It was just after dawn when I broke into Bachelor Gardens Sewage Works. To my surprise, no alarms rang. There were no security guards, no flashing lights or sirens cutting through the muggy air. You’d think that in our surveillance-swept world I’d have triggered something, somewhere. At least, I thought so; so I waited a while, my legs crawling and burning with nettle stings, bracing myself for the inevitable detection, rehearsing the words to talk my way out of arrest. Minutes passed in half-light; the pain intensified; nothing happened. The metal doors in the spectral floodlit buildings and sheds remained shut. No one yelled at me from the shadowy tanks or the gangways running between rust-streaked vats and water channels. There was just that simultaneous hum and whine of machinery I’d heard so many times from the other side of the fence, now louder and accompanied by the muddy brew of human waste and chemicals rising from filtration beds.
My thoughts turned to escape, for this was not a deliberate act – who in their right mind breaks into a sewage farm? Rather it was the result of a wandering mind and some (in hindsight) ill-advised off-the-beaten-track running. The baby kicking and turning inside Rosie had been giving her restless nights. I’d risen early to let her spread out across the bed and to try to shake off the shackles of too-little sleep. Approaching the edge-land from a new direction, east, through an unexplored labyrinth of cul-de-sacs and estate roads, I chanced on an unruly doorway of tree and shrub leading down to a little river. I ignored a path looping back and, instead, plunged on, running along the water’s side through chest-high vegetation to where I hoped the beck might link up with the Nidd further on. Then, suddenly, my legs were on fire. Nettles concealed in the hogweed and jungle-dense Himalayan balsam had ambushed me. Flailing, flaying, angry leaves waited for the slightest movement to inflict new wounds, but the closest shore in this sea of stings lay ahead and I leaped for it like a triple jumper, hardly noticing the ramshackle wall or the collapsed curtain of fence and old wire. Hardly noticing, that is, until I’d climbed over and pushed through and by then it was too late anyway. I was trapped in this otherworldly facility.
No one was coming. That was clear. So I searched for another way out, one that might spare my legs a second lashing. The perimeter was locked-down; all high walls and sturdy mesh topped with barbed wire. The main gate was chained and its sign graffiti-scrawled: ‘The Smokers Yard’, sprayed in blood-red paint with a scattering of roach ends and cider cans to illustrate the point. Almost willing to be discovered, I headed back to where I’d broken in, but via a different route, a small road that wound between the conglomerations of barrack-style buildings and choppy brown lagoons, past surreally idyllic stands of Scots pine and triangles of mown lawn. It was all very Cold War, the air a post-apocalyptic purple and pink, warm, misty and poisonous-smelling. Everything was deserted, eerie and, if I’m honest, a little exciting. Up, over a rise, and through another screen of pine trees, I was suddenly confronted with a strange geometric pattern sunken into the grass: six large, wide, water-filled concrete circles. Reaching out from their centres were great metal arms that spun slowly, churning and stirring, like the exposed mechanisms of some ancient buried machine. I could smell pine resin, freshly cut grass and sulphur. Beyond lay the huge, hanging silence of the Nidd, the gorge, the viaduct, the wood and, further still, hazed fields of rapeseed and wheat. But it was there that I saw them; there, in the air above those stinking ring-pools that they circled, silently, secretly.
There must have been eighty, maybe a hundred, but so many that at first I took them not for birds but insects clouding in whirls over the drums, turning the way tea leaves do when washed down a plughole. I forgot the pain in my legs and stood there looking east, as the rising sun laid its hot hand across my forehead, transfixed by their flight and strange flocking, feeding formations. There was none of their usual velocity; the birds drifted in the air as if in slow motion, slow enough that I could make out each one’s profile: the stiff-winged, black anchor shape against the sky, reversing direction at will, taking what must have been millions of the stirred-up, snub-nosed sewage flies in balletic sweeps and dips. Here was the tidal wave of summer in its infancy, still out at sea, gathering strength. My boat had somehow drifted into its path. After a while, standing there staring seemed voyeuristic, as though I’d caught them early, backstage, doing warm-ups before the full show. I felt that I should say something, maybe cough politely, let them know I was there at least. But what do you say to birds?
Alarms, security guards, police sirens – they’re what you might expect when you break into a sewage works, not a sky full of swifts. Such things lift the lead from your head. Worth crossing a sea of nettles for; twice, as it turned out.
Where they went next, though, I couldn’t tell you. Those last warm days of May broke, and in swept the storm-horses of rain and wind, catching the country out in a stampede, kicking down the flowery frills and thick green bunting with heavy, iron shoes. The light changed. Skies slated. The outside intruded. Slugs invaded the kitchen every night, leaving silvery ghostly ribbons all over the floor. Weather bulletins showed a graphic of an atmospheric depression migrating east across the Atlantic, settling over the British Isles. Its isobars corkscrewed in a lazy circle, a scribbling motion round and round, like a bored child’s crayon. ‘Here for the next month,’ the man said. And it was, all day, every day, from dawn to dusk until the Nidd surged high, loud and dirty brown. The woods and the wheat fields shook and cowered like slaves under an overseer’s whip. I thought of the swifts often, but each time I donned a cagoule and ran down to the sewage works, seeing anything was impossible, like the sky had fallen in and lay bubbling on the earth. Everything was rank with a sulphurous fog. Eventually I stopped bothering. I knew they weren’t there. Flies spasmed in soaking cobwebs between the perimeter’s barbed wire; I could hear the mechanical arms turning and whining. The egg stink. That was all.
Swifts can’t feed in rain and so will travel astonishing distances to avoid bad weather and find food. They are fantastic meteorologists, capable of detecting the finest fluctuations in air pressure and moisture. Then, despite only weighing the same as a bar of Dairy Milk, they will fly into a headwind to reach more clement climes on the fringes of weather patterns. I reasoned this was what my swifts had done. But exactly where they had gone was anyone’s guess. Ornithological surveys have tracked swifts leaving gathering points above London to conduct foraging trips over the Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts, way out across the North Sea, even as far as Germany, to plunder the abundant clouds of insects that swarm at the rear of an occluded front.
