Out from under (#14 in “a shining moment” series)

Not long ago –  within my own 65 years, I think – the ground on which I stood at 12.30 pm on March 17, 2019 – would not have been visible, much less fetchingly clad in lichens, mosses, et al…

 

 

Yesterday’s post showed New Zealand’s Fox Glacier, in the early autumn evening of March 16, 2019.

The next day my beloved and I were less than half a hour’s drive away, in the next-north glacial valley, walking towards the rapidly-retreating snout of the Franz Josef Glacier.

At the moment this is still, just, one of the few places on earth where an easy walk enables you to view a living glacier and a still-flourishing temperate rainforest, side by side, at low altitude.

Very soon, that will no longer be true.

Had it been 1919 when I stood where I took this post’s image, I would have been on the glacier.

In 2019, as we rambled on rebounding, “fresh” ground, the glacier was a decent uphill walk away.

As it happens, I had in mind a particular musical companion, but it is not available to online freeloaders.

Pianist-composer Mike Nock’s Land of the Long White Cloud is worth paying for, as indeed is the album in question – Ondas, the longtime Australian-resident New Zealander’s1981 recording for ECM.

This post’s musical inclusion is the finest recorded version of my favourite autumn song.

Its lyric proclaims October Song as Robin Williamson’s very first song.

Williamson had already been singing it for some years before he recorded it in 1966, as a 22-year-old, on The Incredible String Band’s eponymous debut LP.

October Song has a fair chance of outliving most of New Zealand’s glaciers!

Dick Gaughan’s version is from his 1998 CD Redwood Cathedral, and is also on his 2002 compilation Prentice Piece.