It’s here, and it feels wonderful to embrace autumn, particularly this year after the long dry spring and summer, that turned everything to dust.
Living and working on a boat brings nature and the changes of seasons to you in a way that living in bricks and mortar cannot. We are in and out into nature constantly, travelling, walking, carrying, and fetching. Living demands being outside in nature, whether getting water, shopping, moving boats, working locks, walking the dog, or collecting firewood.
Autumn really heralds a change of gear, a time to slow down and take stock, to restock, ready for the quiet and still of winter.
Days are shortening but remain mild and often warm, but the evenings have a definite chill, and the fire is lit for the nights.
Every walk is different now. Some are scrunching and squishing through this mast year’s fallen crab apples as they carpet the towpaths. As they burst with a satisfying pop underfoot, they release a delicious sweetness that wafts around.
Birds are more visible in the slowly undressing hedges and trees. They, too, enjoy the fallen apples, and the water birds really appreciate the squashed ones. It’s much easier to eat apples with a bill rather than a beak, when they have been opened for you. Swans, geese and ducks are foraging on towpaths and apple bobbing in the water.
Cruising slowly as we are through rural countryside waiting for more locks to be unlocked once the water supplies have been confirmed, autumnal changes are very apparent. Boring stretches are now spectacular with flame reds and sharp yellows. The fields have gone from gold to brown, neat furrows have been smoothed by harrows. The outlines of fields and hills are now unadorned in the patchwork of the landscape.
As we cruise, the air constantly changes too. It feels and smells different. The scent of boat fires burning foraged wood drifts up in grey spirals into the still air from chimneys redundant since early Spring. There are overnight dews that bring moisture in the air.
The days are mild, but the smell of winter is apparent in the evenings, these suddenly darkening evenings that have us scrabbling for head torches.
Some walks are scuffles, shuffles through crunchy carpets of yellow, red and gold. Anyone glimpsing into the churchyard surrounding a solid grey-towered church the other day might have been startled by the sight of two 60 somethings leaping and dancing under the horse chestnuts and beech trees. No Saturnalian frolics, we were just trying to catch our first falling leaves of the year. The leaves falling are a symbol of change, of the cycle of nature and life. Tradition says catching a falling leaf can bring good luck, a year of happiness or freedom from colds in the winter. All or any will be fine, and my finally captured leaf is now tucked up safely aboard while I await what it heralds.
If it really brings good luck then the remaining locks we have to work to get near to where we aim to cruise for the winter, will have enough water supplies to keep them open for us and for all the boats who want to use them. We are all very aware that the travelling window is short this year, and that the annual maintenance time on the canals and rivers is fast approaching. From 1 November until 31 March a published rolling list of repairs across the network curtails travel, and this year it is made even more difficult for many boaters like us because of the water shortages which have shut areas of the networks.
While for some closing locks and thus waterways has been a minor inconvenience, for others, the lack of water and subsequent canal closures has had a devastating impact. Some floating traders have been unable to get to places they could trade or markets they had booked. Some boaters who don’t live aboard have had to pay marina costs for the places they normally leave their boats, and then for second marina moorings if they were unable to get to their home berths.
These next few weeks with locks reopening will see many people and many commercial boat movers working long hours cruising to get boats back to where they need to be. If the water supplies hold out, then by the start of 5 people and boats should be where they want to be.
For us, it offers the opportunity to cruise in an area we know well but where we have never spent a winter. It will be a chance to see an area we know clad in a different cloak. We know we can access essential services and still be able to move along the canal unless the waters freeze, and we shall have the opportunity to keep a car nearby. I am looking forward to a bit of gentle hibernation and autumn with its vivid colours and startling brushstrokes across the landscape is a final flourish before a wintertime of regeneration, peace and rest. Plans and schemes, ideas and hopes will have time to develop in the short days and dark nights to come… what I wonder will emerge from our ruminations?
Pickingupducks 