Mark Mattock shares one last dance with the woodland cabin.

Can I just have one more moondance with you, my love? – Van Morrison

I’m stupidly and impulsively whittling my big toe nail with a large ridiculously sharp knife as I sit here on the edge of the deck. A female speckled wood is flitting between blades of cock’s foot, buoying in the sun pools like long strands of shining hair loose threaded into the leaf litter, around the fire pit that was obliterated by the record breaking high tide back in April. Urgently, impatiently, searching for just the right blades on which to lay her remaining eggs — one per blade — in the critical ‘extra time’ of a catastrophic season for butterflies. It’s a familiar sight, I’ve never seen it this late, it’s the end of October. I feel her urgency, the dying of the light. My time here is running out. Work kept me away, until now.

I arrived yesterday to discover the aftermath of crack-headed wood mice run amok. The crazed rubber-obsessed rodents having savaged two pairs of flip flops, leaving them looking like plucked hawk kills on the lino floor, and my soft plastic creature baits legless and clawless. The kitchen tops sown with mouse ‘seed.’ Little piss stains all over the white cooker enamel. Scribbled tracks of spidery little feet. It looked like frustrated revenge. I left them nothing to eat.

The moon failed to suck the marsh empty, it’s already refilling imperceptibly. It will equally fail to fill it to the brim whilst in this calm period of high low tides and low high tides. The tarnished wet mud just below me is perforated as if someone had tipped a barrow of stones off this rickety jetty sometime during the night. The paw holes of the fox who found yesterday’s remnants of baked bass and pan fried hedgehogs (mushrooms), left for the crabs like a Christmas turkey carcass for garden starlings. Some foot prints follow to where the largest crabs had stashed the bits they’d wrested from the offering. The same crabs that had disposed of the fish-gut-trifle splat I previously left them, which included a stomach bulging with their fully intact smaller kin. Trip on idea of being a weird part of this perfect circle. High above OP soaring. I’m surprised still here. It’s the last time I see the Osprey.

Over the other side the scum slicks are shearing like melting ice sheets. Splitting in dead straight fault lines as the river gently heaves into reverse. It’s dull, mild and feels very fishy. The sea wolves have finally switched on. There’s one lurking deviously among the shoals of fat mullet lolling lazily in the shallows. A pair of screaming jays up in the golden crisp canopy behind me suddenly shatter the mirror glaze calm with perfect timing, ramping up the atmosphere of expectant thrill to near combustion. As the lure zig zags into the shade, through the flotillas of leaves I’m constantly hooking, it’s yet again smashed ferociously. The hooked bass feels decent. When it bolts for the jetty supports and becomes a monster. Sudden immense power, its huge cavernous raging white mouth just visible in the dark water. Barely controlled panic: thumping, throbbing, pounding; heart, pulse, ears, head. Outrageously hooped carbon. Five long seconds of nerve-shredding stalemate then it relents just enough for me to ease it back into open water. Its ferocity diminishing my head rush flushes relief in the surety that it’s over bar the beaching. Then a simple bump and all goes limp, the patchinko lure floats to the surface. It is impossible to describe the feeling to a non-angler. A moment of utter devastation. Debilitating disappointment. I glare in utter disbelief into the void beneath the settling surface, then want to vomit with the sudden shock realisation of a hitherto unimaginable possibility; was that my very last bass? It is, isn’t it, of course it is, because it was one of the biggest. It’s right it ends like this…no? I can’t. It wasn’t. Not yet.

The early November weather forecast is a flatline of mild and grey. I break the record cross country from station to cabin by ten minutes, exactly an hour and three quarters.

The kingfisher is going mental, charging in deranged exuberance up and down the evening river; crash bouncing off the surface. Erratic sharp turns, loud sharp chitters. Territorial. Possessive. Over the far side a goofy warrior-face painted great crested grebe, a juvenile in its first winter plumage. On the yacht being moored out in the shrinking mid-river a young woman asks her grandad if fish pee, and do they drink? She’s seen the mullet. Sound travels. They leave in a quiet-motored inflatable. The river is too low to fish from this jetty. I’m not allowed on the shore. I might sneak out under it later when totally dark. A muntjac screaming chillingly human as I cut back through the wood. Unseen branches tapping me on the shoulders. If I didn’t know better!

