The Flow, Rivers, Water and Wilderness, by Amy-Jane Beer, Bloomsbury Wildlife 2023
I have always enjoyed the author’s contributions to British Wildlife Magazine and first wrote, briefly, about this extraordinary book in October last year.
“I don’t know what drew me to take this photograph but life is full of coincidences. Over lunch afterwards I started reading Amy-Jane Beer’s The Flow; rivers, water and wildness, of which much more another day. Suffice to say for now that it has moved me very close to tears several times in the first thirty or so pages alone. She writes of a river scene: “The longer I look, the more subtle features I see. Micro-eddies, upswellings, swirlings and little [fingertip] dimples.” What is odd is that I had never really noticed them before, let alone had them drawn to my attention in writing minutes later.”
You know you are in for a treat when recommendations within by stellar nature writers, and others, like Patrick Barkham, Nicola Chester, Guy Shrubsole, Stephen Moss (and those are just the ones I have read), variously describe it as a hymn, captivating, stunning, a true masterpiece, quietly courageous, open-hearted, lyrical, wise, passionately alive, a work of tremendous range and scope, a tour de force, an extraordinary book by an extraordinary author, as passionate as it is knowledgeable, epic, erudite and joyous. Nick Acheson, one of our group leaders on my wildlife trip to Norfolk last year, writes “The Flow moves deftly between deeply touching personal experience and carefully-researched erudition. It is a book of wit, of wonder and of wisdom.” I would add that is in many ways magical.
There are 22 chapters, many of which (but not all of them so that it does not seem contrived) are punctuated by short passages printed in italic, “Eddys”. What a charming idea.
A very close friend of the author died in a kayaking accident and the book is a memoir of Amy-Jane’s reconnection to nature which she feels especially near rivers and streams after she visits the scene of the accident years later and also of her coming to terms with her friend’s death. Kate had fine advice about children: “Embrace the mess” and profoundly and succinctly summarised something I have never quite been able to put into words: “When a baby is born that’s only the start of your separation, so you have to start straight away getting yourself used to it … our kids … are people in their own right and they need us to teach them how to be that. Our job as mothers is to make ourselves redundant when our selfish hearts want the opposite.” My italics. Fathers too. In all honesty I have not ever begun to get used to it and my children are all adults now.
The author loves white-water rafting but she reminds us that is dangerous, far more so than I had realised, as she deals with her feelings of grief, guilt and rage.
There is no limit to the ways in which she writes about water, from the scientific to the poetic. We read that the mass of water “falling as precipitation on land every year is estimated at 119 trillion tonnes (119,000,000,000,000 tonnes, or 119 teratonnes)”. Water is a.k.a. dihydrogen monoxide (H2O), and Wikipedia has the story of the dihydrogen monoxide parody in the form of various pranks, with dire warnings that the substance can cause corrosion and suffocation. As hydric acid, it is a major component of acid rain suggested one hoaxer. Perhaps they say the substance should be restricted or banned.
The book is full of little surprises and delights and they are always beautifully phrased. Of a visit to the beach at Westward Ho!, she describes the exclamation mark as eccentric and fascinating. Our bland terms and their so much more expressive French equivalents are juxtaposed: moving water, l’eau vive and white (or wild) water, l’eau sauvage.
Her philosophising about death is profound. “We never talked about death when I was growing up … western culture generally fails hopelessly in this respect”. But perhaps instead of resistance and denial we might think of death as a “natural of peaceful part of a larger process … wrapped in every loss is a parting gift. A reminder to live.”
Her description of the disastrous flood of 1952 – an estimated 90 million tonnes of water had fallen into the tributaries the East and West Lyn rivers – is as powerful a description as one could begin to imagine. The village of Lynmouth was pretty much destroyed, as “water, soil, boulders, trees and dislodged masonry hurtled downstream”, 50-tonne boulders became “gigantic waterborne wrecking balls.” Thirty-four people died. How or why did this happen? Possibly the geomorphology of the catchment was simply largely to blame, an “ill-advised Victorian culvert” was a contributing factor, or were there darker forces at work in the form of weather manipulation, the controversial experiments in cloud seeding under the banner “Project Cumulus”, the last flight taking place one day before the Lynmouth flood? Silence ensued and a tv programme about the project was never aired. Files were alleged to have disappeared. It is a sombre testament to water as a destructive force that the largest boulders which had to be dealt with were blown up – they were too big to move by any mechanical means. In the Eddy which follows, we read that whilst we may think of geological time as though rock was the “epitome of durability”, in fact “water wins every time”. Ultimately, the power of a river derives from its relentlessness: “It needs no breath, no sleep, no pause to stretch or shake. And in time, without fuss or ceremony, it will take heat from flesh, life from limb, tree from bank, rock from channel, mountain from continent. It will hollow the land. And it demands total respect.”
