It has been ten years since one life ended and another began, long enough to grow older, short enough to still remember. Ten years since I made a promise to journey down the Camlin, and now the time was right. The world had stopped and I was given a chance to carry out a wish, to make my water pilgrimage. I set out on my voyage in remembrance of an old life and in celebration of a new one. The river has not changed, even if I have, and yet I think now of all the water that has flown through it in those intervening years, all the memories, all the raindrops, all the molecules. We are both our own wish-fulfilling jewels.
Water has been with me all my life, from the streams and gullies of the fields around our farm to the ebbing seas that surround our island nation.
The county of Longford in which I live has been shaped by water. Here in the centre of Ireland we are the navel of this ancient place. Below our feet lies layer upon layer of limestone said to be the remains of ancient sea life. This stone is known for its permeability; water flows through it, creating strange shapes as it goes. Unseen underground rivers and streams feed the land and create a hidden world.
Sometimes in this land, I think that it is the meeting point, that the water flowing through the stone has shaped not just the rock but us. That in this middle place, this middle kingdom, we are meeting life and death, heaven and hell, nature and destruction, that the permeation has made us the people we are. That the water has in fact shaped our souls.
In the Aboriginal Australian understanding of the earth, the world must be sung into existence, and so I sing now the song of the river; its bends and breaks, its corners and depths. I sing though the old words are long lost, I sing to the crooked pool, to the Camlin.
Rivers are special things. They hold and contain our memories; from them we have found food, built cities, launched wars and sought defence. They occupy only 0.1 per cent of the world’s land mass and yet, to us, they are the ever-giving life source. Wherever man is, a river is not far off.
The Camlin river is no different from any of the great rivers of the world. Upon it here in Longford we have built towns and villages. Around it, we have farmed the land and found the grass sweet and plentiful. Inside it, we have for thousands of years caught its fruits of trout, perch and pike. It is but a feeder river to the mighty Shannon, the artery of the nation, but to me it is as mighty as the Ganges.
Rising in the east of the county, the river follows a meandering course for some thirty-odd miles, from near the town of Granard to the village of Clondra in the west. The river is a dividing line separating the hill and drumlin land of the north from the flat grasslands of the south of the county. In the 1800s Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a local landlord, sought to change its course to make a canal across the county for boat traffic and to prevent frequent flooding. That change never came and the river flows as it has always done, meandering, ebbing, flowing, falling and rising, following no course but its own.
County Longford is a small place, only some 450 square miles in area, a hidden land seldom visited by tourists and not well known, but its lakes, rivers and waterways are some of the finest in the nation. Perhaps it is its small size or because it is often overlooked, but this secret has kept our water bodies pristine. A few years ago a Waterways Ireland expert told me that the Camlin was one of the best feeder rivers in the country and if there were fish kills in other places they could always depend on the Camlin to find new stock. That was something that gave me great quiet pride in my little river.
Rivers are in so many ways personal things. They become uniquely special to each new person who beholds and inhabits them. Perhaps it was the site of one’s first kiss, the spot where a great fish was caught or simply where we came to rest. The ‘our’ of collective experience of a body of water becomes a personal ‘my’, the river in so many ways flows for us alone, and in that intimacy we understand the true majesty of these bodies of water.
To travel the length of the river was my goal. To navigate its flow my mission. That there was a pandemic on was not my concern. Rather, it had given me the time and space to undertake the trip. In order to carry out my voyage I first had to study the river and the land that had made it. I needed a map to guide my way.
The first documented map of Ireland, which is by no means accurate, was drawn by Ptolemy in AD 140 and shows some fifteen rivers, but it maps little of the interior.
Mapmaking is relatively recent in Ireland. There was no grand cartographic tradition in the nation prior to the 1600s because our world was a highly localised one. It’s said that all the geography a man needed to know could be kept in his head. I think in a respect we have retained this ancient quality. We are still a highly localised people, some people never straying from the townlands of their birth the whole of their lives. So it is for my father, who was born in Soran, lives in Soran and, if he has his way, will die in Soran, the townland of our home.
Longford as we know it was first formed out of the now-extinct territory of Tethba, which comprised all of Longford and half of Westmeath, our neighbour. Tethba was divided by a river, the Inny, which demarcated the east and west of the territory. Tethba played no great role in the foundation of the nation, which had more to do with the ancient peoples who came before, the Fir Bolg and the Milesians, the Gaelic travellers who journeyed from Spain to Ireland to settle this land. (On a recent trip to Galicia my guide, who knew the name of the Milesians, reminded me that we are family.) Tethba does, however, play a mythological role in the nation as the setting of the Wooing of Etain cycle, in which men and gods fight over the beautiful Etain – our own Helen of Troy. Etain herself was turned into a pool of water, perhaps signifying even then the special relationship we water people have with the rivers that flow through our lands. Tethba ceased to exist as a territory after the Norman invasion of 1184 and soon the county of Longford was born out of the remains of the kingdom of Annaly, the territory of the O’Farrell clan.
The Camlin was first mentioned in 1375, its origin being described as the lifting of a large stone on the side of a hill, from which the river flowed forth. Longford as we know it now was mapped in 1610 by John Speed for his book The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1612). The map clearly shows the Camlin flowing through the county and being fed by Ballin Lough, a small lake near the east of the county and part of the true beginning of the river.
There is something special about seeing the river mapped some four hundred years ago. It was flowing even then, and witnessing what is now only notes in obscure history books. Who knows what the river saw? What joys and agonies? Speed’s mapping, beautiful as it is, was not just a pretty picture, it was a working tool of the conquering Tudors, who wanted to know the land they were subjugating and occupying. The natives had too much knowledge of the place, as Edmund Spenser noted, calling them ‘a flying enemye’ who hid in woods and bogs. If the English could map the land, they believed, they could control it. Knowledge of the place would help them divide the land among themselves.
Speed’s map contains Irish, English and Latin words, revealing the already complex nature of language in this land. The Camlin, though not named on the map, features prominently because with so few real roads in the county the river would have been one of the few navigable highways, a thoroughfare to bring men and munitions through. This was a time when rivers were never more important. This map is the embodiment of my home at a time of great change.
Great as the Speed map is, it’s not exactly the best navigation tool for a trip in the modern world and so, with the help of the county council and of Marguerite Donohoe, a neighbour and family friend, a map was made for me. Its aim was a simple one: to chart the Camlin from source to end and to show me where it flows. It would be my guide on my journey through this land.
With my map in hand, I had more than Columbus dared dream. I knew the way and, with a borrowed Canadian canoe, I had the means. I had crisscrossed the river’s course on foot, by bicycle and by car since my return to Ireland five years ago, but I had never journeyed down it.
Meandering as the Camlin is, it’s deep in parts, and further west of my home it runs through terrain unknown to me. It is a place of both beauty and danger, so undertaking my journey alone wasn’t something I wanted to do.
Peter Geoghegan is an investigative journalist, a writer and, most important for my trip, a trained geographer. In the time of the first global lockdown he found himself at home again in Longford for the first time in over a decade. The Irish countryside is full of people who have fled the cities, and Peter left Glasgow behind for the safety of our quiet community. I am glad of that, for I need a co-pilot.
Ours is a special friendship. His father has been a family friend since childhood, a schoolmate of my uncle Paul’s and later my parents’ vet for our cattle. Now a second generation of friendship has come for us, their sons. We did not know each other in childhood; our friendship has come about as men through an introduction by Peter’s mum. We both work with words, Peter with his journalism and me with my books. We have travelled throughout Ireland in our short but dedicated friendship, climbing mountains and making documentaries. It is a friendship that has been a boost to both our lives. Peter is the friend, the learned friend I had been looking for for so many years. That he was here all along brings a smile to my face – I did not have to travel far to meet a soul brother. There is something right in our friendship, something of the community of this land.
After weeks of chats to keep up our collective spirits I have decided to unfurl my plan to Peter. I call him to explain the journey, hesitant at first, thinking he will view it as daft, but when he hears my scheme he agrees straightaway.
‘It’s something I’ve never done before,’ he says. This from a man who once travelled to Outer Mongolia to make a documentary on the ancient art of wrestling.
‘Neither have I,’ I admit.
‘It’ll be fun,’ he adds. With that, our mission is set.
I do not go into the greater reasons for the trip. Peter has not asked and, besides, there will be a right time to tell him.
We agree to leave come Sunday. We will travel the Camlin and meet its sister, the Shannon. It should be a journey of some two days.
Water is a strange substance, the second most common molecule in the universe. It occupies some seventy per cent of the earth’s surface and is needed for all known life, and yet it contains in itself no calories or nutrients, no special salts or salves.
Considered for millennia as one of the four elements, its chemical makeup was not investigated until the work of Henry Cavendish and Antoine Lavoisier in the eighteenth century. Cavendish, a shy man, first documented the element hydrogen, calling it ‘inflammable air’. He discovered that burning hydrogen created water. Lavoisier, a French nobleman and chemist now known as the father of modern chemistry, who discovered many of the elements of the Periodic Table, carried out Cavendish’s experiments and gave hydrogen and oxygen (the elements of water) the names we now know them by. It was not until 1811 that the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro determined the H2O formula (though Cavendish had correctly guessed the formula years before).
Water is the great moving chemical on this earth of ours. It is continually changing in its form in the ever-flowing water cycle. The cycle involves the movement of water through the natural world in evaporation, condensation and precipitation. As with everything in nature it works in a harmonious rhythm that has continued since time began. It is found in every corner of the globe in its three forms of liquid, gas and solid, and is the only substance so widely distributed in all these forms. We use seventy per cent of the freshwater in the world in our agriculture, but salt water is not without its uses; a great number of people in the world depend on its native wildlife to feed themselves. We use salt water too as a means of transportation, taking goods long distances across the seas and oceans from one corner of the globe to another.
We are surrounded by this magical liquid every day, from a kitchen tap to gentle rainfall; indeed, we are so used to it that we take for granted the molecule that makes our blue planet. It has been thought of as an infinite resource; it would always be there, rivers would flow for ever, a litany of tomorrows. But in recent years the concept of peak water – that we are taking more fresh water from the earth than is readily replaceable and renewable – has entered the mainstream. In India and China, the two major population centres of the globe, water withdrawal is already nearing its peak. In China, one-third of the people lack access to safe drinking water – that’s over 330 million people – and one of the main rivers, the Yellow River, has been so depleted that over two thousand lakes which it fed have disappeared in the last twenty years. To put that into context, there are only twelve thousand lakes in Ireland; and if we lost that many it would be international headline news.
We take our water for granted, and yet without it we are nothing. We are the freshwater people; this is our culture and our lifeblood. Water, as the saying goes, is life.
The day is set and we are ready for the journey. We decide to start in Ballinalee; after a few days of research I have discovered that the upstream section of the river is both too shallow in parts and too overgrown in others to navigate. Besides, on some soul level it seems right to start here in Ballinalee. I have started so many great missions in life here. Why not one last great adventure through my home?
By Enda Tully’s house, my father Tom parks our Jeep and sheep trailer and unloads the canoe. Peter and I take our gear out of the back and make some last-minute checks before we carry our vessel to the edge of the water. We are ready for adventure. Its song is in our hearts. My father smiles at us.
Da and I have become great allies in the years since I returned home, and we farm and work together as equals. Ours is a bond of friendship now, and each day is a learning day as I come to understand his gifts of reading the land and animals. It is not, however, a one-way affair, for through my books he has become a literary man and we discuss these things on our long hours out in the fields or in the cattle sheds. Our topics range from ancient history to the best way to tackle foot rot in a pregnant ewe. We are the two bulls in the field who have come to know each other better.
My father is excited about our mission and I know that in a way he would like to come himself, but he has one concern. He is worried about our safety, and justifiably so. Exactly a week before I tried in vain to launch a kayak from the same spot only to come to a very wet end and a half drowning. The canoe, he agrees, is a safer bet.
Some fourteen feet long, it is a fair vessel, fire-engine red in colour, with great upturned points fore and aft. It holds our gear neatly in its centre. It has no name, which seems unfitting for such a grand adventure. We call her simply She, and perhaps that will do. She’s as close as we shall ever come to the Bounty or the Endeavour, a better vessel than the Aran island men had long ago and more fashionable than Saint Brendan’s rig. She’s all we need and more.
Peter and I slowly get into the canoe and my father hands us the last of our belongings. Neatly tied in a black bag is the fire stove, a water kettle and a small bag containing all our food. I lift it gently into the boat, checking there are no holes. No one wants a soggy sausage for their tea!
‘I’ll stay till you get to the bridge,’ my father says.
‘That’ll do,’ I agree.
Slowly, gently, Peter and I use our oars to push out from the river bank. The water at Tully’s is deep, some five feet or more, and now we gradually get our bearings and remember our training.
‘One … two … three,’ I call. Peter answers with the rhythmic movement of his paddle from behind me and together we paddle on and the canoe comes to moving life, sailing forward gently as we find our river legs.
Out on the water now I say a private small prayer to God to bring us safely across these waters, to bless our journey and bring us fortune. Faith is something that has grown in me as the years have gone by since my return home. I have, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, found my own Seven Storey Mountain in the natural world around me. In the cathedral of life. It might seem old-fashioned to believe, but then who else is there to give thanks to? I have no word for it all but ‘the makers’. It is what makes sense to me. I am a man of the word and a believer in the Word. I bless myself like the great monks of old did before their voyages and quickly fall into the rhythm of the water.
My father laughs and stares and walks up to the top of the bridge waiting for us to appear.
We stroke and paddle and the Camlin moves beneath us now.
‘Have you got the hang of her?’ I call to Peter as we move under the bridge, marvelling at its stonework.
‘I’ve got her!’ he shouts and I turn and see a smile on his face. He’s ready for whatever comes. With his heavy beard he looks every inch the explorer. He’s the Clark to my Lewis.
As we move past Mickey Hourican’s fields to our left and the agricultural store to our right I turn and see my father on the bridge talking to a neighbour, Martin, our local publican.
‘Where are they off to?’ Martin asks, his voice echoing down to me.
‘To the end of the Camlin,’ Da replies.
‘That’s an awful long way.’
‘Youth,’ my father says simply, ‘youth.’
I’m thirty-three years of age.
But we are on our way. The grand expedition has begun.
Working a canoe is a particular art. For one thing, it is a vehicle that requires teamwork. To drive her forward the person in the front of the canoe must paddle on one side of the boat while their partner in the rear takes the opposite side. If I paddle on the right side, Peter must paddle on the left.
To balance the canoe you must rely on your arse. Leaning back and forth on our glutes we hold the boat in position. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not just sitting on your bottom; you have to work it. Already, after about half an hour, our rears are getting stiff. When they say, ‘Put your arse into it,’ they must be talking about canoes.
Turning the canoe is a different matter, however, and as we sail on down the river by the farm store we quickly realise that we don’t yet know how to turn. Damien, from whom I have borrowed the canoe, instructed us to make a reverse ‘J’ in the water when we want to turn, but try as we might the boat hits river bank after river bank.
‘This is going to take a bit of figuring out,’ Peter says.
‘Fuck the J,’ I say, as we hit the rampart of another sod-filled riverside.
By Forster’s farmhouse we face some shallows and I get out to pull the boat over the stones.
‘We’ll try again,’ I say, and after some careful work we figure out our own method of steering. We call them the hard lefts and the hard rights and when we want to turn we both pull outwards on the same side. It’s early days, but the hard turns work and when we need to I call out the instructions like a race car navigator. We are gaining ground.
‘That’s Forsters’,’ I say to Peter as we pass. It is nice to have the naming of places in this, the universe of the familiar.
I look up to the right to the street of the Forsters’ yard as we slowly drift by. Long ago the family had a mill here for grinding flour. All my life the wheels of the old mill sat outside the front wall of their home house. It was Tommy Forster’s great wish to restore the mill and bring back a part of the industrial heritage of the village. Many plans and schemes were tried, but the mill never did get going again. I think now the fun was in talking about the old times, in the idea of getting it back up and running, for what use would a mill be now?
Tommy’s son Davy lives in the home house now. Perhaps he’ll be the one to bring the mill back. Perhaps the wheels will turn again for the first time in a hundred years and the old ways will not all be lost. It would be nice.
Past Forsters’ we move now and the river opens out before us.
‘This is the life,’ Peter says, and lets out a sigh of pleasure. He is, I can tell, starting to relax, starting to become one with the river. We have undertaken enough journeys for me to know my friend. I would rather be with no other person in this moment. I am the richer for his friendship, the wiser for his company.
We are happy in our work.
Out now in the open water of the untouched river, we find our confidence. We haven’t talked much as we concentrated on learning the ropes of our craft. The hard lefts and hard rights, however, soon become second nature and our bank-hitting days are quickly left behind us.
The river has opened out and speed has come into her. I call out the depth of the water below us as the steam boaters did in the time of the Mississippi crossings.
‘Three feet,’ I holler, ‘moving into four!’
There is comfort in knowing that the river is not so deep. The Camlin is a tidal river, as I call it, but it rises not with the seas but with the seasons; high and fast in winter when the great storms come, so high you could only dream of launching a boat down her; you would be swept away in a rapid as fast as any you could care to think of.
No, the late spring and early summer are the time to boat the river. Its levels are lower and it becomes less angry and dangerous. Following its ‘tidal’ pattern, it lowers in places to a fast stream in the height of summer, but always it flows, knowing no interruption.
As we approach a hard left we weave and turn the boat through the reeds and a trout breaks from the water, jumping for the insects. I look now and there are mayflies everywhere, rising and falling, swooping and singing. It is May and it is the time of their courtship but I have never seen them in real life before.
‘What are they?’ Peter asks.
‘A wonder,’ I say, and we marvel at their gentle puffs through the air, swanning higher and higher and then lower and lower, carried as if by some unseen propellers.
The mayfly is a living fossil. Dating from the Carboniferous and Permian periods they are, with their relations the dragonflies and the damselflies, among the oldest extant winged insects in the world. To watch them in flight is to see what the very first journeys into the air were like all those millennia ago.
There are over three thousand species of mayfly in the world, but here in Ireland just thirty-three are endemic (a hangover from our isolation from the rest of Europe). Living and dying entirely by the waterways, they are our hallmarks of healthy rivers for they require clean water to live and eat.
We paddle on slowly now and watch the swarms puff and bounce. Some land on the river, only to be snapped up by the hungry trout below us, while above us swallows take great Spitfire dives and gobble them out of the sky.
The river is alive and throbbing and the sky thick with these mighty beasts. I raise my hand and run it through the air, feeling their fluttering forms against my skin. I am not sure what species they are for they fly so fast, but perhaps it is the late March brown, which is a plentiful species of mayfly. Of the thirty-three species in Ireland, seven are under threat from degraded waterways. Perhaps here on the Camlin I shall see some of them. I will keep my eyes open.
Mayflies takes their name from their emergence from the river each May. Despite their diminutive size and drab appearance, they have captured the imagination of poets and artists through the ages, and are found in our poetry, art and even buildings. The mayfly has been a perennial inspiration. Indeed, as far back as the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle wrote of them, noting that they only live for a single day. Perhaps it is the brevity of their lives that so intrigues us; they are perhaps an embodiment of the fleeting nature of existence.
Born in the river, the larvae of the mayfly, known as nymphs, may spend two to three years on the bottoms of rivers and lakes, burrowing into silt and sand, where they filter food out of the water. Ever growing, they move through various stages called instars, moulting and shedding, their forms growing ever larger. With two large compound eyes and three simple eyes, they live in an ever-changing underwater world, breathing through their gills.
At some predestined time they finally emerge from the water and begin their next transformation. Shedding their last nymph skeleton they become a subimago. It is at this stage that they truly become unique, donning their wings and taking flight. The subimago is, however, not a true adult, lacking developed genitals to breed with. In some species the subimago stage lasts just a few hours; for others it is days. In this state, the creature hides out and matures into its final stage, the imago. No other insect undertakes a final moult from one winged state to another.
The mayfly as we know it has now been born, but it is born to die. Lacking a mouth, it can no longer eat and must rely on all the energy it has built up through those years underwater. In most cases it lives for only a day. Fly fishermen, who have so readily imitated it, know the imago simply as a spinner. Flapping its wings and taking to the air, the spinner performs its swansong. Through ritual dancing, a mate is found and after the males have fertilised the female’s eggs they fall away to die.
Alone now, the female carries out the last of her life’s work: to lay her eggs. In this, there is danger. She must lay them in the water and there are predators above and below the water waiting for her. A female spinner can lay thousands of eggs in the water, dipping her tail below the surface in the course of her flight. In these thousands are contained the chance of life for the next generation.
Her life spent, the female falls to the surface of the river and her day of days is over. The ancients were fascinated by such a short life. Here now on the river, where the soul slows down, where a canoe can carry us no more than two miles an hour, I see that time as we know it has ended.
We have joined with a new unison in nature where ten minutes can feel like an hour and an hour becomes a lifetime. It is in this space, the river pace of paddling souls, that the single day of the mayfly becomes an aeon; in their fluttering is contained a universe of understanding; their changing forms contain the soul of all life as it was in the beginning unto the end. If we were all of us to only live one day then better it be the day of this creature’s vivacity than a hundred thousand days of inaction.
‘Gosh, they’re beautiful,’ says Peter.
We stop paddling and enter a powerful silence, simply watching the world around us. Everything rising and falling, living and dying around us. Peter is a man of talk but also a man who can hold a stoic silence when the moment calls for it. We sit in contemplation.
It’s amazing what happens when we slow down. When we simply let ourselves be. We must become as the mayfly and live in the ageless day with blue sky above and water below. We are in the now. Peter and I have crossed the threshold and nothing will ever be the same again.
My Uncle Davy is by many accounts an extraordinary man. An undertaker by profession, he’s also a fisherman, a hunter, a goat and sheep breeder and, most important, a boater. I know of no one else who has sailed the Camlin. He has not journeyed its full length but he has gone further than anyone we know. He is our John the Baptist and our best source of knowledge on what lies ahead. Davy and his teenage son Jack sailed part of the river a few years ago and saw what we have seen so far. In a way, that has given me the fire to fuel our journey and a sense of safety in the knowledge that it can indeed be done.
A few days before the trip I came to him with my map and we studied the river from start to finish.
‘The river first begins as two gripes or streams,’ he explains, pointing out the Rhine and Camlin in the east of the county. I have walked the lands he has pointed out, and we discuss the origin of the river properly. The streams are small but healthy and feed two small lakes, Ballin Lough and Killeen Lough, which lie in a wilderness country that’s fresh and healthy.
Flowing from Ballin Lough the Corbaun River slowly emerges in the northern wildlands of Clonfin.
‘I walked it a few days ago,’ I tell him.
On the river’s southern bank lies a pure untouched land, a place of rush, reed and trees fringing a bog. After several hours walking in the area, I began to notice something that I had never seen before; freshwater pearl mussels. Jutting out of the low-lying water, these highly endangered creatures are the most long-lived animal in Ireland, reaching up to a hundred and forty years in age. They are filter feeders, taking in and expelling up to fifty litres of water a day through the siphons in which they capture food.
The freshwater mussel is on the red list of endangered animals because of bad farming practices, pollution and bank erosion leading to dirty waterways. Not too long ago they were hunted in large numbers to find the pearls that some carried. The Munster Blackwater river in the south of the country was once said to hold 30,000 mussels. but that population has now dramatically declined. Where the species is found, conservation projects are under way to protect them, but I do not think anyone knows they are here in this quiet corner of the Camlin.
‘It’s amazing the wonder we have on our doorstep,’ Davy says, taking the map in his hand.
We talk then of its flow through Clonbroney. There is an ancient graveyard here, and the former site of the first convent in Ireland. It’s said that Saint Patrick himself, coming into this land, ordained the daughters of Milchu, his former slavemaster, to run this place. Its most famous abbess was the folk saint Samthann, who lived a life of gentle charity and after whom the local school is named. The convent is gone now, but the river flows by, unaware of its splendid past. Here it is not navigable, for it is overgrown and narrow. It is a hidden corner of our ancient history.
Davy is a man of adventure and if the time had been right would have been the sort of person to set out prospecting for gold in the Wild West. Years ago, Ellen, his wife, told me his only regret in life was not going to America to live.
‘He could have made it big there,’ she said to me that day.
‘Well, he did it here just fine,’ I replied, at which she smiled.
Pointing to the map, Davy shows me where electric wire crosses the river at various points to stop cattle escaping and then to a great straight stretch of river several kilometres long.
‘That’s the back of the piggery and it gets serious deep here, there’s no bottom,’ he says, and a fear grows in my stomach. ‘But you’ll get through. We did, after all,’ and he laughs.
We talk then of what lies ahead and the unknown waters past Cullyfad.
‘You’re on your own then. I never went any further,’ he says. ‘It’ll be something if you make it to the end,’ he adds and with that folds the map and invites me in for tea and talk of the journey ahead.
He’s my Livingstone today and I keep his advice in my head and heart.
If Uncle Davy can do it, so can we.
Leaving behind the swarming mayfly we navigate the waters of the river. From the brush, a wild duck and her chicks break across the surface, screaming and squealing to be so unexpectedly disturbed.
‘Look at her go,’ Peter says, and we watch their darting forms before us.
We are approaching Soran bridge, a lovely single-arch structure and a sister to Ballinalee bridge, where we started. The Board of Works constructed these bridges, and many more, in the mid-nineteenth century and in the case of the Soran bridge it replaced a much older structure. When we look closer a darker truth emerges from the grey stone. Most of the works on these projects throughout the land started from 1847, the worst year of the Great Famine. At this time the powers that be, rather than providing aid, made starving men work for their food. So began the countless famine roads around Ireland. Roads that started nowhere and led nowhere. We locals still compliment the British engineering in this land, but we forget the Irish hands that built it.
I do not know whether starvation labour built this bridge, since we do not know the exact year of its construction, but it’s said that a ghost haunts it and on cold nights, when someone’s coming home from the pub by foot or bicycle, they can feel the spectre.
We paddle on now, weaving between reeds and rushes.
‘This is where the Power Dalton got killed,’ I tell Peter. ‘I was just a lad when it happened.’
At the corner of the bridge stands a simple wooden cross to remember the tragic accident that claimed the lives of “the Power” Dalton, his son Seamus and John Jones in 1995. It was the end of October and the men had been working in the village. Their car crashed into the river late in the night. The bodies of the Power and John were found, but Seamus could not be found after the crash, and so it was that the community went in search of him across the river we now thread.
‘We walked the fields and streams,’ I say.
Hundreds searched the marshland beside the river and the national news came to report on the crash, such was the devastation of having our dead taken from us. I still remember searching with my brother and father, not understanding the enormity of the blow that had fallen on the community. It seemed so strange that this river of joy could be a taker of life, a dangerous thing.
‘It was twenty-five years ago this year,’ I say to Peter.
‘And the body? Was it found?’
‘In the reeds some kilometres downstream.’
The river gave back what it had taken.
The cross stands now as the memories of the community fade. The three men were buried on All Saints’ Day, a feast day for all the great saints that have paved the road since Christ.
‘We must be careful on the river,’ Peter says simply.
‘It can never be taken for granted,’ I agree.
Silence has fallen on the canoe again and we paddle on, watching the water depths as we go. The deep water is starting to take hold, but our skills are growing. We move with a new-found instinct now, as if we were always water men. At times, however, the canoe builds up a great speed from our paddling and, at this pace, turning gets very hard. Perhaps it is the same for all canoers.
‘Let it roll!’ I call, by which I mean that we cannot turn her, and so we let her coast on into the branch or grassy bank. We might only be travelling at two miles an hour, but in the water speed can come upon one quickly. Sometimes it is better to gently hit the bank than risk turning the whole canoe over. We are like the very first sailors; we are learning our craft and at the same time the language of the river.
Nearing the bridge now we can see two figures waiting above looking down on us.
‘Ye made it this far!’ a voice calls. It’s my mother. She and my father are standing above the river watching us go.
‘Which way to New York?’ I shout and we all laugh.
‘I had to see it for myself,’ she says.
‘Have you got the hang of her yet?’ my father asks.
‘We’re getting there,’ Peter says.
We savour the good wishes. We do not know when we will meet another person.
My mother takes a picture of us for a keepsake.
‘You are making a powerful memory,’ she says.
She is right. At the end of time when the book of life is weighed against a man’s soul, we shall have the river and this journey. It will be marked in that slim column of joyful days. I have worked hard in the last few years to fill that ledger with goodness from the simple act of self-love to the notion of nourishment for the soul. This river is soul work; it is a memory in creation. From here, from this place of goodness, great feats can be accomplished; ones of the heart and ones of the spirit. I am filling the book and in that action I savour each of its pages.
We pick up speed now and skid across the surface of the water.
‘We’ll see you at the other end,’ we say.
‘Be careful!’ the shout comes.
‘Always.’
Rivers were the first roads in this land. On them, the ancients explored the interior of the island, pushing ever further inland from their coastal communities. We think of the canoe as a modern vehicle, but here in this country there are canoes of such age that it makes us marvel at the genius of those who came before.
The Lurgan canoe, which now sits in the National Museum in Dublin, is perhaps the best example of the handiwork of the old people. Dating back some four thousand years, the canoe was discovered in 1901 by Patrick Coen as he worked in a bog in County Galway in a place that had once been a shallow lake. The dugout canoe is carved from a single oak tree and measures some fourteen metres in length by one metre wide. So big was the craft that the trees that produced it no longer grow on this island, for the environment that produced them no longer exists.