To grounded minds, feeding excursions that might clock up 600 or more miles in a day seem incomprehensible, inefficient even, but the more you learn about this bird, the more you realise that considering any part of its existence by our limits and measures is a mistake. Swifts are almost entirely beings of the air, as near to an element as you’ll find in a creature, evolved to spend their lives in a state of permanent airborne motion. From the point that they fledge and free-fall from nests on those sickle wings, the swift’s life is one long aerial journey. Unless injured, they will never touch the ground. They feed, drink, preen, mate, even sleep in the air. Only fleetingly when nesting high up in the nooks and crannies of old buildings do they become creatures of the lower realms, of our earthly world.
Just as the storms had sent the swifts soaring, the dreary, pelting days drove me inside. Each morning through a curtain of grey I waved off Rosie as she set out on her own swift-like excursions across the county. Since moving north she’d taken a job selling produce into delis and farm shops, which necessitated considerable road miles. Her ‘territory of responsibility’ stretched as far as Lincolnshire in the south and Whitley Bay in the north and took in pretty much every back road in-between. Working long hours at my desk as rain machine-gunned the roof tiles above, I worried about her out there, driving alone under dark, unrelenting skies. Soon flood bulletins began to pour in by the hour. The ground was saturated. Reporters dressed in that uncomfortable mix of waterproofs and ties described how whole towns were being cut off or split in half by bursting rivers. There was talk of climate change and blame, how all of us need to get used to living with these kinds of extreme meteorological outbursts from now on, as if the weather was some moody teenager tantruming through a house. The actual source of the misery took many forms depending on who you listened to: either it was Arctic sea ice knocking the jet stream off course, pushing it south, or it was our overheating atmosphere creating drier air capable of holding more moisture, hence the heavier, increased rains. Whatever the scientific argument being put forward, all seemed to have one depressing area of common ground: the hand of man.
Every day Rosie said the same: ‘I’m fine,’ but I could see she was exhausted. By the end of the month, she was done-in by the hypnotic motion of the windscreen wipers and the effort of concentrating through clouds of road spray as she followed diversions. One night she fell into a deep sleep almost as soon as she walked through the door. Lying on our bed as the rain squalled against the window, she gently held her bump, our baby, in its own little watery world. I stretched out next to her, slipped an arm under her shoulder and stared up at the ceiling. It was 23 June. The longest day of the year had already passed, unmarked, lost in the flood; the warmth and sun it normally promised seemed further away than ever. I thought about the swifts again, birds that were supposed to be the winged heralds of our high summer and blazing days, and wondered, Had they come too early? Had they bailed on us? Do swifts make mistakes? I wasn’t sure, but something was troubling me. Their absence, like the unceasing rain, made me anxious, as though the world wasn’t working properly. ‘Generally unsettled,’ the forecasters might have said.
You’ll read of the common swift (Apus apus) as a ‘British bird’, but this is something of a misnomer – a bit like saying the passing clouds are British, or the constellations. It’s true that many make the nearest thing to a home – their nests – here, but even the swifts that converge in our skies each year only spend a maximum of three months (usually between May and August) in the UK, a mere quarter of their lives. Really, we borrow them at best. The rest of the time they are in transit or hoovering up insects above the rainforests and rivers of the Democratic Republic of Congo. All the world’s population of common swifts overwinters there, living the same fluid, ranging life under African skies. Just as they will in more northerly latitudes, swifts cover huge areas in the search for food. Flying high and fast they will travel as far as Mozambique in the east, Angola in the west, and down to South Africa. Then, around April, with their breeding season approaching, they surge back in their millions, rising and heading pole-wards, undertaking epic and perilous migrations over vast oceans, mountains and deserts to often long-established nesting sites across Europe and Western and Central Asia.
‘Our’ swifts, as much as we can ever really call them that, were once believed to fly directly north, following what seems the straightest and shortest possible route back to Britain. That’s what land-locked logic assumed. However, recent geo-location data from the British Trust for Ornithology has revealed another story. One tagged bird’s ‘flyway’ – as the experts snazzily term migration routes – was found to follow the Congo river west, heading out from its mouth across the Atlantic before turning up in a curve to Liberia in west Africa, taking advantage of feeding sites and wind patterns. There it circled for ten days, feasting and fattening on swarms of flying termites, before a rapid, non-stop flit back to Cambridgeshire across the Sahara, over Spain and France, covering 3,100 miles in just five days. Amazingly, within three months, just as autumn began to cool the far horizon, it made a similar-length journey in reverse. In total, the bird was recorded as flying a round trip of 12,400 miles to breed in the UK. And this was by no means the record – other tagged swifts in the same migratory loop had more than 17,000 miles under their wings.
And to think that these birds make these pilgrimages once a year, every year, cruising at seventy miles per hour as loftily as 10,000 feet, sometimes higher. People claim to have seen them at nearly double that altitude, cruising above the peaks of the snow-crusted Himalayas. That zooms out the mind instantly. Right out and up into the cold clarity of the higher, quieter realms. You enter a kind of Google Earth world where cities are reduced to smudges of grey; forests and field networks are little more than pixels of green. The more you think of it, the more the head spins, as though you’re flying up there yourself amid the isotherms and the jet stream, rising with air currents as sun-edged horizons, entire countries and vast, grey, hostile seas spin and vanish between the breaks in clouds below. It’s a dizzying perspective. The mind struggles to conceive of how these small, almost weightless sylphs, woven of little more than feather and thin bone, are capable of such ludicrous speeds, heights and distances. And they are nothing short of ludicrous. I read somewhere once that a swift chick ringed in Switzerland was found dead as it returned to the same nest site twenty-one years later. Observers reckoned that in the intervening years it had clocked up around three million miles.
But for birds migration is not a choice, an urge to travel like ours, born of being too long settled; it is an ancient, hard-wired instinct driven by those two biological imperatives: survival and reproduction. To the swift a British summer is supposed to provide the riches of insect hatches filling warm air and a relatively calm climate for raising chicks. If swifts had such things, the travel brochure for the UK would promise: ‘long balmy days and sunny evenings for extended feeding sorties – perfect when there are new mouths to feed!’ So what happens when they arrive to a washout? Are those ancient, miraculous journeys all in vain? Almost certainly. Experts tell us that adult swifts toiling in the wet end up woefully underweight and at risk of lacking the reserves to complete the return flight to Africa. Even when they try to nest, scratching the undeniable biological itch, it seems they have an awareness of the hopelessness of it all. Knowing there isn’t enough food to feed themselves, let alone young mouths, they abort, pushing eggs unhatched from nests. Over time and given persistently grim summers, it’s feasible that swifts could cease to exist at all in our skies. We’re only too aware nowadays that species will vanish, but the thought of losing swifts terrifies me. ‘They’ve made it again,’ wrote Ted Hughes, ‘which means the globe’s still working.’1 How perfect that is. Nothing speaks of this planet’s interconnectedness like the swifts’ migration; nothing screams so loudly of its fragility either.
