The Consolation of Ducks

JOURNAL ENTRY

20^th September, Friday

“Hanging at the still-point between
Summer and winter’s
Swing and counter-swing.

Rooks roister joyously westwards,
Red with promise.
Above them, fourteen successive
Straggles of geese
Head eastwards
Flying on swift wingbeats
Against the grain of the day.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

Earlier this evening, thunder rolled across heaping clouds in the distance, to the north of us, and now thin bands of rain have started to fall. The forecasts warn that it is set to get heavier as the night grows old. The wind is getting up too, buffeting the boat and making the mooring lines and fenders creak.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of a warm wet equinoctial September night to you wherever you are.

It's lovely to have you here. I am so glad that you could make it. It's warm and dry inside, so come aboard and make yourself at home. The kettle has boiled and the biscuit barrel is to hand. Welcome aboard. 

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

According to the old almanacs today was St Matthew’s Day. Not a lot seems to happen on St Matthew. Poor old St Matthew. As our old friend Miles Hadfield’s An English Almanac succinctly says, “English tradition seems not to have accumulated around him.” Added to which, Godfrey Baseley’s A Country Compendium’s brief little entry simply states “It is not known how or where St Matthew died” and then adds the two rather singular pieces of country lore: “St Matthew shuts up the bees” and “St Matthew brings the cold rain and dew.” Well, that is certainly true today, although I am not so convinced about bringing the rain as just giving it a thumbs up sign and instructing it to just “carry on.” As far as the English almanac goes, St Micheal or Michaelmas fall at the end of the month on the 29^th seems to hold a far firmer grip on our calendars and lore.

There a probably a number of reasons why St Matthew has not really had much impact on life outside the church liturgies and calendars, but one must be that his day falls so closely to (and sometimes on) the autumnal equinox. That momentary period of balance between night and day, light and dark. Matthew might be a big hitter in the Church, and perhaps that’s why his feast day was chosen for such a momentous time, but he would have had an uphill struggle to shift associations with Harvest Home and before that Mabon.

Although, locked behind clouds tonight, the September Harvest moon has been spectacular and is now waning towards its third quarter in a couple of days’ time. And the air recently has been soft and blustery. It’s a time for the final push of boat jobs to be done before the weather really turns. Grabbing advantage of a few days of fine to slap on some paint, or sort out those little jobs you were going to do in the summer, but somehow never got round to it. It’s a hive of industry here. Hopefully we have a few more weeks’ window left.

The short lull following the summer holiday traffic has given way to the next wave of boat traffic. Boats beginning to head slowly home to winter moorings. But also, those heading out to enjoy – what many boaters feel is the best season on the canal – autumn. Summers are great, but a boat really comes into its own when conditions call for something a little cosier.         

The canal-sides are, even now, beginning to warm with the festive colours of autumn’s fire. The soft, candyfloss fluff of old man’s beard is beginning to thicken and elephantine leaves of burdock are withering down into desiccated crumples of brown parchment. So too are the leaves of black bryony leaving thick necklaces of cherry-red berries that hang in looping garlands over a chaos of bramble tangle, elder and hawthorn, and thick trains of ivy. Haws, of an impossible red, begin to fall – scattering underfoot, where twig and trampled plucked blackberry lie. It has been a great year for blackberries. Even now, great fistfuls hang heavy on branches just out of reach. And for those with a sweet tooth, gather ye blackberries while ye may, for come Michaelmas the devil will stamp on them, or spit on them or even pee on them – depending on your locality or taste in lore. The dog rose lamps are being lit, turning, from their first blush of watery orange to scarlet, then pillarbox red, and then to the deepest of crimson lake.  

It's a bit too early for the trees to turn yet, although a small hazel dwarfed by the canal-side alder and ancient oak is beginning to lighten and yellow. And all along the bank-side lies the trail of willowherb smoke. The rooks and jackdaws are gathering once more, raining the clamour of their black-blizzard lives upon the ash and oak that overhang the canal. So too are the geese. In fact, it has been a while since I have seen so many of them around here. The half-light of dawn and dusk is filled with their wild song and line upon line of them like lapping waves on the flood-tide; threading their paths in loose v-formations, sometimes breaking to form new formations.  Even Maggie pauses from whatever she is doing and looks upward.

The sound on the wind of autumn  

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THE CONSOLATION OF DUCKS

I am lying in bed as the night fractures and rages around me. I am tired, exhausted in fact, but sleep eludes me. I am too tired to open my eyes, but my mind is fully awake and filled with a pacing restlessness. These are the nights when it feels as if the bed is filled with glass shards and sand.

