The Inland Sea of all our Mechanical Dreams
I have an unhealthy attraction to marginal spaces; spaces where it feels like civilisation opens to possibility: the thundering of the under-bridge, clearings deep in wooded roundabouts, the abandoned quarry filled with saplings. Such spaces aren't without their dangers.
Driving back north along the M6 one bright day, I heard a noise and discovered, on pulling off at the next sliproad, the backlight unit of my car had fallen into the road. The car had recently been to a particularly avaricious garage, and to add incompetency to injury, they'd failed to secure the unit in place properly. It was a fairly substantial thing, and quite the hazard to other drivers, so I decided I'd better find it and walked back along a field at the top of the motorway embankment to see if I could see it. This rapidly became impossible, as the embankment became increasingly wooded and the trees spilled out onto the field, and so I entered, staying low enough to see through the young forest, but high enough to avoid the embankment and any crashing cars.
Now, it was quite clear that no one had been in this long wood, which probably stretched 10 miles, since it was planted. Despite the motorway section being finished in the 1970s, the wood was still quite young – the trees seeming maybe 15 or 20 years old at most. Perhaps more strangely, despite the likely absence of any great management, it seemed nevertheless well tended. There was none of the usual leaf litter and twigs one would find in an unmanaged woodland, and it seemed as if the wood was caught in a perpetual state of suspended growth: simultaneously forever growing with the vigour of youth, never shedding, and yet also never escaping adolescence. The floor of the wood was, instead, cast with the detritus of the road: old fast food containers, children's toys, articles of clothing, the whole reminiscent of the flotsam and jetsam of the coast, left by some peculiar mechanical tide that intermittently washed from the cutting – only recorded in the odd mudguard and fragment of a number-plate left by the backwash. And, indeed, the sound of the traffic did seem oceanic, for the steady and continuous swash of vehicles past became a soothing background noise, hypnotic almost, such that I thought I might stay there, abandon my life in the outer world and live in this wood, with whatever fae merfolk – pushed into the margins, the borderlands, this last refuge of refuse and greenery – might inhabit it. And, indeed, maybe it was the carbon monoxide that spilt from the peculiar valley, or the obscure desires of such folk, but for a moment I fell to one knee and felt my eyes close, before I awoke with a start, fearing the cutting had stumbled on some entranceway in the geology, or the trees once linked to some imagined geography, and I might wake to find the world moved on, the trees filling across the concrete, covering all but some horse track, and the fae once again expanding into the world.
I stumbled back to the car; but by the time I arrived there, I was wide wake again. I never did find the lighting unit; I can only assume it was obliterated by the uncaring maelstrom of circulating traffic, ground to fragments and scattered into the woods to eventually become the layer of plastic chipping that would keep the growth stunted forever, or perhaps picked up by some bewildered unseely underling, taking its reflectors for jewels, and building it into some undergrowth doorframe.
Either way, the margins between man and nature, between the real and the dream, the conscious and unconscious, need treading carefully, for here the tide pulls both directions, and the shoreline is only available to those willing to risk being divided by the currents.
26 June 2018