Invisible Influences

Our memories are never etched in time. They are fluid and ephemeral, ever-changed by the life we’ve lived beyond them, and often what may have been an otherwise pleasant moment can be poisoned by future moments. Thus killed, the past becomes an imperfect ghost, haunting our memories like regret. Chased by these revenants I drove, through Plymouth and out, along the A386 toward Tavistock and gloomy Dartmoor beyond. Dartmoor, whose fogs and tors, flocks of sheep and cold stone prison lived and breathed beneath time’s deceptive veil. Dartmoor, whose very existence was everything I imagined it would be and only vaguely like my memories of it. I drove on, following the Tavistock Road to Lydford and the medieval church it housed. The church, if I knew it at all, had been lost somewhere in the twenty-five years since we’d first met. I could still remember St. Michael’s on the hilltop, Buckfastleigh and Charles Church in Plymouth, its husk a scar left by the Nazi blitz. Though not by name I could still recall the eight hundred year old church we’d visited one Easter morning, it’s moldering scent as strong in my mind as it had been that day; but the church in Lydford escaped me. I couldn’t remember following in the footsteps of its flock along the ancient Dartmoor Forest path, from their farms on the moor to the church in Lydford. They called it The Way of the Dead because it was along this sun-dappled path that they carried their dead from the rolling, craggy moors to the cemetery gate.