Dropping back
Riverwitch #4
‘Riverwitch’ is a collaborative project with my wife Sharon Blackie, writing on her Substack The Art of Enchantment. It’s the re-understanding of a prose duet we wrote for each other back in 2014, both grieving and celebrating our dislocation from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides to Donegal in north-west Ireland. It offers a story-within-a-story as, ten years on, we try to make sense of the ways in which places claim us, mark us – and then, when it’s time, cast us loose. We are taking turns every Wednesday to revisit one of the original posts and add new reflections and insights. This is the fourth in the series. You can find more of the background to this project here.
Dropping back – Late January 2014
Some idioms are peculiarly heavy in the palm of your hand. Some turns of phrase stop us in our tracks. They sound just like other words on the outside but they are actually concealed stories, complete and detailed, tightly compressed into just a handful of syllables. Microbursts of meaning. Simply to utter the sounds of these words is to cast a spell over the day and make it something that it was not. For me, this is the power in the simple fisherman’s expression ‘dropping back’. Just to open my mouth and say it cuts me loose from the world, leaves me stranded in a reverie on the bank of a river in early spring.
As I write this, I am still haunting the rivers of the Outer Hebrides while Sharon is, briefly, on the banks of the Tullaghobegly in Donegal. She is securing our new home. That strange-sounding river lies at the bottom of the garden. We have not yet met, this playful stream and I. Sharon will lead me to the waterfall below the house one day soon, and introduce us. In her own good time. When she is mended.
The rivers on Lewis are in spate: their water is raucous and diffracted like a class of school-trip children piling off a bus. And the tides have been extremely high.
These beautiful little rivers, punching above their weight, flexing their featherweight muscles as soon as a shower has fallen, relaxing them again within hours of the sun coming out. They rise and they drop back as if on a whim, with none of the slow, deliberate siege preparations of the Tay or the Severn or the Great Ouse in flood. But it is not the dropping back of the water level that I am talking about. I am thinking about the salmon and sea trout that live in these rivers. The fish which thrust themselves inland to spawn in November and December, and are now returning whence they came. Unseen in the turbid flood waters, fish are dropping back.
We are often reminded of the salmon’s return journey upstream to the place of its birth, to breed and, most often, to die. In some species of salmon in the Pacific systems there is complete mortality after the spawning. But not so with our own wild, beleaguered Atlantic salmon. And certainly not so amongst the migratory sea trout that so often share their habitat. True, most of the cock fish die after breeding – and there is another story there about the nutrients from their bodies providing the fertility that nurtures the young parr – but many of the hen fish wake up the morning after their totally reckless love-making and start to think of living again.
Their bodies are emaciated from a long fast (adult salmon are unable to eat in fresh water – it is the price of their osmotic versatility) and from producing the richness of hundreds of eggs from their own body’s store of fats and proteins. Their skin is not the beautiful silvered mirror, suffused with a faint purple that exists nowhere else in the universe, with which they entered fresh water. They are dressed in dirty reds and black tatters. Their scales, those that remain, are itchy with parasites, and their gills are fringed with decay. The shining, plump fish which entered the river last autumn are now known as kelts.
Despite everything, they hold their station in the spring rivers by a determined, slow shovelling of water with their great slab tails. They cannot just make a run for it. The reversal of the chemical changes that allowed them to enter fresh water must take its own time. But they begin the slow journey that is ‘dropping back’. They begin, using another term in the same noble lexical family, to ‘mend’. From the spawning beds upstream at the base of the mountain, they will drop back pool by pool, hold a while, then drop back again.
Eventually they will reach the sea pool. The sea pool. The place of transition. Washed with salt twice a day. The ultimate liminal. A place of great danger. In low water or low tides it is a death-trap. Fish can be stranded by a falling tide and all their many predators know to wait there. But not this week. With a great joy I have just watched all the little rivers here puff themselves up into torrents at just the right time and throw themselves at the highest tides I have ever witnessed. The sea pools have briefly become great open thoroughfares and I stand and watch and see nothing at all in the deep peat-darkened water. But I know that fish are dropping back past me, exhausted, smiling, slowly turning silver and heading out to start all over again.
Dropping back - 2024
What if the gods decided to punish me for my sins, which have been many and grievous, by transforming me into a sentient boulder for a millennium? But having a nose for redemption and a wicked sense of humour, what if they allowed me to choose the place where I would be set down for the duration? Then I would tell them to place me in the sea pool of a Hebridean river. I haven’t quite decided which one yet. I have loved so many. But perhaps I have a little time, before it becomes necessary to make the final call.
The rivers of the Outer Hebrides are rarely longer than ten miles from source to sea. They often flow through a series of small lochs, each lochan complete and confident in itself but joyfully partaking of the community of the river. The flowing water, like a travelling story-teller, spends a little while in each still water and then, its tales all told, moves on.
Few of these rivers have anything you could call an estuary. Instead they have sea pools. At low tide a ridge of hard rock, or a wall of boulder-pebbles will separate the river from the ocean. The fresh water squeezes itself out through gaps or slides skinny over chutes of polished rock. During this period, the sea pool is claimed by the river. As high tide approaches, the sea pool licks its lips and waits for the first frothy frisson of salt. A breaching wave rolls in and the poor ragged seaweeds of the upper littoral gulp their fill of seawater. Salmon and sea trout smolts skitter at their first taste of the ocean. Now is their time of transition. For a short while, the sea takes possession of the pool.
Only on the highest tides, at the peak of the great sine wave of the moon, may the mature salmon enter. And even then, only when the rain has filled the rivers to bursting. They do not ask what will become of them, up there on the mountainside. This place calls to them when they are far out from land. They answer. By the end of winter the river is cradling the fragile hope of their offspring, like half-remembered dreams waiting beneath the gravel. The adult fish, if they have the strength, are free to transform themselves again.
You paint with words, David! Bravo!
Masterful.