The fragile wonders surrounding us

Damien Enright is reminded of how precious nature is

IT is high tide at six o’clock in the evening and the mackerel are in the bay, right up to the pier. Half a dozen rods are busy hauling them, in three and fours, out of the sea. They shine and spin on the feathers in the yellow sunlight as they come out of the water. It is one of the rare evenings of sunlight we’ve had this year.

After the first dozen or so are landed, the anglers return their catch to the sea. These days, everyone is more conscious that the sea’s bounty must be husbanded. Some stocks are so low the species face extinction. It is heartening to see the mackerel back again; one event in nature is on schedule. It is heartening to see the sun shine. Maybe there will be bees and butterflies yet.

Fish don’t mind the rain, one supposes. However, the downpours, hailstones and run-off from the fields surely dilute the environment of salt-water fish left behind by the tide in very small pools. When these are inundated by rain issuing from the heavens in the unseasonable quantities we have suffered this so-called summer, the shannies and blennies — small, brown, ‘bendy’, big-headed fish with whom anyone who has ever trawled a tide pool will be familiar — have evolved a mechanism for survival.

‘Specialisation’ has provided them with well-developed front fins and a skin that ‘breathes’ so they can, literally, crawl to safety. If the few gallons of trapped sea in which they’ve taken up temporary residence suffers a life-threatening influx of fresh water they climb out, wriggle across the rocks and plop into a bigger, less diluted, pool.

While an excess of the “blessed rain from heaven” may not suit rock-pool fish or summer holiday-makers, a regular supply is essential to life and insuring that we respect it, protect it from contamination and husband it was a timely point forcibly made in Future Shock, Philip Boucher-Hayes’ excellent programme about water on RTÉ 1 last Tuesday night.

I am intrigued by water-capture innovations in Bermuda where householders capture the run-off from the roofs in basement tanks. I remember seeing tanks and rain butts under the down-pipes in the yard of the farm where my father was born. I’m not sure such husbandry is common now but it may come back into fashion.

Later on that same, rare sunlit evening, I watched a fox chasing a rabbit around a field, an obstacle course through the stands of ragwort, very tall and ugly as the stems blacken and the seed tops begin to look like lumps of dirty cotton waste on a garage floor.

Last week, when strong winds blew, thistledown took to the air, drifting sportively past our upstairs windows, if one can ascribe sporting instincts to seeds. The poet Coleridge famously, or infamously, ascribed consciousness to a leaf when he wrote: ‘The one red leaf, the last of its clan/ That dances as often as dance it can.’ It’s plain silly, of course, to suggest that a leaf might fancy a dance before it falls or that thistledown is sportive.

However, as anyone who has ever read a poem will know, personification of nature is everywhere found in verse and song and provides inspired and vivid images. Dylan Thomas wrote about “the heron-priested shore”, Seamus Heaney of “birches inheriting the last light”. John Betjeman, in Diary of a Church Mouse, puts words into the mouth of a rodent and in Hawk Roosting, Ted Hughes has the hawk tell us:

‘It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather …I kill where I please because it is all mine.’

It is hard to find a poet who hasn’t, somewhere, used images drawn from nature, given that it surrounds us wherever we are. It hardly surprising that word-pictures such as ‘bleeding’ skies, ‘dancing’ leaves, ‘angry’ waters and ‘blessed rain’ are found in every culture and language.

We’ve all heard the joke that goes: “How do you tell it’s summer in Ireland? Because the rain is warm.” Warm, it may be, but this year it’s gone beyond a joke.

Let us pray for some September sunshine before the cold rain falls.