Underhelm

Grasmere

G was born at Thorney How (off left of blip) but grew up here at Underhelm (bottom of blip). When a walker fell and died on Helm Crag G’s Auntie Edie cried and said she’d never believed the mountain could do such a thing. It seemed so dwarfed by the mass of the Fell and by all the snow today.

After watching David Hare’s play ‘I’m Not Running’, I’ve been thinking of all the little steps that add up to action/inaction. A combination of many things bought me here today. It was a spectacular day and as I headed off there was a spike of ice axes heading up Blencathra, a crush of crampons up Helvellyn and the world and his wife parked up at Grasmere, all understandably making the most of the conditions. I climbed up to a frozen Alcock Tarn and onto the ridge towards Heron Pike. My eyes were bigger than my boots with ambitions to go on and return by Stone Arthur but I knew I’d be overstretching it so headed back the way I came. As another walker and I agreed as we passed each other, we were running out of superlatives for the day. The most bizarre bit on my way back down was a woman in just a swimming costume in the Tarn breaking the ice with a hammer (extra).
Second extra is the view down towards Windermere on the left and Morecambe Bay glistening in the distance on the right.

Here’s Wallace Stevens again. I’m not sure that I have ever realised, in quite such a concrete way, how much of a companion a poem can be (after freespiral ‘s comment yesterday). One of the most mindful poems I’ve come across and like all good practice it rewards revisiting over and over. I can at last say that as I descended my legs and feet were snow and we slid our way down as one...

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.