It started with the wind, of course. At least I think so. Yes, the wind – because of the sun, and because of the carbon dioxide in the air, which had to do with anthropomorphic climate change, which had to do with carbon in the earth being released, having been trapped since whatever extinction of an earlier geological era, and the whole lot still dancing to the tune of the sun even then, and maybe once up on a time the earth was formed, though whatever time that was, or how you measure it, or whether that was what caused time to be imagined into being in the first place…
(…and surely time is not the x-axis on which the graph of life is plotted but rather its outcome. But that’s a tale for another day.)
… And though somehow it had not rained all day, we were in the middle of a named storm, with a wind whose gusts could knock a cyclist flat. Perversely I took my bike out and headed towards Rouvenac and the Col des Tugnets, a satisfying but normally easy climb of some three or four hundred metres. The headwind, not yet too bad at the bottom, reminded me of Scotland and the extra workload gave rise to a pleasing sensation of effort in my thighs, forcing me to go slowly, trying to anticipate the gusts and steel myself. Cloud patterns raced past overhead, islands of sunlight brushing my skin with warmth between dull cold channels. Nobody else was foolhardy enough to be out riding, none of the grumpy old men with gnarled legs who form the cycling clubs hereabouts.
Above St Jean de Paracol the wind, funnelling round a corner, forced me to dismount. I could have walked on, of course, had I needed to. Instead I turned and raced back down, before repeating a bit of the climb as a bonus, then dropping back into Rouvenac village. Nobody was about as I entered the village, yet I sensed that something was amiss, or afoot.
The reason arrived suddenly. Half an hour earlier, when I passed through in the other direction, there had not been one. But now a tall tree was lying across the road, a cedar, up-ended by a gust of our storm-in-real-time. A man was there immediately with a chainsaw, snedding its many thick branches, and a couple of others were dragging the severed branches away. I arrived just in time to help with piling the branches up at the side of the road. In moments a dozen men were present, two with chainsaws and the rest clearing debris from the road, which was thickly covered with seeds and down from the fallen tree. We worked silently, bar the occasional joke, moving about each other with a natural sense of flow. Vehicles were stopped on either side, and drivers got out to help. The unspoken flow of the road was interrupted, and cars and people built up on each side. But nature must abhor a blockage as much as it does a vacuum, for the same sense of flow was now poured into clearing the fallen tree. Normally taken for granted, an unblocked road was suddenly a profound meaning.
The tree was sappy, aromatic and clogged the saw chains. Still, with one man taking off sections of the trunk and the other working on the branches, the blockage was removed in a quarter of an hour, the only remains a coating of golden fluff and a carpet of nuts, and some heaps of branches. The job done sufficiently, no longer a common cause, the men began to disperse. As I wheeled my bike away, three of them thanked me – just villagers, yet transfigured by their arrival in time and place, tall, elegant as they held their brooms and rakes. Our eyes met, the moment was confirmed. Minutes later everyone was gone and the incident moved to memory. Perhaps everyone was fifteen minutes late for wherever they were going.
I was left in wonder. Where in the history of the earth had this accident begun? Or more immediately, where did the men come from who so quickly were on the spot? How did the situation up-end itself so single-pointedly, so that the blockage could be removed so fast? Had it not been a public highway, of course, the tree could have lain there for days. As it was, it was just minutes. And now, for everyone, except the owner of the tree and whoever was left with all the branches, it was memory, the only evidence in the present the restored normality, the flow on the road.
This is where time emerges… Caused by what? the tree? the wind? A node in the fabric of temporal being, where time intensifies and we are aware again of the eternal moment. We are never outside that moment, but mostly we pay little attention to it. To do so takes a manifestation of this kind – not the French kind (industrial action or a protest march), but also something less than entirely metaphysical – the arrival, in the moment, of a swarm of men to resolve a situation, who remain there as one until the thing is resolved, and who then fade until the scene is silent once again.
Be_flummoxed 