The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (23 page)

For although we may increasingly take them for granted the more urban and enclosed our lives become, rivers constitute one of the key elements of human existence. They did not have to be: just as we could have easily evolved on an earth without flowers, so we could have done on a planet without flowing water, and it takes an effort of the imagination to register what a singular phenomenon that actually is, eternally changing and eternally the same; we need Heracleitus to remind us, that no one steps into the same river twice. But being such notable entities, and being there in our evolution from the beginning, rivers in due course became for humans part of the very nature of things, and I remember the thrill of recognition I felt when I first saw this truth nobly expressed by Norman Maclean, the American professor of English and fly fisherman whose autobiography became a celebrated Hollywood film. ‘Eventually,’ Maclean wrote, ‘all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.’

So rivers are as much a part of where we come from as the sky is; but there is a discrimination to be made. They divide into two distinct categories: the giant rivers of the world, and all the others. The giant rivers seem to me to be a separate sort of creature from the rest, not only geographically, but also in our cultural responses to them, for they are much more than scaled-up streams; as water bodies on which voyagers may travel for thousands of miles, they are really lengthwise oceans. Go to the
encontro das aguas
, the meeting of the waters near Manaus in Brazil, where the Solimões and the Rio Negro unite to form the Amazon, their brown and black currents flowing separately
side by side, and you will find that the Amazon has a horizon, just as an ocean does, and indeed, the giant rivers of the world defied exploration more than the oceans ever did: Europeans found the far side of the Atlantic long before they located the source of the Nile. It is the giant rivers, of course, which in early history most exercised the human imagination. Many of the first great civilisations coalesced around them: Egypt with the Nile, Mesopotamia with the Tigris and the Euphrates, India with the Indus and the Ganges, China with the Yellow River and the Yangtze. These stupendous watercourses were miraculously life-giving, but they could be furiously life-threatening; they could bestow riches but they could destroy in anger – the deadly Yellow River most of all – and the peoples who depended on them naturally made them deities to be worshipped, thanked, and placated; even in the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot, who grew up in St Louis on the banks of the Mississippi, could not help but see his colossal childhood waterway as ‘a strong brown god’.

I have felt that awe of the Mississippi too, and of other giants such as the Niger, from the air at Timbuktu a great green ribbon of rice paddies snaking through Mali’s yellow-brown semi-desert, at its surface the bearer of enormous painted canoes, the pirogues, symbols of its own enormous dimensions. But awe is not the same as love; and the rivers which I have loved have without exception been the others, the lesser ones, those on a human rather than a superhuman scale. How lame is English, for once, not to have separate names for them! French does it, naturally; a giant river is a
fleuve
, a lesser river a
rivière
, but in English they are pitifully lumped together, so the 2,900-mile-long Congo and the 85-mile-long Avon of Shakespeare are categorised by the same term. Let me be clear, then, that henceforth, in speaking of rivers, it is the Avons I mean, not the Congos; it is the Avons which have captured my heart.

The reason is, I think, that they are not there to be feared
and placated, the smaller rivers, they are there to be befriended; and having my strong sense that all rivers are special anyway, like all butterflies are special, and that their individual differences are simply a magnificent bonus – as are their names – I have spent much time river-befriending, and always been rewarded, and I have fallen in love with many of them, from the Hodder, astonishing you that Lancashire, cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can contain such a jewel, to the Dysynni, dark and brooding and isolated under Cader Idris; I have loved bully-boy rivers such as the Helmsdale in Sutherland and sweet shy rivers such as the Lyd in Devon, and in particular, small rivers with literary associations, like Housman’s Teme, or the Taw and the Torridge of Henry Williamson (and of Ted Hughes, too), or Dylan Thomas’s Aeron (he and Caitlin named their daughter Aeronwy), or Seamus Heaney’s Moyola, flowing down from the Sperrins into Lough Neagh, the river of the ‘kingfisher’s blue bolt’ song quoted above, ‘pleasuring beneath alder trees’.