It is unclear what the canoe was used for. Some experts think it may have had a ceremonial purpose; others say that the small holes in the vessel may indicate that it formed part of a larger catamaran vessel that would have been truly seaworthy.
To the old people, there were no nations as we know them now and despite the world being so much bigger then, regular trade occurred between Ireland and the rest of Europe. The beautiful gold artefacts from the pre-Celtic period produced in Ireland are found as far away as Germany and Scandinavia, such was the connection of the ancients across the seas. Who knows if the Lurgan canoe brought such treasures? If it moved across the waterways of the west carrying wonders we are yet to discover?
The canoe is not a European creation, however; it is found in all nations and among all the peoples of the water, from North America to the Aboriginal Australians. After the land bridges had been exhausted and then inundated, it was the canoe that brought people out of Africa to the rest of the world some fifty thousand years ago. Why the first migrants decided to take to the water we shall never know, but if it were not for their bravery we would none of us be here. The canoe above all other inventions changed the course of human migration.
As we paddle on along the Camlin, we paddle in history embodied. We see the same never-ending horizon as the people who went before and who are always with us, held inside our hearts, pushing us ever onwards.
A river can be hard and a river can be smooth. For now, we are in a smooth stretch and the canoe gently skims the water. We ride ever so slightly on the surface tension of the water, barely breaking its invisible form. Ahead, a pair of swans float gently, uncaring of our presence. There are always swans in this stretch of river. There must be a nest around here.
Damselflies hover around the water and a mating pair land on my knee. I do not brush them off. This is their river. They are common bluets (Enallagma cyathigerum), a plentiful species in the waterways of the region. The bluet is known for its distinctive black and blue colouring, which is much brighter and more vibrant in the males. Bluets can be confused with the azure bluet, which is very similar in colour and shape. Rarest of all in this part of the country is the Irish damselfly, the crescent bluet, though they have been found in the south of the county in Lough Ree.
Damselflies are very good indicators of the health of the river and the presence of pesticides in the water, which can seriously harm these graceful creatures. Their presence lets me know this is a goodly place. Natural hunters, they eat smaller creatures and are themselves the foodstuff of birds and fish. They are perhaps the brightest creatures we shall see on the river today, a testament to the vivid palette of nature.
The damselflies and their relations, the dragonflies, are beloved and revered in many cultures throughout the world, but it is perhaps the Japanese who have taken them to their hearts most of all. Recently my love Vivian returned from a trip across Japan and was full of the stories of this great land, from the art island of Naoshima to the bustle of Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. We share a love for the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose beautiful music soothed the soul of his nation in the wake of the 2011 tsunami.
Sakamoto, a musician, actor and producer, is also an activist who has passionately campaigned against the use of nuclear power in his country. His visit to the Fukushima contamination zone after the devastating meltdown there further radicalised his thinking on the dangers of nuclear power and led to his protest concert ‘No Nukes’ the following year. The night before the concert he said to a crowd of 150,000 protestors, ‘I come here as a shimin [citizen]. It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.’
Apart from Chernobyl there has never been another level seven accident in nuclear history. So bad was the damage to the plant that officials considered evacuating Tokyo, some 140 miles away, for fear of poisoning its inhabitants.
The tsunami washed over the sea walls protecting the power plant, flooding the lower grounds around the four reactor buildings, leading to a loss of coolant, which caused three nuclear meltdowns, three hydrogen explosions and the release of radioactive contamination. The clean-up from the accident will take some forty years.
In Japan the dragonfly symbolised bravery to the ancient samurai, the attitude of never giving up until victory has been achieved. I think of Sakamoto now. He continues to campaign for an end to nuclear power, fighting not with swords or daggers but with sonorous notes that heal rather than divide. He is my azure bluet. He is the water dragon.
As we paddle on we enter the marshlands of lower Soran. All through the fields, plantations of spruce trees have been set. They are growing strong and steady and have provided a home for pine martens, who were once on the edge of extinction.
Between the trees stand the sentinel-like upright trunks of bog oaks. Alive thousands of years ago, their fossilised wood was preserved in the peaty mass. When the planters find them they stand the trunks upright.
‘It’s their custom,’ my father explained to me years ago. The lands came from woods and are returning to them, the old littered among the new.
‘Should we take a short break?’ asks Peter.
‘That’s a great idea,’ I agree. ‘I know just the spot downstream.’
It’s been a while since we left Ballinalee, since we have become men of the water.
We push on now, watching Charlie Reilly’s big field as we pass. In the winter the mighty whooper swans nest here and they feed on the grass of Charlie’s great field after their migration from Iceland. So great was their number in some years that we could hear their calls some kilometres away. I tried once to get close enough to photograph them but they were wise to me and quickly moved away. They live now in my mind’s eye, honking and cheering as they waddle across the sweet autumn grass.
At Doherty’s bend, where the Soran river meets the Camlin, we bring our great procession to a stop and pull the boat onto a shallow sandbank.
‘This is the best spot to break,’ I say.
Peter and I stand up now and get out of the canoe. Our feet get wet as we cross the water, but we do not mind. If that is all that gets wet today we will be happy. It’s too early to produce the kettle and make tea – we have not earned that yet – so Peter opens some water bottles and we nibble on homemade flapjacks. We sit on the sandy riverbank and I light a cigarette.
‘I know I need to quit,’ I say. ‘When we get to the end I’ll stop.’
‘When Edmund Hillary was climbing Everest with Tenzing they packed fifteen thousand cigarettes for the trip,’ Peter says. ‘Can you imagine that? Puffing away as they climbed the highest mountain in the world!’
I have only four fags, so it’s no Hillary operation, but the break is nice.
‘Getting to the end is about more than stopping smoking. I’m here for another reason,’ I tell Peter.
‘Oh yes?’
‘There are some things, bad things I’ve been carrying around for a long time, and when we get to the end of the river I want to leave them there. I need to leave them there.’
It is the first time I have let Peter know my true reasons for this trip. It is not a secret, but it has taken some bravery to be honest with my friend.
In the harvest of memory, as the Irish poet John O’Donohue called it, we so often only remember the bad memories. They gather together like a scab blotting out the good in the book of life. For me the unlived lives, the choices not taken, have been following me. A failed marriage in Canada, a broken friendship in Australia, a life implosion. These things have haunted me for years, hung around like a dark spectre blotting out the good things or marring them in so many ways. I have sought to put them away from me but they have remained for years like a stone around the heart.
One of the great sorrows of life is the unnavigated and unlived one, but one of the great tragedies is the thinking that we have not taken the right choices. In going down this river I seek now to let those thoughts float away to the sea, to end their haunting. We cannot change our past, but we can come to peace with it.
Water is a song between the rain and earth but it is more, it is the absolving liquid of life. It can wash away all things.
‘I’m putting the past behind me,’ I say and realise I have never before made this intention public. In that moment of sheer vulnerability there is a sense of growing freedom from it. We have to feed nightmares to keep them alive and it’s time to put a stop to that.
‘I understand,’ Peter says simply. It is all he needs to say. Sometimes we must all make voyages of the heart.
I nibble on the flapjack.
‘These are great,’ I say, changing the subject.
‘My mother made them,’ Peter says, and soon our mirth has returned. Above all things, pleasure has ruled this journey and it will continue to do so as long as we keep going. Peter is the perfect river mate – he has the gift of happiness in his soul.
‘So much for being brave explorers,’ we laugh. ‘Our mothers are watching out for us!’ Yet we are not alone in this; even Thoreau living in his log cabin went home to get his laundry done.
We sit on the bank and soak in the sun. It was here at Doherty’s corner that we built our rafts in my childhood. Doherty himself was the grandfather of our community. A senator in the Irish parliament and an adviser to a taoiseach, he was the wisest man we knew. He had no wife or children of his own and so we, us neighbourhood children, were his family. He often walked to the river bend to see us play, delighting in our fun. He’s gone now, and it was my father’s wish to make a walkway along the river here for the community in his honour. It is a simple grass clearing along the riverfront and down the field from the road. It bears no sign, there’s no car park, but we know it is his stretch. His memory is strong here and we who knew him embrace it still.
Soon the river is calling us again and we must go. I finish the last of my cigarette and stow the butt in my bag. Peter packs away our water and nibbles and we push off once more.
From little things big things grow
It was ten years ago now and I’d never kayaked that far before.
I’m twenty-three and I’m out on the Sydney Harbour paddling for my life. A passenger ferry is bearing down on me and if I don’t move I’ll capsize and drown in the deepest natural harbour in the world. I pull and steer, splash and rake and slowly paddle myself through the waters of the harbour.
Long ago, before this land was colonised, the Eora nation lived around the harbour; the Gadigal, Cammeraygal and Wangal people fished and canoed its inlets and lived from the fruits of the land and sea. In that time the area where I was kayaking was known as Djubuguli. With the coming of the British, Captain James Cook named the harbour Port Jackson after Lord of the Admiralty Sir George Jackson. Through this body of water came the great fleets and the city of Sydney grew from its humble beginnings at Sydney Cove. In 1788 Governor Arthur Phillip said that the harbour was ‘without exception the finest harbour in the world’.
I have no time to think about this history now. The boat is coming straight for me. My friend and the owner of our kayaks, Daniel Stricker, shouts to me to get out of the way. I’m not wearing a lifejacket for I am full of the confidence of youth and think that nothing bad will ever happen to me. The morning sun is harsh and strong and I put my hand up to shield my eyes. We are in front of the Sydney Opera House and its white sails look beautiful and inviting. Designed by Jørn Utzon, the building was opened in 1973 with much controversy – the architect even resigned from the project.
The ferry is now some twenty yards from me and Daniel shouts to me to hurry. I paddle and paddle, pull and puff, and rise and fall over the currents and waves of the harbour. The ferry is too large to brake or come to a stop and I wonder now can the captain of the vessel see me at all? I must be quick. I gather my strength and battle the rising and falling water.
As the ferry bears down on me, I think of the Camlin now, the main river of my county, and how easy and safe it was to cross, that at worst only a pike roamed beneath us, while here in the harbour sharks prowl, looking for easy pickings.
If I make it out of here I’ll remember it for the rest of my life, I think; and if I don’t, everyone else will remember it for other reasons. I think now of the Australian writer Richard Flanagan’s first novel, Death of a River Guide, and how I’m like Cosini seeing his life flash before his eyes as he struggles in his sinking kayak. I say to my maker in my quiet way that I will return to the Camlin if I survive. It will be a camino of thanks.
Daniel shouts again, waking me from the stillness of the impending accident, calling me closer, and although I fumble, I gain a balance on the rippling waves and pull myself out of the ferry’s trajectory. The huge boat powers past, its big diesel motor roaring. Its horn ruptures the air, letting me know that I was lucky to get out of its way. It cuts through the water powerfully as we watch it head towards Manly to meet the morning commuters making their way to work in the city’s skyscrapers.
‘That was close,’ Daniel says.
‘Too close,’ I admit. We sit for a time on the water, not paddling, just looking around us. I take in my near miss.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ I say. It’s all I can think of to say. In the aftermath of near-death we are awakened to the beauty of the world.
‘Most fantastic spot in the world, mate,’ Stricker says, smiling at me with a beardy grin.
I’m alive. Between the north and south headlands of Sydney Harbour, I rest. I have been reborn in the water and nothing will ever be the same. I made my promise that day to return to the Camlin. The dream, the promise, is coming to pass now.
The small rapids at Doherty’s bend is one of the best fishing spots on this section of the Camlin. Here the river lowers to a fast gravelly pull and then deepens after the bend. It was here that I caught my first ever fish as a child.
‘This is a great place for fish,’ I say now, pointing out the corner.
‘Oh, I’d love a bite of something fresh,’ Peter replies.
‘You can’t go wrong with trout,’ I say.
The brown trout is my favourite of the fish in the Camlin. Not only is it good eating, it is a natural born fighter and a handsome creature. Its sleek gold sides are camouflaged with black and red spots, making it look like a river leopard. Its family is formed of three subsections: the river trout; the lake trout; and their cousin, the much bigger sea trout. So bountiful and common is the brown trout that it is found throughout Europe from as far north as Norway to the Atlas mountains in North Africa.
They live on a mixed diet of insects and, in some cases, smaller fish. So often when we see a jumping fish it is a trout feeding on hovering insects, leaping out of the river’s watery embrace to take their prey in one mouthful like the natural hunters they are.
‘I heard there was a six-pounder caught here a few days ago,’ I tell Peter.
‘Now that would be something to see,’ he replies.
Beloved by fishermen, brown trout have been introduced to distant lands around the world from Australia to South America and they now call those distant rivers their home. The journey of the first trout to go to Australia is a story in itself, involving the transportation in 1864 of 1,500 brown trout eggs from Cornwall in England to Melbourne aboard a ship called the Norfolk. The eggs were packed under tonnes of ice to keep them cool for the four-month journey. Not all the eggs survived, but enough made the perilous crossing to be brought to Tasmania, where a breeding colony was established. The trout soon prospered and are now found throughout the south-east of Australia. The story of their arrival as detailed in a fisheries report from 1864 reads as a tale of attempting to bring a bit of home to the antipodean nation. The results are there now for all to see and I have fished their sons and daughters myself under the hot southern sun.
When we were seven or eight years of age, my father taught my brother and me the great craft of the water and brought us down to this stretch of river. At first we fished with hooks and worms on our junior rods; then, as our confidence in the river grew, we used floats and spinners. I remember taking my first trout, the excitement of the then-unfamiliar downward pull on the rod and my father’s gentle instructions.
‘Don’t take him yet or he’ll snap the line. Give him a second, let him tire himself out,’ he said. And I listened – to me then he held all the knowledge of the world. In his own youth he too had caught fish on this river and often sold them to neighbours in the village.
We caught and ate my first fish that evening, frying it on the pan at home. I still remember the taste of its crispy skin and the juicy pink flesh, cleaner and more wholesome than any fish I have eaten before or since.
We seldom eat the fish any more, instead practising catch and release. It is enough to have the thrill of the capture, take a picture and have the feeling of besting the beast, if just for a fleeting moment. They live to fight another day and we hold fast on the memory.
Former US President Jimmy Carter once said that many of the most publicised events of his presidency were not nearly as memorable as days spent fishing with his father. On that, I can agree. The thing about fishing, I have long ago realised, is that it’s not about the fish, and those who seek to only catch miss the true nature of this gentle pastime.
We paddle on and around the corner. On the river bank, as if manifested by our chat, a fisherman stands casting his line.
‘See, I told you this was a great spot for fish,’ I tell Peter.
I look closer and see it’s my cousin Mike.
‘Arra, Mike,’ I say. ‘I bet you weren’t expecting to meet us today.’
‘Not a bit,’ he laughs.
I ask how the fishing is going and he says there are plenty of them but they’re not biting.
‘It’s a lucky corner. I say they will bite yet.’
Mike is a big fine man, a talented footballer in his day; it was said he could have had a spot on the county team if he had wanted it, but his building work in Dublin kept him busy and after a certain age he left the football to one side.
He worked with my other cousin on the footings for the Samuel Beckett bridge in Dublin a few years ago. That is something that has always captivated me. Not only was Beckett a hero of mine, but in the making of the bridge, I felt like we had contributed in a small way to the playwright’s legacy. Beckett himself was no stranger to Longford; his relations, the Magans, live to this day in the village of Killashee in the south-west of the county. Recently I met a cousin of his and reminded her of that great connection and how privileged we were to have a Longford link to the great man. I like to think that perhaps old Sam looked at this river one day and in that there is something special.
Mike is throwing in the towel, he tells us. Despite the rumours of a prize fish being caught a few days ago, his work has come to naught. We move on up the river and suddenly I see the fish that have eluded Mike, basking in the clear shallows like great sea dragons.
‘There’s loads here!’ I shout back to him, but he is walking home now, his day over. The fish are oblivious to their near miss.
‘You never know who’ll you run into on the river,’ Peter says, and I agree.
Peter is a smart man. He’s studied in universities around the world and divined the secrets of more than one craft. He was a journalism lecturer with tenure in Scotland, a geographer in Dublin and nearly a scull boatman in Cambridge.
‘I was offered a PhD there a few years ago but I turned it down,’ he says off-handedly as we crest the waters.
I have always been fascinated by the old British colleges and would have loved to attend Oxford or Cambridge. I tell him as much.
‘These places seem all hallowed when you are young but really there’s nothing too appealing in listening to a bunch of self-entitled undergrads lecture about a world they know nothing about,’ he laughs.
‘But it’s where the elites go.’
‘Oh, yes, they are all there, the future leaders of every sector in British society.’
‘The people who voted Leave?’ I ask cheekily.
‘Both sides.’
Peter has become an expert on Leave and Remain, the two divisive terms in Britain. He has spent the last few years writing a book on just what happened in Britain and the link between dark money and the results.
‘It was all a strange sideshow in the rest of the world,’ I say, ‘except, of course, our own nation’s role in everything.’
‘It was even more surreal in Britain,’ he says.
We talk then of the early hours of the vote, of how the markets crashed, how Cameron had to resign and how, in short, there was a global disbelief at the shock result.
We talk then of English–Irish relations of the last few years. We have come to a new friendship with our closest neighbour and have seen that after everything, when it boils down to it, we are really not so different. Their dreams are much the same as our own.
The Irish border is but a few miles up the road from us and has dominated our lives since childhood. We are both sons of the Good Friday Agreement; both of us grew up near its presence. I still remember my first visit to the North during the 1994 ceasefire and seeing the British Army’s peace towers. It was a life-defining moment. A sense of entering an alien landscape or, rather, a landscape that had been made alien to me. I knew nothing of the North then, only the footage from the television and the reports from the radio. This was a land in strife, though I had not the words for it then. It did not deter me from the North. Rather, it has only grown a love in me for that land and its people. Through my work I have ventured to Belfast as well as Dublin, and both places now feel like home.
Last year Peter and I travelled along the entire length of the border for a documentary for Australian radio. It was an illuminating experience. We saw sheer poverty in the housing estates of working-class Derry, the never-give-up attitude of the Crossmaglen GAA club, the beauty of the Louth shoreline in the east. In both nationalist and unionist communities there was a sense that the North needed to change. That in fact there was an appetite, as we saw it, for unification, but a unification in which all sides would be treated fairly, for peace and prosperity were now the order of the day.
‘The fear of a hard border has changed everyone,’ I say, remembering the staunch Orangemen we met, who suggested that London no longer understood their minds.
‘It has,’ Peter agrees.
‘I’d still have loved to have gone to Cambridge. The sculling would have been nice.’
‘The sculling would’ve been great,’ he agrees.
‘Row, row, row!’ we shout, laughing. It might not be Cambridge, but it will do.
A river naturally runs lower than the earth around it, and there is something strange about moving below the level of the land. There is something in moving below the earth that changes one. In this place society exists only in our minds, our language has changed to that of the water and if it were not for our maps and knowledge of this cumulative thing we call home it would pass to another world altogether.
The Aboriginal Australian understanding of the spirit of the world is ‘geosophical’ or earth-centred. The earth is as integral as the mind, body and spirit. At first, in the Dreamtime, the land was bare and formless and it was the creator god Baiame and other such beings who brought the rivers, mountains and forests into being. Thus when we understand the earth we understand all of creation’s song. We cannot define ourselves outside the soil of life; we must understand it from within.
Eckhart Tolle, the German spiritualist and author, says that life gives us the experiences we need to evolve our consciousness. That in a way we have already chosen the path before we do so because it is the soul’s intention to better us by the doing of this thing.
I have set the goal of travelling this river, but it took a chain of events to lead me here from a promise in Sydney Harbour to a global pandemic and perhaps, I think now, the journey came before the events. Perhaps, by travelling in this, the centre of the land, we will be remade.
It seems odd to think this way but then so much of our thinking in this world is not novel but repetitive and wasteful. We worry about things that have either already happened that we can no longer change or things that have yet to come to pass. If we were to remove those thoughts, what then would we think of? How much of our mind would be truly free?
Maybe the river makes minds blank so that the soul can think instead. So that the soul in fact can, once in a long while, lead the way. We can find our flow state in the current, like a fish moving towards its spawning grounds, led not by the mind but by the predestined nature of the world.
On past the Cruckalissa river mouth we float now. We are entering the land of Kilnacarrow, the wood of the weir. In my childhood we often walked across this land to the bridge at Kilnacarrow. Behind the then-empty cottage at Charters stood a plum tree, which we would feast on in the summer months.
Soon the waters lower to a half-foot deep and I must get out of the canoe.
‘You can stay in,’ I tell Peter, who agrees. He will keep the boat steady and prevent it from running away from us in the rapids. We identified some trouble spots before we set out on this step of our journey this afternoon and Kilnacarrow bridge is one. Although the water is shallow in parts, there are fallen trees across the river and deep fast sections. It’s not exactly white-water rafting, but as the canoe is only made of Perspex, a sharp stone could finish us.
I lead the boat through the river, my feet splashing through the water. The liquid is pleasant and warm. It is a fact of canoeing the Camlin that your feet are going to get wet, but once you accept that fact you become a happier soul.
There was once a mill here, but it is long gone and no trace remains. Our neighbours the Trapps and Reillys live in this land and have been our friends all our days.
Eileen Reilly, a historian and former academic at New York University, has returned to Longford in recent years and we have kindled a friendship. Her father, Pat, and my parents were dear friends during his lifetime. He went to America to make his fortune working as a skilled gardener in the Eastern states and was in so many ways a role model to all of us of what hard work could achieve.
We cross under the bridge now, which is a beautiful diagonal cut, and hear our echoes carry through its vaulted frame. Its grey stone stands as it has done for generations.
‘Steady now,’ I call out to Peter as we pass the first fallen tree. It is an old pine and has been down for some time. The crossing at the bridge is deeply forested with pine, beech and ancient sycamore and reminds one of the time when all this land was forest. Perhaps these are the very trees that gave this land its name.
I pull the boat forward, dodging stones and boulders, and soon we pass the second downed tree.
‘All good?’ I ask. Peter nods.
‘That’s the first problem section done,’ I say, and breathe a sigh of relief.
We are at the edge of the known world now. My knowledge of the river runs dry shortly after here. It’s undiscovered territory from here on in. We must become explorers and rely on our maps and our minds.
‘I don’t know much more what’s after this,’ I say.
‘Well, get in and let’s find out,’ says Peter.
I hop back into the boat and we paddle fast now, into the deepening water. We have the boat, we have each other. We are ready. What more do we need?
‘Three feet deep turning to four!’ I yell and paddle rightly.
The Camlin flows through fifty-five townlands from its source to its confluence with the Shannon in the west. Looking at my map now I see the names listed out before us in a litany of geographic joys: Soran, Garvagh, Cavan, Kilnacarrow … and on it goes.
The townland is an ancient division, unique to Ireland and the lands of the western isles of Scotland (where the Irish themselves went). There are some 61,110 in Ireland and they cover every area of the island. They are Gaelic in their origins and older than the Norman and English mapmakers who came in the centuries since their creation. They exist in no other part of the world. They are unique to us.
Townlands have always fascinated me. Not only do they delineate an area of land, they describe it. So Soran, my home, becomes the place of the limekiln, while, say, Cullyfad, which we shall soon paddle through, is Coill Fhada, the long wood, where a huge forest still stands to this day. The townland is a multi-faceted concept, describing history, geography and nature.
The old people knew and understood this land far more deeply than we ever shall because it was their maker and their livelihood. The townlands do not change, even if we do, for they are our guiding compass in the DNA of this nation. In this place too a person is known by their fearann; their territory. And so a family name is tied to a townland in much the same way as a lord would have been to his demesne. One has but to say the Tynans of Esker or the Farrells of Bunlahy and the listener knows of the exact family.
There is no set size for a townland. The smallest is the Old Churchyard in County Tyrone of some 0.625 acres; the largest is the huge 7,555-acre Fionnan in County Galway.
When the English came to map the land they anglicised the names of the townlands. Some changed from a geographic ‘knowingness’ of a place to a meaningless word. In their original names, we can find the sounds of the past in these places and hear the ghost language and cadence of the people who went before. They are our songlines.
In the 1980s the English geographer and writer Tim Robinson took on the task of mapping the Aran Islands, the Burren and part of Connemara – all the land he could see from his home. He said later, after the work had been done, that he as an Englishman had sought to undo a little of the damage his countrymen had caused in their careless mapping and anglicisation of this land. He called it a work of reparation. We call it a gift. Robinson and his wife died recently, and with his passing the nation lost one of its greats. He was rightly mourned. He floats with us now through this ancient land as we map the course of the river.
Peter has pointed out to me that we will be among the very few to have sailed the length of the river. Maybe for the first time in a century, he thinks now. I agree. What we see now is a land untouched; the rivers are the last great wildernesses of this ancient place.
I gently turn the names of the townlands over on my tongue. They are our North Star.
There’s gold in them thar hills
With Garvagh to our left, we move on through the water. Mary Ann Tynan, our neighbour and friend, farms in this townland and it was with her last year that I heard a story of discovery.
The day was fine and Mary Ann’s meadows had been knocked to make round bales of hay, but it was not hay that was on her mind when I found her. She had borrowed a day labouring man from the piggery down the road to clip her ditches with his weed-whacker. I had come in a hurry for the lend of a tool of some sort, but as is so often the way in the country, the hurry was replaced by chat and the mission soon put to one side. The labourer was an English man and when his job was done he too fell to talking with us. He was a keen fisherman and enquired if the Camlin was a fishing river. We told him it was. The man confessed his love of two things: fishing and history.
‘I’ve been twenty years out of England and I don’t miss the place one bit,’ he said.
‘Twenty years is a long time,’ we replied.
‘It’s my home now,’ he said simply.
‘What makes you like this place so much?’ I asked.
‘I’m a metal detector enthusiast,’ he said.
He then began to explain how on his weekends he went to the bogs all around here in search of ancient treasure. I smiled then, for I thought him foolish.
‘Oh no,’ he countered, almost instantly. ‘Just a few miles from here I found a hoard in the bog, there were swords and chalices in it.’
‘There are things like that here in Longford?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, that’s my biggest find,’ he explained.
Boglands cover much of Longford. Their bottomless wet centre, as Seamus Heaney wrote, holds our intimate lives, or rather our bottomless lives, because in digging down we find new things, new old things to be precise. In finding the swords this man had come across the harvest of this land and brought sight to unseen things. In digging down, many seek to bury things, to put them from one’s mind, but in this land it is the reverse. We come to know ourselves better in descent.
I have always been captivated by the story of the finding of the Ardagh Chalice, the most celebrated of our Christian metalworks. It was discovered in a field in County Limerick by two young boys, Jim Quinn and Paddy Flanagan, in 1868. The boys had been digging up potatoes planted in a ring fort and found a hoard of objects hastily buried a thousand years earlier to hide them from Viking raiders. To have planted potatoes in a ring fort suggests an act of desperation; ringforts are seldom disturbed in this nation for fear of upsetting old spirits or fairies. We leave these sacred spaces to their own devices.
The boys did not benefit from their find. Quinn would emigrate to Australia, while Flanagan was to end his days penniless and is buried in a paupers’ grave nearby. We must at all times keep beauty in our minds – it is, as John O’Donohue says, our inner landscape – and I wonder now was the chalice the only beauty that Flanagan would ever know in his life? Was the sight of that chalice the thing that kept the flame of wonder alive inside him for a brighter day? Or was it rather a haunting, a thing that marked his life? Perhaps it never left the prism of his mind, perhaps it was, in the end, the one beautiful thing in a hard life, perhaps it softened that hardness and poverty.
We must, I think now, be careful in what we bring forth from the past in this land for it carries with it the weight of our ageless song, both good and sad.
Mary Ann, ever the woman to find the right phrase for any occasion, summed up the stranger’s story best. ‘You never know what’s beneath your feet.’
Perhaps we’ll meet the treasure hunter on our trip today fishing for gold. Who knows what bounties the river holds? They were gods in the old world and offerings were made to them as well as the boglands. The goddess of this river sings for the ears that can still hear it.
The river created the beauty of the plants that grow and float upon it. As we move on now through the Charters land at the fringe of my internal map we watch great swatches of nature pass us by.
One can never come to the end of detail with the beauty of nature. Around us are gathered wild angelica, forget-me-not, watermint, yellow ragwort and everywhere tall reeds and strong bulrush. To our left the blooms of the yellow iris tower out of the water, attracting nearby bees. The canvas of nature has given this habitat its colours, from pinks and reds to yellows, greens and rusty browns.
In the quiet of the last few weeks of the lockdown I have come to listen to the bees once more. They appear as if new members of the world. But they have always been here, only we had not the ears to listen.
We paddle on and I pluck one of the iris flowers and examine it in my hand. The flower of the iris is a sword-shaped thing. Its centre holds sweet pollen and nectar. The French fleur-de-lis symbol, inspired by this flower, was used widely on coats of arms throughout that nation. It’s said the three petals represent the commoners, the nobility and the clergy; the three facets of society as it was then. The fleur-de-lis is not, however, without controversy. In French America it was used to brand runaway enslaved people in the territory of Orleans. After a first attempt to escape the symbol was burned into the slave’s flesh and their ear cut off. If a slave ran for a second time they would be branded again and their hamstring cut. On their third attempt, they would be killed. I think now of that artful image contorted to such terror and let the flower fall into the water.