The room had grown dark. Tiredness was finally dragging down my somersaulting mind. My head sank back, further into the pillow, descending into the quiet, loamy blackness of sleep. Then it registered something, an alteration occurring in the atmosphere. The rain was stopping. I looked up at the ceiling and imagined the roof peeling away, the clouds dissipating and seeing swifts up there somewhere, swimming broad-shouldered among the stars.
My arm had gone to sleep. I slid it from under Rosie’s shoulder. ‘You OK?’ she whispered, stirring. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Migration.’
She smiled and turned over. ‘Please don’t,’ she said, guiding my hand to her belly and holding it there. ‘Stay here with us.’
I laughed and then it dawned on me. That was it! That was what I wanted to say to the swifts, what I should have said when our paths crossed at the sewage works. Stay here with us. And it was those words I was thinking of the next morning when, opening the curtains, I glanced up and finally saw a scattered band of them flying high in blue sky, east to west, like stray eyelashes blown across coloured paper. I pressed my face against the glass and then wanted to tell Rosie, but she had rushed out an hour earlier to a midwife appointment almost forgotten in the mad monsoons of the last month. Oh, well. A nice surprise for later. Then – what timing – she called. I was on the edge of relaying the news when my brain registered the formality of her tone, the forced calm, the words: I’m on my way to the hospital. There is … there might be … something wrong.
Hope is such a useless emotion, but it’s the default setting in all of us. You can’t help resorting to it. And I hoped against hope that this was just normal pregnancy gremlins, a regular nothing, some common mix-up. After all, she’d corrected herself; she’d said might, hadn’t she? With the phone still clasped to my ear, brain whirring, I realised I’d been staring at the silicon seal that wraps around our double-glazing for I don’t know how long, noticing for the first time how it had a few little black specks of mould spreading from the corner. I noticed other things too. The heat and brightness of the morning. The softness of the carpet between my toes. The carpet – we’d deliberated in the shop and then plumped for the softest and most stain-resistant one, even though it cost more, as we both envisaged little hands and feet crawling over it. All the time, in my mind, cogs were turning, processing. To speed things up, Rosie was driving herself straight from the doctors’ surgery and was already near the hospital when she’d called. Don’t come, she’d said. Honestly. By the time you get here they will have finished the scan. The scan? How long does that take? They put me on a machine for twenty minutes. I’ll call as soon as I can. Promise. Don’t come.
The machine is actually a belt consisting of two sensors which is strapped over the womb to monitor the baby’s heartbeat. As I washed quickly, dressed and tightened the belt of my jeans, I thought of the same thing happening a few miles down the road and felt sick. I sat down. Over and over a question: How can I fix this? I got up again. Making coffee I knew I wasn’t going to touch, I replayed internally what Rosie had told me, looking for solutions: the midwife had been going through the routines as normal, asking the questions, all cheery, motherly, brassy, comforting. ‘So, what about this rain we’ve been having?’ Her eyes had taken on a glazed, middle-distance look as she ‘had a feel’ around Rosie’s bump and took her blood pressure – quite high. ‘Have you been overdoing it? You should be taking it easy at this stage.’ Then she drew closer, leaning forward with the stethoscope. The cold disc caught a high, tripping heartbeat first, going far too fast for itself. Odd. So she reset and tried again. And again. Now it was even more unusual, a yawning silence. An absence. It was then she called the Antenatal Clinic.
Every room in our house suddenly seemed devoid of air. I went outside and – wouldn’t you just know it? – the day was spectacular. The month had got over its tantrum. Light poured down the street. The mottled stone chimney stacks reached up into a tropical ocean sky, casting long shadows over the slates. You could smell the heat building. Cars gleamed. In front of our door, before the low stone wall and the pavement, weeds had run riot with recent over-watering and colonised a small strip of pebbles completely: pink-flowered herb Robert, willowherb, dandelion, alkanet, the rough leaves of a flowering currant dug up long before our time, yet still clinging on. A laurel bush I’d cut back a few weeks earlier had started re-growing clumps of soft, waxy leaves from its cut branches. I noticed all this: the way nature was defying the obstacles, using them even, the way the laurel had tangled with the fence to gain better traction and strength, the way the currant had forested the pebbles with young shoots. I noticed it all. And hoped. Could these be signs? I thought about running to the edge-land, running to the hospital. Then, suddenly woozy, I crouched down with my back against the house. An orb spider’s web was knitted perfectly between the laurel’s leaves. I fought the urge to project everything onto that spider, but my brain wasn’t behaving – If it moves left everything will be OK. Move left. Please. I checked my phone’s screen, bewildered by how slowly the minutes were passing. The spider sat still. The stone in my stomach grew heavier. And over and over, those four words in my head: Stay here with us.
The sound was distant at first, like that note you hear sometimes when still half-asleep with your head buried in a pillow and you breathe out through your nose. A soft, airy whistle. Then it swelled quickly until it was a loud banshee scream – seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee – zipping fast and low over the terraces and the back-to-backs. Swifts tipped into the streets in riots of joy and noise, like a carnival hitting town. Their scream wasn’t menacing or melancholy, more playful than anything; the peak of a laughing fit, a toddler being tickled. Seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee, they implored in their glee. And I tried, but before I could even turn my head they were off again, arrowing over another roof.
‘Did you see the sparrows? They’ve gone mad!’ said the little girl from next door. I hadn’t noticed her coming up the pavement but she stood on the other side of our fence now, foot on her scooter, all red dress and big smiles. She’s a kind, confident girl, Libby. Could be a kid’s cartoon heroine – a wonderfully bolshie tomboy, bright as sun on snow and the first person who spoke to me on our road after we moved in. Shielding her eyes with a hand on her thick-rimmed glasses, she craned her neck and scanned the empty sky.
‘They’re swifts, Libby,’ I said, ‘not sparrows.’
She looked at me, frowned, and repeated the word to herself under her breath. Swifts. ‘And where do swifts come from?’
‘Africa.’
Africa, she mouthed it silently again. ‘Why are they here then?’
