It has been a river week. The weather has been mercurial at best. We are walking on eggshells around it, afraid we are going to disturb the balance somehow. Right now it is nice outside the window of my study. The wind would still cut you in two, though.
I live above the Blackwater River, on a wooded cliff set back from a sweep of fertile pastureland. In the old days the farmer would grow cabbages and potatoes and onions in its soil. The workers were old men with cigarettes in their mouths and skin like cured leather. As children we would walk through the fields, down to the callows to go swimming in the river. Our parents never seemed to be afraid that we would drown or get swept away in the mighty dark current. Maybe we never told them we were going. I can’t remember. Now the farmer grows trees and shrubs for garden nurseries. It looks very nice when the evening sun catches the saplings, their infant leaves rustling in the wind coming up from the river. It is not the same, though. There is something about the food crop that is romantic, primeval, homely. The worker toiling in the field, sweat glistening on his cheeks, like Steinbeck’s majestic Salinas Valley must have been in the Twenties. I was in Salinas two years ago and it’s all machinery and harvesters and sophisticated irrigation systems. In my naivety I expected to see the migrant paisanos hunched over baskets of salad, the dark Californian dirt falling like rain from their roots. And when the church bells rang from a nearby Mission, that they would stop their work to pray and be silent.
Being so close to the river I expected to see the first of the swallows returning to their summer homes. I always see a lot of them around here – swifts and martins and swallows, but nothing yet. I took a walk into town yesterday, and at a crossroads, in between the roofs of a pair dilapidated buildings a swallow suddenly darted out of nowhere. He swooped over my head a few times, tumbling and gliding and twisting. A triumphant dance of return. He didn’t know the eaves in which he was housed was a large hulk of an eyesore, a paint-flaked embarrassment that should be knocked and razed to the ground, and the remaining gap in the street praised for its more aesthetically pleasing quality. If I saw it in Albania I’d say they were a barbaric race of people. The swallow doesn’t give a damn about aesthetics the way I do.
Last weekend I kayaked the lower section of the Blackwater, where it fans out into the estuary before exiting to the Atlantic Ocean. We paddled upstream as the tide was ebbing and it was powerful enough to overcome the flow of the river. On this ten mile stretch of West Waterford the British built the most impressive stately homes upon vast swathes of annexed (i.e. looted) land. The architecture is simply stunning. The likes of Robert Boyle and Walter Raleigh and the Cavendishes and the Villiers-Stuarts populated these lands during the Plantations of the 17th century. Gifts from Queen Elizabeth I. One of the guys I was kayaking with was of Anglo heritage himself. I told him I should thank him on behalf of his ancestors for bringing a bit of British refinement to our beleaguered countryside. If they hadn’t gotten there first the river would be fringed with vapid housing estates and tarmac driveways. He laughed and said I should say that to his mother-in-law. She still thinks Protestants speak in tongues and have sex with their sisters.
Of course it has not just been a river week. Writing has got me all riled up, as it does every week. In fact it’s doing it all the time. I think I have finalised the ten stories that I plan to stitch a collection from. Just got a rejection letter from a literary magazine for one of them I wrote. It’s about a scientist who has been going crazy in an island laboratory. The editor put it nicely when he said it was a matter of too many stories, not enough space. But hey – you’re not a writer unless you’re getting rejection slips! If I’m still saying that when I’m forty someone please tell me to stop. The world must be full of frustrated writers – a call for submissions comes out and it’s like flies around a freshly squeezed turd. All jostling for a piece of the action. I am a fly. And I too love turds. I am drawn hopelessly to their curious yet ultimately unsatisfying odour.
Less blogging more writing. And running. I have a race to run in four weeks. In memory of my father. It is the first anniversary of his death next week.
Strange how a blog about my father’s death receives one twentieth of the hits that a blog about not liking blogging receives. Perhaps people were being polite. Perhaps it is the internet version of being awkward at a funeral.