Dog tired, I stay in, it’s too cozy, with tawny lullabies and Ali Farke Touré.

Still dull. Still very mild. Very still. ‘All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey.’ A morning sky of dimensionless grey all the way to the horizon. Soft silent stillness all the way to the horizon; bar the soothing familiar sticky ticks and taps from the wet lustreless pewter mud. The eastern oak bank now russet, rust and olive, like the spent worn wings of the last silver washed fritillaries of summer. Pert molecular tensioned domes of brilliant clear water magnify the claret arteries and scab like spangle galls of a fallen oak leaf. Inches from it a strip of delicious luminous green. In the gap between the ends of the jetty slats and side panelling, a miniature rain forest, a lost world, a microcosm of mosses, a microcosmos. Every bit as rich and diverse as forests thousands of times bigger. Lush in its own inch deep bespoke climate. Happy again to feel infinitesimally small, and stupid; in awe, and mesmerised. On all fours I follow the hidden valley — now the gassed wasp that’s been crashing into my head — passing over cushion canopies of intense greens. Plantations of miniature fungi. Over micro bonsai forest clearings of fruticose lichens with their coralloid structures, columns, just millimetres high, like the remnant tree trunks of some catastrophic ecological disaster. But which couldn’t further from the truth. Tiny renderings of the garden of Eden where life on land began, how it emerged from briny waters. Not by some beachhead of the fittest but a collaborative, collective, mutually beneficial action of the mass, the bio masses. Lichens are symbionts, a perfect harmonious merging between two life forms: photobionts and mycobionts, algae and fungi. One converts sunlight into energy for the other, who provides structure, absorbed nutrients, in return. Joining to become one, a completely new organism. Symbiosis is the true driver of life, and love a scientific term.

In the macrocosmos a chinking blackbird switches to alarm. I look up. A large winter flock of blue tits silently working their way through the canopy and leaf litter. In the purslane beds they look like tea pickers. A large female shore crab is carrying her much smaller man, belly to belly, like a baby in a carrier, I didn’t notice him at first, peering from underneath her.

I’m sitting here with the wood mouse beside me, we’re staring out, across, towards, the horizon in the unreachable future. Behind us the horizon of the past, of no return. He’s crouched as far to the back of the clear cheap plastic trap as possible, clearly shitting himself with overwhelming agoraphobic horror of the enormity he’s now perfectly free to escape into. Strange lone weightless snow flakes keep catching my eye, ominously falling like floaters as they drop across the horizon, from bleak pallid sky into dark muted land, through air impossibly still. Like the animated fallout in the public information films of the seventies and eighties. It’s ash from some big building waste fire behind the eastern oak bank. I have to tip the mind-blown mouse out. Even from here he knows where the cabin is. The toxic smoke-odoured peace is suddenly further desecrated by opening salvos of grating heavy steel construction from beyond the trees, as another rich person builds on their ‘private keep out’ land. Another house, extension…or bunker. Only the privileged can surround themselves with nature. Live in it without reciprocity. ‘Lifestyle’ trumps life support.

Golgotha looks fire. Hot. Glowing. Radiating ‘hi’ in quantum mechanics. Behind her a giant pre-super moon lifting from the blazing oak bank. Directly opposite, the sun setting on a nail bed of black pines. This time of year the sun sets cabin side. This welcome back is overwhelming. This, all of it, the whole space, knows.

The dawn air so still, nothing moves, neither ripple nor leaf, just the water rising in the channel so slowly I can’t quite detect it. But every time I blink it’s higher. It’s just bitten off the section of mud it always does, twice a day. Its fidgety fluid-shrink-wrap circular rim of molecular attraction incrementally, delicately, consumes the mud pie. A force unstoppable. At the island’s vanishing point a briny bubble is burped, like some escape module, an arc, ejected just in time. At the very same moment the reflection of a flock of linnets passing above crosses the very spot, becomes a shoal, joining the fish fry rushing over renewed grazing. The whole scene and sequence a terrifying metaphor.