The words were there somewhere, but they suddenly refused to form in my mouth. I coughed and checked my phone. Only a minute had passed. Ridiculous. Then from somewhere beyond the end of the road, from the direction of the edge-land, that swelling sound again: Seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee.
‘Here, look. They’re coming back,’ I said, pointing up at the long blue corridor above, formed by the rows of terraces. That’s the trick to watching them, to look at the sky rather than try to follow the bird. And that time we did see-see. Immediately three screamed into view and split formation, the two outer birds peeling left and right over roofs; the central swift plunging down into the canyon of houses, banking and brushing up against the side of number 28. It was a quick movement, a deliberate crash: the swift touching the point where wall met the carved wooden roof trim, before turning and bursting off again. It passed so close to us I could see the sun through its tail and hear the wing whistle. Libby put her hands up to her head and whooped. ‘It went through my hair!’ Not quite, but that’s how it feels when they explode past you – as though their seesaw wings are brushing your face, coating it with sky dust and cloud wool.
It’s one of the things I love most about swifts – that they manage to pull off part elemental wonder and part town-bird with such aplomb; they are creatures with a truly panoptic world view, possessed of a higher consciousness tuned in to the great governing forces of our globe, and yet, for a short time, birds of the common people too. When they return to our realm it’s not to pristine reserves or protected wetlands, it’s here, to the sewage treatment plants, factories and back streets. The sprawl is as much part of the swift’s world as the stratosphere. They’re like little, wild, black boomerangs hurled down from the heavens, sent to us to bestow a kind of day-to-day benevolence. One minute you’re fumbling with the keys, emptying bins or waiting desperately for a phone call, the next they’re with you, above you, around you, a dose of the sublime where you least expect it; when you most need it.
More came, spinning and thwacking into the eaves or bouncing off over our heads. Gangs of them casing out the joint – numbers 25, 20, 13, 12, all the houses soon had visitors. We ticked them off together each time the birds appeared in their scattering, lunatic, overlapping shrieks. I had no idea our street would be such prime real estate, but it made sense – a row of Victorian terraces that, for all its modern UPVC double-glazing and brightly painted front doors, is still decidedly higgledy-piggledy in places. Swifts have a nose for lapsed DIY duties: the fallen-away mortar between sandstone, the inviting vistas between slipped roof slates, the gaps where gable ends and eaves have warped a bit over the years. This is because, over time, swifts have warped a bit too. At some point along the evolutionary high wire they threw their lot in with us, largely abandoning the nesting habitats they evolved with, like tree holes and cliff fissures, for the nooks and crannies of towns. Some have suggested it may have coincided with when those master stonemasons, the Romans, were spreading through Europe. And that would have been a clever move. Beautifully opportunistic. Why wouldn’t you ally with an ever-expanding, building-obsessed species with a tendency to leave holes in its many roofs and towers? But what may have been a successful strategy for two thousand years has been unravelling in more recent decades. Swift numbers have been hit hard by post-war building methods and materials; the sealing up of structures in the name of energy efficiency, and a general squeamishness at sharing our homes with the natural world. They don’t give up easily, though. Being dependent on the man-made these days, swifts keep looking for the gaps, forgiving our cooling affections and indifference, blessing us with their presence. I love that about them too.
That’s what all the wall-bouncing was about. It is known as ‘knocking’ or ‘banging’ and it’s what swifts do to scope out their nest sites or challenge for occupied spaces. The urgency was understandable. With mating delayed by the weather they were wasting no time with formalities, but slamming about, ringing doorbells one after another to see if anyone was home. Breeding swifts are traditionalists and will keep the same partner and nesting site year on year, provided man and nature are complicit. When arriving at their nest sites separately, the first bird in a mating pair will reclaim the spot by screaming their presence, folding in those broad wings and vanishing into the eaves. Should a rival already be inside they will fight in violent, close-quarter duels, like handcuffed wrestlers, hissing, grappling and scratching sometimes for hours at a time before one is ejected and the victor roosts to guard it and wait for their mate. Reunited, both male and female birds take shifts to gather nesting materials from the air – feathers, thistledown, leaves, grass, seed cases, even the cotton centre of cigarette filters – all taken on the wing and formed into loving, soft, cup-shaped bowls bound together by saliva. Spit-welded, you might say. The younger, non-breeding swifts – those birds under two or three years – also play the knocking game, usually receiving short shrift from a shrieking breeding occupant. Unperturbed, though, they pair up and range out to the edges of a colony, looking for space. In some instances they’ll even build dummy nests, practising for when their own time comes. Given their speed it’s hard to know for certain, but I’m pretty sure both breeding and non-breeding swifts were working their way down our road. It made me wonder if perhaps our street formed the outer limit of an established swift territory, if our house might not be a swift edge-land.
My thoughts tumbled like this as we watched them, Libby and me. She was a little human blessing amid the avian ones. I was thankful she was there, forcing me to keep my eyes skywards, calming my trip-hammer heart, distracting me with her never-ending list of questions: ‘So how far is three million miles?’
‘Well … it’s like flying to the moon and back. Six times.’
Her silent mouthing again. The moon and back. ‘And they can fly that far?’
‘Over a lifetime, yes.’
‘That’s impossible.’
But nothing’s impossible. That’s what I was secretly telling myself. Swifts prove as much: the migrations, the heights, the distances, the speeds, the ability to navigate from African jungle to the same tiny crack beneath the same fascia board in Harrogate. Miracles happen in nature every day, we just don’t pay attention. Things disappear and things return. Cloudy mornings bring in sunny days. The world sometimes rights itself. Sensors pick up missing heartbeats.
And a few miles away, the half-hour of surveillance came to an end. The nurse shook her head with bemusement and began removing the belt. ‘Nope, there’s nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘The baby’s heart rate is perfectly normal. Strong and regular with just the usual variability. Spot on for twenty-eight weeks.’ She even showed Rosie the data printout – a perfect pattern of peaks and troughs. A mountainous, panoramic heartscape. Understandably, Rosie quizzed her: then why had it been fast? Why had it failed to register? Why these irregularities?
‘Hard to say. Could have been anything. I’ll have them look into it. My guess would be a problem with the equipment at the surgery. Either that or human error.’
Then the baby kicked, hard, and, as though proving a point, it did so all evening, knocking and banging like the swifts outside our bedroom window.
