Poems by Rogelio Luque-Lora

Out There Lives a Fox

by Rogelio Luque-Lora

From Canary Spring 2019

Rogelio grew up in the Guadalquivir watershed in Spain and currently lives in the Anglian river basin in England.

For the first time since this started I woke up and I did not want to do the rest of the day. I was too aware of the relentless pangs of suffering that this would involve. It’s true that I had not looked forward to anything in months, but so far I had powered through with the momentary warmth of fleeting contentedness.

Soon I found myself walking south out of my house, not paying attention to anything in particular. On a better day I would doubtless have paused to take in the oaks in bloom. No two holm oaks bear flowers of the same colour, so that the land is painted with a plethora of shades of ochre, copper, gold – only one of each hue. When the wind blows, clouds of pollen diffuse this pattern, like water poured on aquarelle.

About a hundred and fifty yards from the house is a barn where straw bales are stored. To me the bales have always appeared to be a structural component of the building – I have never seen the back wall. As kids we would climb to the top of the stack, about six bales high, and explore the uneven surface around us. Only a few times did we venture all the way to the opposite end of the barn, where the air was dark and thick with dust.

I hopped over the fence by the barn and my feet landed on grass. It was the spring window when the grass is high enough to force you to kick a path through it, but still fresh and supple enough for this not to be unpleasant. Leaving the garden gravel and paddock mud behind invariably feels like stepping out of the premises of domestication, however different the current wood-pasture – called a dehesa – may be from the Mediterranean forest that was here before humans arrived.

The novelty of feeling grass underfoot had not yet worn off when I was quietly startled by a fox fifteen or twenty yards to my right. He was unaware of me, too occupied with finding breakfast. His face was pointed, exaggeratedly so, like a caricature in a field guide. His fur was homogeneously tawny except for the black tips of his ears; his gait silent, accurate, but not fearsome. He was confident, springy, looking well aware of the importance of the task at hand and completely confident of his ability to accomplish it.

I lifted my binoculars to my eyes as gradually as I could. With enhanced vision and unaided hearing, I entered the silent movie that is remote wildlife watching. He was hunting mice, following his instinct and stomach. And so my gaze stayed with him as he searched the shrubs and burrows in the vicinity.

I noticed my eyes searching for a collar on his neck. There was none, of course – this creature was wild. He acted according to his own will, not mine, and shunned my company, as well as that of my dogs, who wear collars as tags of their domestication.

After searching in three or four more thickets of thistle, he brought his trotting to a pause and looked up towards the house. Perhaps ten seconds elapsed and he had not moved an inch. I reckoned he was pondering what to do next. Finally he resumed his search, steering away from me. I followed, his instinct and stomach guiding me southwest, until he momentarily disappeared into a dried-up stream bed.

When he came into view again, he was trotting straight towards me. I remained baffled and still, but I should have crouched down. Predictably, he turned away as soon as he saw me, doubling his speed as he ran towards his home and away from mine, and left me filled with a muffled sense of regret for not having been quicker to react.

I trudged on, heading towards where he had escaped to, without particularly tracking him – I was not expecting to see him again. But the encounter left a lingering feeling of relief from worries that until then had been permeating each moment of my days. During the short while that the fox was nearby he monopolised my attention. My eyes tracked his every move, and my mind pondered only what he would do next.

There was no place for my usual obsessions in that mindset. The fox was utterly not me: I could not communicate any of these thoughts to him (unlike my dogs who are responsive to my mood) and in him I saw no trace of human history, nothing that my worries could relate to. I had stepped outside of domestication, but it appears that this had also given me, quite immediately, an outside view of my human concerns.

Perhaps I was predisposed to feel this way. In one of the articles that I keep going back to, psychologist and ecology writer David Kidner emphasizes the importance of knowing that there remains nature independent of humanity. In his words:

The knowledge that whatever our own personal problems, or the ineptitude, corruption, or blunder of whole societies, there is somewhere ‘out there’ a natural realm within which one can find refuge, renewal and certainty, is a fundamental source of security.

Kidner elaborates this idea by drawing upon anthropological work by Tim Ingold and Robert Williamson, who suggest that in many indigenous societies, one’s life is profoundly located within natural processes and places. Williamson explains that for the Inuit the most restorative factor is the habitat. He tells the tale of a young hunter who, upon hearing news of the death of his wife and the removal of his children, drove a borrowed dog team into the wild, on his own, for two days and two sleepless nights. As they watched him disappear into the distance, everyone understood his reaction. Unlike the bereaved Inuit, I did not set out with the formed intention of escaping the environment in which my psychological ailments brewed. But the restorative effects were there all the same.

