The Stream of Everything E-Book

John Connell

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 289

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

It's summer, and John Connell finds himself, like so many others, confined to his local area, the opportunity to freely travel and socialise cut short. His attention turns to the Camlin river – an ever-present source of life for his hometown's inhabitants and, for John, a site of boyhood adventure, first love, family history and local legend.He decides to canoe its course with a friend, a two-day trip requiring physical exertion and mental resilience. Despite the world growing still around them, the river teems with life – a symphony of buzzing mayfly and jumping trout. Meandering downstream, John muses on what's brought him here: his travels, his past relationships and his battle with depression, as well as on Irish folklore, geopolitics and philosophy.The Stream of Everything is both a reverie and a celebration of close observation: a winding, bucolic account of the summer we discovered home.'Quietly triumphant.' Donal Ryan'A contemplative, open-ended, ethically attuned pilgrimage.' Niamh Campbell'A terrific book.' Michael Harding'This is a sensitive, edifying, soul-nourishing book, celebratory, salutary and quietly triumphant. I loved reading it.' Donal Ryan'A rich river journey, entrancing as all rivers are.' Bruce Pascoe'Gentle, restorative, devotional, and strange.' Niamh Campbell'A hugely satisfying read, full of imaginative wonders and absorbing philosophical musings.' Michael Harding'In his joyful consideration of his native place, there is sweetness and ease … A book very much of its strange and eye-opening time.' Belinda McKeon

Leseprobe

The Stream ofEverything

John Connell

GILL BOOKS

Also by John Connell

The Ghost Estate

The Cow Book

The Running Book

For my mother and PeterIn memory of Patrick Burke,Ophelia and Tarrow

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Also by John Connell

Dedication

Prologue

The crooked pool

The source

Maps upon maps

First mate

Water, water everywhere

The river book

Water work

Mayfly

Uncle Davy

Where old ghosts meet

Bon voyage

The canoe

The water dragon

Let it happen

From little things big things grow

Ahoy there!

Sculling

Below the centre of the earth

Under the bridge

Townlands

There’s gold in them thar hills

On nature

Highways and byways

The boat people

‘Pull like a dog’

Taking flight

Hinterlands of the heart

Light on the river

Songlines

Ratty

Patrick

The big Kahuna

The Everglades

Entering the void

Hearts of darkness

Dirt

Let there be light

Lord of the manor

Look

Rashers and some sausages

The stars keep on calling our names

Cock’s crow

Dreamtime

First fleet

The Eden in everything

Raids and rallies

Tweets

The earth is shaping my face

Take me to the place I love

Borders

Second breakfast

A short walk

Lights, camera, action!

Open up your heart

Deathless beauty

The great kill

Wounds

Samuel Clemens

Gould’s Book of Fish

Soran river song

Don’t look back into the sun

Cranes in the sky

Wind

Healing a river

Making it count

Fear

The navigator

Path to the palace of nowhere

The windmills of Roscommon

Meander

The bridges of Clondra county

Copyright

About the Author

About Gill Books

The future futureless, before the morning watchWhen time stops and time is never endingT. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’

Prologue

Time has stopped and time is never-ending.

The world has grown quiet, but the soul of land, the soul of water, echoes still for all who can hear it. This is the bee-loud time, the fox-crying time, the trout-echoing time.

Everything has stopped but the flow of the rivers and the lap of the seas. The roads, the gravel of humanity has been beaten low and we are all of us living through a time that will be remembered for ever.

We have stopped, to be safe, but nature hasn’t. Nature moves on ceaseless to our motions and motives. It’s strange to be here. But there is magic in this time, in this great stoppage. We can – I can – for the first time see the Eden in everything.

When I was a boy I built rafts with my family and neighbours to sail the river near our house. We made voyages of fun and gaiety in those days. But now, in the heart of the stoppage, I am looking to make a voyage of the heart. It has been an idea, an aisling, for years now, but so busy was I in the world that I had not made the time to stop, to cross the threshold.

As one world closes, so often another opens. If we have eyes to see, we can fathom all depths, wade all crossings. In the collective experience of stopping, I sought movement. I sought to experience life differently, to be back in the nature that had made me. In the waters that had known my boyhood.

Peter, my friend, is home. He is here to be with his mother, but life, I think, has brought him to me in this place for another reason. We are here to sing the song of the Camlin and travel down it, to fulfil an idea of mine, to complete a promise I made over ten years ago in Sydney Harbour, that I would voyage down it in thanks for saving my life.

The time of that journey came when the world was on its head, when the world was complex, but when has the world ever been easy? When has it not been complicated?

In coming to the nature of the river we can write our own epigraph to this time. When the world was quiet we moved; the stillness gave rise to a great adventure along this river in a canoe, and the world for us would never quite look the same again.

The idea started in the quiet of the mind, but it has refused to go away. I am glad of its echoes. It has brought me home.

This river knew me as a boy; why not know me as a man?

If I do not now make this voyage of discovery, then when? During this long, quiet summer, as the days turned into weeks, I quietly made my plans to take up the paddle and venture downstream, Peter in tow. Together we would be voyagers of the water and see a world that was not blighted by the pandemic. A world that carried on as it has always done, without us.

It was the year we all shall remember for ever. It was the summer we discovered home.

The crooked pool

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.

The source

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.

Maps upon maps

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.

First mate

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, water everywhere

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 river book

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.

Water work

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.

Mayfly

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.