Friday 29th Aug – Stickle Tarn
Paul and I discuss some film of a dawn swim at Potter Tarn shot in July and then toy with images/quotes from an ancient Taoist text – ‘Lake beneath mountain’ – ‘It furthers one to cross the great water’ –which we half joke about whilst still feeling their relevance – drive off to Langdale at 2pm.
Up into cloud – to Pavey Ark and Stickle Tarn – late afternoon – we change and enter the water, past ‘floating’ islands of bonsai trees, the atmosphere is close, the water calm, the cloud low, the mountain hidden – ‘lake beneath mountain’ – we swim across the expanse of water to where sky meets water – arrive at the far shore – a moments rest – start back – Paul is swimming well but I am aware of feeling the cold round my shoulders – we swim on steadily and before long I can tell that I am drawing on reserves that I haven’t had to draw on before – Paul knows I am struggling – ‘it furthers one to cross the great water’ – my mental buoyancy aid – gradually we pull to the shore – Paul stays close and together we stagger out – later on– an unanswered, tongue-in-cheek, quip – in ‘crossing the great water’ which shores did we actually reach?
29th August 2008 – Stickle Tarn
From the car park we could see the route we needed to take but Pavey Ark was completely lost in low cloud and remained so until we reached the severe horizontal of Stickle Tarn. The wind was still and the surface smooth and highly reflective. Patches of weed, floating in rafts and tiny islands holding natural bonsai trees contributed to a landscape drawn by Hokusai.
Without definition of its height, Pavey Ark could have continued into the stratosphere. The sense of having arrived into a different landscape with its different rules of physics was compelling.
We entered the tarn from the right hand side of Pavey Ark and decided to swim the length and back beneath it.
Throughout the ascent, ants were swarming in the humid air and were flying with their once in a lifetime wings in order to breed. Thousands lay on the water, some dead, some still locked together in a wet coupling in a forlorn attempt at continuing their gene strand but were essentially drowning, We pushed them aside with our strokes as we swam through.
After reaching the far bank and pushing off again to return, it was soon apparent that Richard was feeling the cold more than me. His face took on increasingly desperate angular features as if the air pressure around his head was intensified. The further we swam the more his breathing became laboured and exaggerated. Checking in regularly with him brought words of reassurance that he was okay but it was clear he was reaching the limits of his tolerance to the cold.
By now Pavey Ark was clear of cloud and somehow its gaze upon these two small insignificant people was both reassuring and threatening. Reassuring as if the mountain had chosen to reveal itself to us, but threatening because of the immovability and permanence of the mountain simply emphasised our frailty. When we finally pulled ourselves ashore, the need to get warm was urgent – hot coffee with whisky gave an instant hit.
Richard had brought a thermometer and we had deliberately not tested the water before our swim. It read 15 degrees from the shallows and surely out in the deep middle it must have been a degree or two colder.
We started the descent quickly in order to warm up. Towards the bottom, a young family had immersed themselves fully clothed into a pool fed by a waterfall in full flow. Their screams and laughter rose as they entered the falls, etching a permanent memory that would never be lost.
Richard writes:
Angle Tarn, Friday 22nd August
Set off midday and after a long, and in places steep climb arrive at Angle tarn – Paul is up for swimming the diameter of the near circular tarn – I can only manage a large cord – during swimming altered thoughts occurred – thoughts ‘outside’ the normal pattern, – imagining the water below, occasionally looking down and forming an image of the subscape – visualizing the contours of the tarn floor – the shape assumed by the mass of water through which we were swimming – a shape which, were it to be inverted, would assume the contours of a mountain – a desire to see and sculpt this nonexistent mountain – a desire to see the varied underwater landscapes set out in this way as a chain of conjectural mountains – how to do it – then the cold and need to return – I ‘cash in’ my thoughts and we swim back.
22 August 2008 – Angle Tarn, north side of Bowfell
The longest and steepest ascent to the highest and midway point of our swim home. We climbed for two and a half hours to reach the tarn to find it a busy place with hikers resting up a while by the water and two tents pitched nearby. The atmosphere was very different and somewhat under the gaze of others we entered the tarn and swam across to the other shore and back.
Although the highest, it was not the coldest and the afternoon sun helped cheer us. It felt good to complete a width and back and return to dry clothes, hot drinks and some belated lunch.
As we relaxed, the light played on the surface of the water and mesmerised us. Dandelion-like seed heads blew across the water, rolling on the actual surface without getting stuck.
The descent was as long and testing as the climb up, although enlivened briefly by conversation with a young Hungarian about to return to home after a period of employment in the Lake District. She had found her whistling echoed across the water from Rossett Pike as she sat by the tarn.
Richard and I had discussed many things including: restructuring lives to maximise opportunity; where the art lies in artwork; and jazz saxophony.
Below, in the Old Dungeon Ghyll the beer tasted so good.
15 August 2008 – Sprinkling Tarn
Paul writes:
We looked full-faced into the abyss and it was stunning.
The reward of the hour and a half climb up to Sprinkling Tarn was eagerly anticipated. The cluster of peaks held the rain-filled climate, producing white clouds that formed below out altitude and which was blown up and over the ridges, across the tarn like bonfire smoke. Richard later recalled Seathwaite being the wettest point of the UK – 130 inches per annum. Eskdale Pike stands south of the tarn, protecting it from sunlight and warmth. Entry soon revealed how cold the slab of water was. We swam to the middle but solidifying muscles told us not to go any further. It was at this point we independently looked beneath the surface. Nothing. No light penetrating. It was so dark it could have been a mile deep. A strong sense of awe and fear heightened the cold we felt. Back on shore, we dressed, ate our food and drank hot chocolate with rum that Richard had thoughtfully carried up the mountain. Richard had also located a beautiful, vertical rock surface sliced by diagonal striations and hairline near vertical fissures. The rock face was also colonised by patches of tight black moss and acid green lichen. This was our canvas that we marked with earth-based pigment. In the rain, the paint spread and we knew that very soon the weather would return the rock face to its original condition, only emphasising the very limited temporal experience and inconsequentiality of human existence.
Richard writes:
A sombre day with showers – the shock of the colder-than-usual water as we enter Sprinkling Tarn – this time I have goggles and swimming out to the middle I, unintentionally, look down into the depths of the lake – what I see gives me the horrors – I pull my head back at once and look up at the sky as if looking for an antidote to the vision below – my back crawls and yet what have I really seen – absolutely nothing – a brown/green/ grey void – but the quality of this void makes me shudder – some blank visions below the surface say ‘come down and explore, see what you can find’ – but this vision speaks of endless nothing, of being lost, of never returning – a shiver of repulsion – later on dry land we wander through a maze of crags and find a large surface which invites paint – water-based paint so as not to pollute, so as not to be permanent, to say ‘just passing through’ – Paul says ‘lets just look at the surface first’ – ‘let it suggest the style’ – the painting finds the marks already there and develops them like putting make-up on a face, I imagine, or the way cave painters used features of the rock to suggest forms which they then elaborated – it rains as we paint and the painting changes and begins to disappear ……