We paddle on gently and around us the broad leaves of the water lily float on the surface. Their budding flowers grow out of the water waiting to burst forth in the next few weeks in butter yellow hues. We slow down and admire the plants now for there are so many of them. Peter marvels at how the leaves float upon the water.
‘It’s like a painting here,’ he says, and we slow to a stop.
We breathe deeply and enjoy the palette of the living. These pads and their sisters, the white water lily, have long captured people’s imagination. Perhaps it is the delicacy of a flower floating upon water, or the beauty of their petals. I do not know.
Ten years ago I was in New York making a documentary on the composer Arthur Russell and chanced to visit MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, where I saw Monet’s ‘Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond’. This huge triptych is hung on a curved wall, enabling the viewer to feel immersed within the water itself. Monet had been a celebrated painter in his day, but it is for the work he did in the latter part of his life that we remember him as a titan. From the age of fifty Monet turned again and again to the water lilies and the ponds of his Japanese-inspired garden in Giverny in France. The Australian art critic and writer Robert Hughes called the work of the Impressionist painters (of whom Monet was one) the landscape of pleasure, the celebration of the everyday. Gone were the mighty kings and elites of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, to be replaced by the extraordinariness of the ordinary.
Monet’s work on the lilies deepened our nature of seeing. And yet Giverny was a created landscape. Monet diverted streams and planted flowers and trees to make his ponds. He controlled the subject and the paint.
Here in the theatre of the real, in the crooked pool, we see the water lilies for no admission price other than stopping. We perceive them as they are meant to be: bright stars in an ever-changing constellation, for the river can never be a still life.
‘These are just lovely,’ says Peter.
There are some things that art cannot replicate.
We are here. We have come to the piggery lands of Garvagh and the great straight section of the river.
‘This is problem area two,’ I say to Peter.
‘What’s that?’
‘Uncle Davy says there is no bottom to the river here. We are going to have to be careful.’
Peter is quiet for a moment. He can swim, but as he says himself, he’s not the best.
I feel his hesitation and a small sense of fear enters me too.
‘All we have to do is take our time and go slow,’ he says.
Peter is no fool. His words are true. We are in wild land now, the territory of bog and tree plantations. Mighty pine and spruce plantings flank our left side and the banks are higher than we can reach. If we run into trouble it will be up to us to get ourselves out of the situation.
We are dressed for getting wet. We are both in light shorts and T-shirts; our footwear, which is already wet, is old runners, which are light to the foot; and, most important, we are wearing our lifejackets. If we run into trouble we shall float. God knows how we’ll get back into the canoe, though. Dressing for canoeing is not an aesthetic affair. Gone are the days of Jerome K. Jerome’s Thames skiffs. We dress for utility. I think we look rather good, like adventure-seekers going down some great river.
The Camlin is straight now for what seems like two kilometres. It is unnaturally straight. It was sectioned into this form because long ago it often flooded these lands. I don’t know when the works were carried out, but on the 1837 Ordnance Survey map the river is a winding and bending thing.
I unfurl our map from my Ziploc plastic bag. To our left is the land of Glenoghil and to our right the land of Rhine, my grandmother’s country. I wonder now what she would make of our voyage. To her, life was a gift and I think she would have rejoiced in the sheer joy of our turas. We have to uncover again and again what it is to be alive. Such can be the hardship and struggles of life that we can forget. Today is our discovery day in the country of the self.
The great straight pushes on like a highway through nature. The good news is that we can see the bottom of the river. That’s not to say it isn’t deep – it’s made up of depths of five to six feet – but not so deep that we cannot see its base.
Great underwater beds of water-crowfoot sit below us, gently moving in the slow current. We see small minnows and juvenile coarse fish hiding and feeding and all is good. Above the surface, great strong rush clumps surge upwards and outwards and at times we have no choice but to move through them. It is like moving through a mighty water jungle.
‘Has Vivian ever been on a boat with you?’ Peter asks after we move through yet another clump of reeds.
‘Only once, but her family know the water.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They were boat people in Vietnam after the war.’
‘I never knew that.’
Vivian’s family, the Huynhs, had been part of the elite of Vietnam; her grandfather Huyn Ba Tho was the son of a landlord in Saigon. So wealthy were the family that they had a Rolls-Royce to their name. Huyn Ba Tho’s life was to coincide with the great upheavals of his nation: first the war against the occupying French; later the Japanese occupation; and finally the communist forces of the Việt Cộng. Ba Tho and his family first supported Hồ Chí Minh because the call of Vietnamese independence ran deep in all their hearts. However, as the country soon divided into North and South Vietnam their support changed.
‘Speaking through Viv’s translation Ba Tho told me when I first met him over a decade ago that the communists began to take everything from people and they had no choice but to support the democratic movement.’
‘That can’t have been easy,’ says Peter.
‘It was the decision of a lifetime.’
Ba Tho’s children were to fight on the South Vietnamese side in the war alongside the Americans. One of them was Viv’s father, the other her uncle. Viv does not know what they did in that time because they never spoke of it, and both men are now dead. We have always wondered what they saw and what they did.
A few months ago, I had dinner with a Vietnam veteran in Washington DC. He had been dishonourably discharged for refusing to drop napalm bombs on Vietnamese villages. ‘We should never have been there,’ he told me. Thinking back now, the pains of that war were still visible and real to him although he was a man in his seventies.
Ultimately the war would see nearly three million Vietnamese deaths. The US military estimate that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died in the war alongside some 58,200 Americans. As Saigon fell in April 1975 the last message from the US station stated, ‘It has been a long fight and we have lost. Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we learn our lesson.’
‘It wasn’t the Vietnam war, it was the American war, that’s what Viv always says,’ I say to Peter now.
Ba Tho and his family lost everything in the war. Gone were the Rolls-Royce days. Viv’s parents met during the war. Viv’s mother worked at a coffee stand and her father would call to talk to her when he was on leave, and so began their courtship. They did not know it then, but they would become Thuyền nhân Việt Nam, or boat people.
They fled the south in 1981 with their young daughter (Viv’s elder sister), ending up in a refugee camp in the Philippines. There they were given the choice of going to either Germany or Australia to live, and the flip of a coin decided their fate. They emigrated to Sydney alongside thousands more, and after they settled and began to work they brought Ba Tho and his wife by plane to Australia to live for the rest of their days. So it was that their second daughter, Vivian, my beloved, was born an Australian.
Viv grew up between the two worlds of her Vietnamese community and the wider Australian society. She is proud of both her heritages. Sometimes we have joked that it took a war for us to meet and the machinations of global affairs to fall in love. Our courtship was a long one and it took me many months to build up the courage to walk into the shop where she worked to speak to her. I had moved to Australia to finish my journalism studies at a nearby university and had only planned to stay for six months. We were in our early twenties and the world was full of wonder and fun. We became each other’s first loves and moved in together a short time later, setting up a house of our own. The six months soon turned into six years and I had a reason to stay for ever. But events transpired to change our lives and we would not see each other for many years.
Viv always maintains that being a refugee is not who you are, it’s just something that happens. That something would happen to 800,000 Vietnamese and they would make their new homes in strange lands. When we visited Vietnam together in 2018 there was a part of her that loved to be there and another that knew she did not belong. The Vietnamese have a word for the diaspora – they call them Việt Kiều, sojourners.
‘Viv knows a lot about boats,’ I say now to Peter. ‘More than you and I shall ever have to think about.’
‘What?’ asks Peter, his curiosity piqued.
‘I’ll tell you that tomorrow.’
It’s not the Mekong Delta here in the tall bulrushes of central Longford and our voyage is not one of survival. We are lucky.
Everyone on the island remembers where they were the day the O’Donovan brothers took silver at the Rio Olympics in 2016. Gary and Paul captured the hearts of the nation, both with their rowing win in the men’s lightweight double sculls and with their antics out of the water. Hailing from the parish of Lisheen near Skibbereen in County Cork, the brothers took to rowing at an early age when their father, Teddy, himself a talented rower, took them to the local rowing club. So began their love of the water. Speaking later, Teddy said that there was a drive and urge within them both from an early age. In short, they wanted to race.
Talented from the start, the brothers were selected for the Irish junior team in the Home International Regatta in 2008, taking gold in the junior quad sculls. Eight years later, 2016 was their triple crown year; the brothers won not one but three medals at the World Rowing Cup in April, the European Rowing Championship in May, and finally in August 2016 at the Rio Olympics. They did not achieve gold that day, coming second to a strong French side, but their silver was Ireland’s first rowing medal at the Olympics. Asked by the media how they did it, they replied that it’s not that complex a sport. You move from ‘A to B as fast as you can go and hope for the best. You close your eyes and pull like a dog.’ The brothers’ honesty and wit endeared them to the nation and lifted our hearts after a poor Team Ireland performance, with none of our boxers winning in what has become our trademark sport.
The brothers are a strong combination of strength, speed and technique. Paul credits Gary’s strong arms and technique, while he brings a physicality to the boat. The cumulative package is an unstoppable force propelled by only one thing: the will to win. In their own words, they ‘keep tipping away at it’.
Rio was not the end for the brothers and rather than drink champagne with Hollywood celebrities (which they did in typical style) and dine out on their fame, they went on to further glory in the 2017 European Rowing Championships as well as the World Rowing Cup. In 2018 they finally achieved their long-sought-for goal and took gold at the World Rowing Championships in the double sculls, just seconds shy of the world record.
In 2021 Paul, together with a new partner, Fintan McCarthy, went on to win gold and set a new world record at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but it is 2016 that is remembered best of all. Perhaps it was the gaiety of the win, the simple happiness at their feat.
The O’Donovans give us heart as we paddle along in our canoe. They would leave us sitting in their wake today if they met us on this great straight section of the river, but they’d have a good phrase for it too that would make us laugh.
We’ll pull like dogs now and although there won’t be any cheering crowds at the end we know we are doing something special too. They are our brothers of the boat.
We are coming through the great straight and in the unturning highway there is a real opportunity to see the birds of the air around us. Swifts swoop low and take mayflies and damselflies in their beaks in great dives, arcs and dips. There are so many birds here that we revel in their aerial orchestra.
‘The summer can’t start until the swifts come,’ my friend Hilary told me a few weeks ago, and he should know as he is an avian expert. These migratory birds come from central Africa in early May, hatch their young and then leave around mid-July to August. Their family name, Apodidae, comes from the ancient Greek for ‘footless’ because their legs are so small that they rarely use them. They are truly the birds of flight. Their swooping and diving is a controlled thing, they bank and dodge and take unseen prey before our eyes. So fast are they that they can reach some 100 kph on the wing and it’s said they can travel over 200,000 kilometres in a year.
They come to the same sites, generation after generation, to breed and nest in old sheds and dilapidated buildings. However, due to building renovations or destruction, their numbers have declined by about forty per cent in the last decade. Sometimes by doing nothing at all we can save a species. Our built heritage has a natural inheritance too, it would seem. That old shed or cottage on a farm or quiet country road can be a home sweet home to more than just a human being, it can be an oasis for a weary traveller. I have a family nesting in an old byre at my cottage at the moment and delight in their daily activities.
‘If we’re lucky we might see a kingfisher,’ I say.
‘That would be lovely,’ Peter chimes.
‘My father told me to keep an eye out for them.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.’
We have passed their small earthen tunnels already today, dug into the riverbank. These beautiful iridescent blue and orange creatures, the great anglers of the river, are among my favourite of the birds of the river, second only to the herons, though we have not seen any of those great long craftsmen yet.
Found from western Europe to as far away as Japan, the common kingfisher is highly territorial, claiming a section of the river as its personal hunting ground. A kingfisher can eat up to ten small fish a day, nearly sixty per cent of its body weight. Their territory can be up to a kilometre long. Fights can erupt if a rival enters their territory and sparring animals will attempt to drive their foe into the water and hold them down in the river by the beak. I have read of one such fight that lasted two hours.
Their bright blue plumage was used in the ancient Chinese art of tian-tsui. Literally meaning ‘dotting with blue’, this practice began in the Ming and Qing dynasties. It involves inlaying the blue feathers of the kingfisher into jewellery, headdresses and other metal objects.
The Chinese use blue feathers in much the way as the Navajo use turquoise stone in their metalwork, with both blues providing a flourish. This convergent evolution of artwork shows our great love for the bright colours that nature can provide.
The blue feathers of the kingfisher symbolise immortality in Chinese culture, and true this is for astronomers and diviners at the imperial court of the Han dynasty wore kingfisher feathers in their hats. So great was the demand for the feathers that bulk orders came from outside the kingdom and were also given in tribute. The feathers came to symbolise not only wealth but also untouched, pure nature. Ironically, such was the demand that huge populations of kingfishers were wiped out as a result of this highly sought-after untouched nature.
Later, kingfisher figurines would come to be used in burial culture in ancient China, mostly in the provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan. The figurines, cast in bronze, have been found in grave sites in mountainous and rugged terrain – places that were still wild and untouched – showing the link between the wild, free nature of the kingfisher and the importance of beauty for humanity, even in death. The figurines were linked to the ‘Queen Mother of the West’, Xiwangmu, an ancient goddess revered as early as 1766 BC. She was the dispenser of eternal bliss, and some scholars, such as Kost, believe the kingfisher was used as a messenger who could travel between ‘the cosmological tiers’.
The kingfishers do not have a song – instead they call out in a shrill whistle – but their cousin, the largest member of the kingfisher family, the Australian kookaburra, has perhaps the most famous of bird calls in the world. Many a morning I woke up to their laughter in Australia. Researchers now believe that the bird calls of Australia were among the very first bird songs in the world and that all songbirds originated in Australia before spreading to the rest of the world.
A few years ago RTÉ, the national broadcaster, started an initiative to join with public broadcasters around the world to bring the dawn chorus from every part of the earth live as it happened. I still remember the May evening as I sat in my car listening to the sounds of the Australian dawn chorus as the sun set over north Longford. I had not heard the birdsong from that place in over four years and it transported me back to another time and another era in life.
I lowered the car windows and let the Australian birds sing out in unison with the evensong of our Irish birds. There was the sweet melody of the magpie, the shrieks of cockatoos and the tweets of lorikeets. As the cockatoos cried out in their bullish manner I wondered what our cuckoos and swifts, wrens and warblers would make of this, the sound of their forebears. To me they were the sounds of distance and longing but also the music of long ago when the world was young. I had a joy in my heart to hear that dawn song and listened intently as the radio programme moved from country to country, station to station. The world was, in that brief moment, alive with song.
I hope we shall see a kingfisher today. I do not know if that will happen, but we are happy just in the thought of their graceful forms.
It has taken an hour or more, but we have left the great straight. And turning now we can see the land of old Killoe and the Protestant Church of Saint Catherine’s on the distant hill. We are entering the territory of Cullyfad and it does our hearts good to see the horizon once more.
The day is still fine and it has been several hours of paddling since last we rested. It is my turn to call for a stop.
‘I’ve got some nice bread roll sandwiches in my bag if you fancy them?’
‘Ham and cheese.’
‘We’ll pull in so,’ Peter announces gleefully.
I know just the spot. In my reconnaissance I stopped at the nearby Rhine bridge to check the water levels.
‘There’s a lovely low grassy bank just before the bridge and we can pull up and eat.’
We push on now with the thought of the crumbly bread rolls in our minds. We still have water bottles and a small stash of KitKats, which will be all the sweeter. I’m normally not one to eat chocolate treats but we need the sugar because our paddling has been intense at times.
The water of the straight lowers and clears once more and in it, we see the forms of fish swimming around us. They are not perturbed by our mysterious craft moving through the water, nor by our paddles chopping and slicing. I wonder now what their eyes can perceive. What do they make of us?
‘Would you look at that, I can nearly touch them,’ says Peter.
There are crayfish in the river too and if they were not protected I’d think of catching a few to make a nice seafood pasta for our supper. The midlands are one of their last strongholds and they have a sanctuary here on this river.
Overhead now we hear the distinctive cries of geese flying over us and look up to see three companions pass in a V. All is one in this most glorious moment.
Soon we see the Rhine bridge and pull our craft in. Peter steps out of the boat first and then, since I’m at the front, I use one of our bags as a weight and tie the front rope to it to anchor us.
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry,’ says Peter.
I agree and unfurl the sandwich rolls. Unfortunately, they have become a little soggy from water in the boat but we are so hungry we do not mind. The hot day has melted the cheese somewhat, but it is a feast, if a small one.
I break open the chocolate bars and we eat and drink our water in the quiet way of hungry workmen.
The sun shines gently upon us. It is six o’clock, but one would not know. Such is the northern European summer that the day has hours of light left.
‘That’s a lovely little church,’ says Peter as we lean back now, our bellies full.
‘I was there a long time ago with a girl,’ I say.
I do not think I have returned to Saint Catherine’s grounds since, but seven years ago I was there with a woman I had intended to spend the rest of my life with. I did not live in this land then; I had made my life in Canada. We were happy, and such was our happiness that I proposed to her at that old church late one evening when we had come to visit my family on holiday.
Life was good for a time but then slowly a dark depression grew in me and soon I began to withdraw from her and the world.
When we came to Ireland for a family event a year later I was a different man, a shadow figure. I left her at the airport after the event, promising that I would see my new Canadian family in a few days. I never did go back to Toronto. Shortly after that, I fell into a deep hole of melancholia, for the second time in four years, and it nearly took my life. Depression is an opportunity for change, though I did not see it that way then; no, rather it was a prison without a key. But it would not last for ever. It was the beginning of a long journey that has brought me here to this river.
‘Who was she?’ Peter asks now.
‘Someone from a long time ago, someone I’m leaving here on the river. Sometimes you have to say goodbye to things.’
‘It’s a lovely church,’ I add now, clearing the vestige of an old hurt from my throat, and stand up to get a better look at it.
I was going to get married in it but I do not tell Peter this, nor do I tell him the woman’s name, or anything from that tragic time. Peter, ever the friend and wise man, does not press me further. Sometimes silence is enough to let one know that we are there for each other. I keep the facts between me and the river. It is one of the weights I carry in the deep water of the Camlin, but one that I will let go of here too. Sometimes hurts have served their purpose.
We are on the hinterland of a new townland and a hinterland of my heart. It is funny what a journey does.
I sit down again, open the tinfoil wrapping on another KitKat and savour its soft wafer and chocolate in my mouth.
‘The bit of food is great.’
‘It’s a real lifesaver,’ replies Peter. ‘We’ll have some sausages and rashers when we get to Carriglass.’
We pass under the echo of the Rhine bridge and it’s a good straight run now by the forest of Mucknagh. In the old tongue, this land means ‘the place of pigs’ and as the saying goes, we are as happy as our little swine brothers.
‘This has been my favourite section so far,’ says Peter.
The sun is on our backs and the evening is warm and pleasant.
We paddle on through the water passing fields of cattle, who look at us quizzically. They’ve seen people before, but they have never seen them like this. Cattle are good swimmers and I’ve heard how on Lough Erne, an hour north of here, the cattle swim across the lake to fresh grazing on the small islands that litter that body of water. That would be something wonderful to see and to hold in my mind as a pleasant memory.
As we move on now the riverbanks come alive with water-hens scuttling forth, unperturbed, their red noses darting ahead of us.
We paddle now in pleasant silence watching the world pass us by, our thoughts running with the river, moving at its pace. They say the river embodies the flow of life; that it is, in the Jungian context of dreams, a powerful symbol of the unconscious. The bigger the body of water dreamt about the more of the subconscious is being examined by the dreamer. The ego too is like a river, a continual bundling together of memories and potentialities that form us.
In most cultures, water represents life but in the Taoist belief, it represents wisdom as in its flowing, water accepts all and never resists. Water is the way of the Tao and, like water, we must learn to live in effortless action with the world around us. As Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, says, ‘Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.’ In striving to understand his world, Lao Tzu travelled around China on the back of a buffalo and before he left the country for ever, as the story goes, he produced the Tao Te Ching, the central book of Taoism. In it is contained the learning of all his years and his view on man’s link with the natural world and how we must adapt ourselves not to our time but to the natural world’s. We must be like Tzu and tune into our natural inheritance. We must let go of who we are and become what we might be.
Like light on the river, the beauty of the world can only be noticed if it is seen. As we silently watch the light playing on the water, it is in a place like this that we can truly know we are in the now.
Silence is a powerful thing on the river of life.
It’s our aim to get to the Carriglass bridge by the close of day and camp out there for the night. It’s still a long way off. We must pass through the lands of Kelleter, Clonee, Drumhaughley and Carriglass itself. But the going is smooth now and we think we shall get there early.
My map tells me that there are the remains of several ancient raths in this area. Raths or ringforts are the circular fortified remains of settlements that were in some cases built as early as the Bronze Age and point to but one thing: that people have been in this land for millennia. We are living in a coded world, if we have the eyes to see it. Just a few minutes north of us in Aughnacliffe lies a megalithic tomb older than the pyramids themselves, and which gives the parish its name; the field of stones.
The ancient stone markings of the Neolithic people, such as the ones at Newgrange in Meath, have long held my imagination. They are undecipherable to us in our modern age and yet their circles and lozenges, strokes and dots are a window to another language. They are our own hieroglyphics, but so far no Rosetta Stone has been found to open them. They are not just random markings, as some have said, for they occur again and again. It took real skill to apply them; the writers used a sharp point of flint or quartz to precisely incise the figures into the rock. It took time and talent. It took devotion. Many feel that the symbols represent the movement of the stars or that they are maps to this world and the other unknowable underworlds. Knowth, on the Newgrange site, holds forty-five per cent of all the art known in Irish tombs and a sizeable portion of the entire megalithic art of Europe.
In my younger days, I came to know Aboriginal artists in Australia. Up in the desert lands of the Northern Territory, the great masters unfurled their own maps to their world in the form of dot paintings. In them were contained the mountains, rivers and people that made up that landscape. They were the dreaming stories of that country, the creation myths, but also aerial maps of real places.
If we had the eyes to see, perhaps the circles and lozenges at Knowth on the Newgrange site are our maps and they can be translated by people still. Perhaps the symbols of the longest intact culture in the world might be able to decipher our own lost ones. In reading the symbols of the Kerbstone at Knowth from an Aboriginal perspective, the half circles correspond to the Aboriginal symbol for a person, while the concentric circle in the middle of the stone represents a campsite and waterhole. Perhaps these maps can still be read, can still be understood, by a people on the other side of the world. I don’t know, but it could be our best bet.
What is amazing about the Aboriginal traditional paintings is that there are songs to go with the symbols. A few years ago, a family friend made a television series about the artworks. In it, an elderly Aboriginal man from a different part of Australia was taken to see a traditional painting he had never seen before. And yet on looking at it for the first time, he began to sing the song of that country, the songline of that dreaming. He was able to read the symbols, the written language of his people.
It proved, if ever it needed proving, to our uneducated western eyes that here was a way of understanding the world that had maps of its own that went beyond the constraints of our illiterate minds. Maybe the works at Knowth are the maps to our own songs, our lost orchestras of how we first lived and loved in this nation. The Camlin has flown through this land since time began, since before the first eyes saw it and mapped it. Perhaps out here are ancient stones not yet discovered that hold the truth of how we came to be.
I look over the modern symbols on my map for the raths and dolmens, deciphering their forms. We must tread softly over them. They are our makers.
‘Did you ever watch The Wind in the Willows?’ Peter shouts now, breaking us from our thoughts for the first time in a half-hour.
‘Watched it? I loved it,’ I reply.
‘Ratty and Mole and Badger.’
‘And of course Toad!’
‘Ah, Toad. How could we forget him?’ laughs Peter.
We are old enough to remember the wonderful claymation adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s nature classic and it has installed itself in our hearts. The Wind in the Willows is a story of forever time. An ageless book that has never been out of print since it was first published in 1908. Grahame grew up near the river Thames after the early death of his mother, and it was here that the life of the water began to amaze him. And after the birth of his own son, Alastair (nicknamed Mouse), he began to tell him stories about the animals who lived along the river. When Grahame came to write the book after his early retirement from the Bank of England, he expanded the world he had first revealed in the stories he had told his son. In this he is similar to another great British writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose bedtime stories to his children formed the basis of The Hobbit.
In discovering the book and the television show, I came to understand the river world I lived beside. In it were all the creatures of the book. The exuberant Toad of Toad Hall must surely have lived in one of the grand houses in the county, such as Carriglass or Castle Forbes, while Ratty and Mole lived by the river bank at Doherty’s bend.
Ratty is actually a water vole, and this species is not native to Ireland, though a small population sprang up here in the twentieth century and according to newspaper accounts they have colonised a third of the country.
The most majestic of all the creatures in The Wind in the Willows was, to me, Badger, the rather grumpy but all-knowing father figure of the book. I never knew my grandfathers in life but I imagined them to be like Badger; wise, a little stern, but good-natured and with a knowledge of all the world around us. Those Sunday morning viewings of the television show just before mass were in a way a linking to those idealised two men who gave life to me through their children.
The badger is the largest of this island’s carnivores and despite a campaign of eradication that has run for decades – because of its links to the disease of bovine TB – its numbers still remain. Thankfully that culling programme is now being replaced by a vaccination campaign. Badgers are not unlike us. They build homes with different rooms, they have separate toilets and they live in community with their families. Some badger homes or setts have been known to house twenty-nine animals, and others have been known to provide a home for other animals such as rabbits and foxes.
In our farmland of Clonfin, there is a vast stretch of woodland that we dubbed the Wild Wood in honour of where Badger lived in Grahame’s world. There trees have grown strong and wild, for the hand of man is nowhere visible. The badgers’ setts can be found if one takes the time to look. There is something pleasing in knowing that nature can still run free here. The badgers do not disturb us and we do not disturb them. There in the wood, they have all the food they need – wild berries, worms and all types of invertebrates. I have only ever seen a badger once, crossing a road late at night on a long journey down a dark country road, but my father tells me he has seen their families on the land in the twilight hours of summer darkness. I should like to see them. Perhaps one evening when this trip is over I will camp out in Clonfin and await their arrival.
Grahame’s novel holds part of all our collective youth and from it we can learn to be children again.
‘They had some great adventures on that river,’ Peter says, sighing in his way that lets me know he is thinking of something happy, and so too am I.
New people have come into my world since I started my writing life. One was only for a moment. Two years ago now I received a message on Facebook from a young man in the west of Ireland. He told me in his note that he understood and liked my writing, that he too was a son of a farmer and despite having another profession he still worked the land part time with his family.
There was a warmth to his words and soon we struck up a correspondence. His name was Patrick Burke and after a time he told me that he had taken the path I had not and had become a priest.
We met for coffee in Foxford in County Mayo one day and talked about faith and farming. We shared a view of the world, a view from Celtic spirituality that the natural world is the greatest gift the creator spirit has given us. He too had climbed the holy mountains and roads of this land from Croagh Patrick to the Twelve Bens. He had seen the face of God in a new-born animal and in the words of the dying.
At the time I remarked to Vivian that here was a new friendship that had come through writing and that it would probably be for life. Father Patrick was based in Westport, County Mayo, but ministered to the island people of Inish Turk and Clare Island. He went out by boat each midweek to be with them. Across sometimes rough seas he journeyed to give mass, baptise the young and bury the dead. He was only in his thirties, but had the air of a man who would go far. A bishop, perhaps, I thought, such was his intelligence and gentle devotion.
At our meeting that day in Foxford he gave me a copy of The Islandman by Tomás O’Crohan, saying that I was following in the footsteps of the Great Blasket island writers in writing the true stories of ordinary people.
O’Crohan knew the sea, knew boats, just as Patrick did, just as I am now coming to know them. In The Islandman Tomás talks about ploughing the sea with his own canoe and I think now that the sea was to him what the land is to me. Just as I respect the sod, he respected the ripple and the wave, the rip and the current. We both came to writing late, hunting limping sentences in the brain with the mission of setting down the story of our lives and those of our neighbours so that people may know that we lived in this way when in the future it may not be so.
In the work he recounts his whole life from babe to near pension age. He describes with great detail the nature of his island, from great sharks to seals and seabirds. Nature was to be his palette and his provider.
Tomás was part of the great wave of Atlantic Irish writers who included Peig Sayers and Maurice O’Sullivan, all of them Blasket Islanders. In their writings are the celebrations of a different life, and all of them contain the beauty of our native tongue and the turn of phrase that only Irish can allow.
Robin Flower, an English scholar of the Irish language, translated O’Crohan’s works, among them the book Father Patrick gifted me, the work which so attracts me now.
For O’Crohan’s people their way of life came to an end when the government ordered the evacuation of the Blaskets in 1953. The population, which had numbered some hundred and fifty at one time, had dwindled to just twenty-two, many of them elderly. Bad weather, which had cut off the island people from the mainland, was seen as the last straw. For some America would call; others remained in the Dingle area, within sight of their old home.
Such is the pity of this evacuation that if the people had remained just a short time more their lives might perhaps have become all the easier with the advent of tourism, and the Blaskets could have been what the Aran Islands are today: a delight for visitors the world over. O’Crohan and Flower were both to die before the island was abandoned. Flower’s ashes were scattered on the peak of the great mountain on the island.
