I Go Down to the Shore – by RT Wenzel
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY | AUSTRALIAN NATURE WRITING
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.(‘I go down to the shore’ by Mary Oliver )
1.
In the scheme of rivers, this river is not extraordinary. The surface is sometimes lustrous with scum and agricultural runoff, the riverbed coated in sludge and bacterial matting. Not a river you’d travel to see – although tourists do come for the platypuses.
Stretches of picturesque wilderness aren’t far away; this is Tasmania, after all. Golden mountainscapes and unpeopled beaches are always within driving distance. But I crave intimacy with my own backyard, and in particular, the uncultivated part beyond the marked beds, apple trees and sometimes-mown lawn. The terrain beyond the fence where the river lies. You can hear the river’s mood long before you reach the bank – purring in fair weather, stormy and surging after a tempest.
Even an unremarkable river becomes extraordinary if it’s in your backyard. The water is often brown, but sometimes it clears, or clouds with red silt, or runs rainbow with oil from the eucalypts upstream. When the light strikes the water at the right angle, the water sediments, algal blooms, soil runoff and mineral compounds split into a spectrum. Despite all, the river is seething with life and magic. The river is worthy of attention.
2.
The path to the river winds through blackberry and poison hemlock, stitching their legacy into the earth via interlocking runners and roots, and thistles that spawn thousands of airborne seeds. I can’t be cross at the thistles, attracting butterflies and bees to their purple crowns. I don’t resent the blackberry and her summer bed and breakfast for wrens, robins and finches. I’ll save my energy to wonder at their sticky-haired, thorn-throated insistence, and when needed, prune their enthusiasm with shovel and secateurs.
“Nature isn’t excluded by a fenceline. Life creeps in, flies overhead, tunnels up through the lawn.”
Nature isn’t excluded by a fenceline. Life creeps in, flies overhead, tunnels up through the lawn. The weeds are thriving, despite the poisoned waterway – symbols of resilience despite compounded human neglect. But what about the animals who drink the brown water, the ducks, snakes, and bandicoots? What about the aquatic beings who live in it? I don’t even consider this river safe enough to paddle in. I watch a procession of a mama duck and six ducklings glide past. The next day, five. A week later, only two remain. This is a more pressing concern for the mama duck, I imagine, than phosphorus and nitrogen levels.
3.
The waterfowl are moulting. Green and brown-headed mallards, black ducks and larger relations like the huffing, tail-wagging muscovies. They litter the ground with downy undercoat, bright nuptial plumage, long flight quills, curly tail feathers. Most alluring are the speculum feathers from the black ducks, shimmering with iridescent green.
I hold one up and it sparkles with sun. Behind it, the canopy rustles in clouds of viridian, blue-grey, and emerald, a forest of stained glass. Like a child, I’m prone to seeing faces in the dappled light and knots in the trees. The wisha-wisha of the trees and the suggestive shapes of the clouds resurrect the gods of my childhood: Moon-face, Silky and Saucepan-Man. If I worship any gods now, they’re the spirits of shivering myrtle and many-eyed elm. These are the beings I pray to with my feet as I walk down to the river at the bottom of the garden and wait for the god of place that looms largest in my imagination: the platypus.
This is their country. Ecologists have counted eleven in this river, and there are whispers of a burrow on this property. But the only evidence we’ve seen are bubble trails, which could be a trout or an eel, other residents I’ve caught glimpses of in luminous moments. I frequently scout the root-curtained caves that pepper the riverbank, seeing nothing bar the occasional yabbie or water-rat. The paddle of platypuses at the local park perform their daily errands with little regard for the delighted tourists, but it’s the one in my backyard that I want to meet. They are creatures of habit, a local monotreme authority assures me, and the platypus won’t come out unless I integrate with the bank, become part of the river’s rhythm.
I decide to come every day.
4.
