Andy Brown

A Long Passage & A Doctour of Phisik

The herons of Netherton Woods are standing still to watch the stillness that hangs at the end of their bills. They are waiting for a movement; a stirring underneath the silent glass; a sign to herald the end of their hunger here, this mizzled Devon morning.

I have watched them in my own stillness and waited-them-out for what seems like an age, but they have more patience than I – they are masters of persistence; models of how to vanish through your own being.

Once, I watched a flock of blue herons at Witty’s Lagoon, Pacific North West. Those birds showed the same perseverance; just as the water there performed the same tricks it performs here – in and out, up and down, endlessly circling.

Now the Canada geese have landed, their elegant vee reduced to a clatter of ungainly feet across the water’s eye some yards away where the estuary carves gullies in the slow-emerging silt.

Soon they will begin their long passage to fly across the Rockies where, even now in life or memory, my daughter stands

washing her hair in a turbulent stream keen to see a grizzly roll from the forest and scoop a struggling sockeye from the blue. There is so much potential in her bones, in her mind, as she flips her head back, slow motion droplets flying in the air. To her side, her brother slips off his shirt and shoes, to brave the rushing melt. He stilts in like a wader; his skin taut. Nascent.

I look up: the herons are gone; the geese too. It’s time to go back home. I dare not move.