I walked downstream to the picnic place where someone had made a heart of stones and filled it with pads of moss. The stones have gone now but the moss remains and some of it has taken root. A wet Spring. It makes not a green heart shape exactly, but something like. Heart like a blob. Heart like jelly, like a cloud.
By the river new wildflowers are now growing, the seasons progress with colour and line. Some of them are upright prongs of dark pink clovers and some, I suspect from the shape, might be buttercups. Buttercups are famous! I’ve read about them since I was a little girl, in English novels. But I think I’ve never seen one. Let alone the swards of white spear-flowers populating the nearby woods, which travel in a carpet as far as the eye can discern under trees…. On the river a lady duck surfs as lady ducks did on the swift green current with their husbands, three weeks ago. This one has babies aboard. They clutter her back, five dark brown bobbing heads, and she carries them smoothly and the water carries all of them, as time carries all of us, long may it be so if our enterprises and selfishness have not too deeply uncluttered the lifeless oceans and cluttered up the air and clogged with metals the water. Sail away, duck mum, smooth like a promise and find a better, greener place.
A friend who was enamoured of it took one of my books to Hong Kong, and tried hard to get the lady in the passport booth to stamp it. She would not be persuaded. Instead I received a series of postcards through the mail: Dear Cathoel, it’s a beautiful day in Hong Kong and I am taking your book for a stroll by the river. Dear Cathoel, your book and I are having chicken noodle soup on the markets.
I went upriver two nights ago with a box of matches in my pocket. It was overcast and just beginning to get dark. Went down a green gladed path that I know and found the place I’d found before. I’ve never seen anybody there but once there was a girl playing her guitar on the next promontory, sitting on a fallen tree with her hair falling over her face.
As I went I collected twigs and dried stalks and small fallen branches. I made a bristling bundle with each hand, I stretched my palm to carry more. At the place I built a fire. Last week someone had played a game there: twelve squares deep and ten squares wide, etched into the dirt, it had three teams: one playing with smooth stones, one with dandelion flowers, one with short sticks each piercing a leaf.
In front of the fire I sat down to rest my back against a tree. The water rushed behind me, rushing rushing. It had begun to rain, not too heavily, I put on my coat and let the tree shelter me. A blue egg had fallen from the nest, egg-blue and speckled. On the inside its broken shell was white as teeth. Last night I took a different way and when I came to the clearing downstream where a bench and firepit have been built, in front of the bench someone had made a heart with stones. The stones said: “I <3 ..." The inner body of the stone heart had been filled with clumps of moss, and every few inches the green dense moss was punctuated by a golden dandelion flower. Again it grew dark, and again it rained, and I sat and watched by the water.
I was following the river on a very narrow path, about a foot wide, and it was bumpy. Tree roots, little soft holes where the soil has rotted away with rain… You know how you think, Gee I should maybe walk this bit? Or, “I hope I don’t drop this,” etc. And then: >whoooo…< I found myself peeling sharply outwards, dipping, losing balance, falling over the bank.
You have those two seconds which feel like ten where you get to think, Which way should I fall. I fell towards the bank, tried to fall upright and loose. As this was happening I swore, in German. Why not English. Then I was wedged, still on my bike, between the river and a handy leaning tree.
I had hardly time to wonder why "Scheisse!" and not "Crap!" before a party of four Swiss people on hardy mountain bikes came through the mist of trees. They were lycra angels in the afternoon sunlight. I handed them my bike and then two arms came down and two women - the men were busy marvelling that I had landed so fortuitously - hauled me up on the bank. A drop of about five feet. They lectured me but only very briefly and kindly. Those are really the wrong tyres! Are you sure you're ok? It felt cosy to be roused on by rescuing strangers.
On the way home I passed various other people using all different kinds of devices. A girl on a skateboard. A woman jogging, in earbuds. A couple sluicing gravely along on the asphalt with those stocks you use to push yourself on snow, for all the world as though they were skiing. I passed a truckload of army recruits who waved and smiled and when I waved back burst into ribald laughter. But my favourite was the guy gliding between two fields of cropped green stalks who appeared to be travelling on a moving walkway, who was, of course, on rollerblades.