Three weeks later, and they have been among us every day since, revelling in hot, blue, powdery light as June slips unnoticed into this high, burning July. They have taken over the skies and are screaming the place down. Their shrieks whip and whistle past open windows, through curtains and office blinds drawn at midday to try to keep rooms cool. Everything being done is being done to that sound. Power saws moan through planks. Scaffolders sing tunelessly to radios. Cars speed up and slow down. Seeds disperse. Lorries clang and grumble. Tractors spill new hay at traffic lights. People dress and eat and go to work and stumble home sweaty and tired. The bell of St John the Evangelist rings out over the edge-land. And above it all is a constant reminder of other rhythms at the margins of our lives. Even as I type these words I hear it through my attic window – seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee – more females than males in that passing cluster, judging by their calls. It’s easy to tell. The females take the higher register in their maniacal, whirling, rusty-wheel duets.
I see them all the time too. Occasionally, mid-sentence, I’ll stop typing and look up at the square of sky in my attic roof. A swift will be framed there for – what, a second? No, it has to be less than that – half a second. Faster than a blink. A slide accidentally double-clicked through a projector carousel. Sometimes the bird will be buoyed high up on a thermal, flapping madly, finding its balance before powering out of shot quick as a jump jet; other times one will be skimming only inches above the tiles. If I could pause time, I’d see more than just a blur rocketing past, I’d see a sleek, dark, chocolate-brown body, almost oiled, like an otter’s coat, and a tail that can either be forked and fish-like or folded into a tapering point. I’d see a faint creamy chinstrap and those kukri-shaped primaries: massive, blade-like, swept-back, a hindrance anywhere except in the air. I’d see an almost alien head perfectly adapted for open skies and, if I got closer still, an eccentric aviator’s face: large, black binocular-eyes, like a pair of flying goggles with their own in-built anti-glare eyebrows. I’d see a tiny, soft beak – a moustache really – above a mouth that becomes more basking shark than bird when hunting, gaping to inhale insects in phenomenal numbers. What I wouldn’t see, though, unless actually reaching through the glass and poking around its plumage, are legs. Swifts have the shortest stumps in the bird world, barely more than extensions of their bat-like, clinging feet, which retract completely when flying. Perfect for aerodynamics; useless for walking. Combined with those oversized wings, they mean that grounded swifts can struggle to get airborne again and, once fallen, will flop about, helplessly flailing for the air on the hard earth. People find them in this state sometimes, like a boat stuck on a sandbank, wings oaring away, the rower still going ten to the dozen.
Many years ago concerned neighbours called on my mother to help remove an injured ‘something’ making a racket above their living room, shuffling, scratching and screaming. They were surprised to learn it was a swift, recently fledged, that had free-fallen straight from its nest into the recessed flat roof above their bay window. Up a ladder, Mum found it imprisoned by the raised sides of the leaded lip, like a spider in a bathtub. She picked it up, cupping gentle hands around those air-filled bones, then held it above her head on the flat of her palm, lifting and lowering it gently. After a while, perhaps understanding the upstroke of open air on its face, it fell off her fingers forward and flew, pumping its wings and shooting up to join a screaming throng careening around a chimney. I always used to envy Mum that memory of holding and releasing a swift. So much so, in fact, that I once longed to find one stranded on the floor, just so I could experience the paradox of weightlessness and power, those long wings between my fingers, the heart racing in my palm, that worldly eye fixed on mine.
Not now, though. With my paternal instincts becoming keener each day, I just hope that the swifts have settled, mated and are incubating eggs. I thought I saw two coupling in mid-air above the ring road almost as soon as they had arrived on our street, but they were out of frame before my eyes had fully focused, lost behind the pitched roof of a betting shop. A good sign, though, is how annoyed the pigeons have become, how grumpy they seem about sharing their urban estates. On the opposite roofs they gather in clucky, sulky groups by the chimney stacks and gutters to mither: These out-of-towners, bloody immigrants, coming here and taking our houses … mumble, mumble. They were moaning so loudly the other day that I had to get up to close the window against their incessant cooing. As I did, I glimpsed a swift emerge from a crack just below them. It fell out, opened its seventeen-inch wingspan and masterfully looped-the-loop over the pigeons’ heads. They all jumped and screamed, scattering with much shaking of ruffled feathers. I nearly applauded; I’m not even sure the swift didn’t do it on purpose.
After mating, female swifts will lay a clutch of two or three small, white eggs, which the pair takes turns to sit on for around twenty days. Incubation is, by all accounts, a picture of domestic bliss. Jobs are shared: while one sits on the eggs, the other goes out hunting, joining the marauding gangs of a colony’s non-breeding swifts racing in the streets and hunting insects. Unlike the younger birds, however, which climb ever skywards in the fading light to sleep in the open air, a breeding bird usually returns to its nest at nightfall and tucks up side by side with its mate. They announce this by screeching to one another – I’m here! I’m back! – late into the warm evenings, catching me unawares as I’m washing up with the window open or gathering clothes off the line in the backyard. Such gestures are wonderful, though. I find it heartening to hear their shrill homecomings.
The shock of Rosie’s phone call that morning and the brief gravitational drag of loss it brought has taken its time to unknot from my insides. Although a false alarm, it was enough of a slippery footstep over a precipice for us both to pull each other back. A turning point. Slow down. Hole up. Nest. Rosie was overdue some holiday and she has taken it. Even though the glorious days continue, our time is spent home-bound, wrapped up with lists and chores, cleaning walls and carpets, finishing the decorating jobs I’d never got around to in January. And always sleeping early, side by side. The birthing books say the nesting instinct is a wholly natural stage; that, like birds, humans should ‘listen to the body’ and respond to our embedded biological imperatives. I think now that they may have a point. This morning as I waited for my coffee to brew, one hand resting on the cafetière plunger, Rosie surprised me, bouncing downstairs smiling, energy restored, eyes bright. She opened the newly cleaned doors to the yard, filling the kitchen with light and the screeching of swifts. ‘I feel like a different person today,’ she said. And standing there, washed by a beam of sun, I could see she was.
