Moon cycle

Pedal hard. Keep it moving.

It’s been so long since I wrote an essay I’m not sure I remember how.

At least, that’s what I told myself before I remembered this is what I do. Words string themselves together in my head. The trick is getting them down fast enough.

Pin down the words, and you can re-examine them later. Spot the patterns.

Come on now, one word in front of the other. Baby words.

It’s all just a mish-mosh unless you find meaning in the madness.

It’s getting colder, the seasons are changing. A full moon has just been and gone.

Telephone wires bristle thick with rooks. They settle and disperse, like leaves flung skyward.

People too, settle and disperse. Keep it moving. Faces cycle in and out: colleagues, neighbours, friends.

Around here, I find meaning in a long walk, or a long cycle, or a good book.

Books on my shelves have the timeless air of trees. They frame my life unmoving, a constant source of joy.

They will outlive me, the books and the trees.

My neighbour—from last year’s moon walk—told me he shares books onwards, constantly. Hates the sight of a curated bookshelf.

“Keep it moving.”

I felt seen, and a little attacked. Is this a staleness, my bookshelves? My life’s work, my core self, the physical embodiment of my brain: stagnant?

How could I not have my copy of Underland, to refer to this passage, page corner folded down, whenever I need to?

My neighbour is off to Scotland again, for a spell. I suspect he’ll be longer this time, more than a moon cycle or two. I’m really going to miss him. We have the same taste in books.

I respect his rootlessness but, sometimes, all I want is to dig deep and stay put. Read my books. Maybe I’m getting too old, the wandering season past.

For now, at least.

Remember the moon walk this time last year?

This month we cycled to the walk. Nothing like a good walk to pull it all together.

The destination—Aves Ditch—was many hilly miles away. It was all I could manage to keep up with the boys on their bikes. The potholes, plus a steep angle of descent on the more aggressive sections, make it a spicy cycle any time of day.

But at night you really want your wits about you.

You can be as brightly lit and reflective as a Christmas tree but if some tweaked out 18 year old in his first car takes the corner too fast, you’re done.

I used to not care too much. Loose the brakes, keep it moving, spin down that hill on a blind curve.

But these days I’m more careful.

The full moon rose over marshlands of the Cherwell valley, resplendent and illuminated. My bike’s pathetic headlight barely splashed the side of the hedge.

As we cycled, my carpenter friend—who still declines to be named and so shall remain nameless—told me about a man called O’Bree who set the record for riding the furthest in one hour. He had no sponsors, no money, no fancy kit. He built his own bike from rusty parts in his backyard in Scotland. Even took apart a washing machine for the ball bearings that could handle a hundred thousand rotations an hour (or something, don’t quote me on the numbers).

His bike was perfectly designed for the spin cycle, turning loops of a velodrome.

He took everyone by surprise, and the record.

Eventually, we made it to Aves Ditch and stashed our bikes in a hedge. I anointed the ground with some territorial urine—to keep the hedge bike thieves at bay—and we were off.

“This is the Ditch.” My friend gestured at the darkness.

All I sensed was a tranquil path, slightly elevated, that followed a stately line of trees and skirted a field.

“It’s a weird one, this walk,” he insisted.

One of my fellow walkers said that recent archaeological excavations found decapitated Iron Age skeletons in one part of the Ditch, deemed to be prisoners, thieves or scoundrels since their lost heads were set, in ignominy, at their feet.

“So the Ditch was an important place.”

It was a pleasant path through two lines of trees. At one point, the path went through a dense coppice.

What it wasn’t was any kind of ditch.

A scant half meter, at most.

Seriously: I’ve made deeper indentations stepping in thick mud.

My neighbour was defensive.

“Well, four thousand years is a long time to hang out in this field. It’s been steadily flattened but it’s still here.”

I felt like that worst kind of American. You know, the kind that splashes itself around abroad like, ya call this a landmark? It’s so small. Whaddaya mean you don’t have HBO? Where’s the creamer for my coffee?

Call this a ditch? This ain’t a ditch. My grandma could dig a better ditch. Make it bigger. Bigger is better.

Gag.

“I’m going to have to come back in the day to look at it properly. Tell me more about the ditch. How old is it?”