O’Crohan finishes his book with the words ‘I remember being a boy; I remember being a young man; I remember the bloom of my vigour and my strength. I have known famine and plenty, fortune and ill-fortune, in my life days till today. They are great teachers for one that marks them well.’
I think of those words now as we make our voyage on the water, as it fills us up to our gills with life and love.
It came as a deep shock to discover that Father Patrick died just a few days after that meeting when he gifted me O Crohan’s work. He had been planning for the upcoming arrival of Pope Francis to Knock Basilica that summer and had just been appointed parish priest of Carraroe in Connemara, a Gaeltacht area. He had, I was told, been complaining of feeling a little unwell and had retired to bed to rest. He fell asleep, never to wake again.
It is a strange thing for a friendship to end so soon after it had begun. Patrick had sent a welcome card to Vivian when she came to live in Ireland to be with me and it sits on our mantelpiece still, waiting as if for another letter from Patrick to be set beside it.
I did what he would have done. I drove to his wake in Westport and said goodbye. The mourners gathered outside the priest’s home in the centre of the town on a beautiful summer’s evening. His mother clutched a picture of him, his father was still in shock. I did not know what to say and uttered the simple words ‘He was my friend.’
It was a six-hour round trip, but he would have done the same for me. It was he who urged me to write again, to keep ploughing. On his Facebook profile picture, he sits in a rowing boat while the western sea which he loved floats behind him. In a way, this trip is his. He paddles along with us now in the great spiritus mundi. The holy man of the water I knew all too briefly.
‘There’s someone up ahead,’ I say, looking some hundred yards in front of our craft.
‘Who is it?’ asks Peter.
‘Fisherman, I think.’
We paddle on, our faces into a slight breeze as we come closer to the figure. We have not seen another person in a long time and it is a shock to meet someone here in the quiet of the countryside.
‘Hello there’ comes from the bank. A fisherman stands with his two daughters, waving to us.
‘We hadn’t expected to see you,’ I say.
‘I hadn’t expected to see you either,’ the fisherman laughs.
‘Are we close to Carriglass?’ Peter asks now from behind me.
‘Carriglass? Oh, that’s a long way off.’
The news comes as a shock. We have been paddling for a long time now and had thought our fabled bridge would soon be in sight.
The fisherman’s two girls look at our boat and smile. Like their father they are carrying fishing rods and I think now that this is a family outing and that we have perhaps broken the reverie of their moment.
‘What are you after?’ I ask.
‘Pike,’ he says.
The pike are the river monsters of this land. Apex predators, pike can grow to huge sizes, with the Irish record standing at some forty-two pounds, though the Irish naturalist Dick Warner has written of the Meelick Lock Pike which grew to ninety-nine pounds and was found, rather than caught, in 1926, having choked to death eating a fifteen-pound wild salmon.
The northern pike (Esox lucius), found in North America, Europe and into Russia, is a fearsome beast with the body of a hunter, sleek and muscular. Their sides and backs are olive green, a natural camouflage colouring, while their bellies are white. They have large eyes and strong muscular jaws to grab their prey and are an aggressive species, especially when it comes to food. When times are bad they resort to cannibalism and will eat the young of their species as well as their own siblings.
Irish pike grow faster than their European cousins due to the pristine habitats of our rivers and lakes and the ready availability of prey for them to feed on. (However, culling of pike has taken place in some areas in the belief that they were killing too many trout.) Female pike are much larger than the males. The males have a tough life; at breeding time they may well be eaten by the females.
A few years back it was reported that pike arrived in Ireland some time after the last Ice Age – some eight thousand years ago, according to Debbi Pedreschi of UCD, who has studied the history of the pike – though there are some who believe that they were introduced in the sixteenth century, in part because they do not appear in any historical records prior to this time. This theory of introduction could have some merit since the Normans are known to have introduced other animals – hedgehogs, rabbits and fallow deer – to Ireland.
I still remember the first pike I caught. We were in Lough Gorteen, outside the local village of Ballinalee, when I pulled her in. She was a five-pound fish and a big size for a small boy. I did not know the way of fishing then, and to my shame I did not return her to the water, rather letting her die on land. I was scared to touch her lest she should bite me. I remember that cowardice still. Gorteen is, however, full of pike and my cousin Thomas and his son Jimmy have caught many whoppers in its waters.
‘Have you caught any yet?’ Peter asks the fisherman.
‘Not yet, but there’s been a few bites. The trout are jumping for the mayfly this evening and the pike are waiting.’
Pike love spinning lures – their bright metallic colours of bronze or copper imitate a small fish.
‘My father caught a few further upstream a few days ago,’ I tell the fisherman.
‘What size?’
‘Smallish, but a good fight all the same.’
Da has got used to taking pictures on his phone now and sends me photos of his exploits. I know he is waiting for the big kahuna. So am I.
We compliment the fisherman on his daughters, saying they are a great pair of girls, and paddle on into the waiting waters.
‘Good luck!’ we shout as we leave the party.
We are coming close to Aghaga bridge and the townland of Cloonee. We won’t stop at this bridge because it is too small and we need to push on if we are to make it to Carriglass before the evening comes.
‘You know, I feel like I’ve been here before,’ says Peter.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Well, not here, but this place, this landscape, it really reminds me of West Virginia,’ he says.
‘West Virginia?’
‘Yeah, I was there before Trump got elected documenting the way that people would vote. It’s a very green place, like here. But it’s also got some big problems. It had an industrial side to it but that’s all gone now, a bit like all the factories that were once here in Longford.’
‘That’s interesting,’ I say.
‘They have coal the way we have the peat.’
West Virginia was born out of the division of the American Civil War, with unionist northern counties of the then state of Virginia voting to break away on their own. West Virginia and Nevada were the only two new states admitted to the union during the long and bloody war.
Mining became the industry of West Virginia after Civil War reconstruction, and digging for lime, salt and, most important, coal were to provide generations of employment for its people. Coal made West Virginia a rich place and provided tens of thousands of jobs, but with the mechanisation of the industry and, more recently, restrictions on carbon emissions those jobs are all but gone and the state is now among the three poorest in the USA, with a median household income of $45,392. Now its biggest employers are the chains of shopping centres and fast food outlets. Walmart, no friend to the worker, is the second biggest employer in the state.
Trump’s call to save coal turned the once Democratic state Republican and he polled one of his highest votes in the 2016 election there.
‘Why did they vote for Trump?’ I ask now.
‘They voted for something different,’ says Peter. ‘It was that simple. A lot of these communities have been hollowed out. It’s something that I could recognise.’
West Virginia has the same problems as so many of the rural places that I have seen around the world, from Spain to outback Australia. Factories have gone, people have migrated. They are places looking to redefine themselves.
The peat industry was Ireland’s version of West Virginia’s coal, but now the bogs and plants are closed. The environment has been our chief priority, but there have been job losses.
The small rural places of the world are suffering. It makes me think of my own travels in the American Midwest, where nearly whole towns were boarded up as I drove through these forgotten places. It seemed to me that the roads of the Midwest, the great highways, were full of nothing but moving trucks bringing people from these rural, isolated towns to the next big city. There was nothing for anyone in between these vast metropolises.
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the communities that had been clinging on were further depleted as young people moved to urban centres. In Spain, over twenty-eight per cent of the population of countryside have migrated to urban centres over the last several decades. These regions are known as la España vacía – empty Spain. I have seen them with my own eyes; they are sad places where the young are educated only to leave, they are not educated to stay. The towns seem to be waiting stations for the old to pass on. What they will become when that generation goes is anyone’s guess.
Although plenty of my friends, too, left our nation after the crash and went to Australia, Canada and the UK, many have since returned or plan to. There is a future in lands such as ours; reversals of fortune can and have happened in the new Ireland.
The rural manifesto is a motto I came up with while on that trip in Spain. It is the notion that we, the people of these rural areas, need to form a meitheal of the spirit to preserve and restore the places that modern economics wants us to forget. These places still have so much to teach us.
Perhaps this river has a place in that new story. Perhaps we won’t be the last passengers on it, perhaps it will become a pilgrimage site of its own, a place where people come to commune with nature, in the same way the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia have become a mecca for tourists. In the quiet and natural inheritance of this place, there is a beauty to be gained. We have a land deep in culture in a way that post-industrial America can never have or attain. We are of Longford and we shall remain.
‘The world has changed a lot since Trump was elected,’ I say now, thinking of the great divider.
‘There was so much spin,’ says Peter.
‘Steve Bannon and his cronies had a lot to do with it.’
Peter remarks now that he spoke with Bannon for his book and that he was a very strange character, and one he won’t forget.
‘I was writing this book about how democracy was being subverted and how these demagogues have gained power. I really wanted to talk to Steve Bannon, who at that stage was out of the White House.’
‘Wow, so you got a hold of him?’ I ask.
‘It took a long time at first to get a hold of him and I had to play up the Irish connection. I said I was a Mick journalist and wanted to talk to him before I had my pint of Guinness for the evening. When we did finally talk he was very charming, articulate even. He had things he liked to talk about and things he wouldn’t venture into.’
‘Like what?’
‘We talked about all sorts of stuff. He knows how to talk about things he doesn’t want to bring up. He thinks Trump is going to win the next election. We went back and forth for an hour. I didn’t want to be a mouthpiece for him and I had to ask proper questions. Not all of what he said was true, but I wanted to have that perspective.’
‘Is he a smart man?’
‘Oh yes, he’s smart, he got that far on his brains alone. He’s had a huge impact on the world.’
‘You know, the thing about Bannon is he never spilled the beans on Trump when all the others have published their books,’ I say, thinking now.
‘I guess he still believes in what is happening.’
‘Isn’t it strange how so many of Trump’s cadre are all Irish American Catholics?’
‘Well, that’s the thing. Spicer, Bannon, John F. Kelly and Paul Ryan – they’re all Irish.’
The Irish American connection has always been a political one, with members of the community in both the Democratic and Republican camps. We have been imm-ersed in American affairs from the beginning, with Irishmen fighting in the Revolutionary War and 150,000 Irish in the Civil War. America is, as we see it, our country – we helped build it. It is our promised land. The gathering of Irish Americans in Trump’s presidency is not something that has been celebrated here, but it is something that we have become aware of and accepted. We have prejudices of our own that are perhaps coming to light now that were not given voice before. We may be builders, but we can be dividers too.
‘I have an American friend who has a business on the East Coast and when I asked him was he a Democrat or Republican he said he was neither,’ I say.
‘What is he then?’ asks Peter, now interested.
‘A businessman, he says. He gives to both parties, to whoever will help him grow his ventures.’
‘That’s the thing. There’s no deep state, no great conspiracy. It’s all about business and you know it always comes back to that in America.’
‘It surely does.’
With the smooth must come the hard. Our river lives have been easy until now. We have glided and paddled, stroked and sighed, but now everything is different.
After passing Aghaga bridge we have entered an unknown land of darkness. Great sweeping trees of poplar, ash and willow cover our way, making the passing dark and impenetrable. We have titled this land the Everglades for it is nearly impossible to move through. Gone are our dreams of Carriglass bridge and the smell of sausages on the pan. A beer, a cup of tea will have to wait. Life is hard and there is little joy in this place.
We are alone and now know the true cost of our journey.
We cannot go back and we can barely go forward. At times we get out of the boat to lead it through shallow water. At others we bump and hit great branches of trees and floating broken limbs.
‘Let it roll!’ I call now as we hit another branch.
‘This is fucking torture,’ says Peter.
Our frustration is growing.
In the Everglades, there is only silence. We do not hear the sounds of birds or insects or humans and their enterprises. It seems too this river itself has gone quiet. Its gurgles and burgles strangely absent.
It is in places like this, the Australian writer Tim Winton says, that the thoughts of a man come back in echoes. In the lack of distraction, we are faced with only ourselves and this land reduces a team into individuals. Though you may be together you are alone. When the early Christian monks came to this land they spent great amounts of time alone in their cells, waiting for their cells to teach them, waiting for the silence to give them answers.
Perhaps it is the darkness or the sheer quiet, but I think now of when I sought to capture silence. I was young then and I was obsessed with recording the sounds of the natural world and its stillness to make radio programmes in Australia. I did this with my friend Luke. Together we travelled across the city of Sydney from the mighty cliffs of Vaucluse to record the noise of waves crashing a hundred feet below us to the creaking of bamboo trees as they swayed in the night air.
I think of Luke now, of our friendship, the best friend I had always sought in my long years of travelling, and how my actions pushed him away. Our world, our friendship, began in noise. He was a musician then and we played music together in the evenings at his mother’s house. It was a friendship of water too; he taught me how to swim in the bays of Sydney Harbour and Gordons Bay, where the big groupers stalk.
We started a business together all those years ago and made documentaries for television. There was talk and music and laughter and all the things that young enterprises bring. We lived through each other then but now we live through silence.
The business, a media production house, fell apart because of silence. As the first manifestation of the darkness of depression grew in me at twenty-four, I pushed him away. I had never known depression before, had never learned the signs of it. I did not share with Luke my anxious thoughts and fears, instead turning to the pub and the shelter of oblivion. In alcohol there was a way to escape life’s problems for a time. Looking back, they were some of the loneliest nights of my life. In my rejection of Luke and our friendship, I created a chasm that words could never heal. He did not know what was happening, though he did ask me one day towards the end. The business closed in bad fashion and, with its ceasing, our friendship imploded too. I know now if I had spoken out he would have been there to help but I could trust no one then.
Such is the danger of darkness that we feel we must be alone. I left Australia, coming back to Ireland broken and bruised. I would not return down under for years.
I think now of him, of the nature of memory, that there is only a wanting for a wrong to be righted, that in my thoughts there is no anger, only love. Water can be moulded, formed into shapes. Perhaps it can hold the past too, so that in the capillarity of this liquid things can stick and take on new forms.
I think too that for ten years now there has only been one bond between us, that of silence. I think of all the days we have missed together. In noise we are running away from ourselves, we can distract from the past, but in silence we meet ourselves, as the Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge says.
In coming home, in coming to this land, I thought I had left that noise behind me, but now I come to know its acquaintance again for it has always been there. In silence there is a worry but there is also the promise of peace. I have sought that peace for ten years and here, in this dark stretch of river, I am confronted with its finding. I think of Luke now, of our song, our work, our old ancient friendship. He sails with me in the darkness teaching me. Silence can be anywhere and now it is with me.
Failure is an opportunity, as Lao Tzu says. We can correct our mistakes.
Nothing can be said without silence. Perhaps on some level Luke is listening. I do not know. But there is much I wish to tell him, much I wish to share about the path to peace.
The Everglades, like their namesake in Florida, stretch on and on. I have seen them with my own eyes, travelled through them. That land where the alligators roam, where the Seminoles fought to their last in their many wars with the American settlers and government, is a sad land, like this stretch of river. There is a darkness in everything.
We have entered a new universe with its own rules. River time has ended; there is no time here, only strife. The past, the future are not things we can understand any more for the light has gone from us. We have become Buddhists living in the now and, like Buddhists, we know that suffering is part of life. Our desire caused this suffering. Our ignorance of the way of the river caused this.
Paddling on now, we chop through the river. Branches of trees batter us as we pass, threatening to knock us into the water at every stroke. There is no horizon in this land; we can see only twenty feet in front of us.
‘The hard had to come,’ Peter says, wisely.
‘It was going too well,’ I agree.
In the Irish mind, we look always to the dangers of the good thing. History has taught our people to question ease because this nation hasn’t known that certainty in 800 years. It is not a modern anxiousness; no, it is a historical race memory. We never knew what lay around the corner. Death, exile, famine, these are the things of the eternal present. These are the things a maimed people have to contend with, the long arc of a history that has known tragedy intimately. There is no such thing as simplicity in this land.
Like the goddess Sionnan, we have come seeking wisdom from water but, like Sionnan, we are being warned now, nature is telling us to heed it.
We have travelled for about a half-hour in the Everglades, though I cannot be sure of exactly how long it has been. We are in the land of Cloonee where my local football team train, but even that fact seems alien in this place.
The river too does not seem to know its mind. It oscillates from great depths to tiny shallows. We push on now with struggle our only companion.
‘Hold up, hold up!’ I call.
‘What?’
‘The river. It’s totally blocked.’
I carefully step out of the canoe. The water, rising some three feet, wets my legs, reaching up to my arse.
‘There’s no way through.’
A tree has been washed up across the river, blocking its entire span. Great bubbles of surging water greet us, as do the trappings of a dam. Great sections of lumber jut out of the water and threaten to break our canoe. We cannot go forward and if we try we shall harm ourselves.
Peter sits in the boat as I stand looking at the floodwater’s handiwork. There is a small open section on the right, but three feet behind it lies another fallen tree.
‘Fuck it anyway,’ I say.
The riverbank is some four or five feet above us and it is to it that we must pin our hopes.
‘If we can get the boat through the bank we could re-launch.’
‘I think that’s all we can do,’ says Peter.
I pull the boat towards the bank, steadying it. Peter grabs the tufts of long grass and pulls himself up and onto the bank.
‘Stay here and I’ll see what we can do,’ Peter says, taking charge.
‘We wanted an adventure,’ I mutter to myself.
Peter disappears into the thicket, past the cutting briars and stinging nettles and through the thicket of poplar trees.
‘It’s so dark in here!’ he shouts.
‘Is there a way through?’
There is no response for a time and all I hear is the sound of Peter rumbling through the high trees.
‘There’s a way, but we have to clear some of these branches.’
Peter returns and we agree that we have to try. We refuse to give in and we refuse to go back. I unpack the boat and take our bags and food from it, throwing them up on the bank. With all our belongings on the dry bank, I lift the canoe out of the water and onto the bank and Peter pulls it clear and dry out of the water.
Now I pull myself out of the water and after a moment’s rest we inspect the forest through which we must weave. There is no point in climbing into the field adjacent to us; the trees are too thick and closely planted to get the canoe through and we do not know how far we may have to carry it.
I curse myself for not having brought a saw, for the thought had crossed my mind. We don’t even have a knife. But we have our hands and slowly now we begin to break branches and clear a path by the riverbank. The operation takes some twenty minutes but soon we have a hole big enough to pass our vessel through. We shall thread it like a needle. We lift the boat and slowly walk it through the clearing, me to the front and Peter to the rear. We walk some ten feet and can see clear water. The river is deep here and I get into the water, which is some four feet deep, and I take the canoe from Peter and gently lay it into the water.
Peter walks back for our belongings while I hold the canoe in place. We repack and I pull the boat further down the river to lower water where Peter can get in.
‘At least one of us is dry,’ I joke.
We slowly get ourselves into the canoe and begin our journey again.
‘Have we lost daylight?’ is all I can ask after the exertion.
‘We’ve lost a good bit,’ Peter says.
There is no option now but to press on. We have to make the light count. Without it, we will be lost.
The Everglades, those cursed lands, have not abated but at least now we can paddle again. At times the canoe continues to hit branches and our skin is torn and cut, and though our blood seeps into the river we are making progress. Our map is pointless – it cannot tell us about this wilderness, it points only the way forward with no mention of the jungle we are in.
‘It’s like the heart of darkness in here,’ says Peter.
‘That reminds me of an old story,’ I say.
‘Oh yes?’
‘Before Conrad and Casement, before Leopold and the horrors of the Congo, there were other journeys into Africa and one of them was by one of our compatriots.’
Over a decade ago now I stumbled on the story of the forgotten Irish explorer Daniel Houghton in a journal in the rare books section of Sydney University library. I had returned from a months-long research trip in the Northern Territory documenting human rights breaches by the Australian government against indigenous Australians. I had turned to the library for a reprieve before I began the work of assembling the Aboriginal documentary and discovered Houghton entirely by accident. Or rather, I think now, he discovered me. His trail has stayed with me all these years because it too was a river voyage into the unknown.
The year was 1788 and although the British Empire then covered vast sections of the earth, Europeans knew little of the interior of Africa. A nine-man party of a private gentleman’s club decided to form the Africa Association to promote the discovery of the interior of parts of Africa. Their chief was to be the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, who had sailed with Captain Cook decades before to chart Australia and New Zealand (and who was to propose sending convicts to the great southern land of New South Wales).
This group was to change the course of West African history and Houghton was to be part of that vanguard. Their aim had on the face of it been a scientific one. Driven by the ideas of the Enlightenment era, they sought only to understand the world. However, like Speed and the mapping of Ireland nearly two centuries before, in coming to understand a territory a land could be mapped and later controlled and eventually colonised.
One of the group’s chief aims had been to find the fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali, then a great centre of learning, commerce and intrigue. This quest was perhaps driven by the writings of Leo Africanus in the sixteenth century. He had described the enormous wealth of the city, which had ‘plates and sceptres of gold’ throughout it.
If wealth came from exploration the members did not mind and it was wealth too that drove Houghton. He had joined the British Army at eighteen years of age, but it had not benefited his purse.
By the time Houghton offered his services to the Association, two unsuccessful expeditions had already taken place that had led to the death of one explorer and the near-death of another.
Houghton’s mission was to be their great success. It would, they believed, succeed where the others had failed. Houghton was commissioned to travel to the Gambia, find the city of Timbuktu and chart the course of the Niger River. Houghton arrived in the Gambia in 1790 and he was to sail east up the seven-hundred-mile Gambia River. The Gambia itself had long been changing hands between various European powers for its prime location on the west African coast, which had proved to be a key point in the slave trade with the Americas.
Received in the kingdom of Wuli in the east of Gambia in 1791, Houghton wrote to his wife, ‘Gold, ivory, wax and slaves may at all times be had for the most trifling articles: and a trade, the profit of which would be upwards of eight hundred per cent, can be carried on … without the least trouble.’
Houghton was to meet bad luck, losing most of his navigational instruments and weapons in a fire, shortly after which his interpreter abandoned him. Despite his hardships, Houghton had pushed further into West Africa than any European before him, and his dispatches to the Association from Bambuk encouraged them to open up trade here. It was a halfway point between the Gambia and Niger but, most important, contained the Bambuk goldfields.
It is here that the real intentions of the Association can be ascertained. Africa was not just a scientific mission; it could profit people and the project of empire. The future of West Africa lay in those footsteps of Houghton. He was not an aberration; more and more Europeans, French, British and Dutch would come, indeed would not cease coming until they controlled all this region. In 1792, following Houghton’s discoveries, the Association enlisted the support of the British government, which outlined that the commercial interest of the Empire was to be considered.
The Irish long played a role, from administrators to clerks, in the project of empire and we have a share of our own explorers, from Burke and Wills in Australia to Shackleton in Antarctica to Houghton in Africa.
The final stage of Houghton’s mission was to travel to Timbuktu and from there set sail up the Niger River. The river, he knew, held the key to the entire region and charting it would change the place for ever. I think now of our jungle voyage, our charting of unknown river lands. Our work is not, however, like Houghton’s. We do not seek to conquer this river or ship the souls of other men down it; rather we ask only permission to pass through it. Our work is of the eternal kind.
Houghton was to finish his journey in the desert near a waterhole called Tarra. He would never live to see the European outposts that would crop up in the region as a result of his explorations nor the dispossession of the native Africans of their lands and kingdoms.
His remains were found years later by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who said that he had been left to starve by Moorish traders at that place and on his death his body had been left exposed for scavengers to pick at. Perhaps those traders knew what the coming of the European meant. We shall never know.
‘It’s hard when those sorts of Irishmen appear in history,’ Peter says now.
‘We like to remember the rebels, not the colonisers.’
We have hit the shallow ground once more and I am out of the canoe again, pulling it forward like a sleigh through the water while Peter holds the balance in the rear. We have to work twice as hard in this land to make progress. We have to win over this stretch of earth and convince it into letting us see the light of day again.
The Everglades has made us sad too, for in its overgrown trees are held the remains of black silage plastic. This plastic is used to wrap round bales of grass on farms and it is my fellow farmers who have dumped it into the river. It strangles the trees and the life of the river and as we move now we do our best to pick up the big lumps of plastic and throw them on the river bank out of harm’s way.
‘Fucking plastic,’ says Peter as he picks up yet another lump.
The river until now has been pristine and clean, but here in these dark lands the hand of humanity is visible and the detritus of our society is hampering the life of the water. It is a poverty of spirit that creates the eyes that cannot see the beauty of the river and it is this poverty that thinks it okay to dump the plastic.
When the great civilisations of this age fall and all is changed, all that will remain of us is our unchanging waste – plastic cannot break down for millennia. I hate this material that has ruined our world. Travelling to the northern mountains of the Sapa region of Vietnam with Vivian I have seen the damage this material has done when unchecked. Everywhere in that land there is plastic, unchanging, unbending, littering its beautiful mountain rivers.
To understand beauty we must also understand ugliness, and it is our ugliness that has created this problem. This plastic is the corpse of our industry and it speaks now in the killing of the nature around it. The truth of this ugliness is that we have left pockmarks on the landscape of our natural inheritance. The river is a mirror and we are the reflection. Our throwaway culture makes us ask the one real question: what are we really doing in this world?
‘When we finish we will get this section cleaned out,’ Peter says as we throw up yet another clump of balled plastic.
‘I’ll make some calls,’ I agree.
We paddle on, leaving the refuse behind us, and suddenly there is something ahead of us in the darkness. A spectre of white in the unending darkness. It is a swan paddling through the Everglades, lighting our way. It is a light at the end of injury.
‘I think we might be able to get out of here,’ says Peter.
We follow the swan. She is our guide in the universe of dark. Nature finds a way and so can we.
‘How long has it been?’ I ask now as we emerge from the Everglades.
‘Hours,’ says Peter.
We are different men. The river has broken us and in that breaking she has humbled us.
‘That was hard,’ I reply. It is all I can say because the hardness has brought an honesty to our words. There is no need for the superfluous.
To our left a team of horses run in the field neighing and snorting. There is life again and the sun, that stranger, has returned to our world.
I look at my map and see that we are in the lands of Cullyfad. Father Sean, my friend, tends to its small church and I think of him now in this light-filled sky. He has ministered to his parishioners from home during these long weeks of the pandemic. I have dropped to his house on socially distant visits and left him books and films to watch. He is a man of action and does not like to be so hemmed in. He is waiting for the day when he can begin his ministry again.
He knows of our trip and has provided me with insights and clues. He too is a man of the water. His home place in Killashee in the west of the county lies on the ninety-mile Royal Canal that links Dublin to Longford and the Shannon. The canal’s construction began in 1790 and it took twenty years to complete.
Father Sean walks it often. He stops at times to sketch buildings or scenery and has shown these to me. His eye is good – he was once an architect. The canal and its water give him a place to think, as they have done for countless others. He told me once that he felt he had an affinity with the canal waters because the canal was human-made. That he understood it better than a wild river. The canal is a place of both tragedy and joy. On it famine Irish travelled to be scattered to the far reaches of the world; and famous mathematicians discovered new formulae to better understand the physics of the world.
I often think of the 1,490 famine migrants who walked the canal road from Strokestown in Roscommon to Dublin to board a ship bound for Liverpool and later for Canada. On the canal now are dotted metal replicas of a child’s pair of shoes to remember those who walked the 165-kilometre route, never to see their homes again. Of the 1,490, not all survived the passage to Canada on board the coffin ships. Some would venture towards the USA in the years that followed, seeing action in that nation’s Civil War; others vanished without a trace in the records of the day. They are our ghost family and theirs was the largest exodus of tenants during the Famine. This canal rightly remembers them now.
Of the mathematicians, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, a respected man of the 1800s, was to develop his theory of quaternions (an applied mathematics system) on the canal, carving his initial thoughts on a bridge over it. It is strange to think of two so very different experiences on this body of water.
Father Sean has not seen his beloved canal in many weeks. The water calls him, though, and he tells me he looks forward to the day he can connect with it again.
‘It’s good to be out in the open,’ says Peter.
‘Thanks be to God,’ I agree. ‘We’ll be in Carriglass soon.’
The river has opened out now and we enjoy the breadth and width of its body. The mayfly have returned and with them the sightings of trout and roach.
‘Look, there goes a little shoal!’ I shout.
We cease our paddling for a moment and let the sun wash over us and we watch the nature around us. Our muscles are tight from the Everglades and our skin is cold. We warm ourselves like great basking lizards, the evening sun healing us.
‘The swan didn’t lead us wrong,’ Peter announces.
We are behind schedule, but all is not lost. We only have to make the Carriglass bridge by nightfall and today’s work will be finished.
‘I can smell them rashers,’ I say jokingly.
‘I’ll do you one better – I’ve got a beer in me bag.’
‘Well, that about trumps everything.’
Carriglass was once a fine place. Now we paddle past the crumbling ruins of what might have been. It is a story of exuberance. What remains now is all but ghosts.
‘It’s a travesty,’ says Peter as we pass the tree-lined landscape of its outer wall.
‘It was a dream that turned into a nightmare,’ I reply.
We were both teenagers when the tiger came to this land. When men made fortunes building housing estates and packing people tighter and tighter. There was a rush, a mad heady rush that filled the minds of the children of farmers that this was the promised land, that Ireland’s time had arrived. Ours was a nation that had never known a renaissance or an industrial age, but this tiger, this wild creature, was to change everything. It was in reality a sort of mass hysteria that changed the spirit of this nation for ever.
Carriglass was to be the crowning glory of a local developer. The gothic revival manor and its six-hundred-acre walled estate were to change from a symbol of British authority to a destination resort.