I lie close under the lip of the gunnel. As close to the cabin wall as I can. Partly to avoid waking Donna with my restlessness and partly because I can almost feel the cold of outside. The dew that, even now, is falling, pearling the mooring lines, trickling like rain drops down the cabin-sides. I am as close to being outside in the healing indifference of darkness and the soft embrace of its maul as I can.  

But in this night, there is one thing holding me; an anchor-point in the vortex of noise. I am aware, that where I am lying, beside where my head is lying, just the other side of the wood panelling and metal of the cabin wall, there are two ducks who are also navigating their night-times. I caught a glimpse through the window before going to bed. A male and female. One, head tucked under his wing, the silvered flash of an open eye. The other, gently preening. Running her beak along the long warp of her feathers. Now several hours later – perhaps an eternity later, soft chucks and grunts are whispered on the night air.

“There is something surprisingly comforting about being aware of a duck, outside, alongside my bed in the middle of the night.”   

I wrote those words a few years back, when the landscape seemed to shift and tilt and I no longer felt at home. The familiar no longer was recognisable and I felt lost and spun away. When the untidiness of life presses down too closely, too heavily.

I was reminded of it when a few days ago I watched a short video reel produced by Mark Hogben. I follow Mark on Instagram. He is an interesting man and there is something vulnerably human about him and yet very inspiring too. He lives off-grid, with his high-spirited dog, as a recluse on an island in lake Kipawa, Quebec, Canada and is dying with late-stage Parkinsons, the effects of which have made surviving the brutality of Canada’s last few winters difficult. Mark acknowledges that he won’t be able to survive this coming winter and is planning to move off the island. His short 10 to 20 second video reels are unvarnished, searingly honest, yet funny, clever, often insightful, and very humane, as he charts the final phase of his life within a sometimes starkly beautiful landscape.

A couple of weeks ago he posted a reel of him standing on the wooden jetty of his cabin and feeding a duck as he explained,

“I would often see old people feeding birds. I have never understood why, but now as my brain deteriorates you get a tremendous calming factor from feeding birds, feeding ducks. Now I am become an old man feeding the ducks on a bench in the park. And I am enjoying it.”

On hearing that, I immediately felt for my little notebook that I always keep with me in my pocket. I didn’t need to open it; I could remember word for word what I had written all those months back – “There’s something surprisingly comforting about…”

And its true. There is something that calms the turmoil, that consoles the sweeping winds of sadness in ducks. Yes, you can get that from feeding any bird, as Mark says – or even animal – but it seems more pronounced with ducks. There is something singular about them.

The power of Mark’s video reel is in the image of a man in a flannel shirt crouching down on a wooden jetty and a lone duck taking oats from his shaking hands. It would have worked well if it had been a blackbird or a robin, but perhaps not worked quite so powerfully. A man battling loneliness – he had to let his dog stay with neighbours and something he openly admitted he found difficult to cope with – and his mis-firing brain, and a lone duck make such a haunting and yet profoundly moving image.

Perhaps we subconsciously feel a kinship with them, both caught between the wild and the domestic. So much have they become part of our lives and urban landscapes, it is difficult to look at them with the same sense of mythic feeling as wild geese and swan, and even heron. Geese and swan are our muse for wildness and our restless hearts the long for the uncluttered, unfettered life. I love Mary Oliver’s poems about geese, but can see how they wouldn’t retain their profound power if instead of wild geese, she had chosen wild ducks instead.

Around this time of year, I love to stand and watch the victory plough of geese formations straggling across a darkening sky of roiling clouds. Or the aching wing-song of a swan in flight. Both touch us deeply – almost elementally or primally. But we rarely celebrate duck flight in similar terms. Even though, to my eye, they are much better, more spectacular fliers. I have to take slight issue with, the otherwise excellent, Stefan Buczacki here when he states that mallards, ‘although strong fliers, are neither fast nor graceful.”  If ever you watch a duck in flight, you will witness true mastery of the air – as good (again to my eye at least) as that of gull and corvid – and that, I know, is a high claim. But what they lack in sheer spectacle and aerobatic creativity (although their ability to power almost vertically from the water is something to be admired), they make up for in pragmatic precision. They read the air and geography with meticulous command - not a wing-beat is wasted. There are a lot of ducks around about here and almost daily I find myself lost in the beauty and admiration of their flying ability – however, I have never heard anyone form the simile ‘to fly like a duck’ to express aerial brilliance.

