores.”

  Try as I might I couldn’t figure out why he was avoiding me. Everyone else at the farm was outgoing and friendly. Finally I asked Faith Cloverdale about his behavior.

  “Well, you’re an American, are you not?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “He’s afraid of you. He thinks you’re armed. He’s heard about Americans on the telly. Don’t believe he’s seen many though.”

  This little valley had a strange hold over me. I was actually reluctant to leave. The family that ran the place had been on the same farm for nearly four hundred years, and they had acquired a seasonal rhythm driven by weather, crops, and animals. There were many animals around, Meg, the dog, a clutch of puppies, two or three pregnant cats, a herd of thirty-eight cows, each of whom had a name and known character, a less well defined flock of sheep, with many “lambykins” as Faith called the lambs, chickens and chicks, doves in the dovecote, a goat, two pigs, and a community of valley people including the postman who would come to the kitchen part of each day or evening to chat. I grew very lazy there, sometimes sleeping through the rains, and I began wondering if I could live like this in this spot.

  There was some ineffable, almost mythic quality to the place. It was this very attraction, the hold it was beginning to wield on me, that made me think I had better leave. Pilgrims on the way to their various shrines often get waylaid or tempted by earthly attachments. The strange power the valley was exerting was somehow increased by the fact that almost every day it rained at least a little. This no doubt accounted for the deep greens of the hills and valleys, the freshness of the brooks and the river that ran behind the house, and the wealth of bird life—the thickets and high moors were alive with thrushes and warblers, the cry of the curlews filled the air all day, and there were continuous bursts of red and speckled grouse in the thickets of heather on the heights. The weather was part of the attraction, however. In Andalusia I came to take the sun for granted in spite of the fact that I hit some patches of rain. In southwestern France the presence of sun was a regular part of the journey. I would ride on under the warm skies, day after day. But here in the Swaledale, the appearance of the fulsome, silvery yellow sun in a cobalt blue break in the clouds was a near religious experience. The slanted, raking light that filled the valley at dawn and dusk was infused with a radiance I hadn’t ever noticed before, anywhere.

  When I announced that I must pedal on, I sensed a vague, unexpressed sadness at the dinner table that evening. These Yorkshire people did not have the effusive, overbearing, almost smothering qualities of some of the bed and breakfast “mothers” that I had encountered, but they had a warm, country directness, the famous north country kindness that made me feel at home. I wasn’t really a guest there, I was just there, a part of the place.

  On a clear, warm morning, I packed my things, helped feed the lambs, wandered around the farm, seeking people out to say goodbye, and then, while the family stood by the kitchen door, not saying much, I bid them all farewell and unhappily mounted up and began the long climb out of the valley. About halfway up the eastern slope on the road to Kirby I came upon the postman walking down the hill. I stopped to say goodbye.

  “Leaving us are you then?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “On to Kirby, then Sedbergh, then the Lake District.”

  “All the way there? The Lake District is it? It’s a long way off.”

  “I’ll make it,” I said.

  “Right.” He looked away.

  “Cheerio,” I said, and held out my hand.

  He shook my hand, tipping his head downward and to the side as he did so and nodding without looking me in the eye.

  “Goodbye, then.” He let go of my hand quickly.

  Poor little man, I thought.

  “I’ve got to do the mail now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Must be going.”

  “Well I’m off, too.”

  “I wish you luck in your adventures,” he mumbled and clipped off at a fast, nervous pace without looking back.

  I crossed a bridge over the headwaters of the Swale at the crest of the hill. It struck me that at the rate the postman was moving, he would reach the farm at about the same time as the waters now running under the bridge.

  Thirteen

  Apparell’d in Celestial Light

  At Sedbergh, at the edge of a field, I found a pleasant bed and breakfast with a sunny dining room and white tablecloths, each table set with a little bowl of local wildflowers. Warm-hearted though the Keld household had been, it was a rough and unpretentious existence there, with few amenities and ample, but by no means elaborate or well-presented, dishes. Here, at tea, I had fresh scones and strawberry jams on little plates set on doilies with china cups and silver table settings, a Scottish maid named Mary, who set out more plates of sweeties, and was there again in the morning, dishing up oatmeal and toast points, pots of real coffee—as opposed to the dreaded instant coffee—and dishes of fresh fried eggs. I took very long hot baths in their old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub and left the next morning, pedaling on easy country lanes, amid birdsong and the scent of fresh-mown hay.

  Knowing the difficulty of the climbs ahead of me, I rested by a wide, rippling brook practicing Irish jigs on a penny whistle given to me by John Rukin, the son of the farm family in Keld. I went through my old favorites, “Soldiers Joy,” “Roaring Jelly,” “The Muckin’ of Geordie’s Byre,” then took off my shoes, bathed my feet, and lay back in the spring sun to think about my schedule.