The developer had big ideas for Carriglass when he bought it in the boom. He would turn the ageing country pile into a €160 million luxury hotel with three hundred holiday homes, a golf course, a deer park and a nursing home.
The project was started in 2006, just two years before the global credit crisis that would cripple the world. Too much was attempted too soon at the estate, and before long there were hundreds of half-finished houses, land ripped up for the golf course and a gutted manor house.
It was, as the local people said, like a place the devil had been. The devil had in fact never left this place: its first owner, Sir Thomas Gleadowe-Newcomen, shot himself as the result of a financial crash in 1825 and its second owner, Chief Justice Thomas Lefroy, had exiled Irish freedom fighters to meet their deaths in the toughest penal colonies in the world. The developer was to go that way too, dying a few years after the crash, the wrecked land an elegy to a world he had tried so furiously to remake.
A place can hold wounds, scars that run deeper than just the tracks of an earth mover or digger. They are in fact sites of psychic maiming that stain a land. I have felt them in other places in other times, from the tribal areas of Native Americans, where great battles have occurred, to the ruined empty settlements where colonies didn’t prosper. Carriglass has that air, the sense of not just one dream but many that never came to be.
I can understand a land like this. I know hauntings. I know what it is to have businesses fail, to lose money and to have to sit in the ruins of what once was. It was a calamity such as this that brought me to Canada to start again after my time in Australia. The media business I had spent years building with Luke in Sydney had ended because of our broken friendship and I looked to find a new start in a new country. But failure can follow you across the globe and it wasn’t until I worked on me and not the businesses that prosperity came again. It came when I least expected it. When I had come to sit with myself and rebuild a life in this land, my homeland, I came to understand that we are all of us builders. And we must make our foundations strong. Mine have been the farm, the land and the people I call my neighbours and friends.
While other ghost estates were eventually repackaged and sold, Carriglass lingers on, limping from one age into another. A place not for ghosts but of them.
Paddling onward now, we pass under an old crumbling footbridge leading out of the estate and heading to Kiltyreher, where Frank Kiernan’s steel factory now stands. My grandmother used to walk this bridge in her childhood to go to mass in Killoe. Her family had worked on the estate for a generation or more.
‘The Lefroys gave us work when there was none. We were glad of them,’ she said once.
It was at least one good that came from this haunted land.
We paddle on and leave the ghosts and memories to themselves.
The insects are swarming hard as we push through on the last straight of the river before the bridge. The fish are jumping once more and taking the small forms in their mouths whole and clean. The intricacy of nature forms this dance of life and we are happy to be witnesses to it, if only for these brief moments.
Waterfowl have appeared again and moorhens and swans paddle the waterway, ducking and bobbing as they go. We watch a family of swans with their cygnets in tow scuttle away from us. They are not perturbed by our arrival and I wonder if they know what we are.
The animal can perceive much, including the sight of a human. We in our foolishness think that the act of looking is a one-way experience, that only we are the looker. This is the world of the fish and the bird; we are the strangers here. It is their right to look at us.
For so many, the shared look between man and animal has been broken. We have created our own landscapes, great concrete platforms that have cut us off from moments such as these few seconds now on the river.
In animals, as the art critic and writer John Berger says, we find reflections of characteristics of ourselves. We could be as strong as the lion, as brave as the boar and at times as graceful as the swan. But there are no lions in this continent now and we hunted the boar from this land hundreds of years ago. The birds are perhaps our last link with this world. They offer us a glimpse of a different vision.
They are the free ones, we the chained, bound not by metals but bonds of the mind. We cannot truly know freedom in nature, so weighed down are we by the human-made problems of the everyday.
I wonder now would we welcome the swan so gently to our house as it has welcomed us to its.
The removal of so many wild animals from our lives has deprived us of a central experience of living: the realisation that we too are animals, that we too are of the earth.
When we saw the first animals, as Berger says, they were sacred, they were magical. We painted their forms upon our humble caves. They spoke to us in ways beyond words. The moorhen is thus not a spectacle, it is another being, another sentient thing with thoughts and actions of its own. It knows where to find food, it knows dangers and pleasures. It knows fear.
There are those who say the actions of nature are governed by behavioural ecology; that, in short, all the actions of the animals of this river are governed by ecological pressures. That in a sense all the movements of the animals in an ecosystem are pre-ordained by evolution, instinct and their environment. The spider builds its web because it has an instinct to do this, the mayfly hatches from the water because evolution has made it so. But these theories remove us further from the natural world. They seek to place a barrier between us and them.
We think we are the lonely ape doomed to communicate with nothing else, to perceive the world alone, but we do a disservice to the world when we put our ego above all else.
The great truth is, if we could talk to the animals – truly talk – I do not think we would like what we might hear. They have given and given to us, from their flesh to their tireless labour. When the horses of the world pulled our carts and carriages we did not reward them with a green field in retirement, rather a trip to the glue factory.
There was once a time when we worked with wild animals. The Aboriginal historian Bruce Pascoe has written of how the Yuin people of Boydtown worked with orcas to hunt large whales. The orcas and the men would bring the great beasts to the shore, where the Aboriginal people would then kill the whale and in thanks give the tongue to the orcas for their help. This practice, Pascoe says, had existed for as long as anyone could remember but it ended when a European shot the lead orca, thus breaking the bond between man and killer whale for ever.
Nature is giving. The swan does not chase us away from her river. There is patience and tolerance in this world. The animal does not reduce us to a thing as we do to it.
This is not a zoo, this river. These are not broken animals.
‘I can see the bridge.’
‘Where?’
‘Dead ahead where the setting sun is,’ I say.
Our journey is near its end for this day. The half-darkness of Irish summer is coming upon us. We are in the Celtic twilight.
There is a huge mighty tree downed on the river ahead of us. This is problem number three. We sighted it this morning as I picked up Peter before we set off; however, we do not need to contend with it since it is beside our campsite for the evening and we can simply lift the boat out and park up.
‘No one will believe we came so far,’ I say.
‘We will know,’ replies Peter sagely.
The cool of the night is coming and goosebumps form on our arms. Our wet legs have not dried and they are getting cold now. Soon, though, we shall light the fire and eat. Peter shall have his beer and I will drink tea. It has been many hours since we left Ballinalee, many hours since we last stopped for a break. Whole expanses of nature have passed us by, unseen ecosystems of life and living that humble us and make us feel that they are but a small part in an ocean of world.
By the riverbank, we pass a fisherman who tells us that he is out for trout with the last of the evening’s mayfly.
‘We’re about to finish for the day. Come and sit with us when you’re done,’ we say.
The canoe moves quickly now across the silky water, the promise of rest propelling us on.
At the fallen sycamore we let the canoe roll into the waiting grassy bank and slowly now we emerge out of our craft. The river water is warm from the day’s hot sun as we step out. Our bodies feel lighter, as if we have burned away not just fat but the strain of the everyday, we have burned away the convention of the real and entered what we were always meant to be doing.
We pull our old girl out of the water and up onto the river bank. The bridge stands unmoving, waiting for us.
‘I’ll get the fire going,’ I say.
I pick a soft spot by the river bank to make our camp for the evening while Peter sets up the tents.
There is a strange feeling in the earth, we feel lighter, our bodies are buzzing, coursing with the flow of the energy of the river within us.
‘The land feels different. I feel different,’ I say.
‘I feel so alive,’ Peter replies.
Something has happened on the river. We have awoken to something deeper than ourselves and a gaiety now passes between us. I feel like a younger man, like the twenty-something who kayaked in Sydney Harbour all those years ago. Perhaps, in a decade-long search for meaning, I have found it here in this old unchanged place.
I take out our gas stove and unfurl our food for the evening. There are sausages, rashers, eggs and potato bread. The burner has stayed dry on our long, wet voyage and I am happy to see the blue gas flame spark up.
Peter takes his beer, opens it and downs the frothy liquid.
‘That’s the best beer I’ve had in a long time.’
I walk to the river and fill our kettle with water and put it on the flame to make tea.
We are different men this evening.
When the tea is made I take the pan and begin to cook the sausages and potato bread. Soon a sizzling noise fills the air and the smell of cooking flesh fills our nostrils.
‘How are the tents going?’ I ask.
We sit by the fire and watch our long-sought-for meal cook. The pan is small and we eat the food as soon as it is done. I take a rasher in my hands and eat its flesh and fat in two mouthfuls.
‘This is the life,’ says Peter.
When we have eaten our fill we sit by the river and talk about our travels. We shall not forget the Everglades or the great straight, for the difficulties have made our rest all the more worthwhile.
Peter savours the last of his beer as I sip my tea. So often in life, it is the simplicities of the everyday that are the richest joy.
The fisherman has finished his work for the evening and comes now to talk to us.
‘Did you catch anything?’ I ask.
‘No, but it was good fun all the same.’
The stranger sits with us now and we talk of life. He is not of this land. He has come from Zimbabwe.
‘I’ve been twenty years in Longford. It is my home now.’
‘Would you ever go back?’ I ask.
‘Mugabe ruined that land. There is nothing to go back to,’ he says.
Zimbabwe was once a land of plenty, but with the gradual political decay of the Mugabe government it has crumbled into chaos. Its independence struggle of the 1960s and 1970s was hailed as an end to the minority white rule which had controlled the country since its establishment, but the war and eventual independence have sent the once-prosperous nation into decline.
‘We lost everything under Mugabe,’ the fisherman says.
The Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that Mugabe had ‘destroyed a wonderful country, a country that used to be a breadbasket is now a basketcase’.
The flight from that nation has seen its people, both black and white, seek refuge in other lands. Years ago I spent a week with a black Zimbabwean family in Alice Springs who had come there to escape the tyranny of Mugabe’s government. Their children missed home and talked only of returning there when things settled down, when Mugabe was no longer in power.
Mugabe said once in an interview that he wasn’t concerned about possible indictments from the international criminal court. Rather, he was, he said, concerned with what his people thought.
‘I will never truly understand that man. We wanted to stay. We wanted to make a life in the new Zimbabwe,’ the fisherman says. ‘But it was impossible.’
Mugabe is now dead and perhaps there can be hope for that place.
‘I’m too old now, but maybe the next generation will try,’ the man says.
We offer him a beer, but he refuses, saying that he must get going. He is thankful for the river, he says; it reminds him of one where he used to live in Africa. It was peaceful once there too.
‘Savour it. You never know when things end,’ he says, and leaves us.
The stars keep on calling our names
The night has come, but it is far from cold. It is not so dark either, for in the northern summer it never truly grows dim.
I make more tea and we share mugs of the liquid and talk gently for a while.
‘Isn’t it strange how the Covid has changed everything?’ Peter says after a time of silence.
‘You’re right,’ I agree. ‘I was supposed to be heading to America and then on to Brazil for a research trip.’
‘And I had my book to promote and then a trip to Eastern Europe. Strange that we are here on this river,’ Peter says. ‘I never knew all this was right here.’
‘We never looked before.’
Covid has given an opportunity for thoughts and actions that otherwise would have lain dormant. It has brought the world to a standstill, but in the deafening silence there are new joys to be found. A walk on a quiet road has become a thing of wonder, a conversation with a stranger a longed-for experience. We have stopped the needless journeys of the body and taken up the real ones of the heart.
This canoe trip is the furthest Peter and I have been from home in weeks, and though we do not travel very far, it feels more important than any we have taken in a long, long time.
Covid has taken, but it has also given. We shall be different people when it is over. The world will be different too.
We shall emerge out of it remade and for the first time in a long time the world will see that nature got on just fine without us – indeed, it has thrived. I’m told there are fish in the canals of Venice and dolphins in the harbours of France.
‘A fox was seen walking up Grafton Street in Dublin the other day,’ says Peter.
‘That would be something to see.’
We are alive for now and in coming here we revel in the real, if just for a brief moment in unceasing time.
I look up to the soft stars twinkling in the sky. I am happy. We are happy.
‘Let’s get an early night. We have a long way to go tomorrow,’ says Peter.
We throw the last of our tea on the ground and retire, the sounds of the river gurgling beside us soothing us to sleep.
Peter is an early riser and is up before me. I have been dreaming of Canada, of not getting on that plane back to Toronto. I have seen that failed relationship and marriage again, as I have so many nights in the intervening years, but this time the dream was different. It was not a haunted thing. It has ended peacefully. I have told that former love that it cannot be any more, that there is a new present and a different future for me with Viv. I have never had this dream end this way before. There is a peace in it, a sense of moving on for good. Maybe the magic of the river is already working for me. I am happy on waking; it is a new feeling for me.
I crawl out of my tent and greet the new day.
‘Coffee?’
‘That would be wonderful,’ I say.
Peter has already made a flask full of the black liquid gold for our day ahead.
‘We can be civilised and have it when we want,’ he says.
I drink a mugful and eat a few sausage rolls from our tucker bag.
There is a new song in our step today. We know our river and she knows us. It is no longer a mysterious thing.
We roll up our camping gear and pack away our cooking equipment. There are more sandwich rolls for today and eggs and rashers to cook if we feel hungry. Our stash of sausage rolls is plentiful and tasty. We are ready for whatever joys or sorrows the river brings.
I take the map from its Ziploc bag and we spread it out on the grass. We have covered much ground. The town of Longford lies ahead and then in the far distance the fabled land of Clondra where the Camlin meets the Shannon.
We walked the banks of the small public park where the river flows through the town in our preparatory research and know that at its steep rapids we must disembark from our vessel and walk the canoe to safer ground under the bridge at the cinema.
From this point, there are many bridges running out of the town and the water level seems good.
‘I don’t know this land to the west,’ I admit.
‘Neither do I,’ says Peter.
We examine the map and note that the river branches into two towards Clondra.
‘We have to take a left here and then it should be a clear run to the village,’ I say.
‘Is it deep?’
‘I don’t know, but the pleasure boats do this branch and then travel up to the Shannon, so it can’t be too shallow.’
All we can do is be safe, we agree. The weather is fine and the morning already warming. There is a day’s paddling ahead of us but we have rested well and slept the sleep of physical tiredness. Our bodies are ready. Our canoe awaits.
We leave our campground now and walk to our boat. She is sitting on the bank where we left her. We put on our lifejackets and leave this home.
I step into the water and its cold touch gives me a little shiver. The water will warm up later, I tell myself.
We pull the craft out onto the water. Peter loads the gear into the belly of the canoe and then climbs in. I push us out to floating water and then sit in myself.
‘Here we go.’
We paddle slowly now and make our way under the Carriglass bridge. Overhead a car passes by, unaware of our quiet quest.
The river is already alive with the sounds of nature and as we find our footing in the river again we regain our balance. Our rules of the water apply again, but they have become instinct. We paddle on, gaining speed, as the great trees of the orchard field drop over the river bank.
The great walled garden of Carriglass lies just out of our vision. It has been a daydream of mine to one day put on concerts in its ten-acre enclosure.
‘It could be our own little Glastonbury,’ I say, telling Peter of my vision.
‘Who’d play?’
‘Maybe Van Morrison.’
‘That would be something,’ says Peter.
‘It would be an evening-time concert, just when the sun’s setting, and everyone would have a seat to relax on.’
People have long written music to water and rivers are no exception, from Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ to Billy Joel’s ‘River of Dreams’. There is something about the river, its flowing, changing state, that attracts us. Its body is a mystery, as much as the song itself is in music. I think now Van’s voice could slide out of that orchard and down into this river, turning old men’s hard faces to joy.
I sing the words of Van to myself now, the ones about moving from the dark part of the street to the bright side of the road. There is something so pleasing in this tune, and Peter, I know, enjoys it too. It’s a good day to sing. The sun is up.
‘Van the man,’ says Peter, and laughs.
It’s a silly dream, but maybe one day it will happen.
We’re on the bright side of the river now.
We crest the surface of the water as we continue down the straight. The countryside is waking up and we hear tractors and cattle in the distance. There is a joy in being up and out on the river early.
The morning mists are lifting and in the scene there is a touch of the mystic, a feeling that we are in the Dreamtime of this land. As the Irish philosopher John Moriarty said, there is ancient life in us, ancient life with ancient needs and ancient ways of seeing things. We look at the river now, at once an ancient embodiment and also a new thing. It is more than a duality, though; it is a construct of past, present and future. Our future lies downstream, but also our consigned pasts will reside there. We will leave part of ourselves here in the atoms of the river. Part of us will always be in this Dreamtime.
The old ones believed that water was a link to the underworld. Indeed, the valley where the River Nore flows in the south of the country has been called the valley of death for all the ancient burial sites along its route. Perhaps the ancients thought that the souls of the dead would be carried down its streams and tributaries. The underworld is alive here too on the Camlin.
‘Did you know there’s a prophecy about the river?’ I ask Peter.
‘No,’ he replies.
Long ago, when a saint went through this land, he said that the river would turn red with blood on three occasions.
The old people say that the prophecy has come to be twice already. First when the river turned red when a garrison of soldiers washed their bloody clothes in the river at Ballinalee after the Battle of Ballinamuck in 1798. The rebel Irish and their French counterparts were slain in the village after having been marched there across our very fields in the aftermath of their bid for freedom.
The second occasion was during a cholera outbreak in 1832, when a butcher killed a flock of sheep on the banks of the river, their life force running out into the waters in that dark time.
‘And the third?’ asks Peter.
‘Well, that hasn’t happened yet. But when it comes it will signal the end of time – or at least that’s what the legend says.’
‘The old people had a saying for everything,’ laughs Peter.
There is in the river a yet unmanifested end, but it is not here, not this morning in the glory of the new day. We are in touch with our souls out here in nature and in that state we can see the soul in everything, not its demise. The moment of the timeless now is with us.
The British often think themselves the greatest naval nation, but it is on the Polynesians that we must bestow that honour. They are the great explorers of the Pacific. Setting out in all directions in their mighty canoes they settled as far south as New Zealand and as far east as Easter Island.
Their great ocean-going canoes are still remembered in Maori culture, their names enshrined in history. Indeed, the Maori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa, was the name of the canoe that first brought the mythical explorer Kupe to New Zealand. He named the islands after his vessel and then, as the legend goes, sailed home to share his discovery.
Hawaiki was the original homeland of the great navigators. It’s said that the modern-day island of Raiatea was the homeland of the Maori and the island from which they spread.
The Maori are said to have set sail in forty waka canoes. The waka range in size from small craft – waka tīwai – to the forty-metre-long war canoes known as waka taua. Europeans long thought that the Maori could not have made this journey to New Zealand, but in 1947 the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed from South America to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of some eight thousand kilometres, proving once and for all that the mighty wakas were capable of such feats. The canoe has always been a central part of Maori culture, and whenever traditional gatherings are held, canoes or references to them still feature.
New Zealand was to be the greatest discovery of the Polynesians, a huge uninhabited land that held a variety of game, ample fresh water and fertile land for agriculture. Their first settler canoes arrived sometime between AD 1200 and 1300. The land was a prehistoric place with unique megafauna, a place where the giant flightless moa bird walked the forests and lowlands while the Haast’s eagle towered in the skies. It must have been a wild and strange place.
The construction of the wakas changed when the Maori came to the southern islands. They found massive totara trees, which grew to much greater widths and heights than the trees in their native Pacific homelands. It’s said a totara would be picked out years before it was felled, and prayers and songs would be offered before the tree was cut down. Indeed, it’s said that the tree used to make Kupe’s famous waka had itself been picked out years in advance.
What is perhaps most amazing about the construction of the great wakas is that they were built and carved not with iron tools but with stone and fire. The great war wakas could take over a year to build.
The love of the canoe has not left those lands and wakas are still built there. It’s said that the secrets of Polynesian navigation were handed down through song, shared through oral culture, and that the navigators were the most respected members of each society. Undaunted by the sea, the great peoples of the Pacific continue to sail great voyages across this, the biggest ocean, proving time and again that they did not just stumble upon these lands but used the stars and earth to guide them to new homes.
A few years ago a friend was shooting a film in New Zealand and, as is the custom, there was a traditional Maori welcome. My friend is an Irish speaker and, together with his sons, responded to their Maori song in Gaelic song. We are both island peoples, both formed by the sea. The Maori sailed their canoes the way we worked our currachs. There is something in that story that has always attracted me and endeared me to our island cousins of the great south.
The canoe was the great instrument for the discovery of the Pacific, and it holds its powers still.
Every person has their own Eden and I think in a way I’ve found mine here on the river. The water is calm this morning and with the sun now shining down on us everything is in a sort of reverie.
Butterflies flutter across the river and I watch their gentle forms rise higher and higher in the breaths of invisible air.
There are peacocks and small whites, large whites (which feed on cabbages) and lovely tortoiseshells. They feed on the plants and flowers of the fields around us.
In all, there are thirty-two butterfly species in this land and three common migrants. They are an old animal and evidence of the Papilionoidea family has been found from as far back as the Paleocene era, some 56 million years ago (evolving from the moth family, which originated some 190 million years ago). We have studied the animals in this land for over three hundred years and this family make up one-quarter of all named animals in the world.
The butterfly is a key indicator of the health of an area. They work as pollinators but also provide huge quantities of food to other animals. Ireland’s butterflies are facing some problems. The loss of thirty per cent of our grassland species, due in part to changing farming practices, means that they are under threat. The National Biodiversity Data Centre has identified Ireland as being in the top five out of twenty-one countries for decline in both widespread and specialist butterflies. While increases have been seen in some species, there are still some 0.9 per cent fewer butterflies than in 2008, when records began. In short, we must do more for these gentle creatures.
Perhaps the most amazing of them all in this island is the painted lady, sometimes called the thistle butterfly after its food source. The painted ladies are a treasure and I hope we shall see some this morning.
Many are still undertaking their great voyage here and it is a crossing of epic proportions. Starting in North Africa, millions take to the wing, travelling across the Mediterranean to central Spain. From here a new generation will birth and grow, taking to the air to head for Ireland and Britain. It’s said that our May arrivals are the fifth or sixth generation from those that set off from Morocco. Figures from radar in the UK in 2009 showed that some eleven million individuals crossed the seas to make it to our isles.
Our two islands are not their only destination – they migrate as far north as Sweden and as far east as Turkey. The butterflies can fly hundreds of kilometres a day to reach our lands.
It is amazing to think that the great-grandparents who began the journey to our little river will never know this land. What is perhaps more amazing is the return journey of the painted ladies. Travelling some 14,000 km, they leave these lands and return south, all within a single generation. Their family members, found from America to Australia, are also plentiful and widespread.
The year 2019 was the year of the painted lady. Surveys determined that their numbers were up by 600 per cent when compared with the 2008 figures.
Their colouring is similar to the small tortoiseshell’s and many people often confuse the two.
The butterfly has long been part of our art and mythology, first depicted as far back as Ancient Egypt and appearing again and again in cultures throughout the world, always with symbols and meanings. Our own goddess Etain was at one time a butterfly too.
In the old world of Ireland, butterflies were said to be the spirits of the dead who returned to their favourite spots in life. It’s said the dead came back as these animals to let us, the living, know that they were okay.
When the world was weary on me those years ago when the wedding in Canada had not happened, and I had decided to stay in Ireland to face down this depression once and for all after four years of struggle in two continents, I had my own experience with a butterfly. I had visited the graveside of a beloved uncle for help, for in life he had been a great friend.
It was cold, dark winter when I went to see him. I asked simply for a sign – anything that would tell me that this life, this path would lead me somewhere good. I prayed that the darkness of depression would lift and that life would be good again, that I would find my way back to love. But the dead cannot talk and, try as we might, the grave’s mouth opens for no one except at the end.
It was raining, cold hard rain, and I was about to leave that place. It was then that I saw it, a small red butterfly appearing out of the air and landing on the grave. In Native American belief, a red butterfly signifies an important event or that a powerful spirit or soul is present.
I cannot explain that animal, nor that it was winter when it appeared. I have never seen a red butterfly since. I told my mother of it that day and she simply said Uncle Joe was looking out for me. I think he is still.
It was my Papillon moment. Like the great Charrière, I too escaped my own dark world.
The butterfly is the symbol of transformation. The bringer of change, of transition, the carrier of the soul itself.
There are no red butterflies today, and no painted ladies, but perhaps we do not need to see them. We have changed already.
When Richard Lowell Edgeworth undertook his study of the bogs and rivers of this area in the 1800s he commented that there was nothing remarkable about the Camlin other than its uncommonly winding nature. In this he was wrong. The secret to Eden is that it is everywhere in everyone, from a cold Irish graveyard to the sweet currents of a summer stream.
Passing the townlands of Corradooey and Kiltybegs, we move on to the townland of Clooncoose. We have left behind the orchard and are out in open country. Grassland dominates where an old wood once stood, and we see the signs of cattle everywhere.
‘It’s rivers like this that Vikings sailed up long ago,’ I say.
‘Did they?’ asks Peter.
To both north and south of the river the Norsemen raided the monasteries and settlements of the water people of Longford.
Lough Gowna, a lake I have a great love for, was to suffer their wrath. The lake covers around twelve hundred acres and straddles counties Longford and Cavan. It is connected to the River Erne, the second longest river in Ulster, and it was on this river that the Vikings brought their longships to the sacred Inchmore island where a small monastery of holy men had made their lives.
The monks had settled the island hundreds of years before under Saint Colmcille, who taught the men the sacred ways. Colmcille is one of the twelve apostles of Ireland and was to travel to Scotland to set up the famed monastery of Iona. It’s said that when he departed Gowna he left his knee- and handprints on a huge stone, saying that he would return.
The religious men of that time believed there was a great power to be gained in the hardships of life, that in living in exile they were closer to God. They called this practice green martyrdom, for in a land where people were not killed for converting to Christianity, this was as close as a man might come to be with God.
For a time it was good on that lake and the people of the area were brought into the embrace of the Christ god, but that all ended in 804 when the Norse came and destroyed the monastery, burning and looting it. In this act the monks gained their martyrdom. The Vikings did not spare life.
Last summer I spent many months writing a film script about this time. In the words, I sought to understand what had brought these men to this remote place. I travelled out to the island and camped there to know what their life must have been like. What the sound of the water might have brought to them. What the whisper of the wind might say. To them everything had a meaning, everything was a sign and a motivation from above, indeed speech itself was sacred and used sparingly. The Celts and these monks were a nature people and the mystic voice of the world spoke to them in so many ways.
Saint Columbanus, writing in his instructions, told his monks that the hard life was a just life and that ‘The rewards to come are indeed such that they should induce you to triumph over the hardships of the godly life.’
Lough Gowna, its great woods and ancient trees, reminds me of the wild soul of this land. Perhaps in their sprouting memories are contained the echoes of the holy ones who went before.
On the island, the ruins still stand, a testament to the devotion and the Celtic spirituality of this land. In them was contained the mystery of faith and the deadly consequences of violence.
The Vikings were not content with just this place, though, and they raided across the county, in some cases hauling their ships overland to bring them to new waterways. So it was that the Viking king Turgesius came to Lough Ree, where the Camlin eventually flows through its sister the Shannon.
Turgesius came to control a ringfort on the shores of Lough Ree, at Rindoon on the western shore, and from there launched wide-ranging attacks into Connacht, Meath and the holy monastery of Clonmacnoise. He set up his wife, Ota, as an oracle in the raided and ruined Clonmacnoise and she gave advice to the invading king. So powerful was the Viking that he had a fleet of ships on that huge lake. It’s said that he came to Ireland shortly after the destruction of Inchmore monastery, leading 120 vessels, taking the settlement of Dublin by force and building the first ringfort there, on the site where Dublin Castle now stands. His name is scarcely known in Scandinavia today but it has remained in this land; indeed, some islands are still named after him.
Turgesius was a feared man and it took a High King of Ireland, Malachy, to bring him to his end. It’s said that he was drowned by force in the waters of Lough Owel in Mullingar. What had begun in the water ended there too.
Turgesius was not the last marauder and for the next two hundred years, until Brian Boru drove the Norsemen from Ireland, they carried out raids on the holy lands and sacred sites of ancient Ireland. Lough Ree was to be an important base and great battles were fought between rival Viking groups for its control.
‘I suppose they might have sailed along the Camlin to get to Lough Ree,’ says Peter now.
‘I couldn’t put it past them. This was the great motorway of its day.’
We are quiet for a time, thinking of these ancient warriors and what they might have done and seen.
‘You know, I don’t hate the Norse for all that though. They are a great people.’
‘Ah, they are wonderful,’ says Peter.
‘I read recently how the writer Erling Kagge’s grandfather willingly went to his execution by the Nazis in the war rather than run away and have other men face the firing squad in his place.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘He said he only wished he’d done more for the resistance if he’d known it would end that way.’
‘Maybe the brave Viking soul is still in them no matter how calm they are now.’
‘Maybe you’re right.’
We push on now, past the ruins of yet another ancient ringfort in the fields above. We are coming close to the motorway bridge where the Camlin enters the town of Longford and yet all is quiet and serene. We can hear no cars, no throbbing urban life. The place is calm and the river is pristine. It would make for a good photograph.
We have our phones with us, so we could take them out and document this trip, record videos and make jokes, and yet, save a few pictures yesterday on one of our breaks, we have chosen not to. It has been an unsaid thing.
Peter is a popular man on Twitter and has some sixty thousand followers. I ask him now will he not tweet about it when we are finished.
‘I haven’t decided yet. I kind of want to share this experience with no one else for the time being. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I do. It’s our thing.’
