John Connell - The Stream of Everything

The Stream of
Everything

John Connell

GILL BOOKS

Also by John Connell

The Ghost Estate

The Cow Book

The Running Book

For my mother and Peter
In memory of Patrick Burke,
Ophelia and Tarrow

Contents

The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending
T. 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 hasnt. Nature moves on ceaseless to our motions and motives. Its 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 worlds 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 ones 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.