I wonder about truth and what it is as I chase it around and play with it. Recollections rarely come in chronological order. Memory wanders in the darkness, and the harder I try to remember, the more it seems to dissolve in front of me and take a different direction. As soon as I start to examine a story with anything more intense than a sidelong glance, it shifts in reaction to the scrutiny, reconstructs itself and then changes again, like looking into a kaleidoscope: the colours are identical, their patterns slightly different every time, their detail constantly changes yet the picture remains true to itself.
All the facts that I recall easily are just high points and low ones, bits remembered only because they have some emotional impact or connection to something seen or remembered. They are like a string of pearls: tarnished pearls that have been shut in a drawer and rarely taken out. As I pull them out and look at them some of them are missing, and life seems like mostly string without a pearl in sight – and then a cluster of them appear, tangled and out of sequence. There is no certainty there, and yet, I will try to unravel the strands.
Often I do not disturb myself with language and I just look and enjoy. At other times words come silently creeping in on insect legs. Some start to build a nest, develop a theme – a twig here, a bud there – so I let them. I like to write bits, tiny bits of stuff that fly by like leaves, insubstantial, scattering, and could be gone if I didn’t grab them out of the air. Bits of ordinary stuff that I see and that I can hold in my head in their entirety. Like individual memories or the fragments of pottery that I find in the molehills. Here – alongside and flowing sometimes in and around the simple yet often bizarre facts about how to catch a mole – are these fragments, sometimes sharp, sometimes smooth, written for the most part while wandering across a field with a bag of traps.
Telling the whole story of the life of a mole is equally impossible. Hidden in the darkness, his story is created from myths and a handful of observations passed on from person to person, each with their own point of view. The moles, like us, are deeply mysterious creatures, and we will only ever catch a glimpse of their truth.
What things seem to be matters far more to me than what things actually are. What they actually are is unknowable. I don’t like that prison of hard and cold facts. Facts do not set you free, they trap you into a constructed view of reality that is final. The only truth is here, and here, and here in the three seconds before it becomes a reconstruction. Really I want to forget. Forgetting is freedom and forgiveness but more than anything it is a process of immersing myself in what is happening now.
I could tell this story with myself as the villain or the hero, innocent bystander or agent provocateur, and each time I’d be telling a form of the ‘truth’. What is the value of a truth that has an infinite number of forms? There is a difference between truth and honesty, so I am going to tell you one of the millions of honest stories that I could tell you that might be good enough to call ‘true’. One of the stories that led me to the point of kneeling in a muddy field in December with a dead mole in my hand and deciding it was time to stop killing.
HOW TO CATCH a mole, life as a molecatcher. Written in the season of catching moles, instead of catching moles. I think the only certainty I can give you about this book is that by the end you will know a lot more about moles.
Daybreak
AS I SIT here writing at my kitchen table, a ladybird is crawling on my leg. I accidentally bring a lot of wildlife home from work. Beetles and spiders, the occasional grasshopper under my collar, ants in the creases of my work trousers or fallen into my boots.
The ladybird on my knee is trying to unfurl her wings. The red wing cases hinge open and the black, fly-like wings come out – but the right one is broken, bent back, and will not unfold. She tries three, four times, slowly folding it away and then trying to open it again. She wants to leave. Perhaps I damaged her, I don’t know. It is easy to damage the quiet fragile things carelessly, to break and maim without even noticing.
Yesterday I was clearing away fallen leaves; a robin hopping behind me was eating the beetles and the worms that I exposed. I uncovered them; they were eaten; the robin ate. Things break, things scar, and scars are healed, but they twinge from time to time. Every small step we take on this earth has consequences and each evening when I get home I scrub out from under my nails the messy business of birth and sex and death and decay and I try to wash it all away.
IT IS EASIER not to think.
I get my hands dirty every day nurturing seeds and pulling up weeds. Playing with chaos, tuning it up slightly to make it a bit more exciting; planting a red garden or a white one; sometimes embracing chaos because we think it is beautiful, and sometimes destroying it because we decide that it is messy. Destroying moles and their apparent chaos is one of the seasonal jobs that comes around every year in a predictable way.
There are intertwining rhythmic cycles that thump along: a weekly mowing of the grass; a yearly pruning of roses; trimming the wisteria three times a year; the annual laurel hedge cut in August; picking apples in the autumn when they tell me they are ready; waiting for the frost before I prune the fruit trees; digging up and storing dahlias after two frosts, then replanting them when the risk of frost has passed. Making compost, planning flower beds, choosing plants and buying seeds in the winter. Planting, weeding and clearing, managing annuals, biennials and perennials, and trapping moles in the winter and the early spring.
The year is marked and celebrated in quarters at the solstices and the equinoxes, and these points mark out the year for anybody involved with nature. They are the beginning points of the seasons. Rhythms, long cycles and short ones, interweave, driven by the ever-changing weather, the duration of daylight and the temperature. Every point is the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. Each autumn I rake the red leaves from beneath the same maple tree and put them on the same compost heap. Except, of course, they are not quite, not exactly the same leaves, the same tree or the same compost heap as they were last year. The moles I catch in the same tunnels are not the same moles that I caught last year.
These overlapping and intertwined cycles cannot help but take me inside myself to whatever is there on any given day. All I can do is reflect. My wife, Peggy, goes away for her work often, my children are grown and living their independent lives in homes of their own, and I regularly spend days without seeing another human being – two, three, four days in a row sometimes – and am unable to use my words aloud. I have my cat.
I AM COLD like a spider this morning. It is still very dark. Perhaps I’m too old for this kind of early, but sleep’s no longer my lover. I have lost her for ever. She rejects old people like me. The internet says it is because chemical poisons in the environment have calcified my pineal gland. That’s how it goes, it says. Mercury, calcium, fluoride. It says I need to eat more chemicals to detoxify. It prescribes yet more turmeric.
My incomplete dreams break into my half-waking life, I’m lost in tunnels alone and chased, I lie there as cold as a frog. I struggle with blocked nostrils (I’m allergic to something indoors), and I watch for a long time while the dark decreases, and seems from blackness to break into fragments, microscopic dots of grey floating, ungraspable, before the dawn, before the sun rises. My muscles hurt and lack strength – I worked all day yesterday and last night I drank whisky. I ponder lifting the covers. I pull myself down into the warmth for just a moment, just a tiny moment. My slow eye transitions from monochrome