  I had not been keeping careful track of time or dates in the past week. In fact time had almost seemed suspended in the Swaledale. I couldn’t be sure how long I had actually stayed, and I started working back with dates trying to calculate what day it might be. In this manner I came to the date of June first, which meant that there were only twenty more days to the solstice. In the Swaledale, the sun would leave the valley floor an hour or two after the evening meal, and the light would slowly creep up the west-facing slopes of the eastern ridges. But when the sun actually set was hard to say. Great ribbons of fire would sally across the sky for hours after the valley floor was a well of darkness. At Sedbergh after dinner, I went for a walk and didn’t come back to the bed and breakfast until ten or so, and the sun was still up. So we were getting close.

  I sat up, inspired to undertake a great hill that lay just ahead. I wanted to get to Kendal to find out the actual date.

  Once I got on the other side of the hill, I heard a strange roaring in the air, and in due time crossed over the hideous M6 motorway that strikes up through Lancaster and Cumbria from Manchester and Liverpool. From this point over to Kendal was a slow and arduous climb, followed by a long descent into the busy streets of the town. I went immediately to the post office and learned that it was June second, not the first, and that because of the fine weather, the locals were preparing for another onset of tourists. I pushed on toward Bowness-on-Windermere, riding up and coasting down, riding up and coasting down, all the way on back roads to Trout Beck and on to Windermere and finally Amble-side, where the only place to stay was a three-star hotel, where the hostess set me up in a pleasant single room with a bath and then ruined the atmosphere by making bad jokes about Pakistanis.

  The next day I rode out to Dove Cottage to pay homage to the other great poet of the sun, William Wordsworth, who had lived for eight years in the cottage with his sister, Dorothy, and his wife, Mary.

  In 1799, Wordsworth and Coleridge made a walking tour of the Lake District from Temple Sowerby and p
assed Dove Cottage along their way. The house was then an empty inn called the Dove and Olive Branch, and later in the same year William and his devoted sister Dorothy moved into the cottage. Coleridge by that time had already moved to Keswick, but no sooner had Dorothy and William moved in than Coleridge began regular and prolonged visits. Wordsworth had married his childhood companion, Mary, and she brought her sisters to the cottage, ostensibly to help take care of the children. By this time, Thomas De Quincey, who shared Coleridge’s taste for opium, was an almost permanent guest, and by 1808, with children, and continuous house guests, and the presence of Coleridge all the time, the cottage began to feel overcrowded, and the whole troop moved to Grasmere to find more spacious living quarters.

  I am not one for guided tours of house interiors, but I am interested in the setting of places in which artists and writers worked, and Dove Cottage is set in one of the most beautiful locations of any of the literary retreats that I have seen. From the garden the vista takes in three-quarters of the Grasmere valley, the lake, Loughrigg, Silver Howe, Easedale, all the way to Helm Crag with its sweeping fells, and the gray lake below the billowing Lake District sky.

  While I was poking around outside the cottage I fell into conversation with an old gardener deadheading flowers with a pair of shears. He was dressed for the occasion in flannel trousers and vest, a blue shirt, and a red necktie.

  “Are you interested in the poet, then?” he asked.

  I told him I had been trying to remember a line about the sun, which I then quoted to him—“All things that love the sun are out of doors …”

  “That’d be ‘The Leech Gatherer,’ I believe,” he said. “But there’s others you must know,” and hereupon began quoting the poet: “‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light.…’ Do you know that one?”

  “Sounds familiar,” I said

  “And how about this: ‘… The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth.…’ I can do more if you like.”

  “He was a fine poet,” I said.

  “That ’e was, that ’e was—roamed all over these parts and ’e spent a lot of time right here in the garden, watching the light. Was him and Dorothy first put up the roses here, and the honeysuckle. Dorothy used to bring in flowers from the hills, wild thyme, and columbine from the fellside, and wild orchids from the lake banks. ‘In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm’… as the poet said.”

  “You know a lot about the poet,” I said.

  “Was a great, kind man, the poet.”

  I asked him if he thought William Wordsworth made especial use of sun images in his poetry. “Did he enjoy the sun?” I asked.

  “Well not in the way that Blake fellow did. You wouldn’t see the poet basking naked in his garden. And anyway he loved all weathers, storm clouds and rain, you know, ‘not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come.…’ That sort of thing.”

  “‘Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower …,’” I quoted, summoning a line from freshman English.

  “‘We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind,’” he continued.

  If this keeps up, I thought, I’ll have to spend the rest of the afternoon here, listening to the full body of the 4,000 however many lines of the prolific Mr. William Wordsworth.

  I began to make my excuses, but made the mistake of admitting that I had not yet been inside the cottage.

  “You must though. You must. Go up and ask Mrs. Daley to show you Dorothy’s journal. She’ll have the entry for today. And furthermore, she’ll show you the study where the poet worked. It’s a fine prospect from there.”

  I assured him I would, but I was actually planning to secretly escape. Then I changed my mind and went inside and asked for Mrs. Daley, who without offering the full tour gladly showed the entry for June 3rd.

