An anthropologist discovers a previously uncontacted tribe of dippers

Their world is barely twenty feet wide from left bank to right. But in length it snakes out into distances beyond their comprehension. They have a dozen words for upstream which are paired with acoustic mirror images for downstream, differentiated by intonation and rhythm. Countless more words express aspects and modes of the unwavering flow which defines their lives. Why wouldn’t they have such a rich vocabulary for the water’s arrow?

Some of these words are for the everyday. ‘I’m going downstream to the rock with the piece of pink baler-twine’, they might tell their partner. ‘I’m going upstream to the morning-sun-rock to dry my feathers’, says a recently fledged youngster. Other words are only used for disputation and exegesis. This includes the words which express the ideas of continuing to fly upstream or downstream indefinitely. These words are uncommon and difficult to translate. They share many connotations with our troublesome word infinity but also have some echoes of delusion, hubris or even madness. They occur, for instance, in a story about a pair of dippers[1] who lived many generations ago and who flew and flew upstream for days until they reached a point where the river flowed not downwards but upwards, out of a deep dark chasm in the limestone. Some dippers argue that because the river manifestly continues always to flow, through floods and through droughts, that even the concept of the river’s end is simply invalid. ‘The end of the river’ literally makes no sense to them. The story, in their opinion, is some mysterious allegory, which is to be understood as a celebration of the dipper’s love of paradox.

How are we to explain this fondness for puzzles and incongruities in a tribe with such a penchant for sober behaviour? They dress elegantly in velvet frock coats, always buttoned, which appear black from a distance but which reveal rich nut-browns and understated iridescence when you approach to talk with them. Their shirt-fronts are uncompromisingly white. Never soiled. The kingfishers think them terribly dull. The dippers in flight are a blur of functionality, direct from point to point. Commuters’ flightpaths, maybe an occasional pull-up turn to reverse direction, modest landings. The Grey Wagtails, with their watercolour aerobatics in pursuit of summer stoneflies, think the dippers are awful clodhoppers.

The dippers are impervious to these criticisms. While kingfishers plunge and Grey Wagtails flamenco with a thistle seed they walk unhurriedly upstream from a rock protruding out of the water and simply keep on walking until they disappear. There is no announcement by voice or gesture, no working of the crowd in preparation for this mighty magician’s trick. As the water rises above their belly’s comfortable bulge they lower their heads below the surface, peer left then right and walk right out of the known universe. Maybe there are dippers in the world who dive in and swim. These Upper Eden dippers walk through the looking-glass. From what can be seen of their dark underwater shadows, sometimes faintly visible from a high vantage, their feet remain on the river’s bed. A crouching angle of their back and the occasional genuflection of a wingtip collaborate with the water’s passage over them to keep their buoyancy in check.

Now they inhabit the world which the kingfisher only raids and the Grey Wagtail merely entertains. Cautious but cordial relationships are maintained with the White-Clawed Crayfish whose ground this is by night, who raises a single pincer in economical greeting. Eels blink sleepily out at them. Trout roll their eyes and skittishly disapprove. The dipper sees the river bottom bejewelled with caddis larvae and mayfly nymphs as they glance downwards - and again when they look upwards, reflected in the sticky silver underbelly of the other world above. Some time later a small, dumpy black and white bird appears out of nowhere on a rock in the middle of the river. How long have they been gone? A minute, an hour, a year and a day? We cannot be sure how time behaves itself down there. I suspect it is on a spree.    

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[1] It should be noted that all dipper stories involve pairs of birds rather than individuals.

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