Wild at heart

Graham Spence

One of my greatest fears about moving to England was that I would never again see big skies and wide spaces on a daily basis. I would never again pull up an anchor on a ski boat with Maphelane’s dunes blinking in the distance. I would never launch a boat for a leisurely day of fishing in Richards Bay harbour, probably the most picturesque port in the world. It was a valid fear. Britain has 60-million people, almost three-quarters of whom live in England. It is a small island and the land is consequently somewhat stomped on. The only stretch of countryside where you don’t find a telephone pole bang in front of you is in the Cheviot Mountains up north. I also suffer from mild claustrophobia. Cramped lifts and public speaking give me cold sweats. When I travel to inner London, I feel as if I’m in jail as I look at the row upon row of chimney-houses. In fact, I stumbled across a newspaper story recently about the smallest house in the city, basically a three-story broom cupboard barely three metres at its widest point. I couldn’t read further, such were my shivers of dread. But outside London, my fears have been groundless. Instead I have come to realise that wilderness is a state of mind. In Africa, I could only conceive of wilderness as being where humans aren’t. But in England, where there has been intense human activity for more than 20 centuries, to think like that is insane. Yet England is one of the most beautiful countries around.

Verdant fecundity
The weather we all moan about actually is conducive to luxuriant verdant fecundity on a scale I’ve never seen before. In the mornings while jogging down a farm lane I regularly come across a fox or a Roebuck that has strayed from nearby woodland. Rabbits bounce in front of me, white bottoms flashing as they scamper into the undergrowth. There’s always a woodpecker hammering out a warning as I pass ancient oaks, or the strange cough-cluck of a ringneck pheasant. Squirrels have homes in virtually every tree. Fences have been gobbled up by gorse and are just another feature of bramble-bush. There’s faded graffiti on an old shed, home to a barn owl, which with a little fine-tuning of the imagination, looks like lichen. It doesn’t jar, and if it did, there would be nothing I could do about it. Yet at the top of the lane, 100 metres away, I turn into a street that is solid with traffic. The same is true of the lake where I fish. It is barely 500 metres from the M4, one of Europe’s busiest motorways. Yet even though the hum of traffic is constant, the tranquility is palpable. Canada geese honk as planes fly high overhead, mirroring human and avian migrations.

Buck plunge
I once watched a Roebuck with antlers like a hat-rack come storming out of the bush and plunge into the freezing water, splashing rapidly to the other side. Initially I had no idea of what spooked him as there are no large predators here, when I suddenly realised there was one, the most efficient and deadly of all - us. But even so, apart from gypsy poachers, buck here are only hunted as surplus culling to keep the woods healthy. The sight was so magnificent that I didn’t mind the antelope spoiling the fishing, but in fact he hadn’t. He had barely cleared the far bank when my rod shuddered like a live electric cable. Despite the fact that traffic and people are all around - even if I can’t see them - a day on the lake is as therapeutic as fishing off Maphelane or launching from the Meerensee Boat Club. Well, almost. So what I am saying is that there is wildness even in populated places. Nature has adapted to human explosion like it always does. Peregrines have returned to crowded Essex, thanks to factories cleaning up emissions. Marsh frogs warble in swamps next to highways, thanks to industries filtering effluent. Thriving seal colonies have taken on the rust colour of water in the Thames. Which brings me back to my initial theme; wilderness is indeed a state of mind.

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