Crossed Paths – Badger
Crossed Paths – Badger
As a kind of cyborg – badger/human wearing a stuffed badger head in a glass dome on my back and 14 GoPro cameras, I crawled on the hour every hour for 24 hours around a small area of woodland in Old Warren Hill, Nanteos, Ceredigion, West Wales in August 2019.
Crawl 1 – 16.00pm
It took a while to find the spot where we would pitch the tent and make our camp. We found a suitable clearing, we put some things down to mark the spot, and then did the repeated trips to and from the car, a lot of lugging and climbing in the heat of an August day, but eventually we settled into our new camp. It felt great to get down and begin to crawl – as badger.
Crawl 9 – 12.00pm
I was so excited, crawling was exhilarating, I plundered through the undergrowth. I was back in the rhythm and familiarity of crawling again, it felt fantastic to be down there, on my hands and knees, I had an unexpected feeling of going home. Doris, the Hungarian badger head, stayed on my back, the glass dome didn’t come apart or break – success!. The wood, a hopelessly inadequate noun, had started to reveal itself, unpeeling leaf by leaf; unfurling ferns, biting bracken, thick water logged moss, lichen, ivy, leaf litter, warm dry earth, hair grass, crackling branches, woody piece by woody piece woodily presented itself, in sharp focus, all of us enveloped by a lingering wall of warm air.
Crawl 10 – 1.00am
By 1.00am I was, in it, I was wood, I was badger, I was sick – all of God’s slimey, multiple legged, eight headed, winged, bulging eyed creatures crawled between my bare fingers, it was abject, wretched, exhilarating, I was going further in.
Crawl 12 – 3.00am
I decided to take the path, I was tired, my knees were sore. My consciousness was fractured, splintered, each Go -pro camera strapped to my trunk, limbs, head, hands, mouth were looking for me.. catching me, my body in black lycra, plunged and plundered through the understory, belligerent, brave and badger. I was moving out of human-ness with every knee step.
Crawl 16 – 7.00am
We did it, we made it through the night. I heard the first single simple bird note, it broke the night, it declared morning, I did it. Only 11 more crawls to go. Five layers of foam in the knee pads now, Doris was getting heavier. Our night wood, became less opaque, quickly, bathing in flirtatious, fickle dappled light.
Crawl 17 – 8.00am
Wet, cooler, I missed the night, it felt like ours, the wood and the night felt like ours. I now understood the secrets of the nocturnal wood, the thicker smells, the deeper sounds, the richer tastes, I missed it. But I also wanted to cry with pain, and more than anything I wanted to sleep.
Crawl 20 – 11.00.am
These morning hours were the hardest hours..
Crawl 24 – 3.00pm
The last crawl, 10 layers of foam in my knee pads, I winced at every knee step. Time to go underground with the Badgers, or to go home for a bath and an inspection of the scratches and wounds, I chose the latter. For a few minutes, in the deepest wood night, I think, I possibly crawled out of being human and into being badger. Now, forever, roaming in the digital wood, (in the video) I am something new, not human, not animal, not plant. I am feral, lost, in a digital wilderness. A futuristic cyborg, head, limbs and lungs appearing and disappearing as the timeline moves me, makes me and then swallows me.
All photos by Hannah Mann