Reading this book, I have found, cannot be rushed nor is it possible, for me, to read a great deal of it in one sitting. It is too thought-provoking for that.
Respect is absolutely right of course. Water, the great giver of life, has nearly killed me more than once. At Southwold in Suffolk, during a youth hostelling bicycling trip around East Anglia (nice and flat), I decided to go for a solo swim from the beach. My friend could not swim at all. It was not a wise decision. I have always loved swimming and taken to it naturally. I am not fast but I could swim for a couple of miles without too much effort. I only went off it for a year or so thanks to severe bullying by my school swimming instructor. He nearly took away my love of it altogether, to his great shame. What is it about PE teachers and swimming instructors? Not all of them of course. My brother’s and my experiences of them at school were horrendous. The job seems to attract those with a disturbing predilection for physical and mental sadism. In some cases I suspect as a result of bitterness that their putative sporting careers had been crippled by injury. Swimming in a rough sea though (admittedly preferably a warm one these days) remains perhaps my absolute favourite thing do on earth, that and the joy of waterfalls. In Malaysia once a friend took me to sit in a waterfall. It was glorious and for a moment I saw beside me the most enormous frog. “How big was it?” another friend asked later. I described the size of a football with my hands. “We don’t have frogs that large in Malaysia. That was the spirit of the waterfall.” Diving through those waves in a rough sea, being knocked over by them, feeling their power! In the paradise of Busua in Ghana, I spent ten days doing little else. One of the few holidays when I simply stopped reading books. It seemed pointless, just words on paper. When I wasn’t swimming I simply sat and absorbed the beauty, the sounds of the sea, feeling completely fluid and at one with the world. I have never been so reluctant to leave somewhere. Our simple hotel had a rooftop bar and a house band who were eager to play our requests for favourite reggae songs.
I was fine at Southwold … until I tried to get out. Every time I stood up for the last few yards I was pulled down and back out of my depth. I was scared. Eventually I realised the thing to do was stay on my knees and crawl out. My shins were a bloody mess from the the swirling shingle. In Sri Lanka I once swam out a little too far. I was trying to head back in and had not fully realised I wasn’t really getting anywhere. A kindly local soul swam out to me and advised me to go with the current, diagonally towards the shore rather than at a perpendicular, fighting it. On my honeymoon in Fiji I took my first ever scuba dive at sea (I had been fully trained in a swimming pool at home, albeit under a different system), but the dive master was irresponsible and the dive chaotic, no buddies were assigned (which is crucial) and 25m down (far too deep for my first attempt) I ran out of air. At one point I was left alone clinging to the rope attached to the boat, which was invisible to me, looking up at the distant circle of sunshine from what even then I appreciated as the most beautiful blue, wondering only if I would drown or end up in a compression chamber – if I was lucky. I looked at the needle on the oxygen tank’s gauge nudging ever further into the red and although I somehow managed not to panic, I began to breathe harder and faster, which made things worse. I had no idea whatsoever how to time my ascent and pauses to avoid the bends. The rest of the divers came back in the nick of time and I shared air with a German traveller who clearly very much resented having to do it. I have stuck to snorkelling (which I adore) ever since. I might scuba dive again one day yet (probably not), but the dive master would have to understand and be able to communicate in English, there would have to be a buddy system and I wouldn’t go below the depth beyond which you cannot just rise to the surface.
The worst though was this. The children, who I am delighted to say I had helped learn to swim and shared my passion for it (one of them had a peculiarly unpleasant, shouty, hectoring instructor too however), love it too. We all went for a paddle at a beach in Cape Verde. Red flags were up, but paddling will be fine I thought. The children were under strict instructions to stay behind me and not go get out of their depth, but suddenly, through not fault of their own, all three were and starting to panic. The undertow was ferocious and I was terrified, more than ever – I was fine but their lives were in danger. Eventually I managed to haul each of them out to safety and crawled a little way up the beach before collapsing and coughing so hard it ripped through me. I suffered pressure headaches for days and muscle injuries that required expert physiotherapy. The beach, by the way, was busy. Not a soul lifted a finger to help nor asked if I was ok – it must have been obvious what was happening. When we ate later, we all started crying at the thought of what might have been and my young son handed me a folded piece of paper on which he had constructed a simple crossword, the clues revealing the answers: “Thank you for saving us.”
If you share my love of swimming this book (in spite of all the above), listed in Animal Wild’s bibliography, is superb: Tsui (Bonnie). Why We Swim. Rider, 2020.
Leave a Reply