A Landscape for Recovery

This was a piece Pen was commissioned to write by the brilliant BBC producer, Helen Needham, as part of a Radio 3 series of essays Helen was making about 5 women and their relationship to particular landscapes through emotional and physical recovery. 

I live on a hillside, on de-crofted land that rises sharply up from the shores of Loch Ness. Up above the house a rough, muddy track weaves up to the top of the croft, from where you have to climb over a single wire fence to gain access to a dark, densely packed forest of plantation pines.  The pines give way to birch woods and scrubby, unruly patches of steep and stony ground.  In Spring, broom and gorse burst into life, so yellow it hurts, then bracken unfurls and slowly rises to above your head and the deer tracks disappear til Autumn, when gnarly brambles fruit.

In a Glen famed for its breath-taking views, this is not a particularly beautiful piece of land.  It doesn’t offer up obvious charms and perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to it.  Its dark, thorny, awkward – a bit like me. Maybe I see myself here, a walk in these woods is to walk with myself, I suspect I come here to look in the mirror. 

And I do.

I started coming here as soon as my body would allow it.  We moved to the croft in the first week of lockdown, 2 weeks after my mastectomy and reconstruction, 8 weeks after cancer entered my life and shook it to its core. I wasn’t ready to have cancer and I wasn’t in any way prepared for just how long it would take me to heal physically and emotionally.  In those days, weeks, months, now years, since I came here, this landscape has become my crutch, my confidante and sometimes, quite literally, my cradle.  

(When you first straddle the wire and climb up past the burn to enter the wood what hits you is the smell.  It changes at different times of the year.  In autumn, like now, it’s a moist, dank earthiness, so thick you can taste it, always with an undernote of rich, resiny pine.)

There are no terribly easy routes or paths here, you have to clamber and feel your way.  I like the unpredictability that presents.  No visit is ever the same, no route pre-ordained.  I just head on up here and see where my body leads me. 

Early in my recovery after surgery these woods were my way-marker.  I used them to measure out how far I’d come because how far I’d come mattered, terribly.  Nothing felt more important than that distance between the me-with-cancer and the me without it.  At first, I staggered as far as the tree line.   Then I’d slowly inch further up the hill.  Another day I’d push on and discover a freshly dug badger sett, ignoring the tugging of my scars while I’d search for guard hairs. Each little surge into fresh territory, rewarded with a new reveal.  I remember my utter joy at discovering what I thought was a barred route was actually a gravity gate.   Day after day I came back just to open it and let it clatter back. Open, clatter, open, clatter, til the thrill of the discovery thinned.  But it still makes me smile when I pass it.

I also came here out of badness, to privately stick my middle finger up to a world that was nagging me into the tedium of rest.  Nothing is more infuriating than to be repeatedly told that “it’s still so soon since your operation, it’s still so early in your cancer journey” but time fractures and splits and changes the moment you have a diagnosis.  Seconds are no longer seconds.  The weeks waiting for the-all clear are not weeks, they’re lifetimes.    Minutes are millennia because you’d be amazed how many frightened thoughts you can pack into them. 

So, in those weeks after I got that all-clear but while my body was still bruised and broken I came here.  I intentionally didn’t say where I was going.  I wouldn’t leave a note.  I wanted to disappear. I think I almost wanted to get into trouble, just to see if this useless, frustration of a body could get me out of it.  If I pushed it, would it let me down?  Again.  Because that’s how I saw it. I blamed my body for getting cancer because I couldn’t find anything else to blame. 

On one of those lost and lonely days I climbed right up to the top of the hill, above the pines, birch, burns and bracken.  I didn’t know where I was going, just that I’d know it when I got there.  I came to stop by a scrubby, tatty tree, windblown, clinging to the hillside among the heather and bog cotton. I sat and ate an apple and as I gazed at this landscape I utterly love, in the low light of that Autumn afternoon, I suddenly realised.  I could no more control whether I got cancer than this tree can control whether it gets rain.  Raging at my body for letting me down is as daft as raging at the sky for turning grey.   It just doesn’t make sense.

And the sense that this particular landscape can reveal moments of insight like that has become especially important to me.  I now come here to find answers.  I believe that if I hide up here for long enough something will be revealed, even if I didn’t know I was looking for it.  

Something else this landscape gave me, along with those answers, was choice.  When you have cancer, choice is ripped from you.  You have no choice over whether you have treatment.  You are treated or you die and that dis-empowerment was crippling, the lack of control was quite overwhelming (maybe even more so for a woman in her 50s who was oh so in control of her life til then). But by choosing to come here each day, being forced into tiny decisions – shall I turn left or right, shall I head for the birchwoods or for the burn – bit by bit choice returned.  And it wasn’t a subconscious thing.  I’d come here and consciously choose each step, I’d repeat the mantra in my head “I choose you and you and you” with each step I’d take. 