Maybe it is because of their slightly comic appearance. I can’t remember who said it, but I remember reading or hearing ‘if you are not convinced that God has a sense of humour take another look at a duck’s beak.’ Scientists working for the “LaughLab” experiment at the University of Hertfordshire concluded that the duck is the funniest animal around. Lead scientist, psychologist, Richard Wiseman suggested, “If you’re going to tell a joke involving an animal, make it a duck.” 

The Disneyfication of the duck (especially with Donald and Scrooge McDuck) and the subsequent saturation of soft-toy ducks in children’s lives and bedrooms has perhaps also had a role in re-shaping our cultural perceptions of and attitudes to ducks. However, I don’t think that it is totally the reason why we seem to hold a different relationship with ducks than we have with most other birds.

Like Mark, I too get a kick out of feeding ducks. More so – or, at least, different to the feeling I get feeding the rooks or robins – as enjoyable as that might be. In the summer, when a pair of ducks swim up to the bow where I am sitting, I feel a deeper sense of connection. I seem to be able to read more into their eyes. Their world and lives are totally different to mine, but, nevertheless, that gap between them and me doesn’t feel quite such an achingly deep chasm as it does, for example when I look into the eyes of my beloved rooks.   

And there is (or was) a very different feeling that I experienced on that night knowing that alongside my head, just the other side of wood-clad metal walls there were two ducks nestling into the night, than if it were two coots or swans. Ducks are no less (and no more) aggressive than any of the other birds, but there is something friendly, companionable about them. There’s something about them that raises a smile whenever they appear.

It's therefore puzzling to me as to why they get such a bad rap in the literature about them. They rarely get any attention from scientific studies, and when they are mentioned, it is usually attended by some highly anthropomorphised moral-outrage and invective lambasting their promiscuity and sexual behaviours. I am not sure why such censure has been so heaped upon ducks, more so than other birds. Perhaps it is that we subconsciously feel this attachment and we want them to be better than us. It is also a little surprising because traditionally, and it is still the case in other cultures that ducks symbolise fidelity, family, community, motherhood, grounding, trust.

I don’t know whether it is anthropomorphic sentimentalism to describe their clucks and chuntering as they response to food as the sounds of joy; that ducks feel pleasure when they forage. Is it just another Disneyfication that denudes the duck of her real lived existence. But I have seen their response to the sun’s warmth and it looks pretty much the same as mine and yours. I have seen them swim out through sunrises of mist and crystal frosts and cluster and chatter around the first patch of water clear of ice following a hard winter’s night, dipping in and out, taking turns. According to Jennifer Ackermann’s (2020) book, The Bird Way: A new look at how birds talk, work, play, parent and think, ducks are known for doing something called “coordinated loafing, hanging out together.” It is something that I have frequently noticed. A companionable bob and drift with the currents, such as they are, in loose groups – often accompanied with sort chortles and clucking vocalisation – it is just that there was a proper term for it. What is going on in those little groups – afloat together under the great bowl of sky and the arch of oak and ash? How are they experiencing these moments? What are they feeling?

Yes, they squabble and bicker. I have in the past described them as the Peaky Blinders of the cut and I still stand by that description. They can be violent and mean and at times brutal, but they can also fly like angels. The complexity of their social organisation with its rules and mores, lies far beyond our current understanding, but I know with every ounce of certainty it is there.      

Just after I had left school and was feeling my way through the hinterlands of adolescence and adulthood, I had an argument with God. In truth, it was pretty much one sided - as most arguments of this type generally are. My cycle to work took me through Verulamium Park in St Albans where there is a largish pond – as most urban parks have. Often, I would stop by the sheltered seats, down by The Fighting Cocks pub, and spend five or so minutes watching the ducks and geese, and the slow wheel of the seasons sweep its wash of colours from tree to tree, flower bed to flower bed. One particular afternoon, I remember being riddled with anxieties, and finding navigating the new horizons that lay in front of me particularly difficult and I demanded to know why God hadn’t made me a duck rather than casting me in human form to suffer the impenetrable perplexities of human life? Knowing a little more about the life of ducks – and perhaps a bit more, but less, about the life of humans, I see that both have to negotiate and suffer the uncertainty and strains of our individual existences. There are, after all, no easy rides in this world.

I did, in the end, open my little notebook and read that scrawled entry that recorded that night – which now seems long ago – when I lay awake and shared the dark hours with two ducks.  

I wrote: “Knowing that there is life lived, so proximally close to me, without reference to the burning world of mine is somehow a source of deep comfort.

I am glad – on reflection – that I wasn’t born a duck. I don’t think that I would have made a very good duck. The margins of their world are much more dangerous than mine. Perhaps that is why they talk softly to each other through the darkness of night.”

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very warm, dry, restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG