The Unexpected Poetry of Sleeping Outside

Walking in the Welsh mountains this spring, I found a lamb missing its eyes. It was a young one, hooves small as un-cracked walnuts. No cuts or blood on the fleece—nothing a dog or fox would do. I only knew what had happened because that morning my friend, a woman who lived all her life there in Snowdonia, told me that ravens killed lambs by gleaning them of their soft parts. “They take the eyes before the lamb’s dead,” she said.

The lamb was on its side, and a snow drift had filled the small harbor of its belly. The ravens were nearby, lifting and settling on an oak, folding themselves in the wind.

I’d been lost for a while by then, coming down the wrong side of the mountain in a blizzard. Looking for a road or a farmhouse, finding neither. Nothing but lines of stonewalls running away. I pushed through the prickly gorse, tripped over tussocks. My boots were wet from slipping into a stream. The snow blotted out anything beyond a hundred feet.

Leaving the lamb, I followed a stonewall, figuring it would lead to a road. But the snow was too strong by then, stinging my eyes, so when I walked past a ledge I crouched there, watched the snow catch in the gorse and whip overhead.  The snow and the long walk was opening some weariness in me, and I felt sleep coming.

I nap outside as often as I can. It is one of the great joys of my life, I think. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of the Open Road, “Now I see the secret of making of the best persons, / It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” In bed, my dreams are only my subconscious pile-driving me with cute narratives themed anxiety or doubt. But outside—sunny days in a field or under a tree when it’s drizzling—I dream of big sounds or gestures or shapes; I sometimes wake up humming. Not camping, with a sleeping bag and tent and careful preparation for bed and the constant scrape of polyester. No, I’d rather be huddled somewhere and a little underprepared, nothing overhead or below, day or night, in the way Mary Oliver writes in Sleeping in the Forest.

I slept as never before,
A stone on the riverbed,
Nothing between me and the white fire of the stars,
But my thoughts.

I’m sure the landscape affects us in ways likely more powerful than we realize—because it is a magnetism easily felt on the edge of consciousness, I’ve found. The same temptation for rest—in whatever way you want to read rest—that Robert Frost might have felt: “My little horse must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near / Between the woods and the frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year.” I know the drug of a between-place. That specific type of song you hear when you’re unaccounted for in the woods, or on a Welsh mountainside. The sweetness of resting where or when you aren’t supposed to: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” Despite the metaphors in that poem, perhaps he should have shrugged off his promises that night. At least settled in for a nap.

Surprises come. Last summer in southern England, walking to find my grandmother’s childhood home, I woke with a field mouse in my pocket eating the peanuts I carried. In Norway I woke under a boulder to a rabbit hunter firing off a few rounds above me. I’ve napped in the salt marshes at home countless times, especially afternoons in the autumn, because the marsh grass smells good, is a pillow, and warms  under the sun. The high tide has woken me there, touching my clothes. Asleep in heather fields, moors. I still think about a nap I took on a mountain summit above the Arctic Circle, where I dreamt of the color yellow and woke to a sea eagle flying below me.

The week before arriving in Wales I woke beside Irish poet John O’Donohue’s grave, way out in the west, where it’s all wind and sky and the sound of wild sea. “To live in a valley is to enjoy a private sky,” O’Donohue wrote of his home. Two old men were standing over me when I opened my eyes. “Oh!” one of them had gasped, holding up his hands. “I thought we’d found a body. Just practicing, are you?” O’Donohue, who described death as “a presence who walks the road of life with you,” would have liked the man’s phrasing, I think. To practice in and with death. “On your own,” O’Donohue wrote in his book on Celtic spirituality, Anam Cara, “or with others, it is always there with you. When you were born, it came out of the womb with you; with the excitement at your arrival, nobody noticed it. Though his presence surrounds you, you may still be blind to its companionship. The name of this presence is death.”

So in Wales, I wedged myself between the boulder and tussock, lifted the collar of my canvas coat, tucked my pant-cuffs into my socks, and fell asleep to wait out the storm.

*

I thought it didn’t snow in Wales. Isn’t that the whole point of the Dylan Thomas poem? That the snow was mythological and distantly past, as he explains here:

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: “It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

For a few Christmas Eves a long time ago my family would listen to Thomas’s recording of that poem. Outside, during those years, the wind coming off the sea pushed snow into drifts high on the old stonewalls, and my friend and I would dig tunnels into them. I, too, feel like there was more snow then. Up the road, the swamp in the forest froze, making paths of ice winding through islands of moss and trees. Our neighbor would cut the underbrush so you could skate fast as you wanted, hooking a hand on a limb to spin into the next ice-path disappearing around gnarled oak. We’d skate through those paths all day, until evening inked overhead. Hot chocolate, chocolate balls, and chocolate chip biscotti waited at my friend’s house, closest to the swamp.

The paths still freeze over, and I walked through them this winter, testing the weight of myself. I stood in the forest, watching the snow filter down through the winter-blackened trees. A Great-Horned Owl moaned from across the fields.  Everything was nearly the same as in my childhood—the ice, the tipped-over oaks, the sound of the trees in the wind—but instead of feeling happy, I only felt nostalgic. A pain for the home where I was standing, which, I suppose, is simply a pain for the past.

*

I woke in Wales. The land had filled with snow, the sky cleared of it. A singer of old American ballads once told me that after you learn a song you must sleep at least once before you perform it. To really know it, you have to let your dreams take hold of it, he said. Let it seep into your subconscious. Walking away from the ledge, I was thankful for the tiredness that had come—it did feel like I learned the landscape’s song a little better.

The impression of the lamb—its fleece only a tone darker as the snow burying it, how unsullied by blood its death had been in the ravens’ surgery—lingered with me. It couldn’t be called cruel, because the ravens had eaten it the only way they could, eyes first.  People have thumbs and the minds to built a knife, so kill lambs another way.  And yet there’s a part of me that wonders if we shouldn’t be keening or praying over every lamb out there in the field.

I jumped over many stonewalls, passed through sheep paddocks, slid down hillsides bright with snow that I thought never came. And later that evening, sitting on sheepskin rugs piled beside a fire, I listened to the medieval patter of Welsh that my friend, her sister, and a musician spoke to each other—a language I thought, like the snow falling outside, had long ago disappeared.