Katherine Pogson

Woodberry par soir

The reservoir is peaceful at night, though the birds are loud.  The dark lens of water is demarcated only by their sound, the fringe of reeds invisible.  A cluster of lights defines the perimeter of the reserve: construction lights, house lights, tall apartment blocks, garden lights. But there is no light inside the ring.

My bicycle lamp dances towards the gate, alerting Chris to my arrival.  Chris is the man with the keys. As he melts back into the gloom, I feel the boardwalk through the bounce of my rubber tyres on the slats, and sense the expanse of water to my left in the reach and response of bird calls.  A green LED screen displaying 888 hovers at eye height nearby - Tony’s head torch, in the off position.  I have one he has lent me in my pannier, this one more like a gas mask or miner’s lamp, with a rubberised strap, and twist action, yellowish glow.

We set off along the perimeter path, keeping our torches low, following the crunch of each other’s footfall, and knowing by memory where the path sweeps down into the oaks on the right.  It is a mild night in late October. There is no moon.  The temperature has risen for two days in a row, warm air flowing over from the continent.  We are hoping for migrant moths.

The smell of the ivy reaches us before we can see it, resinous and sweet.  The clumps appear in outline, shaggy and columnar, clinging to oak trunks or growing thickly through bushes in mounds. In the torchlight the flower globes sparkle and glisten, covered in a sticky residue. The flowers are prominent at night, the open ones green and spiky, filled with points of light, the closed ones a ball of round black nails, waiting to explode. The leaves recede into whiteness.

We direct our head and hand torches onto the ivy, breathing the startling scent.  The globes are clearly brighter, more open, on the southerly side of the tree, almost dripping with nectar. I have to work out where South is by zooming out in my mind to a map of the reservoir orientated on my computer screen. I have no natural sense of direction.  “This was all humming with bees and wasps earlier” says Tony.  Nothing moves. The glittery sap imparts a crystalline aspect to the flower globes, cold fireworks caught at the moment of expansion. A woodlouse curls around an ivy stamen, inert.  We move on.  My foot slips into a sudden hole, and just then, Tony’s head torch highlights a frozen form on the bank ahead. A fox, staring at us with strange reflective eyes.  In the night, colour is leached away and he appears silver, drained, cast in some other material.

Absorbed, we work our way along a piece of fence which backs on to some gardens. The ivy is less thick here, easier to scan.  Chris’s torch darts about in the sky as he steps around. I suddenly become aware of the rigid silhouette of a woman at a patio door on the other side of the fence. Immobile in the dark, she is nevertheless outlined by the light in the hall behind her.  My sense of space suddenly expands to include the line of houses outside the perimeter of the reserve.  To her we are a threat, intruders in the dark, our activities appear suspect and covert.

We found not a single moth that night. A year later we repeated the exercise, and again found nothing. I cycle home in the dark, humming, content; carrying the calmness of the place in my body like a bucket I must be careful not to spill.

(4.5 minutes when speaking)