Rixensart

I had my choice of days out in Belgium yesterday - Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp etc. That it was a Monday helped define my choice (Belgium closes its museums on Mondays) but I felt like a day out in nature in any case. Only vaguely informed about where to find such a thing, I took the train south to Rixensart.
Walloonia, this French-speaking southern half of the country, has wooded hills rather than the flat lands of Flanders. I tramped out for an hour through Rixensart, looking for the edge where the countryside begins. It's a pleasant well-kept semi-urban neighbourhood, birds singing in the gardens, but each time I reached an edge builders were ahead of me and a new property was swallowing up the land. I then found I was meeting the next town, growing out the other way.
I pulled in at a petrol station (such had my country hike become). Yes, the man could guide me to a walk though it wasn't up to much ("il n'est pas un grande chose"). It did me well enough, a solid path through a forest that moved from pine to mixed, birch and beech joining in. A shiny beetle crossed the path, a bee hummed above my feet, and I started to feel mended. At the bottom of a hill three mallards burst from a stream and an amphibian croak filled the sky. I followed the stream, and then a track along a river till my passage was stopped by a fence, with some big industrial plant on the other side. In a water-filled rut in the land was a small natterjack toad (identified since, through the distinctive yellow stripe down its spine). I saw a pair of them on a mudbank later. So this was my amphibian sound. It took me back to seeing tiny treefrogs in the Amazon, the size of earrings, bellowing out noises that rent the jungle canopy.
I found new mushrooms and plants too. And wandering back into town a noticeboard informed me that the community is twinned with Birstall, where I grew up and went to primary school, so it was a cheery coming home in many ways.
A natterjack toad is of course as wonderful as anything to be found in art - and liable to become one of the rarest of beauties in my lifetime. I realized that in my walk in search of countryside I was really trying to walk out of the century, leaving urban growth behind me. Back in Brussels we had spent the Saturday in the Musée des Beaux-Arts. In the corner of one room was the Fall of Icarus by the younger Pieter Brueghel.

I've long loved Brueghels, as with any art that includes a narrative. I went from the label back to the picture, in shock to discover the subject was confined to one small corner. And then I remembered the W.H.Auden poem Musée des Beaux-Arts, and realized I was standing where the poet stood in 1938, sharing his appreciation and surprise.

It was good to have some lines to share with Auden. My poetry doesn't compare, so till now the comparisons have been limited to the lines on my face (many still need to be etched in to match the face of the Master, but I'm inching my way there).