Already it is a week since that day that the sun briefly reappeared after months of rain in a month. Armed with rakes, we went down to the river, now receding but still hurling and thrusting over the rocks and flinging momentary crystals up into the sunlit air. And nearby, brown and lifeless, lay the little pond that some naturalists had created for frogs, newts and other pond life.
Our task was to clear the pond of the debris that had settled it – weeds, reeds and three or four years’ worth of leaf fall from the high canopy of oak trees above. Leaves and twigs floated on the murky surface, but the heads of our rakes fell straight to the bottom, dead in the stagnant water, and buried themselves in matted reed-roots and slime. Perching on slippery mud, we found a knack of hooking tufts of this carpet onto the rakes and tugging them to the side and lifting them out – heavy, sodden and lifeless. There must have been a rush of growth when the pond was new, but then when the plants died back in a winter or two, the rotting sucked all the oxygen from the water. The decomposition itself halted, and the stems and roots became preserved in that half-undone state.
Already muddy, our action stirred up the sediment and we could see nothing of what was in the water or how deep it was. In the middle, at any rate it was as deep as the length of a rake. We tore off pieces of the carpet of roots, as intricately interwoven as any actual carpet and with still sufficient strength to be tough and difficult to break down. Gradually the cover was reduced, until finally a rake could pass over the bottom without catching in matted textures. Instead, it bounced on sunken rocks or slipped lethargically through layers of rotted leaves, or got caught with an elastic tug in the rubber pond lining. Meanwhile a sizeable pile of half-decomposed vegetable matter had built up beside us.
He told me that just once the river had risen far enough to overwhelm the pond, presumably washing away any life that was there. And there was another occasion, he said, when they had spotted a lotus leaf and a lotus flower resting on the water surface, true to any oriental meditation image, and for an instant a frog sat on the leaf, the whole bathed in a ray of sunlight. That moment stood out in memory, and two or three days later a storm came that up-ended the tableau and trashed the leaf and flower. Still the image of the sunlit flower remained in memory long after, and resurfaced today. He and his wife were talking about it at lunchtime, creating it in my mind as vividly as if I had seen it myself.
Days later he was telling me that he’d heard the first frog of the year, coming from a neighbour’s pond in the last days of February, then while we were out walking at dusk we heard a series of bleeps, as if from some piece of electronic equipment. In fact these bleeps – short, pure and all on one high note – were the calls of midwife toads, who were also assembling themselves for the spring to come. He told an engaging tale of these toads and how they are so called because they carry the eggs of their spawn on their backs for days and days, keeping them at the right temperature, protecting them from predators and laying them in water at night.
The contrast between the kinetic vibrancy of the stream and the murk and stillness of the pond could not have been stronger. (The case, recently passed into law in New Zealand, of attributing personhood to a river, was vivid here.) Here was life, here was motion and here therefore was time, here was noise, here was a thump you could feel in your feet from the banks. Yet perhaps there is enough life left in the silent pool beside it, still in its night-time, that new frogs will adopt it, as early spring begins and they seek somewhere to spawn. Or new rainwater will displace the old, bringing back oxygen and the conditions for life. And soon again a raucous croaking will compete with the roar of the stream. Time may tell. Or it may hear. We climbed back up the steep bank, to let the mud settle and daylight penetrate the water now cleared of detritus, ready for another chance sighting of light glancing on it, or a lotus flower, more durable in mind than a storm.
Be_flummoxed 