High Water (1)

Just after the solstice, dark still comes down hard in late afternoon, and the ribbon of the towpath is barely visible at first. But these early evenings I still usually choose the walk by the river, not the pavement beside the rush-hour buses and the commuters heading home. The riverside is pretty empty of most of the time. Cyclists move illuminated, but family groups walking together string out across the path and only appear at the last moment. The trees drip their own interpretation of rain onto naked bushes.

The river is high tonight. Real rain has fallen onto saturated ground for a day and a half, and the fields from here to Gloucester, exhausted by the weight of the crops on them all summer, have poured all their soaking into the Thames. It hurtles by close to my feet. I always think of a big cat hunching its shoulders. The impression is heightened by the spots made by eddies as the current thrusts past the narrowboats and the roots of shrubs just below the brow of the embankment.

This is a night when the word “turbid” takes on its full sense. Water is coming up, turning over and sinking again into whatever lies at the bottom of the great flow. The Cherwell, whose first channel into the Thames lies just a little ahead, increases the volume of the larger river by a third. This is hard to believe when what’s coming out from under Folly Bridge behind me is so fast, pushing so hard downstream.

It’s not just the river. On my right, over the shoulder-high fence bending under ivy, the sports field gleams with strange fluidity. How the groundsman of that cricket pitch carries on from year to year is a mystery. All that moves and is lit on the main road has its ghost on the water. Those high ash trees obscured from the road by a very tall fence have more than tripled in height, the world around them glowing like a city on fire.

Across the river water’s odd colouration is trimmed off by the change into land’s blackness. So far, Christchurch Meadows are not much, not much, under water. The river embankment is only a slight interruption in their old role as consumers of flood, a role presumably also once played by the sports ground on the other side. Such meadows were prized in the past less for the protection they gave to the city (no medieval contractor would build on a flood plain) than for their fertility in the drier seasons. The silt of the river would make the land immensely fertile.

Why does the Thames make so little sound in such agitation? Its speed and strength seem to require a roaring or a whipping by. But it moves with tremendous quiet. It takes floating debris out of sight into the darkness with frightening rapidity. The quiet is eerie, the solitude of the towpath uneasy, the racket from the road uncannily close. I quicken my step, wondering if I’ll be able to get through further down.

Night keeps darkening, and the lights on the river break up, re-form in tune with their own laws, and my realignment with them as I go by. Where the path dips in front of the boathouses the water has crept up, marking the edge of its range with sodden leaves, bits of paper. So far though, the only land that has gone is the already soggy flood plain. As I make it to the main road and push on home, I wonder how long we’ve got.

(December 2012)