Good weather is comfortable weather, weather that is as similar to indoors as possible. Weather that doesn’t interfere too much, asks nothing of us. In snow, sleet, storm and gale we stay inside, missing out on a facet of our ever-contracting human experience. To be cold and wet is uncomfortable; but discomfort often points to what lies beyond it. After a few soakings, I find my visits in the rain mirror the parts of me that are opaque, turbulent, or overflowing. In meeting the weather each day as it is, I also meet myself.
Life is full of stresses, conflicts, and responsibilities, but the bracketed time by the river is fiercely guarded. I can trust in the ripple on water and dappled shadows. There is no threat in grass, nor gentle animal arrivals. A mosquito noses at my arm. Muscovies snooze in the summer moulting of their relations. A tiger snake stops by.
The rhythms are constant, yet something unexpected happens every day. A pademelon paddles across the river, an eel prowls the river floor. Three native hens run across the water, barely touching the surface. Sparrows plummet right into the current, hunting insects. A trout leaps out of the water and a silvery school of fry swim past. Leaf boats sail downstream – sometimes a whole curly flotilla.
If it’s warm, I go without shoes. Today, I’m foot-deep in acacia pods, pimpled and crackling. Soft silver wattle seedlings are growing among them. I’m curious to see if any will mature, because there aren’t other juveniles here. There must’ve been once – established trees cascade in arcs towards the cool water. I’ve seen silver wattle split open at the timber yard. It’s a beautiful wood, honey-coloured with a coffee grain. Even more beautiful wrapped in its natural skin and marked all over by eyes.
“I wonder about the riverbank’s experiences, how much takes shape out of human sight. I imagine roots threading clay, worms bellowing into darkness, the inner lives of trees.”
I wonder about the riverbank’s experiences, how much takes shape out of human sight. I imagine roots threading clay, worms bellowing into darkness, the inner lives of trees. Attunement to the older, slower things; the slow spin of the Earth, the creaking and groaning of the seasons. Even the fish hear those, with hidden ‘earstones’ that grow each year like the rings of a tree. I take my notebook to the river to skim my thoughts and scribble precursors to poems, naturalist nonsense, sketchbook impressions. The academic part of me argues that worms don’t have voices, that I shouldn’t speak on behalf of trees. But these speculations make me feel closer to a sentient Earth.
Despite being a naturalist, I’ve avoided writing about nature for a long time. I didn’t want to speak for nature, or impose my ideas of what nature might be experiencing. That seemed like the arrogance of Empire. It was a novel, The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay, that changed my worldview. I saw that imagining the experience of wild things doesn’t have to box in the subject; rather, it can explore the limitlessness of their experience.
Anthropomorphism is an innate, sometimes irritating human tendency to attribute human attributes to non-human beings. The Animals in that Country taught me that it can also be a tool to understand them better, to offer them complexity beyond our limited understanding. Imagining the lives of other animals, of other people, in the most expansive definition of the word—the tree, mud and rock people, the earth-dwellers and sky-beings, the winged, furred, finned and scaled folk – draws them closer, and I care even more for them. Writing from nature’s perspective can be a way of protecting the land, by helping others recognise its aliveness.
It’d be folly to think the river cares about my visits, or my writing about it. Perhaps going to sit with the river to comb out my thoughts and fish for plastic bags is a gentle sort of activism, like making tea for our elders and checking on friends. So I keep forging a relationship with the ducks who couldn’t care less if I come or not, writing about the myrtle that doesn’t give a damn for my poetry. Nature is indifferent to me, and in a world where everybody has an opinion, that’s rather comforting.
I watch the ducks in their uninhibited, spontaneous work. Three adolescents drift by without paddling. The water spins them around and they don’t correct their course, as if they haven’t yet learned how to use their rudders. They drift sideways, backwards, bounce off the riverbank with the stoicism of rubber ducks in a bath. Where the rocks converge, their feet find the shallows; it is a natural place to pause, stand and preen. I often wonder how to live in this world, in a climate that feels lost to cynicism and despair. Perhaps I’m coming to learn from the animals and the trees. To learn how they respond to and are directed by landscape. To pay attention to what’s already here.
