Badger

With Doris—a Hungarian taxidermy badger head in glass dome—on my back and 14 GoPro cameras strapped to my body, I crawled on the hour every hour for 24 hours around a small woodland area in Old Warren Hill, Nanteos, Ceredigion, West Wales in August 2019.

20:00 – Crawl 5
It took a while to find 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 for a hot August day. Eventually we settled into our new camp.

00:00 – Crawl 9
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 being home. Doris stayed on my back; the glass dome case didn’t come apart or break – success! The wood, a hopelessly inadequate all-encompassing noun, had started to reveal itself, unpeeling leaf by leaf; unfurling ferns, biting bracken, thick waterlogged moss, peeling 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. My consciousness was fractured, each GoPro camera strapped to my trunk, limbs, head, hands, mouth were looking for me, catching me, splintered. My body in black lycra, plunged and plundered through the understory, belligerent, brave and badger. I was moving out of humanness with every knee step.

03:00 – Crawl 12
I was in, I was becoming-Wood, I was becoming-Badger, and I was sick – all of God’s slimy, multiple-legged, eight-headed, winged, bulging-eyed creatures crawled between my bare fingers; it was abject, wretched but exhilarating. I was going further in.

07:00 – Crawl 16
I heard the first single simple bird note: it broke the night; it declared morning. I did it. Only 11 more crawls to go.

08:00 – Crawl 17
Plenty of red sticky dots left for the SD cards— my numbering system was working. 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; it betrayed us. I already longed for the secrets of the nocturnal wood, the thicker smells, the deeper sounds and the richer tastes. But I also wanted to cry with pain, and more than anything I wanted to sleep.

15:00 – Crawl 24
Time to go underground with the Badgers or to go home for a bath and an inspection of my scratches and wounds. I chose the latter.

For a few otherly minutes, in the deepest, darkest wooded night, I think I possibly, slightly, almost crawled out of being human and into becoming something else.

Now, roaming in the digital wood, I am a new non–human alien. I am feral, lost, stuck forever in a digital wilderness—hauled through day then night then day again, glimpsed by the red flickering cameras’ lights. And there she is, Doris, strangled by branches again. I am a cyborg; cameras, a mass of disembodied limbs, a distorted head and sucking lungs. I appear and disappear as the timeline carries me, makes me, and swallows me.

Crossed Paths – Badger is one iteration of a larger crawling project centered on going deeply into the living landscape, ecosystems, and interspecies dynamics to explore animal, plant, land, and human narratives.