Catchment by Julia Brigdale

 

 

The river from this window is silver. Its shine, formed in shimmering horizontal flecks, suggests the flow were in this direction, towards me, rather than away, eastwards. It’s just a glimpse of river through the willow, the rosebay seed-heads and the alder on the bankside. And, it’s only silver because the wind is rippling the surface, creating the slightest of undulations that catch the fading light, which as quickly then slip away. Nothing is static and I feel myself sway.

 

The wind is present in various forms: on the water, but also in the treetops on the far riverbank, the wands of greenery on this nearside and the low grasses just outside the window. Of course, it is there to be heard also: a fluid susurration in the trees, the creak it evokes from the surrounding timbers and the knocking and squeaking, scratching and tapping as the outside plays finger drums on the building, as it tries to get in.

 

In the quiet waters its colour is khaki green today. From where I am sitting here at the desk, if I tilt my head forward and look around the corner, the river, in an area of shade, appears as a limpid pool with no animation at all, either of its own agency or any other. I know it is flowing though, a slow, unhurried, seemingly lazy meander. There is a diving board; there is a second platform higher, and a third, higher still. The drop to the water surface from the top must be 20 feet or more. I am told you won’t touch the riverbed if you jump and I am happy to take that as a given. But as I break from this reverie, and I can’t grasp the increment of time that has passed, I look up out of the window and it has become dark. Three or four lights flicker from across the expanse of flat field where, during the day, small teams work on harvesting lettuces. It is cloudy, it is mid-September, the days are shortening. This day is already over.

 

*

 

Lifting my head as I wake in the morning the river is right there in my sights, Verona green, it seems it is at eye level, so close. I feel that if I were to slip my arm out from the warmth of the duvet, I could reach and trail my fingers in the water and be woken fully by the anticipated shock of cold. But I stay warm for a little while longer and just look.

 

Not much later I sit on the single plank jetty with tea and binoculars and look, again. Early morning, no one else about but the sound of the major trunk road, a short mile away. Those in a hurry on their way to work put their engines to the test at full throttle. Racing one another, defying the clock, railing against the construct of time, toying with it, foolishly jesting. The river is silent meanwhile and as old as time.

 

Like yesterday the wind plays against the current and creates liquid ruches in the river’s surface. It is mesmeric. If I look down at the water directly below me, I feel dizzy once more and unnerved. I hold my gaze on the undergrowth on the opposite bank, sip hot tea, then fiddle with the focus of my binoculars to explore the detail.  But without my binos  I can relax my focus on the overall view and find it calming. There is a flash of orange as bright and of the same colour and hue as the flowers of the riverbank jewelweed, and then the electric otherworldly blue as the bird hops and turns, resting on a stump within the carcass of a dead alder tree, and then the strobe of it as it takes flight gliding fast across the water’s surface. How does nature create such colours? It has found a perch now on a twiggy branch some distance away. I raise the binoculars to my eyes and I hear the kingfisher plop-splash but don’t see its manoeuvre until it returns to its seat and I watch it shake water from its feathers as it rearranges its plumage. I can just make out something in its beak and it wiggles its head to get the item down into its gullet. My arms shake and ache from holding the binos and as I give up on them the bird alights and disappears. Breakfast is finished.

 

*

 

I am here to watch the river. To reacquaint myself with it. To revisit this particular stretch in late summer, since walking the full length of the Medway this May just gone. I am here to ask its help once more, to affirm its role as my companion as I walk and look and think, as I try to tease out some tangles. Make some sense of life’s conundrums, given the time and space that walking alone along its banks affords me.

 

I walked a favourite stretch yesterday: outward, on a previously unexplored route to the south of the river, heading upstream, through Kent’s orchards and the remnants of hop-fields, through acres of blackcurrant plantation, through rural industry and then into the urban on the outskirts of Tonbridge. Homeward, on the river’s northern banks, I followed it back downstream, through boundless beautiful flower meadows, the river’s ancient floodplains, given over now to sheep and sensitive environmental management. Back in May, I had left my budget hotel in Tonbridge one morning, and entered this glorious landscape with my spirits high, matching the joyful grandeur of the river, confident just here in its broad, easy flow. I walked these banks in balmy, warm sunshine, feeling buoyed, content, happy. Lucky, so lucky. So maybe it was the enormity and depth of the surrounding beauty of nature, after an hour or more of walking on that day; maybe it was having shared the journey of the river over the previous four days, from its trickling source, through its development deep within its banks, to this empowered, majestic waterway, that led at that moment to a discordant, unexpected and powerful rising sense of my own insignificance. It was as though the accumulation of beauty I had witnessed and which was culminating in the now, was an enchantment that rendered all my filters and protective layers impotent. What was revealed was an abrupt awareness of my self, my solitude, walking unaccompanied, and an unforeseen, stark sense of my separateness; a sudden mournfulness; why, why was I here? What was I doing? What was the point?

 

A tune had been quietly lodged in my head for a while already that morning, a soulful, heartfelt tune with kind, beautiful lyrics of adoration and perseverance. A love song, I guess. I’ve known it since my adolescence. The music, the words, gradually blossomed into my consciousness, working their way into focus, supplanting my immersion amongst all of nature’s presence and triggering a bearing of the soul. In a breath I was overtaken, overcome by emotion. I felt alone, helpless. In the face of an upsurge of memories of past hurts and scars and resilience stretched to breaking point, I felt suddenly alienated, isolated. Any self-protection I had, dissolved, exposing only that which remained: the truths of trusts broken and beliefs over-turned, and the heart-pain of witnessing traumas faced by loved ones. My life’s conundrums. Here I was alone, and my vulnerability felt total and I was laid bare.