  Even without Wordsworth, the Lake District would be one of the most literary regions of this intensely literary nation. William Gilpen wrote a well-known guidebook to the region in 1772, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century sightseers were regularly visiting the area. Thomas Gray of “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” fame spent time in the region in the eighteenth century. John Keats, who also made a tramp through here, complained in 1818 that all of London had invaded the district. Thomas De Quincey, who wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ended up living in Ambleside after the Dove Cottage group broke up. Shelley and the poet Robert Southey spent time in the Lakes. Walter Scott was a regular visitor, one of the inhabitants of Dove Cottage; Tennyson stayed at Bassenthwaite, which is thought to be the setting for the closing scenes in “Idylls of the King,” and the art critic and author John Ruskin moved to Coniston Waters in the 1870s. Beatrix Potter spent almost every summer in the Lakes, as did the children’s writer Arthur Ransome.

  Long before the lakes were discovered by England’s writers and poets, long before there was an England in fact, Cumbria and the lakes region appear to have been an important part of the world. There are more than 1,000 Neolithic archeological sites in the area, one of the oldest of which is the stone circle known as Castlerigg. After my visit to Dove Cottage, I decided to pedal over for a look.

  Very few places are as evocative as a four-thousand-year-old temple, but in order to really grasp the meaning of the depth of time, you have to arrive at the right moment, as I had at Stonehenge. The sun was in the west by the time I got to Castlerigg, and the few tourists who had gathered were lounging around the stones, posing for pictures, and slowly meandering back to their parked cars. I was too early for sunset, but it was about time for high tea, and as the visitors departed I was able to find some isolated spots to meditate on the siting of this important Neolithic site.

  The stone circle consists of thirty-eight boulders, flanked by tall stones set due north, and an even taller pillar set in the southeast. An arrangement of stones juts into the circle from the east and aligns perfectly with an earthen circle at the summit of the Great Mell Fell, which is about six miles off. A line from the southeast pillar fixes the point at which the midsummer sun would have set some five thousand years ago, when the stone ring was laid out.

  The Lakeland fells surround the ring, and the site overlooks a fertile woodland, and this whole arrangement of circles and pillars on a flat, open plain is one of the most evocative settings of any of the myriad stone circles of Europe. Theories on the siting of the temple hold that specific stones in the circle line up with specific mountaintops in the ring of surrounding hills and mark the rising or setting sun as well as the rise of certain stars to determine the dates of seasonal festivals. But as is so often the case with prehistoric monuments, nothing is proven. One of the more interesting theories holds that the stones, known locally as the Carles, are in fact petrified Danish warriors, frozen into rock by the gods for some heinous deed.

  On my way over to Keswick, after my visit, near what appeared to be a conference center, I spotted a circle of people in a meadow above the lake, going through the ritual exercises of a yoga class. For traditional yogis, the sun was a recognized, driving force of the universe, and I waited for a while, to see if the group would execute the well-known series of postures known as the salute to the sun. In the Hindu cosmology the simplest form of the sun god was Surya, the solar disc that one sees everyday. But Surya, like Apollo, who drove a fiery chariot across the sky each day, was known in sacred texts by as many as twelve different names. He was known to be the force behind all the great gods of the Hindu pantheon and is still worshipped today by devout Brahmans. At dawn each day his name is evoked in lines from the Gayatri, one of the sacred texts of the Vedas, as “the divine Vivifier.”

  Back in Keswick, after some searching I found a bed and break
fast outside the town where I was offered the last room in the place, a tiny upstairs den with a green hill just outside the bedroom window. The other rooms had either views of the lake or the mountains and were decidedly more expensive. In the morning there I met a pleasant couple named Rolph and Judy who were undertaking a hiking tour in the old style of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

  “We’ll set out on a fine morning such as this,” Rolph said. “Pick a route and a subject and then try to get to the end of both.”

  I didn’t quite understand. “Get to the end of the trail, you mean?”

  “Yes, and the idea.”

  “What he means is that we discuss something as we hike,” Judy said.

  “Yesterday it was the poetry of William Wordsworth,” Rolph said.

  Judy snickered. “That’s not true, actually. Rolph’s not fond of poetry. We talk about ideas, any idea.”

  “No Wordsworth, not even here?” I asked.

  “Rolph has no time for Wordsworth, I’m afraid,” Judy said.

  I was curious to know what kind of ideas and even had a topic in mind for them, such as “Is the sun God?” but it turned out they were more interested in politics and political philosophies than larger questions, such as the driving force of all nature and culture.

  Rolph was a witty fellow, but it appeared that protecting nature and the environment was not high on his agenda.

  “Gone too far if you ask me,” he said, at one point. “Man’s role on earth is to remake it. Subdue and multiply, saith the Lord.”

  “You see what I have to deal with,” Judy said.

  “So you don’t think much of the Ramblers Association, I take it?” I was referring to a recently formed organization of walkers who made a point of maintaining the ancient public ways in Britain, some of which were being closed off by local farmers and landholders to keep people off their fields, and up in Scotland, away from the grouse moors.

  “Bunch of crazies,” Rolph said.

  “See what I mean?” Judy said.

  “So what’s your topic today?” I asked.