A few weeks back, I made a trip up the line[1] to the old west country city of Gloucester. I had an appointment with my long-time dentist (it’s far too complicated in England to try to change dentists now) and it is always an annual excuse to visit two of my oldest and dearest friends. I grew up a mile out of the city centre, so my journey is always at once a physical journey north up the line of the M5 motorway and a metaphorical journey back to my childhood. You can’t spend that long in a place where the earliest and often most repetitive memories are forged, and not have them ignited by walking the same streets and rounding the same corners.
Although I was travelling towards the end of the third week in August, a time when high summer is usually long gone, this year was different. England had been struggling with an ongoing series of hot dry spells, unfamiliar and decidedly uncomfortable for most of us in the country. The first drought in 26 years had just been declared in perennially damp Devon and Cornwall and even a few days of misty rain had done little to dent the desiccation that the landscape faced.
Driving north, I passed through steadily lightening shades of trees and vegetation until I reached Gloucestershire, where the extent of the drought brought a confusing mix of panic and awe to my chest. Verges had diminished to the palest yellow, pallid imprints between gold fields. Long grass appeared to be the only plant to have flourished in the dry conditions, riven through with umber seed-heads of cow parsley that rose up like air-dried periscopes. Memories stirred of the long dog days of a teenage summer, meandering bicycle rides, fairground evenings in thunderstorms.
I drove a few miles’ west out of the city, where I crossed the shrunken River Severn better known for its volatile flooding around the city’s western flanks, and navigated tiny gravelly lanes with peepholes through gates into dusty fields. The site of a musical evening in my primary school years, the village church at Tibberton should have stirred a memory, but it stood pert and proud on a slight rise and didn’t fit my hazy recollection of that long-gone summer evening.
The door was locked so I wandered the perimeter instead. The path that led into the woods was a creeping cemetery of fallen leaves. I’d seen trees on their autumnal cusp along the motorway verges, but I wasn’t prepared for the sight of these upturned clawed hands, reaching in their final moments for the water that never came. The sight jarred and I did a quick calculation, disorientated for a moment. It was far too early for autumn. All was parched, stifling, terrifying in its aridity.
When I returned home, a beautiful feature in Emergence magazine landed in my inbox. They Carry Us With Them: The Great Tree Migration by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder and Jeremy Seifert charts the ways in which trees will adapt to climate change by migrating over time, as they have always done in the past. The process takes centuries but, little by little, through the dispersal of seeds, trees edge themselves closer to the conditions they need to survive.
The trees of Tibberton do not have the luxury of time. Trees can survive drought in the short-term by severing their upturned palms, their vital tools of sugar-making, of photosynthesis. This early autumn is a sign of intense sylvan stress: its discarded leaves are the sentinels of loss. I have always loved the cozy potential of autumn, but this year it has sounded a death-knell. My heart aches for the trees, but also for us. What parts of ourselves must we sever to withstand this climate emergency? We live abstract lives, detached from our primal contract with water, oxygen, and carbon, and so I fear our disembodiment will not help us this time.
It has rained since then, of course. Thick welts of rain have plummeted from leaden skies, buckets have overflown, and puddles have lingered for more than a few hours. Burrator reservoir is still perilously low but yesterday we listened to chutes of water tumble into the striped waters, their (for-now) resting place after days of ploughing through moorland soil. This grey still morning, the valley is pressed beneath a cool hand of mist and green returns to this place.
The land and its inhabitants have always been in flux, as mutable as the liquid on which they depend. I think how much I’ve changed since my childhood spent with my friends. If I looked closely enough, could I see how the molecules of the streets and alleyways of Gloucester have changed too? How the bricks and concrete and stone of the city centre buildings have decayed by a fraction, their surfaces depressed by microns? Change is constant: it can be slow and fractious, or cataclysmic and disorientating, but it is ever at our heels. Let us hope we can change quicker than the trees.
[1] ‘Up the line’ is a south-western term for travelling north to Bristol or the Midlands, dating back probably to the one train line that went north and on east to London. By some strange coincidence, Up the Line is a science fiction novel about time travel back into the past. It seemed apt somehow.