“Pre-Roman. Built to mark the border between two Celtic tribes, they reckon.”

Turns out, this once-mighty ditch on the east bank of the Cherwell divided the long-ago Catuvellauni (“war-chiefs”, gradually absorbed into a Roman client state) and the western Dobunni, craftspeople who worshipped a mother goddess, embodied in the rivers and springs of the Cotswold hills.

I’m a mother living adjacent to a river-spring. I know my tribe.

“Aves Ditch. It’s also called Aves Dyke, for the wall part. You know, there’s the ditch,” he cupped his hand facing upwards, “and the dyke.” He turned the cup the other way, knuckles up.

“Probably comes from the same root word.”

Everyone went silent. I went red. I never get these speculations right.

“You know, ditch, dyke? Probably the same root word. Maybe Germanic?”

One of our fellow walkers gave a slow, contemplative nod. I felt relieved to be neither scorned nor immediately corrected.

“One is just the displaced matter of the other.”

“Yes, like the Sine wave.” My carpenter friend warmed to the notion. “One is yin, the other yang. The ditch and the dyke. The mound and the declivity.”

After that, the mood lightened. There was a mysterious moon broth (mmm: mushroom melange) and a small bonfire under a lightning-shattered tree trunk of some small items that no longer serve.

As we walked, my neighbour and I talked about books. David Mitchell, Murakami. I am remiss. All I’ve read is Norwegian Wood—depressing, we both agreed—and his short essay-book on running marathons.

At one point, something rustled the wind-lifted hair of my fringe. The decapitated spirit of an Iron Age bike thief, out for blood!

Or a bat maybe, since they spun, low and fearless, around our heads.

On these full moon-lit walks, I often wonder how we look to bats. Like the dead zones of not-air that mountains create for pilots.

On a bat’s radar, I am a slow-moving mountain of dead air.

The Ditch passed a pig farm. The sighing squeal of one lonely beast cut the night and nearly made me shit my pants.

I was unnerved. The Ditch went on and on. Keep walking, maybe forever, or cycle back?

Keep it moving.

Clouds scudded before and around the moon as we wheeled about, turned back.

For some reason, an image landed in my brain, not of walkers or bicycles, but of trains.

Imagine three trains, all sat idling in a station. One train goes around and round in a wide circle but the arc is long and the train is packed with friends and family, everyone you love. The train spins through summer and winter and back to summer again. Trees shed leaves and unfurl new ones. Years lapse. The train thins, perhaps, then grows again as babies are born and daughters become women, sons men. The train goes around, forever.

The second train is empty. The end of the rail isn’t in sight. It unfolds endlessly before you, and new vistas unveil themselves, emerging from curtains of rain, shafts of rock, down a long straight track. The second train is beautiful, lonely.

The last train seems to go nowhere. It doesn’t appear at first to be moving, but slowly, so slowly, it turns back on itself, rounds corners within corners, and enters a spiral of caverns and vaults, all packed into the size of a fingernail, then a pinhead, receding inwards, like the inner world of a pomegranate.

I shook my head to dispel a mist. Must be the broth.

We made it home just after midnight.

A few days after the moon cycle, my neighbour hailed me from his door.

“Read this,” he said and pressed Demon Copperhead into my hands. “But don’t plan on doing anything else for a few days. You’ll see. It’s a book that gets in the way of life.”

When I freaked out twenty pages in that the book was going to detail a particular kind of abuse that I really didn’t want to read, he listened calmly and reassured me.

Lots of abuse, he nodded, but not that kind.

Now halfway through I can barely set it down long enough to write.

This evening, out on the patio, feet on table, book in hand.

“Can’t put it down, can you.” He called from the far side of the hedge, grinning, and made for home; his packed car, ready to head north tomorrow.

By the time I wake up, his car will be gone.

The west-leaning trees have almost no leaves left on them. Fading light filters through branches, like the leaded panes of a stained glass window.

Squirrels scamper a tightrope of telephone wire from tree to tree.

The seasons change, the moon cycles. I sit reading. It’s true: I can’t put it down.

This essay, in fits and starts, comes to you from the gaps between Demon Copperhead.

But look at that: an essay.

Turns out I did remember how.

It was just like riding a bike.