Over the day I criss cross my island promontory with the kingfisher, the marsh harrier and female goshawk, as we work our individual niches in these happy hunting grounds. I no longer really need to catch anything. Just be here, breathe deep, suck it up. Suck up whatever it is in the solitude of the oneness of it all. Inhale it so deep some remains in my lungs forever. Even the white tailed eagle turned up, late morning, perching just long enough in OP’s oak to lock eyes with me. In the split moment, somewhere mid-salt-marsh, a photonic fusion of total indifference and utter reverence in the form of a parting glance. The goshawk catches a teal, and a curlew, spectacularly, in the course of the day. I tread on my glasses, replaced by binoculars, in the thrill of watching one of the strikes — the one where the opportunistic marsh harrier hovers over the immediate aftermath. I know, I know, some of the rarest birds in the whole country, I know.

I don’t light the fire for physical warmth, it’s not cold, but for every other reason. Keep it glowing as dark hugs. The smoke mingles with old village hall musk of lino, pine panelling, manky duvets and wood mouse. I wish I could bottle it, take it with me. Outside the cloud is thinning, a moonscape emerging. I walk out to Golgotha, into the immediate and immense hush surround of soft faint phosphorescence. I feel the tree watching me approach. She’s rocking, grinding, to some heavy beat I can’t hear yet; arched backwards, sweeping arms, bowed head; gently pushing her pubis forward in provocative invitation. Night nurse, cosmic dancer. Bathed in the aureola of the beaver moon -—the last super moon of this darkest of years — with its full spectrum halo glowing behind the last sheens of prismatic cloud. Demented barks and whoops of two rutting muntjacs hiding in the shadows. Touch me. I step forward, put my hand on her exposed ancient-oak-flesh waist, look up as she leans back, her waving shawl of brittle leaves frozen by the flash bulb moon. I press my ear against her, smooth my palm across her taught lignum midriff, push my finger into her lowest, only reachable, belly button of three, feel the sub sonic, sub woofer, hum of pure visceral forest bass. The diamond set screw heads shining like rows of landing lights beckon me to the end of the jetty. The moon now so bright that stars vanish in its glare. It blasts my shadow onto the slats and glowing doilies of luminous lichen. I shiver with thrill. Stare, hypnotised, at its liquid reflection shimmering at my feet. Specks, like stars, sail across it, looking like a TV sci-fi depiction of some spaceship warp-speeding through deep space. The unutterable giddying black of the water so black, black hole black. Whistles, quacks, of nocturnal teal and mallard, the eerie tremolos of curlew, the stretched out ‘pips’ of a redshank that sounds lost. I look back again to confirm with my shadow that I’m really here, in this final moment, this magnificent mad fucked up finale, I am, then raise my arms and turn three sixty, slowly, to inscribe every detail.

Slept so sound, still not sure it was for the last time, as I thought it might have been the time before.

26th November. As we rustle heartsick down the final length of path through the woods, we agree it would be somehow right if, by some, divine, ironic twist of fate, we find it storm-crushed under one of the oaks; for there to be some absolute poetic reason why we can’t come back. Of course it isn’t. There it is, waiting, back to us, like the first time we saw it, under its trees, looking innocent, inviting and indifferent, looking out over the marsh. But now about to be emptied, gutted, of the last remaining things, cleaned a final clean. Turning on the gas taps and water feels like gripping the hands of someone who you’re imminently going to say a soul-wrenching goodbye to, to let go of, and you can’t look them in the eye. I make coffee, and trying not to spill any, step down from the deck and stumble my way to the jetty, my prayer mat, my life raft. But I can’t hold it back, start to blub, my heart bursts like a water-filled balloon before I reach it. This heart spill as unstoppable as the tide. It so so fucking hurts. The shock of it. The finality. I sink broken on my broken jetty, try to take it in, sobbing, shuddering, salty mucus, eye-stinging brine, all of it, one last time…Will I ever know something like this again?

Slamming the heavy glass door shut, turning the key in the lock felt like I just killed something that I didn’t mean to. Something beyond words.

Light enters our body only through the sudden wound – J A Baker, The Hill of Summer

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Mark Mattock. Artist. Photographer. Publisher. Rabbit Fighter. @the_rabbit_fighters_club