On Falling: A Submerged Willow and a Moorhen on the Edge

Walks by the canal - 26/11/23

The sky that morning was peach and yellow and blue and even though I wanted to sleep, maybe more than anything, I pulled myself out of my car, with its blow heater and it’s reclining seats, and I made myself go up the canal. Upstream of the sluice gates the water was flat and blushing with all the colours of first light. As I crossed the bridge, a female mallard scuttled out from her perch beneath me, on a wooden ledge above the surface. After the bridge the path was mud, sticky in the centre, thick with yellow beech leaves.

The edge of the canal was less defined than you expect of a man made waterway. Perhaps it once was a natural river, perhaps the water found its own way and then we appropriated it, adding in the concrete walls further downstream. Either way, the banks were thick with vegetation, reeds spiking up from the shallows, impossible to paddle in. I never see water without evaluating whether I can climb into it, even if what I decide is that I can’t. A moorhen ahead of me on the path scuttled toward the water, then paused rather than diving in. I walked slowly, keeping to the far side of the path where the leaves were crunchy underfoot, and he stayed, head cocked, watching me and always ready to make his escape. Half of the trees are leafless now, half of the leaves left are yellow and red and amber. I noticed a yellowed oak, every leaf spotted with black. On the floor, the colours were muted by a fine spray of frost.

I saw, then, in the river, a thing that should not be there. A thing that wasn’t there before. A tree, a willow, huge and gnarly, half submerged. Back on the bank the bone white snap of its trunk, shards stuck skyward. I could still see the twist of half its limbs, could picture the way it had stood, outlined and proud against dawn, midday, dusk skies, against rain and snow and sun and frost and wind, wind that eventually took it down. The leaves hung down toward the surface of the water, at 90 degrees to what they were used to. I thought of what was beneath the surface, the branches that thrust through silty water and endless weed.

What will happen to it, the half that is submerged? I don’t know enough about it to say. It is a constant theme, how little I know in the face of the natural world. But I hope it will provide labyrinthine homes for underwater creatures, playgrounds for fish, nesting spots in funny angled branches and places for weeds to wrap themselves. I hope it will feed the river somehow, will breakdown and become something new, will mulch down and decay and drop to the bottom and become mud and muck and water and weed and food for a hundred new lives. Now, trunk splintered, submerged leaves rotting and surprised, it feels unutterably sad. But I hope this is a new start of a new cycle. I don’t know but I hope so.