She was up for the walk, despite the rain and the failing light. I watched her finish a tub of pasta through the steamed up windscreen, then bounce out the door-

‘Ready!’.

She joined me at the gate where we inspected the map board, quickly deciding on the route we hadn’t taken last time. We were still looking for new ground to root this thing down into, somewhere to hold it in place.

The path dropped into the gorge through a mossy woodland, where fallen giants lay amongst the living trees. Water ran over everything, and the damp undergrowth glowed a lush green. Tuning to each other, we were saying as we saw.

‘look!’,

‘oh yeah’.

When there was too much to say, we just walked, tangling our fingers.

We came out of the woods by the river. On the other side, the wet rock of the gorge glinted black under the clouds. Cars scurried beneath it, and the air groaned with their noise. We walked along the bank, stepping over traffic cones, beer bottles- all the sorry-looking castoffs the river left stranded. ‘Imagine if humans didn’t exist’, I said, gesturing everywhere. She smiled, looking around for a moment, ‘yeah, I know what you mean’.

Further down the bank she stopped, as if she had suddenly remembered where she was.

‘I’ve wanted to come here for ages. You always see it looking down from the bridge’.

She stood looking up from the muddy river bank, a wasteland wedged between the road and the railway, deep in the shadow of the gorge. She didn’t seem disappointed now she was here. She liked this forgotten margin, neglected in plain sight. It was wild and polluted. She saw both at once- the absence of human attention. That made it feel like exploring. Everything sailed past that place, or high over it, few stopped right here. She smiled at the sight of ducks in the river and at the crude graffiti on the railway huts. She didn’t smile for the degradation, but for the place as it was. As if she desired nothing else than that it would never change.