The ferocity encountered in this wild week
Proof of nature’s power, its unpredictability, the transience of even its mightiest moments.
LAST WEEKEND, hammered by Storm Eunice, parts of the valley saw trees uprooted, fences flattened. Friday night brings heavy rain, a river bulging towards its banks.
The morning after, the Calder surges through Sowerby Bridge. Propelled by its current, a goosander slides along its course. Yet yards away, the canal towpath is eerily serene, sprinkled by snowdrops.
On Norland Moor I see two fallen telegraph poles, neatly laid like bodies in a morgue – uprooted not by Eunice, but by November’s less severe Storm Arwen. For weeks they were seen, twisted like some crooked crucifix, leering over the icy pond. Now they lie filed by the moorland edge, dead wires tangled about redundant fuses.
Up on the moors this nippy Saturday, though, the weather, though still blustery, with sleety rain, is not tempestuous. The Calder Valley is dusted by a silvery veneer of snow, crackling beneath my feet in soft, cold crunches. Along the horizon, the roofs are glazed white, church spires lifting like beaks of Arctic birds. Towards Sowerby, Mount Tabor, Jerusalem Farm, hills are swathed in opalescent snow, blending into seas of creamy cloud.
Hard to believe that twelve hours earlier, a storm advanced. The news is full of pictures of London’s O2 arena, white roof ripped open like a battered Big Top. Homes were
evacuated, lorries overturned. Three people lost their lives.
The ghostly disc of a snowy sun trembles amid clouds, a
precious pearl wrapped up in folds of silk. A wintry mirage, it is obscured by clouds, before re-emerging like some freezing phoenix.
And now, the rain intensifies.
All evening, it sweeps in, pushing canal and river ever more towards their limits. By night, its lashing down mercilessly, the kind of rain that drenches jeans and seeps through shoes, that wheedles its way into your bones, relentless, almost Biblical.
Sunday begins mildly, my corner of the valley enveloped in picture post card calm. Church bells peal, blackbirds chirp, all traces of snow gone. Like the storm, it is now a memory, washed out by furious night rain, thawed in the tepid winter sun.
By the canal, I search for some metaphor with which to comprehend the changeability of the elements, but notice only the shuffling shapes of birds among branches of denuded trees, the tiny snowdrops with their finger high stems, still secure, in the wake of so many mangled buildings nationwide. They are joined by burgeoning crocuses, and sheathes of daffodils, ranged along the banking like slim shafts of morning sun.
These few days seem proof of nature’s power, its unpredictability, the transience of even its mightiest moments. As I write, the media warn more storms may come, as, exacerbated by human abuse, the planet warms. But I am no climatologist, and instead of any astute assessment, blame or, explanation, I can only reflect on the ferocity and variation, and glimmers of resilience, encountered in this wild week, and on how, outside my window in the black night, the rain comes tumbling down, again.