Scampering down the steep stone steps to gain the river path I met our neighbour, skulking behind the boat shed. He was smoking pot. I told him so. “You’re smoking pot!” ‘Ach,’ he said, ‘it’s just so…’ ~ waving his hand to encompass the day, the deepening afternoon, the greenery. “I agree,” I said, and we talked for a while about stinging nettles, and daisies. After that I walked for maybe an hour and didn’t meet anyone else nor their dog. Except for five shadows lurking on the other side of the river, sifting back and forth mysteriously in front of a huge raging fire they had built. The flames were leaping high and the mound of wood they’d set fire to was tall and triangular. This was under the long high roof of a storage shed thatched with bark tiles. Not thatched, exactly. I thought about the impenetrable Swissness of things, imagined the secretive signals by which they would have arranged they would meet up. A train went past a long distance away and at the same moment up on the hillside someone unseen let out a huge, scarifying shriek: the kind you let rip when the forest is all around mystifying you with its trees, and the sun won’t last much longer, it is time to be heading home to the domesticated landscape but for these few moments you are you, you are ancient, you are wild, you are free.
It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.
A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.
I met a horse. This horse had several large brown friends, in white socks, a kind of uniform they wore with insouciance, all of them living apparently in a big barn with straw trodden into its stained concrete. Horse life is boring, I suppose, when it’s under a roof. The horse fixed me with his eye as I was rambling by the river and compelled me by a kind of horsenosis to climb the hill and face him. We stood and stared at one another. I thought of the apple core I had thrown away in the brush. I told him, I haven’t brought you anything because… I didn’t know you were here. Somehow the horse or the grass itself put in my mind the idea that there was fresh green grass spurting everywhere plentifully out of the ground, only – he demonstrated with his head, ducking under the rails, and he had to do it twice before I got it – in a ring around the fenced enclosure all the grass was eaten to the nub. Poor horse. I said, “Would you like some grass? You can have some,” and bent to rip it. Laid my hand flat and offered it to his big lips and teeth. He showed me by knocking the stalks on the rail it is preferable to tear off the woody stems and clots of dirt. I should have thought of that. Next clump I harvested, I tore the stems across so he could eat the whole bundle, which he did. The other horses pawed impatiently at the rails. What stops them from jumping the fence? Only politeness, I imagine. I’m home now, hearing people moving about upstairs and the surprising bleat of sheep and throaty clong of sheep’s bells from a garden with no house in it, two houses away. I can see an Ikea stool belonging to the next-door children and the blooming wild plums on the far side of the river that grow in clumps and look like smoke. It’s growing dark now and the Indonesian lamps inside the house make yellow splashes on the scenery.
My arms are full of scratches from traveling among the trees along the river. It’s interesting how so much of what we see is due to attention. A woman passed behind me as I was crouched in a mossy hollow this morning, poking the water with a stick, and until she was almost on top of me I did not see or hear her, though I could hear in her voice she’d seen me. A dozen stick-lengths away, on the water, passed a long pointed boat filled with army recruits. They were wearing bright orange life jackets and looked like ducklings. By remaining quiet and focusing on my bent stick, dragged by the green current, I stayed hidden though my white t-shirt and dirty orange sneakers must have been in plain view. I used to think of mindfulness as awareness of everything. Now it seems more like acceptance, and focus. There will often be a train clattering over the high arched bridge. There will often be an opal drake, steering absently in the water as though floating on his back. And presumably every leaf, every petal of the shower of gold blossoms overhanging the narrow path has its own sensation of the feeble sunlight trickling through the branches.
I ate my muesli on the river path and watched red insects furred with a fringe of legs investigating the slowly-rotting wood. The boatshed is held up by two felled but still rooted trees. The motorway roars a few hundred metres south, it carries a siren past. I saw a speedboat race upstream and then, twenty minutes later, return, in silence, with its engine cut: they were travelling sideways, simply letting the water bring them. As I watched, the man took his eyes off his wife’s hand on the tiller and folding his arms like a well-cared-for corpse he lay back full length in the bottom of the boat. The peace of people’s secret ambitions. After a long winter of empty skies the trees are full of song. Overnight I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s heartfelt but wry essays about the murder of migrating birds. I honour him. There should be many many more ducks and birds on this river, my friends say, at this time of year. What we have made very little resembles what I know of life. Sitting in a mossy hollow feeling a speckle of sun on my shoulders I realize I have taken refuge in the countryside and may never go back. Spend the rest of my life foraging round them and dwelling in the treetops like an airborne burrow: a nest ~ I imagine visiting cities like a honeybee to carry the gold dust away on my very many legs, darting in and droning away again, making a child’s drawing of a flower.
