Good afternoon, beloved —
I spent last night alone in the deepest part of Epping Forest, a mile or more in any direction from any other human soul.
This is nothing, of course, on someone like Ben Saunders, the Antarctic explorer. Ben once told me he’s frequently so alone on his solo expeditions that the nearest human beings are those on the International Space Station, which orbits about 250 miles up. But it’s certainly the most isolated I’ve ever contrived to become.
I came to the forest — tame as it is in so many ways, despite the frank transgression involved in camping there overnight — precisely to experience this isolation. There is a Buddhist truth that time will strip away everything and every one you love, and if the sorrows and griefs I’ve experienced over the last little while have taught me anything, it’s that I’m not at all prepared for that in its fullness.
And so I began a program of long solo walks on the land. If James C. Scott counsels us to undertake the practice of “anarchist calisthenics,” by which he means breaking trivial laws in trivial ways to prepare ourselves psychically for the moment morality requires larger transgressions of us, you can consider these walks a form of Buddhist calisthenics. I am, I suppose, practicing for loss.
On one level, this is fatuous, in much the same way a well-off college kid thinking of themselves as a squatter because they’ve chosen to spend a few months in a squat is fatuous. The kind of solitude one gets to know during a few hours of darkness, in a place where I could have given up at any moment, walked straight out of the forest and caught a night bus home, self-evidently has not a thing to do with that terminal solitude we’ll all come to know if we’re lucky (or “lucky”) enough to live that long. But it’s a taste. It’s a way of rolling aloneness around on your tongue, to learn where its edges are and what it feels like when you rub against them. And we all know tastes can be acquired.
That’s the plan here, to the degree that there is a plan, anyway: acquiring the taste, relatively late in life, for stillness and silence and solitude and everything that goes along with them. Getting comfortable enough with being alone that I won’t mind it as much when life inevitably inflicts it on me as a fundamental condition. And that has meant spending a solid chunk of time with a person I haven’t always cared for, in every sense of those words.
I’ll say more about that some other time. For now, I want to tell you what it’s like in Epping Forest in the hours of darkness. This is the very first thing you need to know: it’s loud AF, all night long.
First there is the noise of human origin. It wasn’t anyone on foot, despite the forest’s reputation for various sorts of illicit skulkery. The paths were well clear of walkers, mountain bikers and equestrians by sundown; if there was anyone else roaming my part of the woods I didn’t hear them, and the ground cover was crunchy enough that I certainly would have. But the traffic on Epping New Road never quite lets up, even in the small hours of a Monday night, and in particularly it sounded to me like folks with heavy-duty motorcycles chose the roads hereabouts to take them off the leash a little. There were helicopters in just about every hour of the night — whether ambulance, police, military or executive transport I had no idea — and a constant rain of flights into Heathrow that eased only very slightly after midnight, before picking up again a mere three or four hours later.
And then, as you’d expect, there was the animal life. So much animal life! Birdsong per se, for the most part, stills relatively soon after full darkness. What you get in its stead is…a variety of other sounds made by birds, including the classic hoot of a tawny owl, and some clucks that I’m pretty sure were made by a heron. And far and away the most frequent night forest sound, which is also the one which never failed to jolt me from whatever shallow sleep I’d finally fallen into and set my pulse to hammering: foxes.
Oh god, the foxes. Londoners, of course, know perfectly well what a backyard fox sounds like, which is slaughter and abject bloody murder, and something that TBQH took me awhile to get used to after moving here — like, you cannot possibly imagine that Cielo Drive sounded any worse. But, as my friend Alison points out, it’s more or less mating season already. So multiply that single neighborhood fox by a whole lot, sounding off at random intervals throughout the hours of darkness…but close by, and separated from me by a mere few mils of Dyneema. WHOOO, that’s fun! I may have intended my stay in the forest to acclimate me to being alone, but what I actually got used to was waking up with my heart in my throat. Between that, the aircraft, and the constant subliminal scanning for the voices and footsteps of potentially bad actors/bored drunken teenagers/lost dogging enthusiasts/the ghost of Dick Turpin, I think it’s fair to describe my sleep as “fitful.”
But it was magical in the gloaming, at dusk and dawn both, and that alone was worth the price of admission. For my RON position, I’d chosen a part of the forest that is largely open under the primary canopy, which thereabouts is mostly pollarded beech and hornbeam; it’s a distinctive landscape you won’t find too many other places on Earth. To be alone there, completely and totally alone in the half-light, the nonlight, the becoming-light, surrounded by nothing by the trees and the things that live in and among them — words just don’t convey what that felt like. (As you may have seen from things I’ve posted to my Instagram over the time Nurri and I have been visiting the forest, too, many of the trees in this stretch of the woods look a trifle Lovecraftian, or like they’re throwing anguished invisible oranges. If there is, after all, a word for what it feels like to be there alone in the temple stillness of the predawn, that word can only be “kvlt.”)
Those half-hour intervals, bookending the overnight: those are what ticked the box I’d only dimly known I’d set up. They spoke to something surviving pure in me, that I can only betray by trying to name. Maybe I’d finally fulfilled the charter I was given when and in receiving my Buddhist name, upon taking the Five Precepts so many years ago, and which I’ve so risibly failed to honor otherwise: Kwan Jok, “Perceive Stillness.” Or maybe it was just nice to be alone and a few hours away from everyday life’s round of constant, contemplation-resetting, enshallowing interruptions. It’s not that I expect to feel just exactly that way again, in this place on Earth or any other, but it definitely encouraged me to do more of this, and in particular to hurry up with the longer, two-day solo walk across Dartmoor I’ve been planning for the past few months.
I’m not, here, going to get into discussions of gear, though I do take a great deal of pleasure in putting it through it spaces; suffice to say that things have come a loooong way since Army days, and that it’s now possible to carry every last thing you need for a dry, comfortable one or two days out in 35-degree weather and weigh in somewhere under 5kg base weight, consumables not included. (Write me privately, though, and I’ll be happy to share my thoughts about specific pieces of kit, lessons learned and so on, in all the obsessive detail you’d expect.) And forgive me if I strike you as making far too much fuss over what is, in the end, a trivial, all-but-backyard expedition, the kind of thing kids used to do by the time they’d reached Wandervogel age. Evidently I needed to wait this long to learn what I think many of you have known for years, or possibly always, which is that there’s something incredibly healing about the forest, about being alone, and about being alone in the forest, and I just wanted to share some of my delight in the discovery.
And magnificently, in London at least, all of this — screeching foxes, treespirits, dawn-treading revelations and all — is no further away than the end of the Overground line.
Take care of yourselves, beloved. Take care of each other, and of those who need you in these awful times, and let yourself be taken care of. I’ll write again soon.
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 84 of Wednesday, 3 April 2019, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author.