Dawn Fog
In search of owls
It’s difficult to write about much else in the week that Donald Trump has won the U.S presidential election again. In short: how? Who could possibly? I understand how, and I understand who, but only through frosted glass. So let’s leave that there. Here is what I do understand.
I wrote this piece last year, last autumn:
I leave for my run in the dark. It is 6am, mid-autumn and according to the weather forecast, it’s foggy. There is an irony to be found somewhere in the fact that I can’t see it. I can see very little beyond the immediate metre in front of my head torch. I set off on a route through trails that I know well enough to navigate in these conditions. I know where to be cautious, slow down and widen my eyes to the keenness of an owl’s.
And indeed I hear them, calling to each other across the wood. I look up through the trees and hope to see eyes, see anything, but only the slate grey air stares back. I am staring into the inside of my own head.
Although I grew up adjacent to the countryside, and now live right on the periphery of woods and fields, I have never seen an owl in real life. Going for this run is as much an owl hunt as it is training. “How do you manage to get out so early?” Owls. I am motivated by owls.
I am particularly careful down the first steep, slippery hill and get into more of a groove up the following rocky, technical one. I am the first person through the cobwebs and they slink across my eyeballs. It’s not an entirely unpleasant sensation, it doesn’t hurt or irritate, but I still wave my arms around in front of me to swat them away. I must be a bizarre sight, but who is to judge me besides a sleeping cow or a curious owl? I beg them to be curious. I beg to be able to see one. One day.
The dark is remarkable. I know there’s a wood to my left tilting down to the brook and an expanse of fields to my right. The sun will rise behind me when it’s ready to do so. But I really can’t see a thing, my breath combines with the fog in front of my head torch and each step is a leap of faith. I’m on a lane that sways and dips for about 3 kilometres and is an ever-changing mix of sloppy mud, hard-packed mud, roots, rocks and smooth tarmac. Working out which section I’m on is becoming mentally exhausting, too much for so early on a working day.
But this is the priority. Life only feels comfortable when this is the priority. Glycogen depletion, dehydration and sheer tiredness will kick in when I’m at my desk later, stretching my legs and pressing them against the wall behind it, berating myself for yet again, not re-fuelling properly after the run. But I love that tiredness because it reminds me that the desk isn’t everything I am, I have a whole world here in the vague haze of light that I plant my feet into.
My favourite hill on this route is nearly a mile long. There’s no other way up it than to just keep ticking over, lock in, keep moving, keep the focus small. In daylight, on either side there are vignettes of trails through private land, old oak trees swathed in lichen and moss and glades where you might see deer, but if you linger over these for too long, you’ll lose the uphill momentum and have to claw yourself back into gear.
I have no visual indication of the passage of distance so I decide to try for a personal best time on this section. My lungs protest slightly at first but once my body realises what’s going on, it relaxes into it. I think this is the key to managing undulation on any terrain in all modes of traversing it: take emotion out of it. Going downhill is the same - you need to be calm so you don’t tense up and falter. You have to float.
I’m feeling good about my pace when suddenly car headlights appear in front of me. It’s a narrow single track road so sadly I have to stop, I have to step to the side. I wave a hand in acknowledgement to the driver that they likely won’t be able to see. I watch my effort get flicked up beneath the tyres. Time expands before me in seconds lost. Everything stills. I start moving again with a similar effort but a quieter heart.
I only know I’ve reached the top of the hill because the road flattens out. I only know the road flattens out because my stride lengthens and my lungs soften. I swing through a gate and into a field that’s often full of sheep, sometimes cows, occasionally both but today has neither. It’s a beautiful section - the trail sweeps along the top of a steep hill which sways down into a valley and back up to the village of Colerne on the other side. That valley extends before me all the way out to farms and other little villages, eventually ending up at Bath. From a vantage point further along this route, you can see all the way to the edge of the city.
Something about the surrounding light is bothering me and I turn off my head torch to figure it out. Dawn has broken. My light was blinding me to it. I am surrounded by cloud, mist. The sky is still a sleepy blue, but wisps of vapour are lingering in the dips and weaves of the hills. The trees are thrown into reptilian silhouettes, all spindly limbs and even smaller toes. I am the only person left alive and this circumference is all that remains.
The world has been etched in charcoal but it has also been rubbed soft, made eerie. The strangeness propels me to keep running, but with my head torch turned off now. Daylight must have happened while I was absorbed in the hill and encased in a tunnel of trees. I immediately wish I’d realised sooner, but just as quickly, I am glad that it was at this point of the route that I saw it. My jaw drops as I see more of the barely lit clouds lingering in the duvet puffs of the topography. I am running above them - will be down into them soon - and with each passing minute the sky is getting lighter but the fog is keeping it gentle, keeping the world at bay, easing me into it. It is manageable.
By the time I’m back on the A road that ultimately leads to my house, the day has fully set in. I am amongst others on an average cloudy day. I go through the usual rushed, chaotic motions of showering, packing my bag for work and getting out on my bike to cycle to the office. My thoughts are on navigating junctions, cars and pedestrians, the challenges of the day ahead and whether I’ve actually got food at work for breakfast.
But down at the bottom of my lungs I am still there, still her, still turning on the spot in the middle of a field seeing only silhouettes of trees and life in greyscale. I am a charcoal outline of myself, coloured over by dawn.
