I Like the Look of That Lake

Setting: Imagine this with 1000 times more rain

Our coach careened through the countryside, fields and flowers alike nothing more that drowned blurs of green streaking past our windows. Up, we flopped, and down. Then sideways with a heart-stopping jerk. The narrow country road was bumpy and our bus driver enthusiastic.

Suddenly, we slammed to a stop. I wrenched forward in my seatbelt, whacking against the seat before me. Waterbottles, oranges, and other small valuables made an exodus to the front of the bus.

Immediately, forty round and bug-eyed faces pressed against the right-hand windows. We had slowed before to let cars squeeze past, but we’d never completely stopped. What monstrosity must we now be facing?

Our worst nightmare: another bus.

“Oh spit, spit, spit!” a girl cried (only, that is not exactly what she cried).

Inch by tedious inch, the buses backed and rebacked, trying to rig the configuration for success. Our own coach’s rear made a sickening crunch as we nicked a low, stone wall. Then laboriously, at snail-like speeds, we scooted forward.

Early travelers of the Northern England’s beautiful Lake District also used coaches, just of a different sort. And they probably had plenty of coach problems of their own in the rugged landscape. But then and now, the difficulties are well worth the chance to experience the picturesque—the beautiful and sublime—to the highest degree.

Our first dose of the sublime came at Fountain’s Abbey, yet another abbey disbanded after Henry VIII dissolution of the monasteries act. Wordsworth penned one of his most famous poems about a ruined abbey, and though this was not that abbey (see earlier posts for that abbey), the feel was the same—huge, abandoned, stone archways. Damp corridors filled with moldering leaves. Rafters dusted with cobwebs, now home only to the birds. It was quite the experience to walk through the abbey ruins and think about how long the place had taken to build and how many generations had lived there. It kind of gave me chills to see how quickly nature had grown through it. In a poetic sense, you could almost feel how soon you, too, would be like the abbey, part of nature again. I think that feeling perfectly describes the sublime for me—awe and wonder at the beauty and majesty of a thing, but also a shade of horror at how large and overpowering the environment can be.

Inside Fountains Abbey

Looking up the abbey's tower

The exterior of the tower

An inner chamber

Following the abbey, we were off into the thick of the Lake District and the dense picturesque. After parking our things at the lakeside Youth Hostel, we embraced our wild sides and hit the local slopes. In this case, our wild sides were sheep sides, because, man, those sheep can climb like nobody’s business. It was incredible to reach the bluff and feel on top of the world. The entire landscape spread before us like a patchwork quilt, and I finally knew what that expression meant—hundreds of sheep pastures knit together by tiny rock walls. We took many photos in the vein of Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

Looking out over the valley

Back at the hostel, it was interesting to compare our experience as tourists there with the experiences of the Lake District tourists of old. It was too cold to go swimming, so our sheer enjoyment of the place came from sitting and talking with friends and looking out over the marvelous expanse of water to the hills on the other side. Five-year-old me would have been shocked by the No Swimming thing and chalked the whole day up as a Waste. But thankfully twenty-one-year-old me did glean pleasure from just sitting and watching the water lap against the pier. And I would argue with my five-year-old self that sitting and watching water lap is not a waste of time. It is, in fact, a different way of getting educated. Because, like the transcendentalists, I also believe that truth can be found through emotion. I’m grateful the Romantic era, particularly the Transcendentalist movement, occurred so that we could take a school trip to watch the sun sink low and light Lake Windermere’s surface on fire. I can see how people got poetry from that.

Lake Windermere

Artistic interpretation of Lake Windermere

A stretchy duck on the lake shore.

Artistic interpretation of the stretchy duck

It’s interesting to consider how deeply nature is tied to emotion. Any extremes in nature, whether from reality or depicted in art, seem to express certain feelings: tempestuous, placid, and everything in between. And artists such as the Brontes, Wordsworth, and Friedrich have channeled the natural environment to create passion in their art, to tie nature and emotion together. With our trip, we did the same thing on a smaller scale: We toured the Lake District to discover the marvelous landscape around us, and our art processes those discoveries to explore the landscape within ourselves.