Stories and accounts of grief-stricken people escaping to the wild also exist in multifarious forms in Western cultures (see, for example, chapter 24 in Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk). And the need for the knowledge that there are wild creatures and places ‘out there’ outside of society’s influence appears to be shared by many in industrialized societies. For instance, in The End of Nature, Bill McKibben explains how plans from oil companies wanting to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on the northern coast of Alaska, caused sectors of the American public to speak up against them despite the fact that the refuge was at the time only visited by a few hundred people each year. This case also suggests that some of the sense of security derived from the existence of pristine nature extends far beyond the wild places themselves.

In McKibben’s book the idea that many of us need a sense of independence in nature is part of the overall lament for the loss of this independence. The text’s main theme is that, since the advent of fossil fuels, humanity’s impact on Earth has left no unaltered nature. McKibben is among the many environmentalists who claim that the effects of climate change have altered every inch of the world: ocean currents, the duration of each season, the frequency and intensity of storms.

I am glad I found independence and self-will in a landscape that has been farmed for millennia. Like many others, I hope that I can escape future struggles by being in the presence of animals who do not live according to our schemes and concerns, whose impulses are not controlled by ours. As I walked back towards the house, I thanked my cows for keeping the forest open enough for my encounter to have taken place and for allowing the wild to infiltrate a land which I no longer felt I could call mine.

© Rogelio Luque-Lora

Waiting for the Rain

by Rogelio Luque-Lora

From Canary Winter 2019-20

Drought

The last couple of goats walk into the pen and Cáscaras pulls the gate shut.

‘Every day looking up at the sky, desperate for it to rain.’

Antonio presses the inside of his boot against the ground, and with a sideways flick pushes dust into the air.

‘If we just got 15 litres the grass would start to come out. The air would change, the trees’d change… even we’d change.’

It is late September and it has not rained since May. Even when it did rain in spring, it did so scarcely. The countryside has been thirsty for a long time. In a good year, with well-timed rain between autumn and spring, our livestock need no feeding: the land provides. But this year we have already been feeding them for months. There is still some browsing left up in the hills, but we cannot take the animals there as they would have nothing to drink.

We say goodbye to the goatherd and drive home. The road cuts through our farm and, looking from side to side, Antonio voices his worry about how little it would take for these hills to catch fire. A cigarette butt, the smallest of sparks. Or a vindictive poacher seeking retaliation for having been caught shooting wildlife on our land. His grip on the steering wheel tightens.

‘Sometimes when I’m in the living room on my own in the afternoon, when it’s too hot to be outdoors, I wake up thinking I can smell smoke and hurry outside – but there’s nothing. One worries to the point of imagining things that aren’t there.’

I have heard him say this countless times now, but he looks just as stressed as always. He glances at his forearm, locks eyes with me:

‘My hairs stand on end just thinking about it.’

I am sitting at my desk, and through the window can be seen a curtain of dust blowing Eastwards: our soil being taken away from us. Anxious, I resolve to walk.

It is just before sundown and a full moon has risen. The red sun to the West, the pale moon to the East, and the land hanging in between.

The cows are all crowded in the field adjacent to our garden, the only place where the water troughs are fed from a well. It is painful to watch them standing so still – nothing on the ground for them to graze on, nothing to tempt them out of their stupor.

I have not walked long before all the cattle have been left behind me, and I am left alone with the trees and the wildlife. Our farm is a dehesa: a Mediterranean forest which has been thinned to allow direct sunlight to reach the soil and create pasture. But the pasture is mostly gone now, the sweet-scented yellow of dry grass replaced with a dusty and depressing brown.

I continue down the path with the regular tapping and rasping of my walking stick for company. My eyes jump from oak to oak, and I love the individuality that is granted to each of them by the open space around them. Each has grown in its particular way, free of the shading influence of its peers.

And I root for them, like they must be rooting for moisture. This year’s crop of acorns is heavy, but if the drought continues the trees will drop them before they are ripe, and the livestock will not take to them as keenly.

I leap across dry gullies and walk in empty spring beds. Painful signs of the absence of that which has shaped this landscape. I reach our shrinking reservoir, and a flock of cormorants takes to the air in rising spirals. When they are perhaps 90 feet above me, they straighten their flight towards the public reservoir at the bottom of the valley.

