Skeggleswater in extreme weather

Skeggleswater 7 July

• Out in the open,  a searing sun and high humidity. I evaporate in a  shower of dripping and trickling sweat.  Bare  arms protest. Factor 50 isn’t enough.  Water weighs heavy  in our rucksacks but will  it last?   I'll shrivel up like  the sphagnum moss of the boggy sump about Skeggleswater.   Sphagnum moss made of water, now unmade.  
  

 Life follows water and flowers of bog asphodel and cross-leaved heath appear closer to the tarn. A rutted track is fringed with blood-red clots of sundew with tiny white flowers, sundew in dried-out sphagnum moss.

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Clouds, beautiful clouds,  clouds to veil us from the sun,  if anything  can, without them even hotter. A swallow skims   Skeggleswater Dike  hunting   dragonflies. I might immerse  myself among the yellow water lilies, in shadows beneath the foot-bridge, spend my day in the dike  and  my friends could collect me after they  weary  of striding out.

Shake off sensations of searing heat. Think cool.  Reflect. Think Arctic weather and New Year’s Day 2010, a long slog and a lurch through deep snow concealing the tussocks of the sump.  A biting north-east wind.  Walked on  water, crossed the Skeggleswater ice  in crampons.  Watched the sun at play, colouring and patterning the ice.  Sat enthroned in stone and ate lunch hastily before we turned to ice. 

Heat-wave.  A young  woman  floats  on the water, her arms outstretched.   Blue damselflies lay their eggs on pondweed.  Think cool.
 Now and then a faint breeze reaches us.  Ripples  pattern the water of the tarn, arrested by rafts of pondweed spiked with flower- stems.   Pastoral of the farther shore: cattle tranquil beneath an ash, sheep on a fellside.
 Cloudscape and fellside reflected in Skeggleswater, intermingling with  damselflies and pondweed Skeggleswater soothes with ripples and sheen, soft harmonies of colour.  I'd like my camera to be eye-level with the water boatmen amongst the leaves of pond weed,  imaging the surface of the tarn. 
I crave cloud and water in a landscape, refreshing, revitalising.