5.
At dusk, the green sinks back into the ground and the ghostly beings emerge. Tiny white moths and little water bugs that ripple the surface, to be kissed by trout. A spider casts her silk across the river’s breadth and vanishes into the shadows, but the silk still glimmers, a spider-only bridge. The bluebells and love-in-the-mist purse their lips, the eucalyptus trunks turn the shade of burnt butter, the lomandra grows dark and heavy with night. The river is sleepy; the winking play of the surface dissolves, becomes docile, lazy, meandering. A river at rest.
One autumn evening, as the insect hum rises in the shivering grass, I linger on the bank longer than usual. Long, gold-rimmed shadows define the serrated ripple of holly, soft daggers of elm, the feathered hubbub of blackwood. The eucalyptus dapples light into olive, khaki, and sage. Some eucalyptus leaves don’t break up the light so much as absorb it, catch it inside each leaf until the branch glows.
The water is unusually transparent today. A few days of calm weather on the mountain has lowered the water level and brought dragonflies, hunting for mosquito larvae. Black ducks preen, exposing a flash of peacock underwing, and pigeon-grey lichens come alive in the low light. The shadows lengthen. I become as still as the tree root I sit on, let my thoughts drift on the current.
Time slows. A few sparkles on the water, a radiant ripple coming in breaths as the sun moves behind the clouds – light, dark, illumination, mud. A dandelion-clock floats in and out of the shadows: illuminated, invisible.
A snout breaks the water. No – a bill, pushing an arc of ripples before it. The water curls around her in half-moons. Her webbed front feet pull through the water with the sure rhythm of oars, back feet steering like rudders. Above all, she’s following her nose as she warps, flexes and rolls. She fossicks along the bank, stuffs something in her cheek. Abruptly, she buckles and ducks under the water. Her tail bristles rust brown and vanishes without a splash.
The water distorts her shape as she grows closer, but I see the silver gleam under the brown, and the two white patches near her cheek glowing with such intensity you could mistake them for eyes. She pauses near the shore, and her head emerges from the water.
I’ve seen platypuses before, but this exchange feels sacred. ‘More-than-human’ – David Abram’s expression for the re-inclusion of animals, plants and other non-human beings into the family of things, has always been important to me. But as I look into a platypus eye, it takes on new meaning. The platypus knows many things I do not, hidden and wonderful magics. She is more-than-me. This is the platypus I belong to, as this is the land I belong to. I sit in the aftermath of the experience and, for possibly the first time in my practice, I don’t fight an invasion of thoughts. I don’t think of anything at all.
6.
This river isn’t a place that can be brought ‘whole’ again in the short term. The problems are too large, too ingrained in the system to be tackled without revolution. I often wonder what I can offer the river. The river doesn’t want my poems (there I go, speaking for the river again. Who am I to say the river doesn’t like poetry?) Perhaps one thing I can offer is to recognise its wholeness alongside the devastation. Looking beyond the wounds to the life that is flourishing beside and sometimes inside them.
Being with the river nourishes something I can’t name. Writing about the river I belong to is a way of inviting other humans to be with their backyards, clotheslines and all, to see what might be noticed. To see what crackles in each season. To wiggle your toes in damp soil, or clay, or grass. To notice the quantity of colour in a single stone, or how ants move as one mind. How the clouds meet our imagination. The exquisite, writhing life beneath the grass.
This river may not be considered extraordinary in the scheme of rivers, but this river is extraordinary in the scheme of backyards. Not blissful or untouched – but as worthy of attention as any brooding mountain range or heritage wilderness. ▼
Written on Melukerdee country, and dedicated to the river and the beings that belong to it, seen and unseen.
Image: Trevor McKinnon
This work is part of our Australian Nature Writing Project suite.
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