Someone’s built a shelter up at the top of this rise out of branches and bits of frayed blue string.  I find it a bit weird, the idea that anyone else has been here before me, I’ve never met anyone here in the woods, but here by the shelter there’s some cutlery left behind, a knife and spoon, half buried.  I was going to pick them up, tidy them away, but so far I’ve resisted although every time I come here and see them I’m itching to do it!  I came up here once and curled up, just here, under the tree, where I could peer up through the branches of its roof.  It was after a row.   I have a teenage daughter who rages against the world then I rage against her, willing her to understand that life is too precious to be so, so determined not to love every single precious leaf of it.  I guess I came up here to count all those precious leaves one by one, including her, my most precious leaf of all, to remember and treasure.   

You see in the wake of cancer I couldn’t believe I was going to live so these woods became my memory box.  Each time I walked here I’d mentally hang another moment or thought from the branches as I passed.  I’ve come here so often and dug around in so very many memories, the woods have become threaded with them.  A spiders’ web of individual beads of ideas, scraps of hope and despair, now coats the forest like trip wire.  More and more of me has been woven into this landscape, perhaps that’s why I keep coming back. 

Something about this place feels safe.  I can walk here and cry here – and oh how much I’ve cried here – without judgement and without compassion.  These woods, this track, this burn, don’t care about me.  I don’t have to feel guilty here for leaning too hard, like I do with my friends and family.  No rock will tip its head on one side and ask ‘how are you’ in a voice thick with sympathy.

Although it’s strange, while I lean into the dispassionate embrace of this place, I still see it as a place of giving.  I think I’ve done that all too human thing of anthropomorphising something I care about.  I care about this place, so I like to think it maybe does, quietly, covertly, care about me in return.  I’ll never forget climbing up to the birch woods one day when I was really miserable.  My scars were persistently nagging and I couldn’t settle to working in the spare room.  It was a dreich, drizzly day, consistent with my mood, but as I pushed through the bracken, I suddenly saw this mass of bright egg-yolk yellow and gold.  The floor of the forest was covered in chanterelles.  I immediately forgot my misery and aching body and rushed back to the house to fetch a basket and my foraging knife.  My delight in the mushrooms totally outweighing my fury at cancer.  

Having spent so much time up here over the past 2 years it’s impossible not to start to align my own experiences with those of this landscape.  Part way up the forestry tracks the hillside suddenly opens up.  This area was harvested of its trees shortly before I moved here and when I first climbed up the hill it had that violated look that a newly cut forest always has.  That act of de-forestation looks and is shocking.  My own amputation looked and was shocking.  I immediately saw this scarred landscape as a direct echo of my own scarred landscape.  The landscape of a woman in her 50s - of caesarean scars and mastectomy scars, my back creased and puckered from where my reconstruction was taken.   I can’t look in the mirror.  The character cancer has left on my body is too violent for me to contemplate.  So instead, I come here and look in the landscape as my mirror. I look at the scars here and figure if I can find beauty here, perhaps I can find beauty in my own body too.   

3 years on from when they took these trees, already the landscape is softened.  In summer it was bathed in pink foxgloves and rosebay willowherb.  Birch and rowan saplings now all but hide the tree stumps and broken branches.  And it makes me wonder what I have grown over my scars. I can’t grow a new breast, but have I grown in self-compassion?  Have I grown in understanding what I value most and least in this short life?  Have I learned to love and lean in to those around me for the better, deeper, richer?  Can I learn to see my own scars as evidence of survival, of strength, of a body which refuses to be beaten.  Can I learn to love myself more, can I learn to find courage to look in that mirror?  I don’t know.

But I do know, it turns out that by removing all the trees an entire vista is suddenly revealed, the scarred landscape is the one that affords the best view – I’m sure there’s wisdom to be found in that too. 

Cancer didn’t kill me although I’d be lying if I said I’m not still haunted by that ongoing possibility.  And, perhaps, strangely, I draw comfort from the idea that I’ve found a place I’d be happy to permanently lie down whatever it is that finally comes to claim me. 

My artist friend Kenris gave me a gift before I went into hospital for my surgery.She’d stitched me the most exquisite picture of birch trees – that symbol of womanhood and of re-birth.Looking back it feels so prophetic, neither she nor I realising at the time that I’d come to land here but maybe she was pointing me to my place of recovery, maybe it was a sign I should come up here to lick my wounds, in among the birch trees where I can look down on the loch and the croft and the soft pink heather-dusted hills to the south.And where, when I do finally lay down in the moss, I know the sun will rise across the water then fall here to warm my bones.