Yesterday brought the first early-morning snow of winter to Cambridge. Having been tipped off by the forecast the day before, I knew what the muffled calls and screams of children meant when they woke me up, even with the curtains closed and my brain still groggy. Within a few hours of sunrise, the half-inch of snow was latticed into slush on the lawns and rooftops, and soon after that, was gone. (Having spent nine Decembers in Idaho, I’m not impressed.)
Today brought near-frozen sunshine, which I’m now watching gather into sunset just after 3 pm. The walnut tree outside my window is all a-crag with empty branches; I can only see a single leaf clinging and waving.
All this is to say that winter is here. So my post today is a tribute to the memory of the glorious autumn I was so unusually intimate with here in Newnham, working at my south-facing window in my college room, taking strolls for breaks. Here are some of my field notes.
Up the road over the edge of Cherry Hinton, onto the gentle rise of the Gog Magog Hills and their furrowed hide of fields, and I pull off the shoulder where a quiet leaf-screened path is bisected by the motorway. I’m partway between Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits and Wandlebury Country Park (which will one day have its own blog post), and I’m walking on a fallen giant—by one account, the Gawr Madoc of the Gog Magog Hills, slain by the Trojans, crashing and settling and growing over to create what little relief there is in the flat fenlands of Cambridgeshire. The walk is a long-cut through yellow leaves and autumn-ripened berries to another slice of nature reserve, this one copper-colored and called Beechwoods.
Near the edge of Cambridge, in Cherry Hinton, is a stealthy nature reserve. The only hint of the place from the street is the fence threaded with green. That’s not such an uncommon sight in Cambridge, where hedges and trees screen a lot of things from view. These particular barriers don’t seem to hide much—there’s a narrow tangle of trees but no sense of deepening beyond them as you might expect in a nature reserve. Many people, I suspect, zoom past without an inkling that anything is there, as I would have despite attending church less than a block away every week.
But I’ve been tipped off. After church one Sunday I go looking for an entrance, a place to stash my bike, a wooden gate and descending steps into the green. I enter another dimension—one of several tucked into Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits.
A graveyard in England is rife with life. Even in October the graveyard is green. Soil rarely shows, shrouded by a tangle of grass in all stages of growth and senescence, leaves of so many different shapes they lose definition to human eyes, tough stems and new stems, shocks of roots, crowds of brambles, clumps of moss, and even now, flowers, little white clusters of yarrow. In the spring there are snowdrops and daffodils. Under the plants are crawling things, and in the trees are flying things. Footpaths are worn over grass or blanketed in rust-colored yew needles (death-dealing if you eat them); headstones are skew like Jack-o’-lantern teeth with a green patina of age and the steady crawl of ivy. If the Friends of the Ascension Parish Burial Ground didn’t have their monthly work parties to keep the life at bay, within months, perhaps, you wouldn’t know there were any dead kept and remembered here on All Souls’ Lane.
Newnham College and its surrounding lush, peaceful neighborhood was one of the reasons I wanted to end my 6-month pandemic hiatus and return to Cambridge for the fall. In a time when mobility is limited, this is a good place to be.
I went to the New Zealand Ecological Society conference, held on the campus of an agricultural college just outside of Christchurch in Lincoln, largely because my supervisor was going and it was him I was coming to the South Island to see. I wasn’t giving a talk or going for a particular session; instead I saw it as a chance to sample different foci and ecosystems—eg the Braided River ecosystem, which had a whole session. I didn’t mind missing an entire afternoon of the conference to explore Christchurch one day.
After a few days of watching presentations and talking to other scientists about Australasian plants and their classification and evolution(and eating really good food), as well as giving my own presentation about hebes, I took some time to wander around the Te Papa museum. Te Papa Tongarewa, the full name of the msueum, means Our Place in Māori (I’ve also seen it translated roughly as “treasure box”) and is the national museum of New Zealand, showcasing cultural and natural history. There’s a lot to learn about indigenous Māori culture and history—and in general on this trip I came to appreciate how visible and respected this culture is in New Zealand. There was also an excellent new exhibit put on by the Natural History department called Te Taiao Nature, spotlighting New Zealand’s flora and fauna and geology. In addition to the visible exhibits, the museum is a repository for collections of natural and cultural specimens, including an entire herbarium of preserved NZ plants. This is actually where most of my hebe specimens came from for my research (I extracted DNA from little leaf fragments taken from the original specimens). There are lots of people working behind the scenes, curating the collections and doing research on them, including my excellent collaborator who sent the specimens.
