When I was an A level geography student, our inspiring teacher, Miss Diana Raine, would talk seriously about the lives of rivers. She taught us that when they rise they’re youthful and bubbly in narrow fissures and valleys. Then they become staidly middle aged as they meander across flood plains. When they finally slow to flow into the sea they have reached stately old age. I had long since dismissed this as a fanciful bit of personification, albeit a useful way of explaining the changing nature of rivers to young people.
Then I read Robert Macfarlane’s moving, inspiring book, published earlier this year. I now realise that Miss Raine had a point. Rivers are a life force and we kill them at our global peril as we allow heavy industry to build massive damns, pollute the water and ride roughshod over communities and habitats. They are alive. They have what Macfarlane calls “animacy” which is not, of course, the same as sentience. Rivers are an integral part of nature. Directly or indirectly all other life is woven into a tight web of interdependence with rivers. And that’s why there are now movements all over the world fighting hard, and in some cases succeeding, to establish the rights of rivers (and forests and mountains). They should, indeed they must, have legally established rights – like human rights – to ensure that they are not destroyed. Macfarlane gives them pronouns to stress this. Rivers, he argues, deserve “who” rather than “which”. He calls it the grammar of animacy.
Macfarlane’s compelling book falls roughly into three sections – a trip to the cloud forests of Ecuador, another to South East India and a third to Quebec. In each he meets local people and takes part in expeditions in order to gather information. He marvels, experiences, wonders and joins the struggle against further destructive industrialisation. The stories of the people he works with are warmly fascinating. Guiliana for example (whom I’ve “met” before, courtesy of Melvyn Sheldrake’s fine book Entangled) is a mycologist whose father has just died and somehow she finds closure in the high peaks of Ecuador as she finds rare fungi through an inexplicable sixth sense. Then there’s Yuvan in South India who has come through an appalling, abusive childhood to become a knowledgeable, passionate, beloved teacher. I loved the account of Macfarlane accompanying him and his students on a school trip. Wayne whose carapace isn’t easy to penetrate, joins the author on the hazardous kayak trip in Northern Canada (with three experts) and he’s a bundle of complexities. And then there’s water – magical, life giving, beautiful, bubbling, calm, sunlit, turbulent or terrifying. Macfarlane compares the Canadian river he’s following to the sea with the cataract of Lodore and quotes Coleridge extensively (although it was Robert Southey who wrote the more famous poem which is in many school anthologies).
In my teens and twenties I worshipped at the shrine of Gerald Durrell for his ability to bring far-flung places to life. Re-reading The Bafut Beagles recently I found I hated it because it now feels racist, colonialist and disrespectful of wildlife. In places though Macfarlane’s perfectly crafted prose reminds me of Durrell at his best. He describes a paw print in Ecuador on a heap of fresh dung as “cookie-cutter crisp”, the River Yamuna in India is “mintcake-white” and I love the swallows who “sit like musical notes on the staves of telephone wires.”
In between the trips Macfarlane talks about his own local river and its source near his home in Cambridge. He visits thoughtfully with his children, especially the youngest, Will, who’s only ten and already learning about nature, the environment and life’s rich complexity. The final section of the book is arguably fanciful, sentimental even, but it makes a powerful point about safeguarding nature because it will outlast us all.
While I was reading this suprisingly spiritual book I spent a happy weekend with my cousin and her husband in East Sussex where they live. We went to Cuckmere Haven and walked from the car park down to the river estuary – the only undeveloped one in the south of England. The last time I looked at it properly was, oddly enough, on a field trip with Miss Raine. We stood for several minutes gazing at the Cuckmere who [sic] flows energetically, neatly but determinedly and full of life into the sea a few yards away where it creates whorls and cross currents. “Well?” I said to my companions whom I’d been telling about my current reading. “Is a river alive?” After a moment’s thought, still looking at the Cuckmere, they answered “Yes”. Thank you, Mr Macfarlane. Reading your book was like being given new glasses. I see the world differently now.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders
