Mighty forces beneath your feet
‘The trick is to change the way you think about time. It’s no use thinking in minutes or hours or days, or even generations. You’ve got to adjust the scale, think in terms of millennia. Then everything you see here is temporary, the lakes, rivers, mountains, all in motion, the changes taking place over millions of years. This valley wasn’t always here: it was created, gouged out by a great glacier, because ice is a moving thing, just a couple of feet a day but scouring and chewing away with these great teeth made of stone, snapping off boulders, gnawing into rock in a process we call … a process we call?
‘Anyone? That’s right, glacial erosion, consisting of …? Wake up, you lot, you know this. Yes, abrasion and plucking! Why’s that funny, Noah? Any reason why the word “plucking” is funny? Tell the class. No, I thought not.
‘So ice is unimaginably violent, much more violent than fire. It destroys but it creates too, like those hollows called … That’s right, corries or cwms here in Wales, those mountain pools where people like me and Mrs Fraser go swimming, unlike you cowards. Phones away, please, unless you’re taking photos for your project. No selfies. Have you been eroded by a glacier, Chrissy? Then no selfies.
‘Go back even further, about 480 million years, and this mountain, highest in Wales, wasn’t even here. It was formed in what’s called the Ordovician period. No, that won’t be in the exam but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know it. O-r-d-o-v-i-c-i-a-n. Long before dinosaurs … No, long before. But, yes, at some point there were dinosaurs here … No, not any more, don’t be daft. Dinosaurs are cool, Ryan, but this is cooler, these forces, these immense forces …
‘Listen to me, please, if you want to get back! When continents collide, these plates of rock buckle and rise above the water and you get volcanoes, here, volcanoes, can you believe it? Close your eyes and look. You know what I mean. Close your eyes and imagine … Yes, imagine dinosaurs if you want, it’s not accurate but pop ’em in. The point is to remember this process doesn’t stop just because humans are here. It’s happening now and it’ll happen when the last human is long gone. Mighty forces beneath your feet. Nothing permanent, everything changing. Sarah Sanders, don’t yawn right in my face, please. Let’s keep walking. Yes, open your eyes first, see if that helps.’
They began their descent. Like rivers, all jokes had to begin somewhere and he sometimes wondered who had started the notion that geography teachers were dull. Was it a book, a disgruntled kid, an embittered physics teacher? He would never dream of criticising a colleague’s discipline, but were the historians really so interesting, bouncing back and forth between the Tudors and the Weimar Republic? No one in the English department was jumping on the desks, and the mathematicians could preach all they wanted about the beauty of numbers: it was all so much Sudoku. And yet somehow, somewhere, the geography joke had come to be and now it was up to Mr Bradshaw, Michael, to defy those expectations and inspire. He led the way, Mrs Fraser – Cleo – herding the stragglers, and down in the valley he spoke of alluvial fans.
‘Just eighteen thousand years ago, which is nothing, the day before yesterday in deep-time terms, the glaciers receded and left this great gift behind.’ He stomped on the ground and they looked dutifully down and saw the gift of mud. ‘This soil, this beautiful dark soil, came from beneath the glacier, like grain ground into flour, washing out over the valley floor in a rich, fertile … Alluvial. Fan. Alluvial, what a great word. And these minerals spread out and made their way into the trees and plants and crops, into the apples you ate, should have eaten, in your packed lunch. Isn’t that amazing? Debris from an ancient glacier inside you now, calcium in your bones, iron in your blood …’ Here Michael paused and wondered if he should take things further, segue into the origins of these elements, of the universe itself, tell them they were all made of stars. The teenage mind was so easily blown but that was chemistry and physics and, besides, the apples were from South Africa.
‘So – any questions?’ he asked, looking out at thirty oily, unfinished faces, some glaring sullenly inside their hoods, others whispering or giggling at private jokes. He was a passionate and committed teacher who tried his best to punch through adolescent indifference, but the questions that preoccupied these kids were not his to answer. Who can identify stratocumulus when your mind is on the hipflask and the vape and whether she likes you? How can a mountain compete with the boil on your chin? Tonight at the youth hostel there would be another game of cat-and-mouse, torch-lit patrols at three a.m., I’ll pretend I didn’t see that. Put it out. Back to your room. Big day tomorrow, and at the end of the residency he would return home, stooped and pale with exhaustion. Still, he would rather not go home.
He was a teacher but not a parent. They’d tried but there had been complications and obstacles, and he struggled to imagine the circumstances now. There was no comparison between the roles and only the most superficial overlap: a parent might teach a child but it’s a mistake for a teacher to parent a pupil. Still, it sometimes seemed as if all the turmoil and angst of adolescence were crammed into the five days of the field trip, not just the mischief and squalor but the emotional stuff too. The popular, self-assured kids could be left to their plots and schemes. Instead, Mr Bradshaw chose to focus his attention on the nervy, awkward kids left to dangle from the end of abseil ropes. Looking at their fizzing, anxious faces it seemed unlikely they were made of stars but, still, he felt a certain professional tenderness.
‘Landscape is life,’ he told them, ‘and when you take in a view like this rather than your phone, Sarah Sanders – I’ve told you before, I will throw it into the next ribbon lake – then you can see its beauty and read it too. Why are farms here? Why’s the soil this colour? Why are clouds over the mountain but not the valley? Why does the rock glint in the sun like that? Look, how magnificent it is! Look!’
He noted the boys at the back, hoods pulled into snorkels, shoulders vibrating with suppressed laughter. He was well liked as a teacher, more than he knew, though he could no longer pull off the larky irreverence required to be adored. He was sincere in his passion for the subject but sincerity invites ridicule and the more passionate he sounded, the more they’d laugh, just as they’d laughed when Mrs Bradshaw moved out and some boys had seen him crying in his car. Really, there was nothing some kids wouldn’t laugh at, nothing at all.