 

I wiped away tears that had arrived unexpectedly, feeling oblivious to everything outside this flesh and the taste of salt, and my need to search for a tissue. But as though suddenly awoken and without warning, my whole body had stopped still, alert, snapped out of the ego and instead had become wholly, fully and only aware, of a sound from outwith that struck a chord within, displacing in one refrain the beautiful but sorrowful earworm. Some instinct had remained vigilant while I had succumbed and there it was once more, a cuckoo calling from over there, yes for sure, from a stand of trees at the edge of the meadow to my left but that other sound? And again! from the scrub of trees over the river, surely not? I’ve not heard one for real before but that, that, is a nightingale. And I am sure. I am another person again now, alive, attentive, all senses zinging, eyes wide and an overwhelming smile. I am connected, joyfully participating, part of nature, part of this picture.  I know my face must radiate happiness, and as the weight disappears off my shoulders as though some wizard had snapped their fingers, I take some steps towards the river bank to get closer to the sound, my excitement boundless.

 

And the river, of course, glides by, affirming, I am here, I am always here, and look what I give you, should you acknowledge it, should you want to take it, should you recognise that you are a part of it all, anyway. The nightingale sings and it is a sound like no other. The ear knows it, my ear knew it as the sound swept aside my human behaviours, putting me back in tune with my surroundings, part of the puzzle, a part of the whole. Not separated, nor alone. My companion flows by, a warbler trills from within the reeds along its edges, chiffchaffs mark the time, blackcaps pour their song. A blackbird, a thrush, a robin, a wren.

 

I had been momentarily caught in an eddy, entangled within a suffocating flotsam, contemplating something unfathomable as I stopped, irresolute and captive to my thoughts. And forgetting how to free myself by working with the currents I might have been in danger of going under. But a call, a reminder, a link back to the connectedness of nature and my place within it, put me back within the flow.

 

That day back in May, walking on a further mile or so, feeling light and confident once more, I saw my first kingfisher; nature, the river, playfully reminding me with an additional pick-me-up that the world is full of precious things that we should be mindful of, careful of and joyful about.

 

*

 

The river from this window today is pocked with raindrops. The rainclouds have only just blown overhead from what was otherwise a still, windless morning. My last day here and breakfast earlier on the jetty was beside a smooth, flat, gliding waterway, mirrorlike, for the first time these past days. It was calm, eventless. I watched, waited. Upstream under the bridge the river came from around the bend, wide and magnificent, carrying autumn’s first leaves. A cyclist in canary yellow lycra navigated the path on the opposite riverbank and disappeared, reappearing a few moments later in the flash of red of his cycle’s rear light. I watched, waited. Nothing happening and everything; enough. A small, bright brown bird, no, orange, now blue like a shot flying close over the still surface making a line of the middle of the river, such purpose such speed in front of me right past me and gone. A personal kingfisher fly-by.

 

The early morning sun had risen in the sky where the full moon from a night ago had been, each using the treetops to bashfully hide behind while making their ascents. Clouds had scurried across the moon, giving the appearance of frantic activity in the heavens; the sun in its wake, more stealthily concealed. And now it is fully overcast. I sip my tea and drink the river, filtered, cleaned, purified. This considered act marks the limit to my cautious nature’s ability to commune viscerally with the river. To swim is a temptation, real, felt as an occasional pull as though by a gentle force, but easy to resist. Instead I observe, at one remove, not even floating, not paddling or boating; a disconnect through human failings and a wariness brought about by the lack of care given to our precious waterways.

 

*

 

On my long drive home later in the day, I make a detour to visit the river further upstream, back in the landscape of my childhood. I park the car, plot a route for a couple of hours’ walking and head back to the river bank.

 

This! this is the footpath Roz and I would have taken all those decades ago, from our primary school back to her family farm for tea and an afternoon of play in the farmyard smelling of dairy cows, in the chicken sheds, in the fields and under the huge, ancient Kentish oak trees. There is the low-sitting, redbrick, hanging-tiled old farmhouse, nestled in its space. Here is the small dairy herd, still grazing the rich pastures of the river floodplains. The scale is human-sized, the fields an easy walk away from the milking parlour. The farm is not greedy, it is ergonomic and content with itself. The village shop (closed now for many years) likewise a walk away, the hedge-line boundaries, those both ghostly and impenetrable, are domestic and manageable. The river in its relative infancy here, no more than a lively stream in places, runs deep within its banks. It is as if from another world; it is another world. My childhood. An encounter with the river, where was it we swam that time? Surely just down the hill from the farmhouse, about here? Damn! the cows are grazing just where I need to explore, and calves amongst them too. More apprehension on my part. I resign myself to walking on, I settle into my pace.

 

Over a footbridge spanning a ditch, the river curls away to my left and oh! over there, can that be where we swam? My pace quickens and yes, yes, look! here is where you can get down and there below, there is the little pebbly beach! I scramble. I take off my boots and socks, roll my trousers and step into the water which runs shallow and brisk, cold and clear; it is fresh and playful. I would swim, I just feel I could here, without fear, without danger, and now I know where exactly to return, and I will. Closing the circle, connecting with my young self, reacquainting with the river, reaching for immersion, onward, one step into the water.

 

 

***

 

Julia Brigdale lives in Hampshire, a stone’s throw from the river Test and a village away from the county boundary with Wiltshire. She worked there as a gardener for many years and latterly ran her own, small flower farm. For a decade Julia wrote a regular column for Salisbury Life magazine on gardening. Her writing now focuses on her relationship with the natural world and she is working on a series of short pieces that blend her observations of landscape and nature with memory.

 

Photograph by the author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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