It’s been a while. Perhaps a predictable while, for a blog started with good intentions, but complicated by circumstances, given that it’s a place-based blog. During the year since my last blog post, I was only in Cambridge five scattered months, split up by a month-long trip to New Zealand and a few weeks at home in the US for the holidays, and then cut short by the slapdown so many countless people have experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, in about the span of a week, I went from anticipating the burgeoning spring, walks on the fen, and concerts in college chapels, to packing up my room, booking a flight home, and leaving Cambridge for the foreseeable future. Although I didn’t know how long I would need to hunker down at home, I had a feeling it would be months. Unlike many of my friends on year-long programs, however, I was fairly confident I would be back, and only had to mourn the probable loss of a season or two in Cambridge.
Now I have a return flight to Cambridge booked for September, almost exactly 6 months from the day I left. Although the future is no more certain than it was when I left, I feel the need to grasp the Cambridge time slipping inexorably by. It won’t be quite the same Cambridge—one of the reasons it didn’t feel impossible to leave in the first place—but the cultural-physical landscape of millennia is still there.
I also feel the need to keep constructing my little word-lenses for what I can still access of that landscape, as well as for what I remember of the pre-COVID Cambridge which never made it onto this blog (some of which is sitting in half-finished posts already). The urge to write that I described in my first post has never gone away–just gotten a little held up in execution. So I’ve made a goal to start posting regularly again, long or short, every two weeks, as of now on Saturdays.
Meanwhile, I thought I’d give a little taste of the places I’ve lavished my place-love on when I haven’t been in Cambridge over the last year.
In St. Edward’s Passage, one of the many stone-and-cobble
folds of the Cambridge city centre off of the teeming King’s Parade, there is a
secondhand bookshop that is exactly what you would expect a Cambridge bookshop
to be. Looking over the little jungle-y churchyard of St. Edward King and
Martyr Church, an unassuming but functional blue awning announces in bold
letters G. DAVID, EST 1896, and a few
outdoor shelves, crates, and display windows announce a clutter of books.
Entering puts you in a bookshelf sandwich. You are pressed breathtakingly close
to dozens of dashing and eclectic strangers; breathing books, inhaling titles. (The
same could be said about your proximity to the other patrons dancing past you in
the between-bookshelf space.) The first glimpses on my first visit were enough
to put me in a literary swoon—poetry by Ted Hughes, contemporary fiction, something
called Treasured Island: A Book Lover’s
Tour of Britain, Ursula K LeGuin, Dickens, Darwin. There were quirky posters
and postcards pinned to the wall, black and white photos of historical David’s
Bookshop milestones, photos of notable people with G. David bags (including
Michelangelo’s David), and an envelope addressed only to “David’s Bookshop, The
Passage, Cambridge” with a sticky note proudly announcing that it found its way
here. And there were more rooms, and a downstairs. (No photography allowed, or
I would have eaten it all up in my camera.)
Needless to say, I left with more books than I had come to buy.
I’m not sure if I had heard of punting before Cambridge came onto my radar, but it’s become a regular part of my vocabulary since arriving. Punting—pushing a flat-bottomed boat down the shallow River Cam with a long pole—is one of the iconic Cambridge things (incidentally, Oxford does it too).
Punters and St. John’s College from the River Cam (photo credit: my dad)
Outside of midwinter, the city-center stretch of the Cam is reliably busy with the rectangular wooden boats, which are laden with tourists and students reclining on the seats, punters standing on the boat-backs and ducking under bridges, poles dipping up and down. Riverfront colleges have their own little fleets of punts docked in side-bays for use by college members (or friends with connections). There are also multiple commercial punting companies that advertise pricey guided punting tours—the hired punters recite Cambridge factoids of sometimes questionable veracity in affected guide voices—or self-hire boats. So you’ll see experienced punters gliding smoothly around the self-hired tourists spinning slow circles, and prows bump easily, but rarely do people fall in; the boats are stable and the pace is inherently relaxed.
