After The Flood
A favourite walk of mine is taken on a clear blue-sky day after the river has burst its banks and has receded just enough to reveal the narrow spit of ground that edges its banks. I walk in an area called “The Inches”, a long and narrow run of fields flanked by a steep bank of woodland on one side and the River Blackwater on the other. At some point during the autumn the river will burst out onto this bit of floodplain and a large section of wetland will remain all through the winter in increasing or decreasing quantities, acting as a gathering place for Sandpipers, Mallards and Whooper Swans, Shovellers, Curlew and Godwits. Their calls carrying through the valley as an ancient, ancestral echo to awareness, haunting and enigmatic.
Stepping out onto the fresh flood field ignites a small spark of adventure, the landscape although familiar, a strange new place holding a cosy perilousness. Once you get half-way into The Inches you’re committed to taking whatever the river chooses to do to you should it wish to rise a sudden few centimetres again. The waters lay juxtaposed; floodwaters eerily calm waiting in a dark oozy spread to be filtered evaporated or refreshed, the river on your other hand deeply broiling, hurtling and menacingly hushed but for an occasional chug of surface water as it gets wrapped in an undertow. I’ve always respected the stories I heard from locals in childhood of The Blackwater needing to take at least one life a year.
On a day like this the flooded places appear as a sacred magical thing where reflections flip the world, sky merges into earth and the veil between solid and liquid is thin. My feet splack and suck through virgin river deposits, my lurcher’s skinny dog feet create a joyful skittering ploppy rhythm around me. I pause often to breath and let the depth of thoughts that have been processing in my head find their way out either as breath, or tears or sound… or the turning of my face towards the sun to help melt them, or sooth them or put them in perspective.
