Bog Myrtle & Peat

The river runs around the town at the back of the sewage works and the builder’s yard where the giant hogweed grows. There’s shit and prams in the shallows; horses and digger booms which overstand the current and frame the glimpse of a tall church steeple. This is where the tideline gently overlays the catchment’s flow – a brackish dead-zone where sweet fresh water blurs into the sea. 

As the rising tide swarms up inland, brine floats above the outbound stream until the current seems to run in both directions. “In” and “out” share the same silky bed in a swirl of chalk-fine sediment, and at certain points, the river is squeezed to either bank and the ocean dominates the centre. If you try to swim from side to side at that moment, you’ll find yourself zig-zagging and your legs blown in both directions like a weathervane before the rain. 

A dead sheep was floating in the meeting of these waters, with only the hump of its back to be seen above the surface. The fleece was peeling away to reveal the tight canvas bend of two belly-tops and the range of a spine down the middle. Everything else was underwater, and the zombiefied legs trailed below like ballast. My son was delighted by this shape, just as all children are delighted by the novel idea of death. So of course we threw stones at the corpse, and every splash flung gouts of mixed-up water into the sunshine and the bankside marigolds.

Good stones were hard to find and soon ran out, but at last we found a litter of half-bricks in the nettles and carried them in a desperate shuttle along the bank where a magazine of ammunition was hurriedly prepared. That’s when we really got going, and what celebrations ensued when the boy finally scored a direct hit. The dead sheep coughed and bubbled, bucking gently with the ripple in a slow imitation of a gallop, and then it began a new and altered rotation in the onsweep of waters which rose and fell upon each other in an endless, slippery glide.

Shelducks leaped from the nearby fields at the sound of our whooping. The drakes were fat in the sunshine, suddenly white and banded with chestnut motley. We watched them up and turning against the shape of Kirkennan and the heavy pines at Munches and Toull, and I know that you can spend a lot of time trying to recreate treasured moments from your childhood, wrapping them up carefully so that they can be opened again with kids of your own. But it’s also startling to look up after thirty five years and find yourself passing things forward by accident, trapped in the throes of a same-old silliness. 

I threw these stones from the same muddy bank with my own father when I was four, and perhaps the difference here is not that this was like a memory, but the exact same moment come again. As we snatch at the glimpse of our sons in the river, the two streams are clarified for a moment – and their way in is our way out.