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

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 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 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