We walk down Bilton Lane two hours before sunset. The sky is still treacle-thick with warmth, a smothering density of bronze and blue filled with pollen and the smell of bracken and traffic vapour. There’s no rush so we take the back roads, ducking under the low-hanging leaves of a lime sticky with aphid honeydew and thrumming with worker bees. Parked underneath, a van is sugar-coated, glazed like a doughnut and sprinkled with dust. I can’t resist touching its bonnet. I used to do the same as a kid just to feel the skin of my fingertips take to its tacky lacquer. As we approach the edge-land, I feel another pulling sensation, this one between my eyes. Magnetic. Over the roofs and lampposts, past the tanning salons, takeaways and dingy-windowed newsagents there is a pylon-stapled join where sky ripples down and meets the limits of town.
These past weeks are the longest I have spent away from the edge-land and I can sense the change. I feel a pang of regret – jealousy, perhaps – that it hasn’t waited for me, that I’ve missed something. As the space between us narrows, this becomes mixed with other feelings, a sense of returning, of absorption, of acceptance. Homecoming. I bore Rosie by relentlessly pointing out details: Look at all these elderberry buds; I can’t believe the size of the butterbur leaves! But I can’t. And I can’t help saying it, either. There’s too much to take in. I have to let a little out. Along the old railway the infinite greens of the bushes, hedges and trees have reached their limits and lie draped and meshed, sweating out the heady incense of hot herbage. Between them poke the delicate pink spikes of willowherb and the white cloudy clusters of hogweed flowers, crawling with longhorn beetles. Wasps throb on burdock leaves. Further on, in the meadow, there is the honey smell of clover; its flowers are dotted purple-red or white among the seed-topped grass and splats of dusty plantain. Knapweed frills the edges of overgrown paths. Tufted vetch too. And common vetch. I see the shaving-brush seed heads of hawkweed oxtongue. Woundwort. Stinging nettle. Evening primrose. Speedwell. Dunnocks burble deep in the hedges, wrens trill. Fences and wires are covered by bindweed and bracken. Beneath them, the deep black pools of shade. On the far, running horizon, great swathes of hay meadow have been cut. Idling tractors are primary-coloured blobs in yellow stubble. The air is sweet dust and dandelion seeds and the hot metal of gleaming pylons. A toad plods splayed-toed across the path into a dry stack of grass. Crushed underfoot, pineapple weed scents our every step. The earth sings with crickets. I point and point and point. And look. And hear. And smell. And all the time, in my head, there’s a record playing, a particular phrase from Tubular Bells, Side 2, that runs from 4:21 to 5:21. This line selects itself sometimes on my internal iPod whenever view and atmosphere fall into place. There is something in the jarring 6/8 timing and the deep wistfulness of the piano part that sounds like the musical expression of joy and sadness combined. Its minor descent tumbles childlike across a landscape of guitar arpeggios that, at moments, echo exactly the chaotic, concurrent hums and squeaks that surround you as you walk here on a summer’s evening. That feeling of being fully in the moment and fully aware that the moment won’t last.
Wandering up from the lane, we are in the raggedy fields running up to the holloway among wheat that is tall, parched and paper-cut sharp. Nearby there is a little cave in the hedge formed by the ribs of an arthritic elder where six months back I hid, alone and cold, and watched the fox hunting over frozen fields. A month ago I sheltered there from the deluging rain. Now a strip of evening light through the foliage is filled with gnats bouncing around like atoms. And red blackberries. A billion stems of grass. Mass molecular engagements are occurring between the air and my skin, the light and my eyes, sound waves and my auditory nerves. The edge-land is so powerfully alive and glowing that I need to take a breath and stop myself from becoming tearful. Right now I can sense something bigger in the curvature of the horizon, the birdsong, the unearthly crawling of insects and the immeasurable flowers. Something exquisite, enriching, frightening, indifferent, immortal. And I realise it doesn’t care whether I’m here or not.
Everybody loves nature, but I wonder if, deep down, what we really want is for nature to love us back. That’s the impossibility of our obsession. It won’t. It can’t. I have come to know this patch of ground as well as anyone might know anywhere. I’ve seen through its eyes, immersed myself in its histories, dug through its layers and obsessed over its life forms. I’ve walked, crawled, curled up and slept on this earth. Even so, this evening I’m aware that there will always be something elusive and indescribable about this place. Something removed and separate; out of reach. For all the attention I’ve lavished on it, the edge-land cares no more for me than it does a speck of bacteria on the skin of a worm. That’s one reason it remains so compelling, so haunting. The other is precisely the opposite: because all my time here has developed a curious feeling of shared history, some tangible, emotional intertwining. It’s in my blood. After half an hour of being here, it’s conquered me again. When people talk of ‘knowing’ or ‘belonging’ somewhere, this is what they mean. Familiarity comes with the overlaying of our experiences, memories and stories: there’s the stretch of river where the mayfly rose; that’s the owls’ nesting tree; these hedgerows were once the boundaries of enclosure. We project all we are and all we know onto landscape. And, if we’re open to it, the landscape projects back into us. Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and meshing that can feel a bit like love. In the drowsy light of the coming evening I not only see where I’ve walked before, but who I was when I walked there. What I was feeling; what I was thinking. And isn’t this how we navigate this sphere? Creating fusions of human and place, attaching meaning and emotions, drawing cognitive maps that make sense of the realm beyond our comprehension? Our connection to the world is always two things at once: instinctive and augmented.
Rosie walks up behind me and links her fingers with mine. We follow the channel of a tractor’s treads through the wheat to sit beneath the lone oak. The high, grassy curtain around its roots conceals us. The sun prickles our faces through its tickling stems. With my back against the tree and Rosie lying between my legs, we watch the day descend and share the bottles of warm beer I stashed in my rucksack. To the west, swallows flit, swoop and twitter across the surface of the wheat like flying fish. Higher still, in the upper air, the gentle whistle-screams of feeding swifts.
Later, cup of tea in hand, I’m locking up the front door when a gang of them screeches past, returning to their nests for the night. In social or territorial displays they’ve been known to clock up 130 miles per hour, which sets me off wondering, abstractly, if a swift has ever sprung a speed camera. Unlikely, I’m sure, but then again I’ve seen them crop up on TV shows before, sneaking into shot on primetime soap operas and documentaries, even photo-bombing frontline war correspondents. Naturalist Richard Mabey wrote of being struck by an unavoidable allegory about types of existence after seeing a swift flash past the commentator during a report on the shelling of Beirut in the 1980s.2 And, tragically, this isn’t a rare occurrence – neither the shelling nor communities, and swifts, getting caught up in it. Recently I saw a journalist midway through a bulletin from Libya being buzzed by that same telltale shape, his voice momentarily drowned out by that unmistakable cry: seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee. I knew instantly what Mabey was talking about – that juxtaposition of gruesome, human-wrought horror and life-affirming nature. The coincidental sound of the swift’s plea seemed to bring the madness of blowing up neighbourhoods filled with civilians into even starker relief. As though we’ve become so corrupted that even other species are petitioning us to pause and take a look at ourselves.
