The River

It starts with yellow.

Daffodils. 

There is a ribbon of them that grows beside the path, below the field. But they’re above your feet, raised by a wall so that if you walked with your hand outstretched you’d touch the petals with your fingers. 

In the summer there is just a swathe of green and it’s like the daffodils were never there. They turn to brown-edged rags and disappear back into the ground.

I suppose where it starts depends on where you come from, which path you take. The one with the arch that the train runs over as it leaves the station - your voice echos for a second as you go under it. The one that curves around the fountain decorated with black lion heads - it never runs so their mouths are always waiting for water. There’s a path above that one, behind the trees. It briefly follows the train track and is dripping with laburnum in June - I always think of poison when I see it. 

On the opposite side of the river there is the steeper path that runs between two fields, where snowdrops and wild garlic grow at the top. That one has a name - Lovers Lane - but you’d only know that if you were from here. There aren’t always signs to tell you these things. I’d go down it on roller blades when I was little, though probably it was just that one time…Hills felt steeper then but I think I’d be too scared to do it now. I’d walk across the bridge on the wrong side too, on the wooden slats that jutted out the side vertiginously over the water. Somehow it still seems a long way down.

I don’t think I paid much attention to the water then, the way it bubbled against the concrete supports or how it froze along the edges in winter.

But I see the way the clouds are reflected in it now, trees mirror-perfect when it’s still. I think about how the river seems wider on clear, blue-skied days.

I look for otters when I hear they’re around, then almost can’t believe it when I do see them - two scurried from their shelter then dived in synchronised parabolas. Another one, seen on another day in another year, turned to look at me standing on the bridge as I followed it downstream.

It was really during Covid that I began to take notice.

What was once a very occasional stroll became an almost daily walk - getting the outdoor exercise we were allowed. A habit formed by necessity when there was little else to do. Monotony compresses time and there are whole months of the pandemic when I forgot we were on lockdown, when we weren’t allowed to go anywhere other than the places close to us.

It’s easy to feel stuck, trapped, when you’re in one place for a while. It might be safer or just what you know. And once upon a time that was how I felt, maybe that’s how I’m feeling again now. But when most of the world gets stuck too you learn to take things one day at a time. 

On the river path, things continue as they always do whether you notice them or not. Time there is measured by the shadows of cow parsley, by the constellations of chickweed. The year is marked by the appearance of cuckoo flowers, lilac against green, and by the dog rose turning red, turning black.

One winter there is so much snow that the landscape is almost erased. There is just the dark lines of trees, of grasses like pencil marks on paper. There is the slate grey of the river but there is so much pure unmuddied ground, so much milky whiteness, that when I go for my walk I feel like I’m in a dream. I take long, deep breaths to try and absorb it all, to swallow it - the cold freshness of this place. But the snow doesn’t lie for long and when it thaws, instead of crunching smoothly it cracks underfoot with ice. I notice the way it holds on in patches in puddles - edges that look like salt left behind in the sun.

I often find that things are transformed here. You wait for a brown shape in the water to move - flap a wing, turn its head - before realising it is just a damp log. A stone half-submerged, with the wriggle of ears, could be a wallowing hippo.

Sometimes it is the other way around. 

I am still just a little bit haunted by the sheep, perfectly upright but very much dead, floating down the river after days of heavy rain.

Of course there is real life along the path too. The caterpillar whose pink, black and green colouring matched his surroundings fabulously. Another who (caught on camera) is blown back like a tumbleweed while crawling valiantly along in strong winds. To him it was a hurricane.

I’ve been scared half to death by a small deer leaping across the path out of nowhere. I’ve crept along quietly to get close enough to a bird on a fence post to see what it was - I try to work it out later from the wings which spread out as it flies off, carving up the sky in circles. What does the path look like from up there?

It will get covered by snow, by floodwater and in the summer the reeds grow taller than me. But the line of it is always the same. 

Forget-me-nots and valerian always come back.

The river is where everything and nothing changes.

What does change is you, how you see the world and how you see yourself.

Walking back along the path, having turned at the dead end of gorse and steps to nowhere, you look across the river to the campsite, to the swing park where you played when you were little - where you took the children of friends to play as well. 

You think of the people you won’t see again, of the dogs that knew this place too.

You see the skyline of the town then - the point of the church and the curve of the bridge - and you think about what you’re going back to, what it means to be home. And you wonder if you should try a different path.