The Year in Wales: Autumn
These are extracts from letters to our family and friends back home and were written in the first year (of five) of our sojourn in Wales and were, of course, first impressions. Later, after I learned Welsh, after I became part of a hidden Welsh world, my letters home were very different. But for those who have never been to Wales, or never lived there, in the heart of a Welsh speaking society, I hope these first impressions serve as an introduction to an enigma. This first extract is from Year One: Autumn.
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“It is autumn here in this remote and fast-coppering country. This is an ethereal season in Wales — with its mists, its silence, its wine-coloured leaves and its bats in erratic trajectory in the brief and smoky dusk silhouetted against the great, luminous, butter-bright moon.
We have come to love the storms — the rain and wild wind and rainbows and clouds — all the dancing unpredictable enchanting weather. And the beautiful variety of trees and the hedgerows and the green green grass, the birds — hawks, vultures, grouse, kites, nuthatches, British robins, woodpeckers and all. And now the leaves are beginning to turn and the scarlet and purple berries are more prominent among the diminishing foliage.
We are not quite at Shakespeare’s “that time of year…” there are many yellow leaves still, and the sere fields and quiet fog are approaching, but for now the dramatic, spectacular weather claims my attention more than anything else — it is benison — it is glorious — healing to the parched soul within and the parched body without (and nothing tastes better than cakes and tea with Jersey milk after a wild, wet, capricious day).
Our lane, however hazardous to negotiate, with its deep parallel ditches and its width about equal to the width of our car, is a vision of beauty — a pathway into the imagination that stretches back in to time and as far forward as one can see. I will never be able to capture it in a photograph. Red kites and eagles fly low and predatory, just above the car, sometimes and medieval rabbits pop out of the flower-starred hedges. Eyes shine from the shrubbery. Every time we travel on it, particularly at night with the orange leaves blowing in the blustery twilight or those bats, like black nocturnal butterflies, flitting out of the hedgerows, pale against the sky, dark against the moon — I commit it to memory. This land is as beautiful and mysterious as anything I’ve ever seen.
And sometimes driving along the wider lane into the town across the stone bridge over the rising river, past the sheep in emerald meadows, we have to stop while the cows cross the road from the farm to the pasture under the fierce, passionate, dedicated watch of the Welsh sheep dogs who herd them across. We used to watch the sheep-herding competitions on TV in LA — a little eccentricity we kept to ourselves — and now we actually get to see them in action in these rich and silent interludes of a mere five minutes.
I think at those times of that same (and mere) five minutes of interruption in our other journeys — and they were not infrequent — that freeway gridlock that was always so frustrating and agitating — and so ugly. The heat and the sheer presence of thousands of irritated, nervous people in close proximity and thousands of cars and thousands of tons of cement and steel and that urge to “get there” — often in the last few years to UCLA Medical Center (though of course once one gets there, the doctors keep one waiting for an hour sometimes so I don’t know why we feel so compelled not to be late) or a business meeting where no one ever keeps one waiting in a world where the one reigning imperative that one be on time. Americans do not easily tolerate wasting time — as you all know and waiting has always been to us a huge waste of time and an insult to the person with whom you have an appointment.
Here though, no one seems to be in a hurry and “time” is a different commodity. As is pace. I have not even begun my research and everyone says — no hurry — you just got here — take your time — when you’re ready, you’re ready — sometimes it takes a whole term or even two to get into it… you need to calm down and ease into it” things like that — which to my American ears sounds like “cofwhr afhhnia qpfhjrh pftrowny p vaaclhna dkanjr sejadl” since I can’t translate it into anything. Perhaps they consider me a dangerous alien species and are trying to soothe me into compliance. But really everyone is nice, especially the townspeople we are getting to know. (… nice — I remember that) and I feel like I have gone back decades and that a human scale of time and space has been re-introduced into our lives.”