There’s a chance, of course, that the swifts on our street are being purposefully recorded. Numbers have fallen by as much as a third over the last decade and much work is going into understanding this recent decline. Perhaps satellite tags bound around their barely-legs are drawing digital flight maps on a scientist’s computer screen somewhere. Maybe their returning tonight will trigger specially rigged ‘nest cams’ into record mode. Such dedication has helped us move on from the days when we believed swifts and swallows spent winter hibernating in the mud beneath ponds. Yet for all the insight our surveillance society can provide, the maps and methods with which swifts navigate their world are surely as nuanced, complex and hidden as our own. Much is hardwired in that little brain and body. You see innate urges beginning to manifest on those silent, black-and-white nest cams. At around a month old, swift chicks begin this curious routine of pushing themselves up onto their wing tips and holding up their bodies, as if doing press-ups or a core-strengthening Pilates move. The theory is that, before even experiencing flight, they are programmed to prepare for it because once they slip through that narrow aperture into the sky they won’t return to the nest. In fact, they will be airborne for a minimum of two, three, perhaps even four years until reaching maturity, mating and first nesting themselves. Depending on how late in the summer they fledge, they may even leave for Africa straight away, fresh from the nest, untutored, possessing the supreme means to plunge into the unknown.
The precise hows of migration still hover at the edge of our understanding, although we can be fairly sure of certain things. Swifts interact instinctively with their environment, navigating by registering minute changes in light, airflow, moisture, pressure and magnetic forces. Direction, location and altitude are determined through the position of the sun, the stars and the earth’s magnetic field, which, although invisible to us, wraps around the planet from pole to pole like a ball of wool. Birds are believed to be capable of detecting it via molecules in their eyes, beaks and neurons in their inner ears. Researchers think it may even appear as a cluster of stationary spots in their vision, like having an arrow permanently pointing north. As I click off the lights and climb the stairs to bed that night, it strikes me that the maps of the swifts’ world must feature augmented layers too. Geographic adaptations that make sense to individual birds, repeat patterns consigned to memory, ‘regional’ maps that bear no resemblance to what’s on the ground but which join together physical landmarks like mountain ranges and rivers with other waypoints and markers of the mind – the place where their nest was once blown to smithereens by an artillery shell, the spot where a flying termite swarm gathers yearly. Who knows? Perhaps when crossing some barren desert they feel the pull of those ever-churning concrete circles at Bilton sewage works. It’s true that we’re all only ever passing through this world, but part of being alive is that magical process of making it our own.
Here’s the thing: in an era when there can seem to be a deficit of wonder, swifts are like the sky: once you start, you can’t stop wondering about them. Frustratingly, though, their elusiveness and pace mean you rarely get more than a glimpse of what they are up to in a town. The edge-land, however, reveals a wider perspective. From under the lone oak tree there are vast uninterrupted evening skies in every direction; I can follow their sky-slicing insect frenzies for far longer, into dusk, into the dark. So, I start to return here too, conducting my own nighttime sorties from the nest again.
I like to think the flocks congregating above me are made up, at least in part, of the swifts from our street. I have a hunch they are taking a similar route down here to me, wheeling up out of the lines of terraces and crossing the ring road, flying down Bilton Lane, over the nest-free realms of the modern housing estates, to reach the insect-rich air above the scraps of woods, meadows and watercourses of the fringes. If we could compare them, I bet the jumble of lines on our internal maps would look pretty similar right now. In any case, they are feeding relentlessly, which I hope is a sign of chicks being born. I’ve tried to gather more direct evidence. The other day I stood listening for their mousy cheeps outside number 25 just below where a mating pair kept sweeping in and out in a tag-team sequence, but the street noise was too loud. After a few minutes of staring at the eaves, squinting and straining to hear, I realised a woman was looking down from a window. She had a genuine look of concern and a phone in her hand. I sloped off, over-acting that I’d had something in my eye, trying to look inconspicuous.
Sometimes on these balmy evenings, the swifts appear to be momentarily stacked in the hot, flat air like planes circling, waiting for runway clearance. But they are feeding still up there. Swifts will hunt at different altitudes for different prey: gnats, beetles, aphids, ladybirds, flies, moths, mosquitoes and tiny airborne spiders drifting on spun threads, designed to catch the wind. If it sounds like a varied diet, it’s because it needs to be. Swifts are thought to disgorge up to forty meals a day to their young, collecting and consuming somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 insects every twenty-four hours, packing them into dense, gobstopper-like balls that puff out their throats and cheeks. Yet more staggering statistics; yet more reasons you’d pray for this bird in your hand during a game of ornithological Top Trumps.
I see none of these details, though. All I see are the birds gathering then uncoiling like a knot of black rope, buzzing, zipping and tumbling through the sky. They tack and turn, firing off victory falsettos, trawling in such numbers that it confounds the eyes. As though stirred by their dynamism, the wheat shifts too, waving like a festival crowd one moment and then swirling back into stillness again – forming a surface of gold that rolls, ripples and slides towards town. Watching it, I think about something I haven’t in years, the way oil paint moves under a brush. There were a few of us at school to whom the art department was a place to escape to. It was situated, as all art departments should be, in a garret above the sports hall, away from the main buildings and the business of education. It smelled of coffee, tobacco, heated Perspex, hot, cut wood and turpentine, and we chose to spend lunchtimes there, in amongst those smells. We were sixteen years old, learning how to use oils on board, squeezing it from metal tubes and chasing it into thick, wet blooms of life as the grey-stained clouds of north Leeds rolled across the department’s windows. It was long before we knew of surface-focused postmodernism and that texture could be art itself. We sought real life in everything and spent hours manipulating blues, greens, browns and yellows into landscapes beyond the city; landscapes to be marked on their likeness to the real thing. Watching the patterns of swifts and breeze moving through the sky and wheat field, I see now that we were recording reality more accurately than we knew. Beneath the final layer of our finished works, now probably painted over, skipped or thick with dust somewhere, those fluid whirls mirrored exactly the way the landscape, the sky, all of us, exist in perpetual motion. If only I could go back and tell myself.