Not everything needs to be shared, we agree. It’s enough to be here right now. This voyage is not for the phone, it is for us. And even though I now have the thought to write about this voyage I too want to keep it private for now.
‘That’s the thing. We grew up before the internet. We were the last generation who are able to live without it,’ says Peter.
The internet was supposed to free us, the great information superhighway would cut through the land, exposing us to new information and new ways of doing things, and yet now it seems not to have done that. Rather it has distracted us from everything else, and in that distraction a great trick was pulled and we found ourselves divided as never before.
‘The modern world wants us to be alone, it wants us isolated, but our community is the most important thing in this land,’ I say.
‘I think there’s something powerful in that.’
At times I have had a daydream about the great data towers of the world being pulled down and destroyed, not to wreak havoc on these companies (though that might be a pleasant outcome) but rather to free us of our digital distraction and put the present back into our hands, those hands that are so beholden to those phones.
In this land, interaction and friendship still mean something. It is a place where the anam cara, the soul friend, still holds sway. Father Sean is my anam cara but I think I have found another in Peter. He is my uisce cara, my water friend.
An acquaintance once pointed out that there is no philosopher of the internet yet. Reflecting now, I think perhaps the best philosopher of this age is not on the internet. They are out living their life away from its pull. No one will remember in twenty years’ time the great days they had on Twitter or Facebook. No one shall recount how it shaped their destiny in the way that Walden Pond did for Thoreau or how the bounty of the family gave us learned, lived wisdom. We commodified our lives for these companies; it’s time we had them back.
We do not need a pillar of influencers, we need a pillar of cumann, a pillar of association and togetherness. As Thoreau said, we can never have enough of nature. So too, I think, we can never have enough real community.
Social media’s algorithms may follow our every move and predict what we want to see, but they cannot replace the patterns of nature and the algorithms of actuality.
Plato and Socrates had their day. We are having ours now. We are writing our own study. Some things don’t need to be shared. We will keep the phones in our pockets. They are better there. The followers, that loathsome term, can wait. We are being leaders of the self.
My hands are growing cramped from constantly gripping the paddle and at times I must relax and release them. I bend back my fingers and let the stress fall from them. I dip my hands in the water and wash them and let the cooling liquid balm them. The river absolves my tiredness.
I have always admired my father’s hands.
I do not have hands like his, mine are not a workman’s hands, not yet; but my face is a face that is being shaped by nature. That is a powerful thing. It lets me know that I am in the world and it is in me and shaping me.
To some, it is simply the signs of age, but to me it is the land leaving her imprint on me, letting me know that it appreciates my presence. In that vein I can see land in many other faces in our small parish; farmers, builders, housewives, nurses, our jobs shape us, mould us.
When I do not write I farm and I find this work a great blessing, for it is different from the immobile one of the pen and computer. I read once that the playwright Sam Shepard much preferred working on his ranch to writing his Pulitzer-winning plays. He once wrote to his brother-in-law that he had spent several days chopping up wood from a fallen tree and that he had enjoyed it. At the time I thought this odd but now I see that it has a sense. The farm does not take, it gives. The work we expel is real and tangible. Cutting a tree, harvesting turf, they are all end results that have real value.
Before I left on this voyage I made a note of the jobs that need doing on the farm. There are fences and harvests, painting and cleaning, animals to be dosed and others to be sold. They will all of them leave a mark on me and I’ll be an older man when they are done. But now, I think, it is not just the land that shapes; the river itself is moulding us. Its sun is already turning our skins red and brown. Its wind is washing through our hair. If we were to stay on her for eternity I wonder how she would remake us? The river could spend a thousand years patiently eroding a mighty stone that will not bend to its will. Who knows what it could do to a man in one lifetime?
Perhaps one day I’ll have those workman’s hands, I think to myself, with great thick fingers that tell a great story, but looking at them as I paddle they seem hands of a different sort.
Viv jokes that I’m simply getting old, that the lines are coming around my eyes because of age. It seems not too long ago that I was running around the city with a full hairline, but those days, like my hair, are leaving me.
The earth is shaping my face. But I am glad. Let her paint me as she sees fit.
‘Do you hear that?’ I ask now.
‘What is it?’
We cease paddling and listen now for a time. There is a great buzzing and humming in the air. It is, we realise, the sound of humanity.
‘God, those cars are loud,’ says Peter.
We paddle forward now and see the mighty bridge of the motorway. It towers above us some twenty feet or more in height. It is the closest we have been to other people for a long time.
The N4 motorway bridge is not an ancient thing; it is made of smooth concrete and moulded ramparts. There were no stonemasons employed to build it and it holds no great provenance, and yet it is not an ugly thing. It has a beauty, a clean brutalist aesthetic of its own.
We are leaving one world and coming into another. This is Peter’s land now – he is from the town. As Ballinalee and Killoe were my font, this is his.
‘Ah, it feels good to be back,’ he says. ‘I used to hang around this bridge with my friends when I was a young fella.’
We are in the townland of Cloonbalt; the great pasture. We have entered the realm of the urban.
To our left across the fields lies the housing estate of White Linen Woods. It’s here that my sister and her husband live. They gave birth to a baby just before the lockdown came, but I have not seen them in many months. I hope to see their child soon to celebrate the joy of new life with them.
Though we are in town we are also not in it, for great fields of grass and wildflowers still cover the river banks. Longford or Athsada – the place of the long ford, to give it its old name – is not built around the river as some other towns and cities are. There are big buildings around the river, yes, but the greater part of the town now lies south of the river. It’s a strange thing that in a way the town has moved away from the river but as a result the Camlin flows mostly unmolested and it’s thanks to this that there are still wildfowl and fish in this stretch of river. They are not disturbed by the toils of humankind and its shadows.
‘I used to walk through the fields to come down here on summer evenings,’ says Peter, lost in the memory of the place.
‘It’s so green,’ I say.
‘It’s super healthy,’ says Peter.
I am in another man’s dreaming and Peter’s memories come forth and fill the canoe with their happiness.
‘It’s not such a bad old place,’ he says now. Though Longford is our home it has often had a reputation of being down on itself.
Longford is an ancient town with a long history. The origins of the place come with the O’Farrells, the Gaelic lords of the kingdom of Annaly, who built their fortress on the north banks of the Camlin in the 1200s. Martin Morris, the county archivist, told me once that it was probably the fortress and its crossing of the Camlin that gave rise to the town itself.
Another mention of Longford comes in the year 1400 when Donnell O’Farrell constructed a monastery with the Dominicans that, it’s said, flourished here for a hundred years. By 1480 Longford was a well-established market town.
The O’Farrell rule had been retained by hook and by crook in the Tudor period and they were to control much of the county until the plantation of Longford by the English in the seventeenth century. The 1600s was a century of great change in Ireland and Longford was an important place then as a frontier territory between the English-controlled Pale and the Gaelic kingdoms of the west.
It was during this time that the Aungier family were granted their lands in the county and set about changing the urban settlement by building a new town south of the Camlin. The area is known today as Main Street and it’s here that most of the town is now focused.
By the 1650s the O’Farrells, the great lords of Longford, had been forced into exile, their lands taken. With the end of the O’Farrells came the end of old Annaly after several centuries. Their old monastery and fortress are gone, but the town has grown in the hundreds of years since and is now home to ten thousand souls.
It was in my youth a thriving market town, a place which the writer John McGahern pinpointed as a place where great trade of business was done. But those great trading days have changed and it is becoming something else.
It is a town of life and love, loss and hope. It has known war and despair. I have known cities and towns all over the world, but there are few places like Longford. It holds a quiet history and a quiet dignity. Maybe on this river we can experience it in a new way.
Rivers connect, but they can be borders too, a demarcation between one land and another. Perhaps it is the very nature of our coming through the countryside and into the town, moving between the boundary of two different worlds, but this stretch has made me think of other lands and other borders.
‘This reminds me of when I was with the migrants at the river,’ I say.
There is a religious mural in the Texan town of El Paso, on the other side of the Mexican border from Juárez, that depicts the early days of that frontier territory. A river, the Rio Grande, runs through the mural and beside it is painted a large alligator, a reference to the ancient animals that once lived in this stretch of water. The real-life river divides the border communities between the USA and Mexico and at over three thousand kilometres long it is one of the main rivers in the south-west of America.
In the past it was a great thoroughfare and steamers sailed on it, carrying goods and people throughout this region. Many hungry mouths have claimed sections of its life-giving water, and as a result of modern intensive agriculture, tracts now flow at a trickle in parts of the state.
The alligators are long gone from the tamed river, but there are many snapping and dangerous mouths still left in that land.
I came to be on that river border to document worker rights. It was just a few months ago, but the experience changed me for ever.
The Rio Grande river crossing is by its very nature a place of transitions. Daily a transformation of thousands occurs as Mexican labourers come north across the river to work in the US factories. Those who cross change from being individuals into the hands and feet of the great industrial machines of the city and the farms of the region. Their identities become one; that of the immigrant.
It is a sad and dangerous place. In Juárez, women fear for their lives. An epidemic of femicide in Mexico has seen thousands of young girls killed for sport by roaming gangs. In the days before I went there a young woman, an artist and community activist, had been shot in the head as she cycled home. El Paso is no better; there anti-Hispanic sentiments have seen the rise of far-right groups and white supremacists culminating in the massacre of twenty-two Mexican Americans in a shooting in 2019.
The workers I was with all had stories of their time, of crossing the deserts and the rivers that separate these two lands. They had all crossed in search of a better life, but for many that was not to be found.
I remember now the old man who had crossed the border for decades in search of work in the fruit and vegetable fields of America. He was 83 and still working, he told me. He could, in fact, not stop working for he was in the country illegally and had no pension to support him. I asked him had he any dreams of life, to which he said that all his dreams had died a long time ago.
I remember too seeing my first deportation in that divided land. I was at the Border Farmworker Center in El Paso, which sits right beside the Rio Grande river and the new Trump wall that runs for miles and miles in both directions from that place.
Directly across the street from the building lay an American border patrol facility. The director of the Farmworker Center, a man called Carlos Marentes, brought me up to the roof of the centre to get a better look at the border. From this vantage point, we saw a group of twenty or so undocumented migrants being processed. In the space of ten minutes or so, the group, who Carlos said had most likely come from Central America and had been travelling for weeks in caravans, were deported.
Who knows how many rivers they had crossed to get there? How many journeys of the heart and of the head had they made in crossing the Americas to come to this desert town and ford the Rio Grande?
The operation was carried out with such indifference to the migrants. It was a sort of terrorism of ordinariness. The migrants were processed, then put into a van, driven across the river and set down in Mexico. As we watched from the roof of the building the US border guards filmed us and in turn we filmed them. Lens upon lens, we watched each other as this quiet tragedy unfolded before our eyes.
The border guards would forget about this batch of migrants, but we could not. I had seen a moment that would stay with the migrants and me for ever.
‘Once you are deported you can’t come back to the US for ten years,’ said Carlos in his gentle manner.
The people who come in the caravans call their journey the via crucis del migrante, the migrant’s way of the cross. It is a crossing of the heart.
‘Trump’s war is not against immigrants,’ Carlos told me. ‘It’s against poor people.’
I looked out at the river, the narrow stretch of this broken vein of the south-west, and thought of something the philosopher John Moriarty once said, that water is altogether something other than what it is composed of. That it contains far more than just oxygen and hydrogen; rather it was wholly unexplainable as a compound, that it contains reflections and emotions and ideas. To Moriarty, his Irish rivers contained Beethoven symphonies, mountain reflections and the joy of life. But that section of the Rio Grande had none of this. It made me think that it was composed of tears and sadness and ordinary brutality. That it was a water made of hurt.
Every water, from one pool to another, is different, Moriarty said. The Camlin is not the Rio Grande. We move without fences or restrictions, and we should be happy for that.
It has been agreed that we will stop for second breakfast at the mall. The mall or, to give it its proper title, the Albert Reynolds Peace Park, named after our former Taoiseach, is a beautiful oasis of green in the town. It has been here all my life and provides the calm centre of our community. As a boy, I played sport here. As a man, I have walked and run its leafy paths to escape the humdrum of the everyday.
Reynolds was a local boy done good and it was his early work with British Prime Minister John Major that laid the foundations for the peace process in Northern Ireland. They were both moderate modern men and saw the benefit of working together. Major has not forgotten their link and he came to speak in memory of Albert at our local theatre in 2018.
He said something then that has stuck with me; peace is not secure, it never is. He was right too. We must always work for unity all our lives, for division is a seed that grows quickly.
‘Them sausage rolls will be good,’ I say as we round yet another corner.
‘And the coffee even better,’ Peter agrees.
We paddle on through the townland of Abbeycartron. Soon we shall see St Mel’s Cathedral and in that there is an excitement. It is the biggest building in the county and long ago my people came to this land to work on its construction.
‘It’ll be nice to see the old girl,’ I say.
‘It must have been an imposing thing in its day,’ says Peter.
‘As close to Rome as people then might ever get.’
When the cathedral burned in 2009 it marked all our lives. Until then its unchanging structure had seen so much history in this land. The community rallied to repair it and many friends worked on its reconstruction. It was the last act of the departing Bishop Colm who, when asked on that snowy Christmas morning after it had burned what he would do, had proclaimed, ‘We’ll rebuild.’
Moorhens dart ahead of us now as we make our way through this borderland. The water depth is some three to four feet and I see the cruising figures of roach play beneath us. The river is alive in all its forms.
‘Hello there!’ a voice calls and we turn in surprise to see where the voice has come from.
A woman dressed in workout gear greets us from above the bank.
‘Are we in the mall already?’ I ask.
‘You sure are,’ she says.
We laugh now, for we have entered the town in a surprise fashion.
‘I bet you didn’t expect to see us,’ Peter says.
‘You never know what you’ll see in this town! You’re a nice sight,’ she smiles and bids us welcome as she walks on at a fast pace.
Soon we see the familiar landmarks of the park – the old broken bridge that once linked the Templemichael glebe to the river, the ancient sycamore and oak trees – and hear the noise of sports being played. We are in the universe of the familiar.
We know our plan now. We have agreed that we will stop after the bridge into the mall. There are some rapids there that we need to ford and it will be easier to get out and move through them manually.
Soon more people come into our field of view and we remark that if it were not for the people in the park one would never know they were in a town at all.
‘I bet we’re a surprise for everyone,’ says Peter.
‘You’re not wrong there.’
We paddle easily through the deep water, passing the fire station and the basketball courts.
The mall had been closed for many weeks due to the virus and its opening has been welcomed by everyone.
After the bridge, we steer our craft into the shallows and step out onto dry land. It is midday and the bells of St Mel’s ring out as if greeting us. We are travellers, pilgrims, not on a lonely road but on a welcoming river.
I step onto the grassy bank and pull the craft further towards the shore. Peter, coming from the rear, steps into the water, wetting himself slightly. We laugh – we have come a long way and a simple wetting will not deter us.
I unload our tucker bag and we sit on the grass and have warm black coffee in our tin mugs. We open the sausage rolls and split the packet between us. They are neither warm nor filling but after five or six we find our hunger sated.
I have the second last of my cigarettes and we lie out on the grass and let the sun wash over us.
‘Where have ye come from, lads?’ a man asks, looking at our vessel and lifejackets.
‘Ballinalee. We’ve been on the go since yesterday,’ I say.
‘And where are you off to?’
‘Clondra,’ says Peter.
‘My God that’s amazing. Fair bloody play,’ he says, and smiles.
‘It’s pretty great alright,’ says Peter, and we bid the man adieu.
It is pretty great. We are so busy in our work that perhaps we have forgotten the majesty of our undertaking.
We are silent for a time, resting our bodies and minds. It’s enough to have our coffee and enjoy the gentle run of the river. We do not need to think for we are using thoughts every day. I wonder now, could we use something else? Could we feel our way through the world instead of interpreting or analysing everything? Could we rely on instinct, if just for a brief moment? I wonder, what does the felt world feel like? I do not know but I’m ready to try. I let my mind flow with the river and be clear as clean water. Maybe in that there is a blueprint.
‘Did I ever tell you the story of Alan Turing and Longford?’ I ask Peter now as we have our second cup of coffee by the river bank.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘His people are from the town just near your mum’s house on the Battery Road.’
‘The Battery Road? Really?’
‘We should have a plaque to him here.’
I doubt that John and Jane Crawford would have believed that their great-grandson Alan would change the world as we know it, or that he would die so young.
Turing is now best remembered for breaking the German Enigma code which had so thwarted the Allies during the Second World War.
It took Turing and his team’s invention of the bombe machine to fully crack the German naval Enigma code, which would help turn the war around. It’s said the Bletchley Park team’s work on Enigma and breaking the encryptions shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives.
I have always liked Turing, not just because he was Hiberno-English and a runner, but because in him was contained the soul of a philosopher and the intellect of a mathematician. It’s a rare combination that I have seen in only one other person, my friend Zia, a writer, mathematician and investment banker.
Turing was fascinated with the idea that the mind or spirit of a person might go on after death. This philosophical idea grew from his own tragedy following the death from TB of his first love, Christopher Morcom. The experience changed Alan, and he wrote to Morcom’s mother on the nature of the spirit: ‘Personally I think that spirit is really eternally connected with matter but certainly not always by the same kind of body. I did believe it possible for a spirit at death to go to a universe entirely separate from our own … when the body dies the “mechanism” of the body holding the spirit is gone and the spirit finds a new body sooner or later perhaps immediately.’
It is strange, but Turing’s view of the spirit reveals an almost Celtic belief structure. In Celtic spirituality the spirit of the dead did not die but rather moved into the next living thing – a person, animal or thing – in a process called metempsychosis. The soul thus stayed in this world but entered a different host. In our world, a person could become a swan or, like Etain, a pool of water or a butterfly. Maybe there was some old race memory hidden deep within Turing from his family roots in this Celtic land that laid the seeds of his views.
If the soul could go into another body, maybe it could go into a machine? It was perhaps this way of thinking that got Turing to begin the work of artificial intelligence, in the field of which he is now a lay saint. His ideas on machine logic asked, could a machine decide what to do by itself, could it think independently? It’s been seventy years since he asked those questions and artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, but perhaps someday there will be a machine ‘born’, not ‘made’, that can answer that question for us.
Turing’s work opens the psyche. It makes us ask big questions of our souls. Are we worthy of them? Are they ours or have they been here before? He is an architect of the interior. He asked questions to which there were no answers too, but then isn’t that the nature of the human journey: to ask?
‘It’s rare a man sees the world truly differently,’ I say.
The irony is that Turing never saw his insights realised. His baptism of the machine was not to be celebrated, and he would not live to see the birth of the modern computer. Convicted of indecency in 1952 under Britain’s anti-homosexual laws, he opted for chemical castration rather than prison time. Turing fell out of his own life story, his work with GCHQ ended, and he was barred from entry into the USA. He was a broken man and two years later he would take his own life. The man who changed the course of human history, not once but twice, was dead at forty-one years old.
Perhaps his spirit is out there now, waiting to come down into the next living thing. Perhaps it has already taken root and is living again, free and whole.
In Hinduism, the karma of a person determines the condition of their soul in the next life. The transmigration of Alan’s soul would surely have been a beautiful thing. Perhaps he is united now with Christopher, perhaps the universe has given to them in this lifetime what it could not in the last. There are stranger things between this heaven and this earth. Our philosophies are at best only guesses.
I hope, wherever he is, he is happy. Our world would not exist without him.
We sip our coffee now and talk of Alan the man-machine with the soul of an angel.
Second breakfast is over and we must return to the river. The rapids and the weir lie ahead of us behind the council buildings. We shall have to be careful; there is no passing for people or boat by this section, so we will have to carry our vessel through the park.
We gather up our belongings, sling them over our shoulders and begin our march down the mall.
‘I wonder what people will think of this,’ says Peter.
‘It’ll be a first – two men and a canoe in the middle of a pandemic!’
The boat digs into our hands and we stop at intervals to rest. At the Camlin Falls we peer into the deep chasm and agree that it would be madness to attempt a crossing. The canoe would be snapped in two and we’d be drowned in the process. Indeed, there have been deaths here and some years ago now an old neighbour who had moved to the town to retire was found dead in the river. His name was Tommy. We miss him still.
We walk slowly through the park and down past the remains of old Longford.
This section of the river was once a busy place. There were sawmills, tanneries, slaughterhouses and gasworks. On the northern bank of the Camlin lay the foundations of the old town and the British occupation centred on Longford Castle and its two military barracks.
The castle was built in 1627 beside, or perhaps upon, the ruins of the old O’Farrell fortress by the English planter family the Aungiers when they became the new lords of Longford. The castle was a heavily fortified structure and had been built to defend the lords from the hostile local chieftains. It stood until recently. Such is the story of a town that its future is continually built upon and over its past in layers upon layers, and the castle, itself built on the fortress grounds, was knocked, and is now years later replaced by a sprawling shopping centre built during the economic boom. Perhaps the shopping centre in the heart of the old town shows the real ruler of our world now, the material nature of commerce, which has beaten and will beat longer than the ages of kings; and yet the centre is not open. It failed to find tenants and the death of the tiger has left it empty. It stands now waiting for its story to begin.
The north bank of the river holds many stories. Who knows what the English soldiers saw when they came to this land all those centuries ago? It was an outpost, a frontier land, and its inhabitants were perhaps not so welcoming. There were hangings and murders in the old town; holy men were martyred too.
Perhaps the strangest story from this bank of the river involves a regiment of Hessian soldiers who had been stationed in the lower barracks in 1795. The Hessians were hired German soldiers used by the British to bolster their numbers. Indeed, in the American Revolutionary war, some thirty thousand of these soldiers were used by the British. The Americans still remember them as mercenaries.
The Hessians came from the German states of Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Hanau and it was their princes who rented out the soldiers at the time of revolution, seeing this as an opportunity to make money for their governments.
The Hessians were good fighters, so good that the Americans tried to turn them to their side by offering lands and sanctuary for every man who sided with them. Of the thirty thousand who served in the US, five thousand would stay to make a new life in the great new country of the west.
Why the Hessians were in Longford in 1795 we shall never know. It was but three years before our own Atlantic revolution, and perhaps the British feared that we too were massing in numbers to overthrow our rulers. It must have been a strange place to be, stranded in the middle of a foreign land with two languages spoken that they could not understand. Perhaps some had seen action in America, perhaps some thought Ireland might be a mission of peace. What faced them was a wild land, full of unrest, and they would have been treated with disdain but also fear.
What is known about this regiment of men is that one night, while the garrison was stationed in the barracks, fifteen of them took their own lives in a mass suicide. Hundreds came to see the sight of their broken bodies the next day and the men were then buried in a large hole at the back of the barracks.
I wonder now about those German fighters. So far from their home, so broken. All gone in an instant. They did not find peace in this life or by this river, and after the suicides the company was disbanded and the men sent back to Germany.
The history at this crossroads is not always pleasant, but such is the nature of the frontier. Things are given and things are taken. Life begets death and power begets violence.
John O’Donovan, who undertook research for the Ordnance Survey of Ireland – including Longford – in 1837 wrote in his private correspondence that he feared Annaly would ‘not turn out an interesting territory’.
In this I do not agree with him. Longford town is a place of multiple stories and it has gone through several lives already: a Gaelic settlement, a British Army outpost, a thriving market town and now an urban centre divining a new identity. The future of rural Ireland is a battle that is being fought all over the country. We too are part of that story.
There is, however, a hope and light in Longford; it is a town that will endure as it has always done. It is our heart here in the county, and through the many businesses I see a new light coming through.
That battle for rural Ireland will take all the people of the county. The light won’t go out, for it is a special place. There are so many who want us to win and in that will there is hope. As we say in the county, ‘Longford Abu,’ and true it is. There are new chapters to be written. We will all turn the page together.
We pause now to rest our fingers and let the canoe down. Some migrant workers stand on the far bank and look at us quizzically. This is a new land to them, a new country, and perhaps they look on the river in the same way that the English settlers or German soldiers once did, a thoroughfare to unknown parts. They are the new people of Longford and in them too there lies hope for its next chapter.
‘We’ll launch under the bridge at the cinema,’ I say.
The Camlin River Bridge is the finest of the bridges over the river. Many a night I have looked over it – it stands right beside the cinema. Often I queued excitedly for a half-hour to enter the old movie theatre and be transported to other worlds and other lives.
There is something about cinema that is still magic. Some sacred act of sitting in the dark and entering a story. In the dark, we are baptised into the light of a new world, be it a western or drama. The actors are like mirrors to our dreams. The old cinema in town was replete with velvet ropes and red curtains, bringing glamour to the experience, and the old manager wore a crisp black suit. He had served my parents in their youth and now he served me.
Like the oil painters of old, there are masters of the craft, and rivers have captured their attention too. Voyages down them, the attempts to dam and ford them have all been captured by way of the lens.
Perhaps the greatest of the stories of a river is The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s based on the book by Pierre Boulle, who, while working as a secret agent for the Free French in Indochina during the Second World War, was captured on the Mekong River.
Boulle was to undergo forced labour as a prisoner of war and his experiences were to inspire his novel about the Thailand–Burma death railway.
The real railway was a hell for the Allied soldiers and enslaved people who worked on it. The Japanese-led initiative was a plan to build, in twelve months, a 415-kilometre railway through Thailand and Burma to enable the rapid movement of troops and munitions to the Burma campaign. It is said that a man died for every sleeper laid over its harshest terrain. Richard Flanagan, whose book The Narrow Road to the Deep North was inspired by his father’s time on the death railway, said that more people died there than there were words in his book. That is something that has always stayed with me.
The Bridge on the River Kwai was an epic film helmed by the British director David Lean, that brought Boulle’s words to life. Lean’s work was to capture what was then an undocumented part of the war. In it was contained the meeting of two vastly different cultures, the treatment of the prisoners of war, but also the notion of taming a river.
The film would establish Lean as a master auteur and it won Oscars and awards around the world. Lean’s voice and vision for the epic would give rise to grander tales, including Doctor Zhivago (which my own relation Siobhán McKenna would star in) and Lawrence of Arabia.
John Boorman, the director of the film Deliverance, himself no stranger to water and rivers, once told me that film is the business of turning money into light.
The light of the River Kwai shines still; the film is a master class in the art of storytelling but it serves too as one of the few stories from the death railway which would claim over a hundred thousand lives.
We tell the stories of rivers in films because, like stories, rivers have a beginning, middle and end. The river flows as the frames do in a film. There are arcs and moments of danger. We emerge at the end of a river refreshed, changed and remade. So too it is with good cinema.
We are not in the business of turning money into light today, but rather experience into memory. Those memories shall play in our minds for ever more. In short, we are becoming our cinematic selves. The bridges of Camlin country will light our way.
We get back into the water and paddle on down the river leaving the cinema and the old town behind us.
‘It feels good to be back in nature,’ I say.
‘You know, you’re right,’ Peter agrees.
We are moving now past the back of Little Water Street, by CPF and KM cycles, and entering the land of life again. We are back on our river safari.
The river has been surprisingly clean. We had feared that we would encounter the waste of a town, but aside from a few empty beer cans, the river is healthy. That has made us happy.
At times the waters run shallow and I must take up my old routine of stepping out and pulling the craft through the water with Peter in the rear keeping the balance.
I do not mind for I know ahead lies the deep land and when we arrive there shall be no bottom.
We are coming into the townland of Mullagh. It is a special place on the borderlands of the west of the town and is covered with ancient sites of ringforts, kilns and old country houses. I know this land too, because it is also the home of the Mooreheads.
Derek Moorehead is a fellow farmer and family friend. He has taught me all I know about sheep and lambing.
Some years ago now on a Christmas Day morning, Derek came with a foster cow for a purebred calf that had been born that morning. Its mother was a great lumbering beast, quiet as a mouse but with one fatal flaw – she never produced milk. This is a problem that can sometimes happen with highly bred bloodlines.
Derek took one of his dairy cows from his parlour and brought her to us, saying that he was sorry that she only had three tits.
‘It’s three more than we can get anywhere else on this day of all days,’ my father told him.
Derek said to keep his cow for as long as we liked. He knew that we would not be able to buy a foster cow in the Christmas days ahead.
He then looked over the calf and, being a good judge of an animal, agreed that the bull calf, who was a monster size, was worth all the effort. The calf soon took to sucking its new mother and there was a joy in all our bodies.
It’s not every man you can call on Christmas Day morning and who will oblige, but like the wise men in that most famous nativity scene, there are still good people in this world, still those who will come over the horizon with gifts of need and want.
Derek, standing there in his overalls and wellingtons as if it were any other day, would accept no payment or thanks and in the end, my father forced a Christmas hamper upon him, saying simply, ‘We’d have been lost without you.’
He replied that that was what Christmas was all about.
We all of us smiled then and looked in the half-door of the farm byre at this our little nativity of nature.
It would be something to meet Derek or one of his brothers on the river now, I think; they would enjoy the story of our voyage so far. It’s funny – this canoe is carrying not just us but our thoughts; they drift downstream with us like our bags and ourselves; they are our invisible belongings. Derek, the Mooreheads, the cow, they are all with us, all taking a space in this watery world.
‘Three foot moving into four!’ I shout.
We have found the good deep water again and we are happy. We can paddle now without worrying about hitting rocks or stones.