They are all sources of delight, but the rivers which have given me joy, joy as I have tried to define it – the group of rivers whose beauty is such that it sometimes seems otherworldly . . . well, they are elsewhere. But not in some Shangri-la. You can find them on a map. Although it’s a fairly uncommon one. You might have to order it. It is ‘the 10-mile map’ – the British Geological Survey’s geological map of Britain, at the scale of 10 miles to the inch, which shows the country not in terms of administrative regions, or landscape features, but of the underlying rocks. The various strata are variously coloured, for differentiation rather than resemblance (although the dull terracotta which marks the Triassic sandstone of the Wirral where I grew up is remarkably similar to the stone itself), and what excites me whenever I unfold it is the brilliant band of green splashed diagonally across England from the south-west, at bottom left, to the north-east, at top right.

It is the chalk. The green on the map represents the soft
white rock of the chalk hills, stretching from Dorset up through Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Berkshire, then into the Chilterns, and on to Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and the Yorkshire Wolds; it is formed from the remains of trillions of tiny marine organisms which filled the warm seas when the dinosaurs ruled on land, and whose shells settled on the seabed when they died; it is pure calcium carbonate, and is one of the great givers of beauty and wildlife richness. Often referred to as downs or downland, the chalk hills epitomise the tender charm of the southern English countryside. Their form is gentle and flowing (like the contours of the human body, it has been said) and quite unlike the paternalistic craggy dominance of the granite mountains of Wales and Scotland. Even more, they host incomparable bio-diversity, from the flower carpet of the short-cropped downland turf filled with scented wild thyme and horseshoe vetch and milkwort and fairy flax and orchids in abundance, to the butterfly parade of dark green fritillaries and marbled whites and silver-spotted skippers and blues galore, and to the birdlife from stone curlews to skylarks: on the chalk grassland of Salisbury Plain, for example, there are fourteen thousand pairs of skylarks, even today, and in spring they pour down a shower of song which seems as much a part of the air as the wind . . . But most of all, the chalk gives us its waters.

If I had to single out something to represent the beauty of the earth, one aspect alone, it would be the chalk streams of southern England. Their loveliness is dreamlike. They are small-to medium-sized rivers, but anglers long ago christened them the chalk streams, and such they have remained. Anglers have been their champions, their guardians, and their celebrants, fly-fishermen most of all, as they are regarded as the perfect trout streams, and in the literature of fly fishing, which is substantial, two of them occupy pride of place, the Test and the Itchen, both in Hampshire: on them Victorian anglers developed the technique of fishing the dry fly, which became almost a cult. A
few more are celebrated in these writings: the Frome and the Piddle in Dorset, the Wylye and the Avon in Wiltshire (not Shakespeare’s Avon but the one which flows through Salisbury), the Kennet and the Lambourn in Berkshire, the Chess and the Misbourne in the Chiltern Hills. Although there are many more smaller streams, including numerous rivulets you could leap across – the Environment Agency has counted 161 of them in total on the chalk belt running up the country – it is this handful of medium-sized rivers whose beauty sets them apart.

Their most striking aspect is the water itself: it is the cleanest and clearest river water on the planet, the customary epithet being ‘gin-clear’. It is of a clarity to take you aback: the river bottom, which often in chalk streams is a lustrous golden gravel, is so perfectly visible it is as if you were seeing it through a single pane of polished glass. The reason is the geology. Because the chalk is permeable, it allows rain to soak through it to underground reservoirs or aquifers, and simultaneously filters it; when springs return the water to the river, all the impurities have been removed: the water is immaculate. This process allows for the chalk streams’ second key characteristic, their constancy of flow. When rain runs off the land directly, as into so-called spate rivers, the water level can rapidly rise and fall; but because the chalk streams are spring-fed, their level is unvarying and their flow is stately, never sluggish, never torrential, with an elegance all of its own (the Test is like the Loire in miniature).

