Once (13 page)

But to the left the way we're going, the track winds round and climbs along the length of the crag above, a terrace rising steeply. Here we might not stop before we reach the first brow. We'll pass the standing stone, a sometime gate post I think, with a blind cyclopean eye, and ear-holes right through it, and either climb the steep short-cut or go round the long elbow up to meet the new brunt of weather, a new seriousness, a new distance from the world below, a new isolation, and renewal of our covenant.

I never forget how this point in the way – this threshold – seemed to fill me with renewed resolve.

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
D
w
^
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 Lake 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.