Moving under Lisbrack bridge, we are in open territory and it seems nature too has sensed this. Around us now the swans have returned.
The mind of the world created the majesty of the swans. Their mute song is heard on the eternal level. A family moves ahead of us now, father, mother and four cygnets.
They move with speed and grace, their heads bent low. They are part of the horizon of consciousness of this river, both mythical and real. They are part of the sensory gift of living.
‘Is it true the Queen owns the swans on the rivers in England?’ I ask.
‘Oh yeah, they love their swans over there,’ says Peter.
The swan is a special animal in this land too. Even the idea of the animal brings to mind their story in forming this place. Their legend occurred no more than a bird’s flight from where we now paddle. Even in a bookless home, their story is known – it is beyond books. The animal and its myth are a sort of mastery; the swan of the mind and the swan of the water are as powerful as each other.
The mute swan is found throughout Ireland in our rivers, lakes and wetlands and it eats a diet of river plants and small amphibians and invertebrates. Found throughout Europe, its beauty has been brought by the Europeans to the new worlds of the Americas and Australasia and today a huge number are found throughout the United States.
The cygnets travelling with their parents now were most likely born in March on some quiet bank of the Camlin and are now learning the way of the water from their parents. Their mother sat for over a month without food on the eggs to bring them into this world while their father patrolled the nest to keep enemies away. Swans mate for life and a male and female are highly territorial and will guard a section of river or lake as their own.
Dick Warner, the great naturalist, tells of a theory that they came to this land with the Normans as ornamental creatures and then turned wild. However, more recently swan bones have been found that show they have been in this place much longer, though it is not clear, as Warner rightly says, whether they are mute or whooper swans.
The cygnets will learn to fly in the autumn but will stay with their parents for nearly a year. Not until their grey feathers turn white will they be chased away.
A year ago Viv and I lived by a large lake and we watched the lives of a family of swans as they grew and changed. The five cygnets would swim near the shore of the lake in front of our house. At times I simply sat and watched them, trying to get to know them. The father was big and strong and would lead the family across the headland where our house lay. He was, I knew, teaching them of their world.
It was a great tragedy to discover one day that their children’s number had fallen to four. Something had befallen that fifth swan and for some days I walked by the lake-shore looking for the broken body but found nothing. The lake had taken it wholly.
As the season progressed the children grew and their feathers changed until one day it was just the pen and cob again. They had chased away their young to make way for the next season’s brood.
The lake was huge, and so, unlike river swans, I think the children were not expunged totally; rather they found a quiet part of the lake system to call their own.
River swans like the ones we see now will be forced away to find a river or lake of their own. Some will travel great distances and join colonies of other single birds before finding a mate. This can take years in some cases, and the birds don’t begin to mate until they are at least three years old. The swan is a long-lived animal and has been known to live to forty years of age.
The founding myth of Ireland is the Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, but The Children of Lir is the heart of this nation. Its story is not of war but of love and jealousy. It is our story of rebirth and renewal.
Long ago in the time of the Tuatha Dé Danann, before the Christ God came to this land, Ireland was a wild and magical place. The Tuatha Dé Danann were god kings and ruled this nation until the coming of the Milesians (the Gaels). The groups decided to divide Ireland between them, with the Tuatha Dé Danann taking the otherworld while the Milesians took the world above ground, the land we now occupy. Lir, the father of the children of the tale, was a sea god and had sought to be the high king of the gods. He was opposed by Bodbh Dearg, the Red Crow, who succeeded where Lir failed and became the Dagda or high king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. To keep the peace the Red Crow offered Lir the hand of his daughter Aoibh in marriage, which Lir accepted.
Aoibh and Lir were happy and the Red Crow and Lir came to peace. Aoibh gave Lir four children: the beautiful Fionnuala and three sons, Aedh and the twins Conn and Fiachra. In the beginning, life was good and the family were happy, the children grew and Lir watched over his kingdom.
But then, as is wont to happen in the tales of my forebears, tragedy struck and Aoibh fell sick and died. Some say it was during the birth of the twins, Conn and Fiachra. Both Lir and the children mourned her loss deeply and the Red Crow sent another daughter, Aoife, to be Lir’s bride.
At first, Aoife was a good stepmother and cared for and loved the children but soon her jealousy took her because she could not replicate the bond Lir and his children had for one another. And so she brought the children swimming to a nearby lake and there she cursed them, turning them into swans.
Aoife knew that if she killed the children they would haunt not just her but their father and reveal to him their murderer. So instead the curse doomed the children to nine hundred years as animals. The children retained only one human asset, the power of speech and song.
As swans, they were doomed to spend three hundred years on Lake Derravaragh, three hundred on the dangerous Straits of Moyle and finally three hundred on the wild western seas of Inis Gluaire.
On learning of the fate of his children, Lir spoke with the Red Crow and it was agreed that Aoife’s cruel ways would be punished, and so it was that she was turned into a demon and exiled from the land for ever. The heartbroken Lir came to be with his children at Lough Derravaragh and listened to their songs.
The lake is just a few miles from us now, fed by our sister river the Inny. Many times I have been to its sacred waters and listened out for the choral calls from the long ago. It is strange that the mute swan, the quiet bird, could have been given such a sweet voice. Perhaps in some land they still call with human voices, still sing out, and it is in this world that some unknown legend took their voice from them, replacing it with a hiss. We have no myth to tell us why they are silent. Perhaps it is out of sorrow for Lir’s loss.
It is said that the three hundred years of exile in Derravaragh were pleasant ones for the children, they talked and sang to their father, but soon the life of Lir was ending and the children’s time in Derravaragh was over. They parted after three hundred years, never to see each other again.
With all hope now gone, the children continued to their next home and spent their term on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland. This was to be their dark night of the soul. They were often separated and they suffered greatly. Of this time little else is known than that it was a period of great trauma.
I have crossed this strait too and know its howling winds and wildness. My words brought me across it a year ago to speak with our brothers the Scots about my book on farming. It was a lonely crossing and to have spent three hundred years there, removed from beauty, must have been a great hardship.
Finally, the last saga of their curse began and the swans flew west to the island of Inis Gluaire off the Mayo coast. On their way, they passed their old home and saw that it was now in ruins.
Inis Gluaire was a remote but holy place and it was here, after three hundred years, that the children heard the ringing of the Christian bell, which Fionnuala believed would lift the curse. It was here too that they met Saint Mochaomhóg, who explained to them that the time of the Tuatha Dé Danann had come to an end and that the Christ God had come into the land.
At the news of the discovery of the now-famous singing swans spread, the King of Connacht came to take them as a wedding present for his wife, but Mochaomhóg refused, at which the king threatened force.
As the bell rang again the children’s curse lifted and the four beautiful swans turned into four ancient people, at which the king ran away. Fionnuala, the eldest, told Mochaomhóg that they were not far from death now and asked to be baptised into the new faith. This he did and the four died soon after and were buried together. The last of the Tuatha Dé Danann in the land of the Gaels.
When I think of the story of the Children of Lir, I think of their long journey to peace, how for many of us it cannot come without suffering. But perhaps suffering is part of the finding of peace. Perhaps, through suffering, we can recover what W.B. Yeats called the soul’s radical innocence. The children had to earn their peace after nine hundred years, and perhaps we too have to earn ours, for nothing in this world is truly free.
When I think of the epic saga I think too of my mother’s wish to come back as a swan in the next life. She has told me of this wish many times, and I do not think it foolish; it is part of our genesis in this land. What will be stranger is how I will react when I meet her in that form and how we shall come to know one another again on the soul level.
The Children of Lir is part of the lyric celebration of this nation and its story mirrors that of the suffering of this land for eight hundred years. So it was that at the creation of the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin to commemorate all the Irish rebellions, a sculpture of the children transforming from swans to humans was erected. They symbolised our transformation into a free nation.
The mind of the world created the majesty of the mute swans, but we gave them their song. It sings now to the eternal as we watch the family crest ahead of us, lighting the way to the end of all suffering.
We have come into a wide clear section and it has stirred some old memory in me, for I know it in a way. It is the site of a massacre.
‘This is a sad section of the river.’
‘What do you mean?’ asks Peter.
‘There was a great die-off here a few years ago. They found the bodies of two thousand fish here, from Carton bridge all the way to Clondra.’
‘Jesus, was it pollution?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘Climate change.’
‘Fuck.’
Reports at the time of the great river kill said that the bodies of brown trout, pike, roach, eels and crayfish had been found floating in the water. The cause had not been effluent runoff but low water levels caused by lack of rain mixed with high water temperatures of some 25°C, some five degrees higher than the normal fish temperature threshold.
This unique combination meant that less oxygen was being absorbed into the water and the animals suffocated. Fish cannot make a call or signal, but I imagine if they had vocal cords the river would have echoed with their pains to die in such a way.
Wendell Berry, the farmer and writer, says that we must cherish what remains of the earth and that ‘to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope for survival’.
That renewal will be made all the harder when the worst of the climate emergency makes itself felt. Already fifteen of the twenty warmest years since records began have occurred in Ireland since 1990. In 2018, we experienced a prolonged heatwave and drought nationwide; on our farm, the grass withered and burned in the hot sun. Reports from that heatwave saw water temperatures rise in the west of the country to nearly 25°C again, placing a huge strain on salmon and trout in the area. As we move through this century of change, researchers have warned that some of Ireland’s rivers could lose as much as thirty per cent of their existing waters in dry weather.
What is so strange about this is that even though the country will get wetter as a whole due to much stormier winters (with an increase of some twenty per cent in rainfall) our summers will be drier, and it is the rivers on the wet west coast that will suffer the most because they have poor natural storage (what the researchers in Maynooth University called ‘shorter memories’), which means that they could retain less water.
The effects of the great change are already here. As a boy I saw frosty days by the rivers when great patches of ice would form in the winter waters, but the frosts seldom come now. I cannot remember a single day from this year so far when I saw ice patches on the ground.
I do not want to imagine that our rivers could be so destroyed that their ‘memory’ becomes empty. I recently learned of a word from Australia – solastalgia – which describes the feeling of distress we experience from environmental change in our area.
In its truest form solastalgia describes coming back to a place and seeing it changed. For Australians, this is most evident in lands where great forests have been felled and replaced with square paddocks that are lifeless green deserts or where open-cast mines have ripped up sacred soils.
Place defines us and when it changes, however subtly, that affects us. Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who coined the term, says that solastalgia is stirred in us when ‘our endemic sense of place is being violated’.
Solastalgia is brought about when we are unable or powerless to stop the factors that are changing our environment, but the opposite is true with climate change. The power is still in our hands, the violation has not yet fully occurred. The rivers, our veins, our life forces are still here, they are still flowing, they have not yet been cut and fatally wounded, we can change. The soul death and soil death have not yet happened.
After the fish kill in the river all those years ago new stocks moved up from the source to take their place and the panic abated. Nature has a way of healing from trauma; we have but to give it a chance and it can right itself. But if we push and push there is no road back. Every wound to the earth is a wound to us too. If we cannot stop our exclusionary thinking we truly shall be alone.
It was terrible what the kill did to the river. It was terrible what it did to us, though we did not know it.
Past pain leaves a stain on the body. Like the fish gasping for air in that choked river, my past is making me gasp, it has withheld the breath of the present from me for a long time.
I said yesterday that I am putting the past behind me, but I must feel it too. I must know it in my body. In order to become whole, I must let go, but that makes me scared. In letting go there is fear because the last time I trusted, truly trusted, in me my life fell apart. But maybe if we are not afraid we can never grow. Maybe in vulnerability, authentic vulnerability, there is strength.
I was twenty-four when the depression first came and I threw a life away in Australia. When I fell out with Luke. When I closed the business and fled the southern hemisphere. I was twenty-eight when I thought I had rebuilt myself only for it to fall apart again and I left Canada and pushed love away. Ten years have come and gone and though I am now whole the pain has remained.
Can a man learn to trust again? Can a river heal a psychic wound? In joy, in the joy of our trip, there is an answer, but I am not there, not yet.
Like the light after a candle is blown out, I must be absorbed into all the things around me. In that absorption there is absolution.
The trip was never just about the journey.
The river has become deep and wide and we paddle on with speed in our movements. We are free of the branches of trees and the debris of small choked waterways and life is good.
The depth is five feet and our movements are true and strong. We can test ourselves on a stretch like this and agree to ‘open ’er up’.
We paddle fast now and let our girl pick up a speed she hasn’t known before.
‘Ye-haw!’ I shout in mock American fashion for we fancy ourselves men gone west now, setting out on the Colorado River.
‘That’s a mighty fine river,’ says Peter.
‘Yes sirree!’ I say, and we laugh.
‘All we’re missing now is the banjo.’
‘If we had that we’d be set.’
‘Wouldn’t it be great to paddle one of the great rivers in the States?’ Peter says. Now that we know the way of rivers, more adventure is in our minds.
‘Ah, the States would be the place,’ I say.
We have both been there, both visited that vast inland empire. It holds a desire for an Irishman like no other place.
It’s American rivers like these that changed a boy named Samuel Clemens into the writer Mark Twain. He was baptised in them and came out not just a celebrated wit but a sage.
‘I am not an American,’ Twain wrote in his journal, ‘I am the American.’
‘Do you know much about Mark Twain?’ I ask Peter as we paddle on down the wide river.
‘Only that he was very famous – and Huckleberry Finn, of course.’
‘His name was a river term,’ I say. ‘It means “two fathoms” but, you know, he tried out a few more names before he settled on that one.’
Twain knew rivers just as we are coming to know our Camlin. He grew up beside the Mississippi and as a young man aspired to be a steamboat pilot. That meant that he would need to learn every bend and break in the Mississippi. Each rapid and shallow would have to be memorised to allow a steamboat to navigate the waters between New Orleans and St Louis.
The river, I think now, taught him about life. The migration and navigation of its depths would infuse his work. Boats and rafts litter his books, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Innocents Abroad. He was a writer of journeys both real and imagined, and perhaps what is most interesting is how the journey changes the reader and maybe how it changed Twain himself.
In Twain’s world, going down the river meant hardship and suffering, and though we do not fully know what lies ahead of us we do not need to fear bondage. Perhaps like the enslaved Jim, Huck’s great companion, we will find ourselves free at the end of this river.
Maybe in movement plain and simple there is a freeing. Perhaps migration is in our DNA. Like the birds of the air, we need to move each year. Perhaps this voyage of ours is, like Huck’s, a teaching one; perhaps the trip was hidden in our nervous systems or our magnetic minds. The birds move north in summer to find new resources, new foods and new lovers; perhaps a writer must migrate to find new stories? Twain himself would travel the world, becoming one of the first true global celebrities in the doing. But it was this travel that brought new stories to him. Maybe we are like the cuckoo who only gains song when it comes to this land. We have come to the river to make our song, and in the singing we will have a new story to tell when we return home.
Twain’s life was a full one, encompassing fame and tragedy, loss and love. In the end, he got all he had ever sought and lost all he had ever got. In later years he wrote his own river memoir, reminiscing about his youth on the Mississippi and his steamboat days. Life on the Mississippi recounted not just the history of the river but Twain’s history on the river. It is not an entirely true book, but a book with aspects of truth to it, much in the vein of so much of his life.
Twain was not just a writer but a speculator dabbling in inventions (one of which, a printer, he poured millions into) and get-rich-quick schemes. In this, we are the same for at one time I was not just a writer but an importer of boutique whiskey, a restaurateur and an art curator. Not everything worked, but there was fun in the trying. And, like Twain, perhaps it is essential for a writer to have lived other lives before they take to the trade of the pen.
What most endears me to Twain, however, is that he never gave up. Despite the death of his daughter, huge debts from failed investments and a dark depression that threatened to take him under, he battled and found a new way to live. Perhaps it was the strength of a lifetime of battling or the promise of a better tomorrow, but he had the attitude of a man who would live different passages of life. A man, in short, determined to keep going.
With the talk of writers, Peter wonders how I will create a book out of a two-day trip, but I do not. All the stories are here; my nervous system tells me so, the spirit of that old American writer tells me so.
We’re Samuel Clemens. We’re Mark Twain. We’re on a journey to escape the humdrum. We’re on a journey to become free. That’s safe water and a safe bet.
‘Come on, boy, let’s haul some ass! This is as close as we’ll get to America for a long time!’ I yell to the river now and we revel in our speed.
‘Mighty fine day for a crossing,’ says Peter.
‘Mighty fine day indeed.’
We have moved into the townland of Cleggil but really it is the land of the roach. Everywhere now the fish swarm around us.
I have always liked roach; they are a different sort of fish. Silvery and bright, they seem to be like the small dogs of the river. They are plentiful, friendly and not too easily scared away by the sight of a canoe.
The roach is an interesting fish. They are not native to this land and came here only in the late 1800s. The story goes, according to the naturalist Dick Warner, that the fish, along with dace, were brought over by an English fisherman as live bait to catch pike. A wave or flood or, some say, carelessness led to the fish escaping into the river. Nothing was thought further of the event until a few years later when the river they had escaped into, the Munster Blackwater, was seen to be full of them.
The roach issue stayed local for some time until 1905, when a shipment was brought north to Baronscourt estate just outside Omagh by the Duke of Abercorn, as reported by Bill Brazier in his excellent article on the spread of the roach in Ireland. The hundred roach, Brazier writes, were to be food for the pike the duke kept in his artificial lakes around the manor house. But the winter of 1905 was a bad one. The lakes flooded and it appears the roach escaped or were washed downstream in small rivers, ending up in the Fairy Water river outside Omagh.
I know this estate personally and so too does Peter. He is friends with the next duke to be, and I knew his now departed mother, who ran a writing competition to bring Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren together through creative writing in the wake of the Troubles.
It wasn’t long before the fish had spread to the whole Foyle river system in the north of the country and, again according to Brazier, they hit Cavan in the 1960s and were found in the Upper and Lower Erne loughs. The fish was first recorded in Longford in 1973 at Clondra harbour, where we are now headed.
The roach was also sighted in my beloved Lough Gowna the same year and has made a home for itself there ever since. It would be another year, according to Brazier, until they were found in the Inny in the south of the county.
Roach are a member of the cyprinid family, which includes carp and goldfish, themselves great breeders. Efforts that were made to control their numbers in the 1970s all failed. However, their population booms have now settled down, as Dick Warner details, and they have found a stable niche in the river systems in which they have taken root.
The roach (Rutilus rutilus) is a highly adaptable animal that can withstand great changes in its environment, from brackish water to extreme water temperatures – ranging from a chilly 4°C to a hot 31°C. Perhaps their most ingenious survival method is the ability to slow their growth in areas where there is less food. Indeed, it’s this adaptability to a changing waterway system that may well mean they are the most plentiful fish in a warmer Ireland.
Sadly, the roach has caused problems for the native rudd and their numbers have declined due to competition for food sources in many rivers. It’s said that both species are in the Camlin so perhaps a détente has been found between the two species.
The roach swim by us now in their small shoals. Who knew their history was so storied?
Now, to our right, we can see the mount of Cairn Hill in the distance. It is the highest point in the midlands and the watchtower of our lives in this place. From it many rivers flow and those on the south face lead to the Camlin.
From here it looks a grand site, towering above the skyline, but by the standards of adventurers, it is a small place.
It has been known by many names in its lifetime. Long ago they called it Sliabh Uillind after Uillead of the Red Spear, a great warrior, and later it was known as Sliabh Cairbre.
Once I followed the Soran river from its mouth at the Camlin to its source on top of Cairn Hill. It was, I suppose, the very first camino of nature I ever undertook. I sought to gain knowledge of the river and the mountain.
The walk brought me through Soran and Esker, through the fields of my ancestors. In this land, each field had a name, each farm a dreaming. By the long meadow and crab apple I walked, taking in the world around me. Keeping the river as my guide I followed its course. It flowed fast and strong, for it was winter, and the water lapped down Uillind in great bounds and leaps.
It is a stream of great majesty to me because in it are the minnows and mayflies, water beetles and mink. All of my days a family of herons have fished it for its bounty, their low stooping necks digging deep for the good grub.
I walked the Soran river and as I moved the land grew high and steep as I travelled up the hill field by field.
The river was clean and healthy and its pounding rush filled my ears with the symphony of nature.
When my father was a boy he and his father would fish the river in spring, taking the good salmon from its depths. Granda speared a spawning salmon with his pitchfork from the bank, I was told. In that land, at that time, you could sit by a river and everything could change. The salmon was a gift from above and, like the salmon of knowledge of the ancient times, it brought with it a promise to poor people.
There are no salmon now but trout still make their way up its wash to spawn and die.
By Drumnacooha and Derrynacross I walked until the river came to Mallon’s forge near the top. On one side of the road a river flowed and on the other a gripe trickled.
I walked the last few kilometres and made my way by McCormack’s farmhouse and the high fields of the Dorises and walked up to the top of Uillind. I followed the small ditch water until it disappeared inside the rock. The magic of the river, I realised then, occurred in some unseen underground place below those rocks in the heart of the mountain.
It is said that in the 1798 rebellion great fire beacons were lit on the top of the hill to call my countrymen to arms, but there are no fires now.
At the top, where the rivers of both the north and south faces begin, I stood and looked out over the landscape. They say that the ancient tombs built on the hill are in perfect alignment with the sacred tombs of Loughcrew in Westmeath and Carrowkeel in Sligo, built before the human language of maps was tongued, built in alignment with the pilgrim pathways of the old people long ago.
The Soran river brought me to that point and made me see the land in a new way, flowing out in all directions like a tapestried water galaxy. I followed it back home again, a richer man for the doing.
It has been a few hours since we left the town and our stomachs are beginning to call. At Ballykenny bridge, by the ruin of an old house, we decide that this is as good a place as any to stop.
‘Coffee?’ asks Peter from behind.
‘That sounds like a great idea,’ I say, and together we bring our vessel to a halt in the shallows.
The water is low here and we can easily step out of the craft. I lift the food bag out of the now damp canoe and throw it on the river bank. Peter takes the rest of the gear and slowly we set up our picnic on the riverside.
Peter stamps down some summer grass as I lift the canoe half onto the bank to prevent it floating away and soon the smell of black coffee fills the air.
‘What’s for eating?’ Peter enquires as I dip into the nosebag.
‘Two more ham and cheese rolls – and only a little damp!’
‘That will do me rightly,’ says Peter.
We eat our sandwiches and drink our coffee talking of things that people on a break talk about. The weather is fine and we praise the day, then turn to the work we have escaped from for two days. The world of typing and computers and deadlines and all of it, all of it seems so unnecessary, so unimportant in the face of the universe of the real. We turn our attention at last to the river and the canoe and talk of our girl, praising her dearly. We have become such boatmen now that we feel masters of our trade.
After our rolls are eaten I take my last cigarette from my Ziploc bag and light it.
‘This is my last one,’ I say sagely.
Cigarettes have been a companion for nearly a decade now and truth be told I love them, but they do not love me and will, I know, kill me. Sometimes we need to make grand gestures to quit certain habits. A woman might run across America after overcoming her own demons, a man may decide to swim the English Channel after a bad divorce to prove there’s life in him yet. Perhaps this trek will be enough for me. I’ll be the Marlboro man no more, but I’m okay with that. It was a fun affair.
I light up and the smoke wafts through the air. I sip my coffee and I am Humphrey Bogart and this my African Queen moment.
The canoe life is beginning to show on us. Our faces are flushed and freckled from the sun and our legs are turning a light red from its rays. We have been lucky with our weather, the days have been good and there have been no storms or rain, and that above all is a rare thing in the land of Hibernia.
Once, long ago, there were corn mills and kilns here beside this bridge. It was a site of industry where the river, unused to labour, was made work and sweat to grind the corn and flour. I imagine many men came to this place each day to test the water’s resolve and bend it to their will, but that’s all gone now and the river need not work any more. And perhaps that’s only right; she is old and has moved for thousands of years. Her labouring days are behind her, she need only flow now and in that flowing is her retirement. The old house, a fine stone cottage, is all that’s left of this once busy place. We enjoy its shade and imagine what once was.
I open out our map and we look through the land and waters. We have come far this day and soon the river will diverge and then we shall be in the land of Clondra.
‘How long more, do you reckon?’ asks Peter, leaning over the map.
‘Two hours maybe. We need to go left at the break in the river and then pass by the Fallan river.’
We could take the right-hand branch of the river, but that would bring us to the Shannon and we are unsure how hard it would be to navigate on that great waterway.
‘We said we’d do the Camlin, not the Shannon,’ says Peter.
‘You’re right. That was the deal.’
I have studied the left-hand branch, read up on it. It is long and deep and wide, deeper than anything we have yet encountered. The pleasure craft from the canal and the Shannon sail the loop around it.
‘When we get to the left branch we’ll have to be careful – there’s no bottom that I know of. We just have to get to Clondra, that’s all, it doesn’t have to be pretty or fast.’
‘An end’s an end,’ says Peter.
I quench my cigarette in the grass like some old war general and fold up our map. It has brought us this far. There will be no more chances to look at it when we begin again. I memorise its final twists and turns. Its dots, symbols and lines have given us new eyes. We are no longer the men we were when we began this trip two days ago. When we arrive home we will be shocked to discover that despite everything we never really left; rather we came back to our true nature.
There are those who have said you cannot eat scenery, you cannot survive on views and legends alone, but in this they are wrong. This land is not a cursed place; no, it is a feast for the mind for in it we have the sustenance of a great mandala of understanding. The map gave us the tool to see the earth with new eyes. We open them wide now.
We load up our belongings and put our rubbish in the lunch bag. Our coffee is gone, our food exhausted. The last great undertaking is upon us, but we do not fret. We have come this far. We are ready.
Peter sits into the canoe and I hand him the last bag and then I pull the vessel into the deeper water before sitting in myself.
The water quickly deepens and soon we are back in the depths we have come to make our home in.
‘Three foot going into four, hard right coming up.’
We paddle strongly now and take the corner, leaving behind Ballykenny and all it holds. Soon we will be in the land of Kileen and our future will lie ahead of us.
This is an ancient place and it is not without its own magic. Just a few hundred metres from us lies an old bullaun stone ruin. In existence since the Stone Age, these stones with bowls in them were cut out or naturally found where water collected in them. The water from the stones was considered to have magical properties and could cure or curse a person. The curses were real things and people feared those of a widow the most. It’s said a curse could be made by running your finger anti-clockwise in the bowl water and keeping the cursed person and your wish in the mind. It is, I know, all superstition, and modernity now rules this land, but us writers are superstitious people. I should not like to cross the stones or a bitter widow. I do not tell Peter of the cursing stone. I do not want to bring any bad luck our way, not when the deep water lies ahead. We are still in the ever-realising landscape, whether we like it or not. We do not wish to sing bad luck into existence ahead of us. There are old things here, some best left to themselves.
We round the corner and find great clumps of trees crowning both sides of the river. Mighty ash and slender birch stand by the river’s edge and on them now are the figures of five herons, or what the people in these parts call cranes.
‘Would you look at that! I’ve never seen so many in one place. It must be a heronry.’
Peter leans forward, astonished, and together we stop and look at the birds who, having spied us, take off into the air in their great lumbering way.
In my thirty-three years on this planet, I’ve never seen a heronry before. This is something special. These sites can be up to a hundred years old and have seen countless families come and go.
The heron is the great fisherman of the river. Calm as Lao Tzu, they use their long legs to wade out to the deep water in the river and wait for their prey. As birds of prey, they have binocular vision, which enables them to see directly ahead of them and to judge the distance between themselves and their supper. When they strike, it is with great speed, and their beaks have been known to cut right through the flesh of a fish. The heron is a fisherman but he is not above taking other animals and has been known to eat frogs, mice, even other birds.
The birds here are nesting and raising this year’s chicks. The breeding season started in February and the herons’ nests have been added to, plumped and made ready for the young brood, which number between three and five chicks. I have never seen a heron chick before and we shall not see them today – the nests are too high in the trees. But we wish them well.
Found throughout Ireland, their range spreads throughout Europe and Asia, reaching as far away as Japan and as far south as the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. They are the sign of clean water and will only thrive where food is plentiful.
‘They call them cranes here, but the crane is long gone from this river,’ I say now.
‘Cranes … I don’t think I’ve ever seen one,’ replies Peter.
‘They’ve been extinct for hundreds of years. But, you know, a few have started to come back – there’ve been various reports over the years. It’s not the numbers of centuries past, but it is something.’
Long ago Ireland rang out with the calls of the cranes, from our wetlands to our very houses, for the ancients used to keep them as pets. These much taller heron-like birds were prized by not just the Gaels but the early Church too and it’s said that Saint Colmcille, the man who made the prophecy about the Camlin, had a pet crane in his monastery in Iona. The last of the cranes disappeared between the 1600s and 1700s due to changing wetlands and human pressures, but the old people, my father and uncles included, hold fast to the name as if seeking to will them back into this land once again.
As we paddle closer now, another heron breaks from the nest and takes to the air. Their flight is something I never tire of, their great necks tucked back and their mighty two-metre wingspan lazily folding through the sky. They move at their own speed, neither fast nor slow; they are like some mighty seaplanes banking and rolling across the waters.
