The Place Where You Live

On a particular part of the Wash in the East of England, there is a wall. It is the barricade of the sea wall, there for your protection. It’s here you have to stop, climb the bank by grabbing the tussocks of grass and look out over the marsh. A place covered only by the sea at the spring and neap tides. 

And that’s what we call it: The Marsh. It isn’t The Seaside. The Seaside is amusement arcades, ice creams and promenades. It isn’t The Coast, either. The Coast is cliffs and crashing waves. This is The Marsh; unnamed and unnameable. And only now I wonder why this is. I wonder whether all of the villages around the wash call their section of creeks and wind The Marsh.

It was here that I saw my first marsh harrier. Here that I swam in the salty cuts and picked up salty gashes. Here is where a deep human history of reclamation runs like blood in the man-made canals and sits like a shadow in the land. And here is sensual assault.

Huge pulsating bundles of waders and geese roll their way across the mudflats. Your olfactory senses taste the salt of the mud and your hand feels the sharp edges of coastal grasses. The utter flatness creates indescribably vast and distant cathedrals of cloud. Along with the sorrowing curlew a roaring wind arrives from the steppes. Stunted hawthorns lean landwards and I remember Sylvia Plath’s words: “the wind Pours by like destiny / bending Everything in one direction.”

Everything here is so immediate, definite and without compromise, softened and blunted by nothing. It magnifies all your senses, makes you understand what they’re for. It forces you to count each wave of experience as landscape, perception and animal and human history combine. Instictively, we assimilate these sensual markers to create a feeling for which, frustratingly but joyously, we can count and name the components but cannot begin to describe. And it probably doesn’t matter that we can’t. Because it’s real, visceral, present.  

www.colin-williams.com New Nature Writing for Our Time