I head home. On my way back I am startled by the hollow sound of a green acorn hitting the baked ground.

It is now October and the days are shorter, but the heat and drought remain. These are two things which do not fit together in our minds: short evenings should go hand in hand with rain and dropping temperatures. Meteorological dissonance suffuses the air and the land.

Antonio is waiting for me by the tractor, onto which is hooked a trailer stacked with straw bales. He sees me and gets in the tractor, and I jump on the trailer and we set off. Paths have a two-inch layer of dust on them, which the tyres scatter into the air.

Upon hearing the engine, cows flock towards us at an excited trot. They trail behind us in almost single file. At Antonio’s command, I unfold my penknife and cut the four strings that bind together the first of the bales. With each cut there is a thud as tension is released and the bale expands. With the fourth cut the ends of the bale drop either side of the trailer. The cows set to eating the dry straw.

When I have dispatched the last of the bales, I use the bundle of strings I have collected to brush the remaining straw off the surface of the trailer. Antonio stops the engine and joins me. The field is strewn with square mounds of straw, cattle congregated around each of them. They are all pregnant: we have been separating mothers from the rest of the herd as soon as they have given birth, and Antonio tries to judge which will be the next ones to deliver. He gives me his worried look again.

‘I look at them and I’m scared to think about what’s still to come.’

The land is very quiet, and we cannot help wondering where all the wildlife has gone. I think: how cruel that the lives and deaths of so many creatures are determined by the most impassive of forces.

Rain

On October 14th Antonio noticed the cows frisking. The weather’s about to change, he said.

On October 17th I watched from the kitchen window as the sky darkened and the wind shook the leaves on the apple trees. It was no summer wind – too fresh and fickle.

And at 5pm on that day water started to fall out of the sky. How strange the idea of this had seemed in the preceding months. And yet all around us autumn was finally unfolding.

As is often the case in arid and semi-arid regions, when the rain finally came it did so with great energy. Hail, lightning and thunder enveloped us until after dusk. In our excitement we did not even think about the soil runoff which must have been taking place, but this was a price we were very willing to pay for water which we could barely go without.

It is difficult to articulate the joy and relief we experienced that day. I realised then that the land was not the only thing which had become parched during the drought. Rain can be refreshing for the mind and heart as well as for the soil.

Another strange thing happened that evening as clouds discharged their contents onto the ground around me. I was filled with memories of winters spent on the farm as a child. Times when the grass was soft and thick, and the streams ran and the frogs croaked. As if these memories had lain under the dust and were now being unearthed by the raindrops pouring onto it.

That night, despite the cooler air, I went to bed with the windows wide open. Listening to the rain, I imagined it falling on each of my favourite spots of the farm. I paid my full attention to the sounds that filled the room. I listened to the land through the rain, in the same way that one can hear the trees through the wind.

On the following day I walked and rode on horseback and walked again. The countryside smelled of autumn: the rich scent of dry grass which has just started to rot, the earthy smell of watered soil. The sounds were autumnal too: wherever it was that the birds had been hiding when the drought got too much, they had all emerged now.

Mosses also awoke from their dormancy. Over the summer they had become dry crusts on the bark of oak trees and were barely noticed. But with astonishing speed they had now puffed up and glowed with green fluorescence.

The trees, cleaned of their dust, gleamed, and the haze washed out of the air. Millions, billions of seeds germinating, and bacteria mobilizing in the soil under my feet.

The soil… which held so many promises.

Drought

Those promises were never kept, or at least they had not yet been kept when I left the country in the middle of January. That autumn we got frustratingly, despairingly, small amounts of rainfall in a few isolated pockets. The grass never fully emerged, and I have found few things as depressing as the sound of the well pump filling the troughs as late as December. I left without having seen the springs running, and by the time I returned in late June the rainy season was already over.

For weeks and months I walked on dry ground and, like Cáscaras, often found myself looking up at the sky with a clenched heart and an air of resignation. Only where the ground is level and the scant moisture accumulated, a scatter of green lay between what little dry grass there was left and the dusty soil. Slopes remained barren and brown. On the rare occasions when some rain fell, I was overcome with sudden surges of wishful hope, before Antonio’s sobriety brought me back to reality.

I have lived abroad from the age of eighteen, and since then that autumn was the only time that I have been able to spend several months continuously on the farm. It is impossible to fully suppress the thought that if I had picked any other year to go back, I would have had a merrier time.

But the more I entertain that thought, the more I realize how much I would have hated not being there when the land was suffering to suffer with it.