Waiting for a Hunter’s Moon

‘…the secret ministry of frost

shall hang them up in silent icicles

quietly shining to the quiet moon.’

-from ‘Frost at Midnight’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have a fascination with death.

Before I go on, perhaps I should qualify this statement a little. I am no Jack-the Ripper in waiting, nor do I have Pharaoh-like plans to be embalmed in readiness for the afterlife. Although, thinking about it, perhaps I should make arrangements for my rods and reels to accompany me to the grave. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else getting their hands on my Shimano Speedmasters when I finally shuffle off my wellies for the last time.  No, the deaths to which I refer, and with which I’ve had an abiding fascination for as long as I can remember, are those of the seasons.

The reason I write this is because I’m witnessing one right now, ambling along the renovated tarmac footpath of my local river toward the estuary. It is late summer now, eight o’ clock in the evening, and it is glorious.

I know that the summer is dying because at the moment, the air around me is literally alive – clouds of gnats and other small insects are blooming into the air, kick starting the chains of life that hang sequentially from them: birds dart in and out of the scene and even a few bats, out early tonight, flicker through my peripheral vision like the shadow of something half remembered. Out on the water the crystal stillness is shattered by the sudden rising of a trout slashing at the surface and further downstream in the saltwater tidal section of the river, I know that the stately mullet will be echoing this, the sea’s contributed half balancing the equation.

It is difficult to see anything as being less than positive amongst all this, but if the old adage It’s always darkest before the dawn has truth to it, then so must the inverse. Before the darkness there must be a final spectacular flare of life and colour, as though the world had considered the options and finally came to be at peace with the change it knows is coming.

Take the time to look closely around you at this time of year and it becomes plain that a million little deaths have already begun. The mountain behind my house, on which I regularly walk, has been resplendent these last few months in its subtle summer plumage of purples and yellows, but looking up this morning I noticed that the heather, too fragile to last long, has already given up the fight and receded into a blanket of browns, leaving only the sparkling pin pricks of the gorse flowers to burn on; blackberries are bursting from their thickets as if in an early apology of abundance for the lean months to come; the trees are preparing for their abandonment by both the birds and the foliage that now screens them behind its defiant last blaze and even the sky has lost its impetus, sinking into an occluded palette of yellows, blues, reds and oranges that run together and bleed down toward the earth, mirroring the leaves and making it difficult to know where the trees end and the sky begins.

Without doubt this is a season nearing its end, and it is beautiful.

I defy anyone to stand and watch such a sunset as the one that I’m confronted with now and not feel at all moved. I have literally watched hundreds of these over the years, from dozens of different spots along the coast and hills around my home town, but this one stands out particularly, amazing to such an extent that this riot of hues has focused me intensely for the time being, on colour.

Dylan Thomas once wrote the line

‘Once, it was the colour of saying…’

a statement that at once blurs the boundaries between thought and speech, the real and imagined and all that they conjure up both on their own and together, but for my own purposes I would alter this to

‘Once, it was the colour of angling’.

Every angler, whether they realise it or not, will at some point translate their fishing into colours, not to the point where it’s glaringly obvious or even realised at all, but to the point where it is ever present, occurring every time they think of themselves with a fishing rod in hand so that this particular colour will, in turn, draw everything else in like a magnet: sounds, smells, shades and even tastes, all cascading into the imagination in one huge sensory overload.

Thus for some, the deep rich tones of racing green glimpsed briefly in the flank of a passing car will forever catapult them immediately to an overgrown secluded pool, in turn firing off the smells of damp vegetation and rotting undergrowth; maybe the purupup of a moorhen begins to perforate the air and the skin begins to rise in goose pimples at the coolness of a deeply shaded swim, barely emerging from between a bank of reeds to reveal slivered glimpses of a huge carp silting the margins with a slow, stately swish of its tail.

Or perhaps the colour is a mottled grey trod underfoot in the drab surface of a supermarket car park, before immediately transforming into a scarified, rocky, cod-infested outcrop laced with the chill tang of salt spray, pierced by the skriking of gulls and thrumming to the deep THOOM of the tide smashing like a persistent siege engine into its base.

Even if you’ve only ever fished once in your life, the bright yellow of summer sunshine or the turquoise of the sea from which you pulled that thrashing mackerel will, inevitably and irrevocably, lodge somewhere deep in the brain so that some part of you will forever associate with that colour. For me, that colour is white.

