The car stopped on the patched-up lane. I could see her face in the rearview mirror peering back at me and I knew what was happening even as she climbed out.
In situations like this - she walked towards me; mid-20s, professional - I’m not above handing back a flavour of whatever antagonism I receive, but I wasn’t seeking escalation - I visited this lane often and didn’t want it tainted with conflict. Besides, being fair to the driver, I was anomalous. With my tripod standing on stepladders to find the right angle on the dawn, I wasn’t the usual deer, hawk or dog walker you might spot down here.
My teen children are susceptible to the daggers of embarrassment and their uncomfortableness with me being ‘difficult’ in any way - and let’s be honest, with my speaking much at all - has trained me to be unobtrusive and placid, even if feeling provoked. But while there were no children present, still I channelled their influence as the driver approached me, her game face on, her authority activated.
Here we go. Closer. Closer.
The opening salvo - ‘Do you have the landowner’s permission?’ - was pretty provocative.
‘I don’t know them,’ I replied.
‘Everything this side of the bridge belongs to us,’ she said.
‘I’m on a public footpath.’
The footpath snaked left from the bridge which she’d just driven over, then it ran adjacent to the lane she was eyeballing me from. I was on this path. Very deliberately on the path.
‘We’re the people who put all the new fencing in,’ she said.
These were the words that topped me out, pushed me towards abandoning civility. Because over the last couple of years I’d seen the new fencing go in. The wires that corralled the walkers from my village away from taking favoured routes across the flood meadow towards the river - denying walking lines that had been used, it is not fanciful to say, since at least the Bronze Age
I’d seen the new inhabitants of the farmhouse which lies between my village and the river wire off routes not just to humans, but also, more upsettingly, prevent the natural travel of deer and fox. (Badgers and rabbits, I had noted, had found their way beneath). I’d seen the new owners erect wooden ‘Private’ signs along the lane, painted in upmarket, tasteful tones. I’d seen the cottages by the farmhouse turned into holiday lets, causing SUV-driving guests to bundle in ignorant speed round the blind corners of the lane. I’d seen security cameras arrive, scrutinising the domain from tall poles.
So, yes, certainly I knew that they were the people who’d put the fencing in, and I found myself shaking with emotion as I stood on the footpath looking at her, all of the upset I’d silently swallowed with each small new act of unanswered dominion now yelping at once into my body as she spoke.
It has been said in the past that I’ve a problem with authority, which is certainly accurate when authority is inherited, assumed, or enforced, rather than earned via skill, achievement, or wit, and besides, from my perspective - not naturally cut out for a career in the obedience industries - it is authority that has the problem with me. Anyway, she looked at me. It was my turn to speak. I was struggling to stick to my passivity brief.
This was what was running through my mind:
About a mile southwest of here, in a village in which a crippled poet wrote an ode to a pair of doomed peasant lovers struck by lightning, there were found, not so long ago, the bones of a herd of woolly mammoth from perhaps a quarter of a million years ago.
The bones of red deer from three-hundred-thousand-plus years ago were found near a village about three miles northeast of here. About two miles north of here, fifty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal bones were recently found. Two miles north of here, flint axes made by Homo Erectus more than half a million years ago have been discovered.
One hundred and sixty million years ago, everything around us was covered by a sub-tropical sea. There are wars on. My eyes hurt. My teeth ache. Soon you and I and everyone we know will be dead. This morning is as unique and glorious as the breath in your lungs. Your fencing and proprietary are pedantic and obscene and diminishing. Hello. It is nice to meet you
I didn’t say any of this. Instead, I took a deep breath, repressed my spiky cosmic fatalism and said, ‘I live in the village. I come down here a lot. I make experimental films and teach at the university. I’m shooting the sun coming up over the trees. It’s very beautiful with the fog.’
I believe, though this may be fanciful, that I may even have smiled at this point, or at least arranged my features in lieu of such a thing.
She was defused, backtracked on her stance. ‘It is very beautiful,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to bother you. I was just interested in what you were doing.’
I just nodded. She nodded and left. I returned to filming, tried to calm down. Later, when I told my daughters what had happened they seemed proud of me. Black belt in civility unlocked. Not an easy test to pass.
Have you read The Book Of Trespass by Nick Hayes? I think you might like it.