At 8:30 p.m. the next day, I walk out in boots, shorts and T-shirt, carrying only a notebook and pen, and after a hundred yards I am already too warm. The evening is ecstatic. The earth hums in octaves. Only the lane smells of damp, old caravans; arid, tinder-dry air presses everywhere else, even deep in the wood. Wave meets wave on the fields – wheat and insects merge and split. The birds are in their element: the swallows rattle and click like bats, cresting the crops and banking around the trees and pylons; the swifts sky-scrawl in the gassy blue. From the lone oak I can see for miles, off towards burnished moor, ridge and wood. Further, to where pale purple bleeds into sky. The sense of scale is difficult to absorb and harder still when I crane my neck up to watch the swifts, now so aloof and aloft. After an hour or so the sky behind them grows tufted with the wispy brushstrokes of cirrus; ice crystals zooming over town at 300 miles per hour or more and yet seeming so slow, almost stationary to my eyes. The drawing-down of the day blushes these white and grey filaments into reds and glowing gold, and the blue behind dims, like a curtain being drawn over the horizon. Another hour and the swifts are little more than misted dots against it all, gnat-sized in my binoculars, being recalled back to the heavens. They look like they’re falling upwards, as though gravity has been reversed. Their sound fades skywards. Eventually they are indecipherable and, as if each was a drop of black dye passing through the cotton clouds, the cirrus darkens too.
And they will float up there all night in that cooling, loosening air, dozing on the wing. That’s what I shake my head at as I walk home and, waiting to cross the ring road, glance up at the sky. A pair of flashing wing tips blip smoothly overhead through semi-blackness. Somewhere between me and that plane, swifts are bedding down. Between the sprawl and the EasyJets, they make nests in the air. Of all the impressive traits this bird possesses, surely this has to be the most extraordinary. When not nesting, whether migrating or over territory, swifts rest by climbing into high altitude – up to around 10,000 feet – and enter into a state called ‘unihemispheric slow-wave sleep’. A neurotransmitter shuts off half their brain, keeping the other half functioning and alert to changes in wind and drift, ensuring the bird wakes up where it fell asleep. Or, if migrating, squarely on course. The left side shuts down first before swapping with the right, an alternation thought to be responsible for the bird’s gentle swaying motion through the air as it rests, swinging like a baby rocked in a cradle.
Unbelievably, nearly a hundred years before this nocturnal rest-flight could be proven scientifically through satellites and tagging, an encounter had already occurred between human and swifts in this semi-dormant state. In his 1956 monograph, Swifts in a Tower, biologist David Lack recalls the experience of a French pilot in the First World War coasting with his engines off over enemy lines – an account that Lack notes was written-off for decades as ‘absurd’: ‘As we came to about 10,000 feet, gliding in close spirals with a light wind against us, and with a full moon, we suddenly found ourselves among a strange flight of birds which seemed to be motionless, or at least showed no noticeable reaction. They were widely scattered and only a few yards below the aircraft, showing up against a white sea of clouds underneath … We were soon in the middle of the flock, in two instances birds were caught and on the following day I found one of them in the machine. It was an adult male swift.’
That faint and final seeeeee-seeeee, seeeeee-seeeeee. Yes, yes, I do see now, but the more you see, the more you want to know. That’s the quandary. The more the maps seem to interlace and overlay. It all makes it harder to imagine them leaving. Then, one morning, you step through the front door and it’s that time – the turning time. The moment the season creaks on its hinge and, by chance, you overhear. The start of a slowly spoken countdown; the intake of breath before summer’s auctioneer yells, ‘Going, going … gone.’ Outside it appears someone has messed with the contrast and everything has become a little more light and shade. Leaves have darkened from the greens of new lawns and fresh limes to the hue of classic cars, a deeper, richer hunter-green, forest-green. Goodwood and old tapestries. It’s hard to put your finger on it exactly. The heat and glare of the sun are just as stifling; the air bright and blissfully undiluted by icy northern winds; the leaves still weeks or months away from falling; summer holidays barely in full swing and yet, it’s there, agitating the senses, a blur in the heat-hazed horizon, a shift in that swirling brushstroke, a tint to the palette.
In a normal year this is also the moment the swifts disappear. They are masters of ‘ghosting’ – the Hollywood-favoured technique for getting talked about by leaving a party early and without a fuss, slipping through the back door in the wee hours without so much as an air-kiss goodbye. The art of tactical absence. Fledglings tend to go first, followed by the adults and, before you know it, the whole party’s on the wind-down. The streets are immediately lonelier. The traffic louder. The air dulled. Life is less interesting. And you stand there wondering why until, looking up, you notice empty sky.
I say ‘normal year’ because the chicks on our street will fledge late this summer. Rain has caused delays. It’s almost August now; my guess is that, even if they’re being fattened up fast, they might not begin migration until early September. And selfish as it sounds, I’m glad they’re going to be here a bit longer. They’ve come to mean more to me this time around. I know their disappearance is a necessary one, to linger once the insects fade and the frosts come would be a death sentence, but the thought of it hurts nonetheless. The coming and going of swifts are markers in the cycle of our year. Their departure, whenever it comes, augurs an ending.
They’ve harvested the fields in the three days since I was last here. Now we sit against the lone oak again amid wheat stubble, dust and stones. The air smells yeasty, like a baker’s shop first thing in the morning. The tree’s roots cradle my ribs. With my arms around her, I, in turn, am cradling Rosie and her bump. I can feel her breathing, the rising and falling on my chest. I’m not sure why it would only just occur to me but I’m trying to straighten out in my mind the fact that soon we will always be three. It will never just be Rosie and me again. The long summer that has been our life since we met twelve years ago is coming to a close. And that’s it, I suppose: the realisation that part of our lives is already over. The earth turns and the swifts move. You can’t stop the ceaseless clockwork of the universe. Then, as I’m thinking this, the baby squirms beneath my fingers. I feel it like a knuckle twisting in my palm and shut my eyes to better concentrate. After a moment a foot, hand or elbow stretches the skin again. This time my heart lurches with it and I laugh. Rosie does too. Then I think, How stupid of me. How could I forget, out here of all places, in the fields of the edge-land, that every ending is also a beginning?