FOr ten days later, Buxton was buried in snow, further tethered in sub-zero conditions night after night. At Lightwood there is a steep valley surrounded by ancient beech trees and almost permanently in shadow, so as I followed a treacherous route to the valley floor I could feel the temperature drop even further momentarily.
The target is a water pipe. The waterfall is only one meter long, but the ruthless flow of water has washed its catchment basin into an arc of sand and gravel 3 meters in diameter. These rocks are covered with flatweed moss, while the dry south side is decorated with broad bucklers and deer’s tongue ferns that have been blighted by frost.
To my dismay the spray was piling up along the edges like a glorious ice display case. Beech saplings on one side have been soaked and slowly thickened to form side ice tubes, each with a living twig at its core. Further chaotic icicles form from these horizontal supports, but they don’t rely on differentiated “teeth,” so to speak—they’re welded into corrugated jaws, like some kind of fantasy carnivore from the Ice Age Fossilized remains of animals.
The way the whole organism shimmers from its core, partly because I moved and changed the angle of the light, but also because of the beech-screened sun spots passing over the ice bones, is remarkable. The formation at my feet was equally weird and beautiful. The entire ice shelf is a block of ice, but it’s not a horizontal sheet like water: it’s irregularly bulged and globular, like molten metal or polyps on a coral formation.
What’s most interesting is that all of these suggestive shapes are formed by tiny droplets of water randomly splashing outward day after day, then solidifying into increasingly complex shapes. In this respect, they seem to be reminiscent of life itself: the way single-celled organisms—and recall, microbes have owned the Earth for a full billion years—self-assemble into more complex life forms. From bacteria came such wonderful creatures as the saber-toothed tiger, the nautilus, and the orangutan.
The strangest thing is that I went back to that place two days later. The whole world has nothing left. Except for the words written here.