Watching the water flow past a bend in the river. The same place, the same time of day, every week for 52 weeks. A year in the life.

Week 3

A gloom of gathering cloud – I blink to adjust my eyes to the fading light. Slowly I turn away from the sodden grass of the source and make to start my journey back to the village. As I walk I feel a drop of rain striking my head, and then another and another. Looking up I see a dark cloud passing over, west to east. I smile at the cloud, but it does not look my way.

I’ve never really held with this notion of tracing a river from source to sea. To understand a river one must take as one’s starting point the place where it ends, and then wind backwards to where it began: a spring, a rock, a cloud. Only then will one come to realise that the start and the end are one and the same.

 

I carried my dead in a net, a clattering catch of bones, of promise, of might-have-been

Katharine Norbury – The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream