Car headlights appeared, spectre like in the night, materializing almost out of nowhere and floating like eyes from an unconnected from head. Driving felt precarious in these conditions, bends in the road, potholes (of which there were many) and other vehicles constantly took me by surprise, all shrouded in a thick, heavy fog.
A cloud had descended on the Forest of Dean. It was not an unfamiliar experience, sitting
as we were so high in the landscape, we often woke up in a misty veil which
might stay for a few hours or a couple of days.
From our bedroom window, the distant hills of Malvern and the Black
Mountains usually such familiar humps on the horizon, were blocked completely
from sight by this white, impenetrable cloud. It made us feel cocooned,
isolated, like an island in the sky, the whole world miles and miles away, just
us, dreamlike, floating in the heavens.
Occasionally we would wake up on a cool Spring or Autumn
morning and find ourselves perched atop the clouds. The mist sitting like pools
of soft foamy milk in breakfast bowls in the valleys and dips of the landscape
and we would look out like fairy kings and queens over our fantasy cloud
kingdom. The mist took on a magical quality on days like this; it seemed to
hide treasures and secrets in its lacy folds, I could imagine it sprinkling
magic into the ground as it floated dreamily across, planting spring seeds or sending
the ground to sleep.
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The mist seemed to take on a physical form on days like this. Driving through the Forest would take you in
and out of the resting mist as if diving in and out of a milky ocean. One minute above the mist, the air crystal
clear and fresh, the next diving down into a cotton wool sea, and just as
quickly rising out of it again. At other
times the mist would seem alive, crawling menacingly over hedges and tumbling
into the road like a deadly virus out to consume all it encountered.
But we were in the midst of winter now, a cold, frosty and icy January, neither the hope of new life which spring brings, nor the cosy cuddle of Autumn, but the bleak, endless, hopelessness of winter. 17th century German Romanticist painter Casper David Friedrich perfectly captures the feeling in his painting “Wanderer above a sea of fog”, we stand surveying a bleak horizon, brooding and Darcy-like taking in the moody landscape as if it were doing this on purpose just to spite us. And yet even in the face of death and hopelessness, the Forest continued to take me by surprise in forming beauty with the most unlikely of materials; Dark, bare forests transformed into beautiful enigmatic paintings, bare tree limbs and branches, less spider like and more delicate, seemed to reach through the mist and reveal themselves in layers like a series of net curtains gradually revealing the players on a stage, the performer; nature itself.
On a forest walk at this time of year I imagine myself as Cathy
in Wuthering Heights, or Jane Eyre walking through a Gothic, enigmatic,
Northern landscape, holding up imaginary skirts and encountering mysterious men
who are taciturn, ancient hansom and loyal, but who aren’t men at all but trees
only disguised as mysterious men, hiding their beauty and soul behind a rough,
craggy bark, bare branches, and emerging hero-like through layers and layers of
vapours chiffon. One could easily fall in love with a man like that, and just
as easily I have fallen in love with the Forest.
But alas, I wasn’t Cathy and the Forest of Dean is no
Heathcliff, especially not on nights like this, nights where I am just a mother driving her son to Cub
Scouts, knuckles whitely gripping the steering wheel hoping that the next bend
in the road would reveal no more surprises and I could get him to the Scout hut
without encountering another car along a narrow winding lane forcing me to
reverse uphill, blind. I had done that
before on a clear day and I didn’t fancy it when I could see less than three
meters ahead, let alone behind and without the benefit of headlights to guide
me. No, driving in the Forest on a misty night did not transport me to a
romantic scene from an Edwardian novel, it left me shaken and longing for a cosy
sofa and roaring fire to envelop and hold me, the only defences against the
cold and damp Forest of Dean winters. That was winter here, cold and damp, a
damp that penetrated to the bone, with no blustery, moorland wind to drive it
away. A damp which sits and waits for
the forces of its enemy spring to drive it back into the wet ground and rotting
wood.
But I wasn’t about to let the cold and damp crush my
spirits, because I knew that that was what was needed in order to experience
the rich, greenness of a Forest of Dean Spring. The mists would eventually melt
away like a winter snow, and like a bride lifting her veil at the alter the
Forest’s beauty would be revealed. And
so, I left the car on the muddy drive, headed into my house to warm up and
closed the door against the penetrating mist, it could fill fields and spill
into roads and drift quietly through forests, but it couldn’t enter my own safe
dwelling. And through the bedroom window
in the morning I admired the beauty of the mist which shrouded our house still,
and I pulled my dressing gown tighter around my shoulders girding myself for
another chill day, I lit a candle and imagined myself as a heroine in a Bronte
novel, waiting for her hero to return.