In a few weeks from now, we will have weathered the worst of the early equinoctial storms that are already moving in, the clouds will be whisked aside like a magician’s cape and suddenly, the sky is pierced by a huge, ghostly gunshot that showers splinters of white everywhere: the Hunter’s Moon will have arrived.

To many this is a time of depression, the darker months switching them into a kind of mental hibernation mode but to me, the autumn/winter season is a time when the world holds its breath in anticipation and stops to think before sliding on once more. Everything begins to empty – the trees of their leaves, the skies of their birds and the streets of people, and the world is effectively zeroed so that whichever way you turn you are confronted with a hundred thousand cold, gilded edges and one huge empty clean slate.

For centuries tribes across the world have been preparing and waiting for this point in the calendar. From Native Americans to the more native Celts and Anglo-Saxons, the period between the Harvest moon of September and October’s Hunter’s moon has been a significant point in the year, a temporal staging point. Traditionally, this would be a time when harvests were gathered in and livestock slaughtered in readiness for the coming months of hardship, the light from the big full moons and the relative lack of darkness between sunset and moonrise allowing for longer working hours.

Although it hasn’t the same life or death importance to me, living in a time of convenience and plenty, this still remains as significant to me as it did to my forebears, as the gateway to winter.

Whereas their preparations may have included butchering stock, salting and smoking meat, gathering in crops and grain and storing firewood, mine are all of an angling nature.

First come the rods and reels. Rod rings are checked over and the varnish given a thin coat of high build to cover those exuberant hairline cracks of a summer smooth hound session; reels are stripped down, washed, oiled, tuned and loaded with new line, checking the balance of the spools for smoothness of casting – all important for those distant ebb tide whiting.

Next the rigs: new rigs are tied – the tried and trusted and maybe a few experimental patterns to top up the rig wallets; hooks are renewed, snoods re-tied wherever necessary.

The petrol lamp is stripped down and serviced, mantles replaced and the tetra can of petrol that will help to run it through those long cold nights is topped up to brimming.

Finally comes the bait. First, I’ll drive a few miles along the coast to dig a few pounds of lugworms ready to be salted and bagged up in twenties as a back-up or to bulk out large fresh worm baits for cod, then maybe I’ll sneak in a last session on the mackerel if the weather is calm or, as now, I’ll head down to the estuary to gather mussels, razorfish, and maybe scrape out a few sandeels or straggling peeler crabs if it’s been warm enough. When these are done, then I’ll know I’m ready for the winter season.

The weeks will move on. Everything sharpens, becomes more focused; a time of clarity and infinitesimal detail in which I’ll sit waiting for a bite and watching the particles of frost feathering out in intricate patterns across the blue canvas of my rod holdall as the bait does its best to re freeze.

From Friday through to Sunday, and occasional evenings in between,  looking up through the cloud of steam over the rim of a Thermos cup will offer a view across beaches garlanded with little islands of icy white light thrown out by LED headlamps, and by the warm saffron coloured nimbus of the occasional petrol lantern, pinpointing each angler strung out along the bay like little stations of warmth on a journey away into the dark nowhere. The air becomes so clear and sharp that across the channel the lights of Devon and Somerset twinkle hopefully against the blackness. How many of them are tucked in against the cold? Are there any anglers out there staring back through clouds of their own breath, wondering about the distant lights of Wales?

Even though language fails across such freezing miles, even though there can be no communication at this distance, we are linked by what surges alive between us. Beneath the water’s dark calm, millions upon millions of whiting, pouting, dab and, of course, codling will have begun their annual invasion of our inshore waters so that everyone who ventures out to wet a line at this time of year is united by a common purpose. All around this sweep of coastline anglers of Wales and the West country alike are plugged into what flows through the currents of autumn and sustains us through to January, so very far away on the other side of winter’s icy grip.

But all of this is still weeks away, weeks that seem like a lifetime as I watch the sun finally burn down into its own grave behind Swansea to the west. But I’ve waited this long for the Hunter’s Moon, and those weeks will pass quickly enough, as they have through every seasonal cycle stretching back through time, and as they surely must again.

In the trees beside me, the first leaves give up and tumble back and forth, from side to side, as though there were another place to land, some other way to fall.

© Simon Smith 2011