I remember one morning, some years ago now, driving to Granard town in the east of the county when a thick fog covered the land. On looking into a field by a river I saw a cow eating while beside it a tall heron walked the grey-green earth. It was like a scene from Africa, from some Serengeti morning where all of nature was in harmony. In some ancient cultures, the heron is associated with the creation of the world. Its song, which is a nattering call, was said to have broken the silence before creation. It sang out into the void and in its call was determined what should take form in the world and what should not.
It was, in short, the arbiter of a new world. There on that foggy morning, it was as though the story was beginning again in a sort of Bethlehem of the fields.
To see them now I think is auspicious. They are better than any old cursing stone.
There’s a wind picking up, the first gust we’ve known in our voyage. The canoe, our unnamed lady, is not a heavy craft, neither is she a fighter, and the wind blows through us now and moves her to the left towards the banks.
‘Keep it going, hard right, or we’ll run aground!’
We paddle fast and hit the hard right, but the canoe has picked up too much speed and between it and the wind we are off course. I forlornly call to ‘let her roll’ and we head for a nearby overhanging tree. The waiting branches cut my head and a tear of blood rolls down my face. I rub myself – it is not bad – and we reverse ourselves slowly out of the tree.
We have learned how to reverse and it has come in handy because we have hit the bank a few times in our journey, whether due to strong currents or too slow turns, but this wind, this wind is a new factor.
‘I’m not crazy about these gusts,’ says Peter.
‘Me neither.’
We cannot see it, cannot hold it and yet there it is, a fact of the river outside our control. It is funny, I think now, the wind isn’t audible either; it’s what it flows through, gusts through, that gives it its sound. I can’t hear the wind, not truly, rather I can hear the rustling of the thousands of leaves it passes through. Moving like an air river, a wind river.
‘There could be trouble further up,’ says Peter, waking me from my thoughts.
‘We’ll push on. It’s all we can do.’
Not all rivers run free. Not all rivers can be themselves. In the last few years, I have taken to travelling to Los Angeles to visit my friend Ross for a few weeks of each year. He is a talented photographer and has created an artists’ community in his large downtown loft. Musicians, artists, doctors and writers have come to his four-bedroom warehouse conversion to make their work and in turn to leave their mark on the great city of LA.
Just a few blocks from his home is the Los Angeles River and it has made a mark on me. Using it as a waymarker I would run to its flow each day, past Skid Row and the mayor’s office, past Chinatown and the Elysian Fields Park.
Flowing for fifty-one miles, the river rises in the northern mountains of the Santa Susana and Simi hills and follows a course through the city all the way from Burbank to Long Beach.
It is a river that has been denied its natural inheritance; it is a river that has been changed entirely. Once a free-flowing thing, it meandered its way through the Los Angeles basin, but now it is a caged beast.
Long ago the Tongva people lived alongside the river and it is said that there were more than forty-five villages situated by the river, where the people ate the fruits of the water, living on fresh fish and the acorns that grew from the mighty oak trees lining the course of the river.
When the first Spanish came to LA by sea in 1542, the Tongva paddled out to greet them in their canoes. The following day the expedition, led by Juan Cabrillo, sailed into a bay by the mainland, the area that is now the San Pedro port.
The Tongva were not to know it then, but the arrival of that big ocean-going canoe would mark the start of the end of their world. Cabrillo claimed the land for Spain and in the years that followed new expeditions were mounted to establish missionaries in the region. In 1769 the Portolá expedition arrived from overland and saw the Los Angeles River for the first time. They camped where I used to run to, at the intersection of the highway and downtown, perhaps because it was in what later became downtown LA that the largest Tongva village of Yaanga was situated. The Spanish named the river El Río de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula, but we no longer know what the Tongva called it, though it had been their home for ten thousand years.
The coming of the Spanish was to change everything. The Tongva, who called themselves the people of the land, would have been unaware of the Valladolid debate that had raged in Spain in the 1550s over the nature of their very souls and rights to self-determination. They would never know the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, the humanist Dominican who had argued for their basic human rights.
The Spanish ignored the Valladolid findings when it suited them and the Tongva were soon displaced and forced to live on the missions. They would resist and fight back under great chiefs and leaders, including Toypurina, but their link to the river was broken and would not be found again. The treaties signed with the Americans after the inclusion of the state in the union were never honoured and the Tongva are an all but forgotten people in LA, now numbering only twelve hundred. California did not recognise them as a tribe until 1994 and they have yet to receive federal recognition.
The river, with its sacred oak trees and plentiful fish, would change too. Once the only water source for the growing city, it was placed under enormous environmental pressures in the late 1800s but it was to be its tendency to flood that changed everything.
In my runs to the river on those days in LA I never expected to see fish or birds, or to see fishermen or otters playing by the edge of the water, because the river is not there. That old river, the Río de Nuestra, is gone. After the floods of 1938, which caused billions of dollars of damage and took the lives of 115 people, it was decided to contain the river in a channel of concrete. This concrete would cover 278 miles of the river system. In huge sections, the natural stone and sand of the river bed itself were replaced with a concrete bed. The work would save LA from another major flood in 1969, but it came at a cost; the river died.
Today the water flows, but its only life is the runoff from agricultural pollution and urban debris. Perhaps out there in the great ocean is the memory of the way the river once was, perhaps some ancient chinook salmon has a dream or the feeling of a dream of the old river and the places its great fathers used to migrate to spawn.
The concrete slabs encase the nature and the history that once flowed here, but all is not entirely lost. Hope has come in the form of the famous architect Frank Gehry who announced in 2015 that he intended to work with local groups to help bring life to the river again. The concrete will remain, for fear of future floods, but perhaps there is something wonderful in the old man’s mind that could bring nature to that most urban of lands again.
Ross lives in the shadow of the river and I shall keep running that terrain when I am there until the sound of the Los Angeles Rio echoes again with the calls of life. I shall sing with it, my calls piercing through the harsh concrete to its ancient clay soul.
Paddling on, we approach the Camlin divide. To our left lies Clondra, to our right the flow to the Shannon. A large sign erected in the river points the way. We take the left, the longer journey.
‘This must be the turn,’ I say.
‘It can’t be any other,’ Peter agrees.
A gentle rain has begun to fall and wets us now. The elements are slowly changing on us. We are moving, whether we like it or not, into rougher country.
‘Did I tell you about a story I heard recently?’ I say now to bring our minds away from the changing conditions.
‘Go on.’
‘I was listening to the radio, and there’s a man who decided to undertake running a marathon in every country of the world.’
‘Right.’
‘And, well, here’s the thing. He wanted to be the first to do it, but it cost him nearly half a million dollars and in some countries which were too dangerous he just ended up running in car parks and airports and then getting back on a plane.’
‘That makes no sense,’ says Peter, and he laughs.
‘Well, that was my thought. I mean he wanted to be the first, to put his name there and say he did it, but I wonder now was there any joy to it? Any pleasure? Did he even get to savour the beauty of these countries?’
‘It makes no sense.’
‘Did I ever tell you about my philosophy?’ I ask.
Peter hmms, a sound of interest, and I begin my vision.
‘After everything I’ve gone through in the last few years, the last decade really, I stripped everything back. I centre my philosophy around a day and there’s only one objective in that day; to make it count. A counted day is a gifted day. And what makes the gift is our action in the day.’
‘How do you make them count?’
‘That’s the secret. It can be a different thing every day. Maybe it’s a run or treating yourself to a cup of coffee you know you’ve earned.’
‘They all count so?’
‘Exactly. Take our trip. We’re making use of our life – these are two gifted days and we will remember them.
Now, I don’t mean we need to climb a mountain every day or paddle a river every week but simply that we do one thing every day that is with purpose for ourselves, not for anyone else.’
We are silent a time as we think about this notion. I’ve long thought of it. The meaning of life is different for every person. And, in a way, the meaning changes for everyone all the time. On a Monday it could be about money, on a Tuesday about inner peace. There is nothing inherently wrong with this changing as long as we are still striving for understanding. The day we stop looking for meaning is the day we truly stop living. It’s our job to wonder. Wonder has brought us everything. All thoughts start in dreams.
Once in the dark days of my depression, a neighbour laughed at me trying to become a writer. He said my problem was I was a dreamer. I know now that he was wrong. I followed my dreams and they have brought me to this river, to this journey of knowledge. We must all be dreamers. We must all be wonderers.
Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian writer, talks about the notion of the personal legend. In short, we are all here for a purpose. Everyone has a reason why they are in this life. That reason is a mystery, he says, and the only true certainty is death. Our destiny is ours alone, it is our journey to death, it is up to us to come to death, which is really the centre of life, with a feeling of completeness.
My destiny has brought me on a decade-long search for meaning in the valley of the spirit. I travelled all the way through time to come back to an unchanged land and see how much I had changed. My wisdom, my philosophy, like all philosophy, had to be earned. It came not through suffering or abstinence, though I tried those roads; it came not through anger, for anger is only a means to hurt oneself; rather it came through beauty, through re-seeing the world, re-focusing the mind.
The world has a language and our souls can sing it. Turing, I think, knew this; he saw the beauty in the natural world, in the purity of the mathematics of nature that also created the joy of wonder. Everything is in a flow. When we exist not just for ourselves, the way nature does, we thrive when we endure; as the earth does, we prosper.
Beauty is a secret key and finding the joy in each gifted day is our inheritance.
‘It’s our job to remember our life and when we look back in the great book to think of what we put into our days,’ I say now after some thought. ‘I want to look back and think that I woke up at twenty-eight and started living my life for the first time, really, living with intent, not just moving through the land. Seeing the extraordinary beauty of the everyday in everything. That’s my philosophy.’
‘It’s not a bad one,’ says Peter in his wise way.
‘Ah, it’s all muddled together. It’s a way. The way of me. That’s all I know.’
‘At least you didn’t have to run around a car park to figure it out,’ laughs Peter, and we both laugh now as we face into the wind and rain.
Fear is a part of life but it is also a part of a river. This river has taken life; in Ballykenny they found the body of a small girl washed away in the flood years ago; in Ballinalee the bodies of my neighbours after the car crash; in the town the body of Tommy. The river has danger as part of it. We have not felt this danger, but now we are in the deep water of the Clondra loop and for the first time we are afraid.
The rain has grown harder and the wind pushes us on our every stroke, threatening to overturn us. I cannot see the bottom of the river and I call out now that it could be eight foot moving into ten. There is fear sitting in the boat with us, riding as extra weight and threatening to bring us down. Peter is not a good swimmer and if something should go wrong I shall have to think of two lives.
If something happens we are on our own and miles from help. The river is wide here and even getting to the bank could be difficult. The loop is popular with pleasure craft and I wonder now if they come by us shall we be washed in their wake? I do not know.
I imagine huge pike in the water waiting for us, waiting to strike and eat our limbs. The rain is beating down harder and we have to squint as we face into the weather.
I had a dream, a vision of getting to the end of the Camlin, a dream that Peter shares, but now we must counter fear. Black Elk, the Sioux medicine man, says that the truth of the world comes in two faces: one is sad and suffering and the other is laughing. They are different things but they are the same face. We must grit our souls now and face into fear. We have the embers of the joy of the earlier, easier river in our chests and we must burn them to quench and extinguish the fear. Death, the spectre of the river, will not take us, it will have no say in this stretch of water.
‘It matters little how long it takes so long as we get there,’ Peter says. I smile at the words but in truth my laughing face is a mask. I hope that will be enough.
We are lonely figures on a lonely road. Around us, the water has gathered strong and lapping and our boat is straining. Our arms are tiring and our hard faces are being punished by the elements. I remember now my prayer, my prayer to God to bring us safely through the river, and in that memory the figure of the navigator has come to me. He has come in comfort.
‘We’re like Saint Brendan,’ I say now as the wind and rain spit against my face, the first words I have spoken in a long time.
‘What’s that?’ Peter shouts.
‘The saint who sailed the boat out into the Atlantic.’
‘Didn’t he go to Greenland?’
‘Some say America too.’
It has been an unplanned thing, but our trip has near coincided with his feast day. Perhaps he is guiding us.
He too knew the toil of storms. He too knew the wonder of the water.
I have always liked Saint Brendan, not least because he is the father of all boat journeys in this land. His Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis is one of the first and truest immrams – stories of both mythological and real sea journeys concerning crossing the wild Atlantic to the undying lands or, in the case of Saint Brendan, the promised land. Like the navigator, we too are on an immram; we have, like the heroes of old, set out for adventure, but in the doing we have also come to fulfil something deeper. We sail west, like him, on this choppy water, seeking to leave part of our old selves and fulfil a sort of modern destiny.
Brendan was, they say, born near the lakes of Killarney in County Kerry around 489 and entered the holy life, studying under Saint Enda. His voyage across the Atlantic began from a conversation with his friend Barrind who described to him a land where the word of God ruled supreme, a land where one did not grow old or need to eat or drink. It was a place that had existed since the world began. Taking fourteen monks with him, Brendan set out on a mission to find that land. It would be a crossing of the Atlantic some nine hundred years before Columbus.
Brendan’s journey from Ireland was carried out in a leather-clad boat made of oak-tanned ox hide. The vessel was a thin-skinned thing, like our canoe, and it sailed north from Ireland, following, it’s reasoned, the islands of the North Atlantic that dot the ocean all the way to the Americas.
His odyssey would take seven years from start to finish, something that had been prophesied on the island of the Paradise of Birds where the spirits of men lived in the bodies of the animals.
The Navigatio is at once a realistic text in its descriptions of Brendan’s boat and his journey to many of the real islands of the Atlantic, such as the Faroes, but also a fantastical piece that reminds the reader of the modern sea voyage tale Life of Pi. On his journey, the saint meets monsters and whales, monks living with the aid of the creatures of the wild, and comes face to face with Judas, who lived on a rock on the ocean on Sundays as a break from hell.
We, however, have no boat to follow men like that, no vessel that can move through the myths and the mists of time. Our transportation is one of the hands and the reality of real water, though it is sacred in its own way. I have followed in his wake in the only way I can, through the prayer of feet.
I had been writing for many months at the time and a great tiredness had taken me. I decided that a walk in the footsteps of the great man could take away my emptiness.
The Cosán na Naomh is an ancient pilgrim path running from Ventry Beach to the foot of Mount Brandon in the Dingle peninsula, Brendan’s old home. The pathway goes from one side of the headland to the other and was, I was told, designed for pilgrims to come from the sea in their canoes (the local word for currachs).
I had never done a real pilgrimage before and I set out through old country lanes and thickly blossomed hedges laden with wildflowers and blackberries, which I picked and ate as I walked. All around me grew different plants, some, a student forester had told me at my campsite the night before, members of the Lusitanian flora, a group of fifteen or so species that are found only in the south-west of Ireland and the Iberian peninsula. They are, they say, a relic from the last Ice Age or, as some think, were brought here by the early people of long ago.
The Cosán has been a site of pilgrimage for Kerry people since medieval times and, although the day was fine and the region full of tourists, I walked alone.
About three miles in I gained three companions in the form of three local farm dogs. They were all mongrels of one breed or another but they were a friendly bunch. I do not know why they took it upon themselves, but they began the pilgrimage with me through the Dingle countryside. At first, for a half-mile, we remained in the universe of their understanding, in their mapped world, as much as they knew it, but soon we were miles from their farmhouse and try as I might to send them home, on they came, and so, not wanting to turn back, I decided that these were to be my companions. And why not? I reasoned. Saint Brendan had a crew.
We walked on by the old roads through the countryside, which is a world of its own for the people who live there. It had, I reasoned, everything that life wants in rural Ireland; land, water and a hardworking people.
At last we came to Gallarus Oratory, an ancient church – the oldest I have ever seen. In its one-roomed space, I offered up my prayers to the gods of writing and prayed for the health of my family and farm, as any pilgrim would do. The dogs, strangely, did not enter the church, perhaps sensing the aura of the space. Outside, ancient words of ogham were engraved on a standing stone and I thought of Brendan and how he had set out in his boat from this land. How he too might have prayed in this church. How in a one-room-wide church the mystery of the world could still be revealed. That, in short, the door to peace was the same door everywhere.
I attempted to walk on then to Mount Brandon to finish my pilgrimage, but the path was now on the main road and the dogs ran in front of cars and almost caused a crash. I turned back for Ventry. It had already been two hours of walking and it would be another two before I would be back at the start. It was, I thought, enough of a pilgrimage to make a man holy in this day and age.
Back at the farmhouse, I met a confused farmer who was glad to see his dogs returned. He called them little divils and we fell into talking of the land and God and football and all the things two people of the land can muster in the raising of a hand.
‘It must be beautiful to work the land here with the sea on your back and the mountains to the front,’ I said.
‘When the wind blows and you get a smell of the wild fuchsia there’s no place like it,’ he said.
I never did finish that pilgrimage, and yet the day in itself had been a holy one. I had been a stranger in a strange land but had left it feeling known, feeling seen. In travelling to distant lands, in undertaking an immram, we come really to meet ourselves in a different form. That farmer’s journey on the land was as sacred as my own, though we’ve no pilgrims in my townland.
I went to bed happy that night. I had regained what I had come south for. I had discovered the excitement of tomorrow. I think now that is what must have propelled Brendan in his seven years – that notion of tomorrows, that there would be an even greater wonder round the veil of darkness. That in a sense the land of paradise is really the land of the future, for it can hold untold wonders and undreamt-of things. When Brendan moved into that future he thought little of the past; it was no use to him.
Brendan’s trip was proved possible by the explorer Tim Severin thirty-odd years ago when he built a leather-clad boat with timbers from a Longford sawmill. All stories must begin in truths. All joys start with a single step.
‘The navigator won’t let us down. We’re like him. We’re on a mission!’ I shout now.
Our prayers are sent heavenward. God’s answer, Brendan’s answer, is to keep going. We cannot stop, we must paddle on. We have come too far to give up now. I can, we can, only hope for an end to suffering and the promise of tomorrow in a land not yet dreamed.
It has been a half-hour or more. I can no longer tell. I am no longer sure. The river time has expanded again on this mighty section of water and the wind and rain have robbed us of our senses.
I can no longer be sure, but a feeling of déjà vu has come over me. I feel now that I have been to this land before, that I know it in some way, and yet I know in truth I have never been here.
The water, the canoe, the ripple in time, all of it feels familiar. All of it feels already seen. In the old times, this phenomenon was put down to prophecy that we needed to pay attention to this moment, that it had a special message. Perhaps it is the danger of the water, the fear of tipping over into the blackness, or perhaps on some soul level I have been in this place in another time.
Time can be fast and slow and there is no global present. Recently I heard learned thinkers say that in time, in real theoretical physics time, the past is happening at the same moment as the present and the future. That in essence Saint Brendan is on his voyage now at the same time as we are on ours. In this way of thinking I can see other times, other lands. To my left the buffalo of the Great Plains are still there following their unseen trails, their slaughter not yet occurred. To my right I see the future people who will come down this river in our name, harking back to a simpler time. Behind me stand my elders and all the generations it took to bring us here. I see it all now in this timeless moment. That in essence my past, with all its mistakes and tragedies, has not yet actually happened. In this déjà vu the events of the past are both real and not real. These things that have haunted me for years are not visible; I cannot see or touch them. I remember them but that is all that is left of them. They are a baggage of the mind taking up no more room than the firing of a single neuron.
Interestingly, the present and future too, when viewed from another perspective, may not happen in that order. In a sense of deep time, I always had the wisdom I have gained through suffering. That wisdom was with me from the beginning of life; it is only now that I am using it after a period of time in this age. In the moment when I need it most, it has come.
Brendan’s voyage took seven years. They say that we are entirely new people every seven years, that our bodies have replaced themselves wholly. Perhaps the déjà vu is happening to awaken me to this fact that I am reborn and wise. That I was always the man I sought to be.
This river is old and has flowed since before we began. It has crested and moved before my time in Australia, after my time in Canada. It has moved as I have taken my place in this, the land of my birth, as I have come home to make a permanent life, as I have come home to me. I was once a stranger to all of this earth, but now it too flows in me. To the river, we are but a brief flicker and so we cannot understand the true nature of flowing. Perhaps on some level I was always here.
I shake my head. I blink my eyes. It is all so real and all so strange. We are at war with the elements, we are at war with ourselves, but true it is that the war is already over. Creation didn’t end in Eden, it is a continual act. A second birth can occur in one life. I am ready for mine.
We push on, facing into the wind, and round a bend and we see them now for the first time – the signs of man – and they make us happy.
‘Look! It’s the windmills of Roscommon!’ I shout.
‘Thanks be to God,’ says Peter.
We have passed the mouth of the Fallon river and are bearing down on our finish. The windmills stand as temporal landmarks, dividers between the world of the wild and the world of humanity. Memory experts say that temporal landmarks serve to mark a before and an after, a beginning and an end. But to us, they are so much more.
Soon, soon we shall come to the land of Clondra, to the small village we can see in our minds where the barges and pleasure boats come to rest. Where the Camlin trumpets her last song before she joins the Shannon.
‘I’ve a surprise for you,’ I say through the hard rain, for I want to lift us from this misery.
‘What’s that?’ asks Peter as we battle the wind that’s trying to push us into the long reeds.
‘I’ve twenty euro in my shorts and I’m going to buy you and me a pint of Guinness when we get to the end.’
I have not touched a drink in five years but today, today I shall break that fast and allow myself a pause from temperance. We have earned it. We have transcended life and the river and the pain.
‘Jesus, that would be nice,’ says Peter and I know he too can taste the black stuff.
We move on with a renewed focus – the thought of an ending is within us. On the banks of the river, a horse stands looking at us. It is like a symbol from another time, from another world.
In the old days, we worshipped them and their mother, Epona. They alone could move from the delightful plane to our world. When Oisín and Niamh were in love it was a horse that allowed Oisín to travel back from Tír na nÓg by moving across the waters and seas. It would be something to see the horse among the Camlin waters. She stands now, a proud mare, watching over us, a mother of this water world.
‘We’re nearly there!’ I shout to the animal and at the sound, she nods her head and flares her nostrils as if nature itself is acknowledging our quest. She turns then and runs and the sight is beautiful. No surprise that we painted their images on the caves of old. Her beauty stands out; she is the temporal landmark and the spiritual one. I will, I know, remember her and the windmills when all this is over. This has not been a quixotic mission. No, it has been so much more.
‘Row, boyo, row!’ says Peter, and he confesses now that his arse is killing him.
‘I thought I was the only one. I’ve never clenched for so long.’
We laugh now. We haven’t laughed in a long time.
Rivers meander, and so too do people. Our life is not straight – no one’s is. Not everything can go to plan, not every game can be won. In the rain and wind now I think of all the different roads I have walked, all the rivers I have forded but not voyaged down. We cannot have everything, and I think now if we did then what would be left to explore?
Life isn’t pure; neither are souls. They are messy, dirty, earth-covered things bandaged in wounds and wins. They are real and whole. In Vietnam along the Mekong, in the mountains where the old beliefs still hold, they say that every person has two souls; the Hon and the Via, the spiritual and the material. When a person dies their soul is judged by ten members and the soul is sent to heaven or hell.
But all is not lost, for the soul of the sinner can be healed by the prayers of the living said on the first and fifteenth of every month. In short, no matter how bad one’s actions in this life, there is hope for everyone, even in death.
In Vietnam, the special day of Wandering Souls’ Day falls on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. This is the only time when the monks and priests can pray for the souls who have no one to petition for them. Without those prayers, the wandering soul would be doomed to meander the half-world for all eternity.
In me, I see now that the two souls of my being were out of time and that in this lifetime I had wandered from country to country looking for a peace, looking for answers. All the wrong I had done. All the excess of ego had put me in soul death, but there has been one thing that has saved me. One thing that has brought me back.
‘I never did tell you about that canoe trip I took with Viv, did I?’ I say to Peter.
‘No, you never did.’
‘It was a decade ago now,’ I say.
It was a decade ago and we had left Sydney for a long weekend to stay at a bush hotel near Jervis Bay some two hours from our apartment. Viv had just started a new job and I was in the middle of a documentary production. We had come south of the city to escape the pressure I was under, but the pressure had followed me there and the calls on my phone had not stopped, even when we reached the rich verdant bushland that surrounds Jervis Bay.
It was the second or perhaps the first day – I can no longer remember – but it was decided that we would canoe down the Currambene Creek, a journey of ten kilometres or more. I had never before been in a canoe, never before paddled down a creek, but I was young and headstrong and down we went in search of a riverside pub that, we were told, let canoers park outside.
We paddled happily at first enjoying the wonder of the Australian bush around us. Wattle and paperbark trees lined the river, thick and wild, as if the land had never known the hand of man. It was a place like the waters the Aboriginal warrior Pemulwuy had worked in his canoe two hundred years before.
I sat at the front then, as I do today, leading the way, charging on in my headstrong fashion. We were supposed to be getting away, supposed to be young kids in love – we were all of twenty-four and twenty-five – but as the day grew darker and the kilometres counted down I could feel the distance that had come between us in the weeks leading up to this day.
I was going into the rabbit hole of a nervous breakdown, into the start of my lost time of depression, and that was not somewhere I wanted Viv to come. That trip was the start of the end of that relationship. We broke up soon after while I set about burning every bridge I had made in my six years in that country.
‘It was the end of us,’ I say now, thinking back on that time.
Life was giving me wisdom the hard way. From Australia to Canada, I learned. In the suffering of my mind, in the breakdown of my soul, I did not lose time, as it seemed then, but rather, I think now, I gained it.
‘You know, I think of that canoe trip often. It wasn’t the end at all, it’s where it all started, only I didn’t know it. I was alone for a long time. I went on a sort of vision quest to understand myself and the world anew because the old one no longer worked. It brought me all around the world and then back home. That time of aloneness was the hardest I’ve ever known.’
Viv and I were separated, we grieved but we grew, and when by chance we met again four years later when I was in Australia to promote a book we were different people.
‘That girl, that fella, they were both gone,’ I say.
But what replaced them was so much more. That lost boy had faced himself, had faced the darkness and become a man, and that hurt girl had become a strong woman. We had to go on voyages. We had to go on journeys of the self. Saint Brendan knew that voyages were good for the soul, that they were the making of people. That tomorrow was always going to be brighter, even if we don’t know it right at this moment.
It was Viv. It was her all along who brought me back to love. It was her who showed me a new way when we met again, when I thought my heart would never be whole. She showed a new way formed out of the old. We were different people in a different world. Love has the power to do that, to change all things.
That woman, that child of the boat, whose family had to traverse the very waves of the world so we could one day meet – she’s now my wife. Water brought us apart that day on that canoe but it brought us together again in some strange way, through our walks by Sydney Harbour as we rekindled our flames, and through the oceans she travelled to be in this land. To be with me for ever.
I think now the nature of the soul is a simple thing. It’s love. It is in love that we can be reborn again and again and again.
The rain is stopping and we paddle on now, stronger in every stroke. To our left stands another sign in the river and we pass under the motorway bridge and hear the cars rattle above.
‘Jesus, we’re going to do this!’ says Peter.
‘Christ, you’re right.’
We paddle on now for all we are worth, for all that our bodies can muster. The wind, the rain do not matter, for before us now we can see the jetty of Clondra and the sight of humanity has never looked better.
We do not talk. We paddle and we paddle and we paddle and finally our girl, our red chariot, arrives in the promised land of Clondra. In the village of a thousand tales where river stories begin and end. Where the Camlin comes to rest, where the goddess Sionnan awaits her flow.
At the jetty we tie the craft and then, at last, we unflex our bodies. The tension of the last hour and a half is lifted and our muscles sting with an exertion we have never known before.
I attempt to stand up but I cannot for my arse is in shock. I pull myself by the arms out of the boat and onto the floating jetty.
‘Jesus Christ … Jesus bloody Christ.’
We lie on the landing for a moment and look up at the sky. It is blue and the wind and rain have gone. Nature, life, everything is in unity for just the briefest of moments.
‘We’ve done it. We’ve bloody done it!’ says Peter and I sit up and look him in the eye.
‘We’ve done it! I can’t believe it!’
Slowly we stand and help each other up and Peter beams at me and he repeats again that we have done it, that we have completed our mission. We shake hands and I think now that I have not shaken someone’s hand since this virus invaded our world and it feels so nice and good and natural.
‘We’ll have this the rest of our lives,’ says Peter and I smile, a real and truthful smile.
There is a sense of accomplishment that is beyond words. The soul of water has entered us. Things have started and stopped and we have done something for once in a longed-for time that is wholly real.
‘The first pint is on me,’ I say and unfurl the twenty euro note from my shorts and we stumble up the jetty and towards the pub, but Clondra is not the metropolis we had imagined. The pub is closed. Everything is closed with this virus. Being on this river has made me forget, forget about the closed-down world, about the great sickness, about the unseen suffering. It has been good to forget.
We laugh it off and fetch our stove and make two mugs of tea.
In the mirth now, in the middle of gaiety, I see the end of the river. I see my end. I stop for a silent moment and watch it flow. I leave my past here, I say quietly to myself; it is all I need to say. It can flow out into the Shannon and on into the Atlantic Ocean. It has served me but I no longer need it, it is from another time. It has taught me all I need to know.
I watch the water flow and see it all ripple away and feel a sense of freedom wash over me, a sense that the present is mine for the taking, mine for the living.
‘Come on, this kettle is nearly boiled,’ says Peter and he breaks me from my view.
I turn and walk towards him, towards my friend.
There’s a future out there now, but that’s an unwritten tale.
The End