Thus, there is a beauty of essentials. This is further enhanced by the life the chalk streams are filled with, from the profusion of aquatic wild flowers above, led by the ranunculus or water crowfoot, the buttercup decorating the surface with its white stars and emerald leaves, to the fish underneath, such as that most vivacious and animated of fish, the brown trout.
Salmo trutta.
The salmon’s junior partner. Exquisite, with no need to be gaudy like something from the tropical coral reefs: this is the restrained splendour of the north, boreal beauty, streamlined
beyond the dreams of art deco. Ever watchful, ever on the alert. Eternally a-quiver, holding position in the flow (‘On the fin’, anglers say). And so marvellously visible in the gin-clear water, rising to take the upwing river flies on the surface, above all the mayfly, the largest and the prettiest, butterfly-sized and muslin-winged, living most of its life as a larva in the gravel of the riverbed and then hatching in late spring to mate and die in a single day. Thousands of them. The males perform a courtship dance, gathering in swarms and bouncing up and down, twelve to fifteen feet in the air; the approaching females are grabbed, and inseminated, and then lay their eggs in the river and expire in the surface film. And when that happens on any sort of scale, especially in the evening, the trout go mad: they attack the dying insects in rocket-like surges, rising to lacerate the surface in paroxysms of greed. Splash after splash. A watercourse pulsing with life and death.

I discovered the chalk streams thirty years ago from walking alongside the River Chess in the Chilterns, and as I began to explore them and to realise what they were, I was astonished, first at their phenomenal, head-turning beauty, and then at how minimally they seemed to be appreciated, outside the culture of angling. In fly fishing and its literature, these rivers were given their due, but beyond that, they might have been on the moon. Poets did not sing them. Painters did not paint them. Writers did not write about them, even nature writers who wrote about many aspects of the countryside, unless they happened to be fishermen too, like Viscount Grey of Falloden – he who remarked that the lights were going out all over Europe – who wrote as lyrically about the Itchen as he did about birdsong. The chalk streams seemed, and still seem, to have no place in the national consciousness. To me, they stand without question alongside the bluebell woods – these are the two supremely beautiful features of the natural world in Britain – but I have no sense that people widely share this view, or
that they share my feeling that rivers like the Test and the Itchen are great national monuments which should be cherished as much as our medieval cathedrals.

It seemed remarkable, that they were so disregarded; but I didn’t mind. I knew what I was looking at. I felt as if I were in on a secret that only anglers knew about, and I began to devour the literature (books like Harry Plunket Greene’s
Where the Bright Waters Meet
or John Waller Hills’
A Summer on the Test
) until at one stage I became a near obsessive, travelling to see them all. For example, I have followed the courses of all the principal tributaries of the Test – the Bourne Rivulet, the Dever, the Anton, the Wallop Brook and the Dun – driving down lanes, peering over bridge parapets, walking by water wherever I could. And gradually, as I got to know them, I began to understand what was truly exceptional about the chalk streams – even, to employ the much abused word, what was unique. It wasn’t just about beauty, it was more than that. It was about purity.

I would contend that the archetype of pollution, as a modern phenomenon, is the polluted river. Not that the pollution of standing water bodies, or of the oceans, or of the land, is one whit less to be concerned about; but somehow I feel we have in our minds, when pollution is spoken of, a primary image of flowing waters that have been dirtied or defiled – an image we do not like. Large-scale pollution is fairly new, in historical terms, and is a very much more recent environmental difficulty for the earth than deforestation, say, dating back less than two hundred and fifty years to the Industrial Revolution. In that initial explosion of no-holds-barred capitalism, rivers were the natural world’s first victims, being brought into bondage by the first factories, to provide power and to take away waste. They continued to be sullied and despoiled until the widespread collapse of manufacturing industry in the West in the 1980s, since when, not a few have been cleaned; but throughout the
nineteenth and the major part of the twentieth centuries most factories and industrial complexes, and most industrial towns and cities in the western world, had an associated river, which was filthy. Many millions of people will have seen such a water-course. (Now large-scale manufacturing has shifted eastwards, and it is China which is taking river pollution to new heights: alas, poor baiji.)

Yet I do not think people are indifferent to this, even if it does not affect them directly; I think we instinctively find polluted rivers very unpleasant, as a concept as much as an empirical experience. I suggested earlier that we may have an attraction to rivers which lies deep in the genes, a part of the bond of the fifty thousand generations, and if so, then the attraction is clearly to rivers which flowed long before large-scale industrial pollution arrived to blight the earth; to rivers which were pure and could themselves be purifiers, since they could take away human wastes and not be polluted by them, when our numbers were small: these rivers were truly worthy to be cherished. If, then, there is an image of a river buried somewhere in our tissues, and I think there may well be in mine, it is clearly of a wholly untainted one, almost of a Platonic ideal, one that we long for; and thus to see a river despoiled causes distress, even if we can’t quite say why.