RED RIVER RETURNS
The Alphinbrook
Due to lockdown, I had to suspend the Red River project at the end of May last year and cancel the education work planned for schools and adults. After the Covid update from the Prime Minister yesterday, it looks like we may be able to run our full programme of events in a modified and COVID-compliant way in 2021. So now I’m restarting the project, and the official end date has been extended until 31 March 2022. All being well, the bulk of our originally planned educational activities will now take place outdoors over the summer and into autumn. Educational resources produced for these workshops will be made available online over the next couple of months, so that, if we don’t get to work together face-to-face, you’ll be able to make something in response to your own version and vision of the Red River.
Over lockdown it has become apparent to many people that places within walking distance are now more important than ever. Our regular and repeated walks from our doorsteps have revealed pleasures in subtle variations on the theme of the familiar. Small differences have taken on greater importance and changed the scale by which we measure the significant— trips to the compost bin, moss on a wall, tuning our listening in to the expansive and expanding auditory space of birdsong—all of have become intimate.
I’m based in Exeter, a city you can walk out of into the countryside within half-an-hour or so. On one of my regular walks, I cross an old cart-bridge over the Alphinbrook, before ascending the spiral ramp to the concrete footbridge over the A30, the same road the Red River flows under ninety-odd miles down the road to the west. During the first lockdown, I stood on the bridge and listened to the absence of traffic for a whole minute! It was an extraordinary hiatus, with the road sweeping missing cars under and away from me, the sound of the brook clear beneath the sound of wind in leaves. It was dreamy moment of the deep past and future. The strangeness of that moment on the bridge over the A30 will never leave me.
Yesterday, the traffic was back, as it has been to varying degrees since the first lockdown began to ease. The apple tree at the centre of the concrete ramp was bare, but had a stirring feeling about. The great twisted oak on the Balls Farm Road seemed like an imperceptibly slow vortex sucking the earth into the sky. The landscape had a quiet momentum to it. We walked up the hill and out through the village of Ide and on through a road tunnel under the abandoned Exeter to Newton Abbot railway line. It’s a longish tunnel, at the end of which was a veil of rippling light—the road on the other side had become a shallow stream. It felt like a gift, an image of hope, the days and nights of downpour bursting out from the hedgerows and field entrances into glittering fluency, a rubble of small stones and silty splay deltas on the road. It was my wife’s birthday, so myself and our two sons sang out a wailing rendition of Happy Birthday to set the tunnel resonating. I’ve walked that walk many times and the gift it gave back in that moment was a feeling of gleeful inundation, a flood of surprise and hope. I could have travelled far and not felt that intense sense of presence.
Which, really, is one of the key reasons for the Red River project. The Alphinbrook is grey and heavily modified like the Red River, yet I’ve seen children playing in it and searching for fish with inspiring optimism. Why shouldn't there be fish in the brook? I know that many people enjoy the Red River and the valley it flows through, and it has some rare fish in it, but it does need care and continuing attention, as do all our rivers, as highlighted in the recent Environment Agency report disclosing that no river achieved ‘good chemical status’ in 2020. Our less beautiful rivers need walkers to know their changes through the season, and our children need to feel able to play in them—they’re all that many of us have on our doorsteps. And they’re often important indicators of the health of our environment, and misplaced planning priorities. Given that Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, not far from Exeter, I like to imagine (with zero evidence) the Alphinbrook lent its name to the sacred river Alph that runs through the poem Kubla Khan, ‘five miles meandering in a mazy motion’ before it ‘sinks to a sunless sea’. When I think this, the small grey brook grows in scale and resonance, and, at the same time, its difference to the literary river becomes starkly apparent. This is what literature and, particularly poetry, can do. The memorised poem can reframe as special the thing we’re looking at; our own words can surprise us into an intense relationship with something as ordinary as a drain. It is the stories we discover and invent about our relationship to places we visit and revisit, coupled with close engagement with the particularities of place, that encourage us to look after them better: the complex ecology of poetry may develop and enhance an equally complex more-than-human ecosystem through the way it moves us to care for it. The Red River may be small in physical scale, but it’s rich in stories and archival evidence of our relationship with it. I’m looking forward to getting back in the archive whenever it reopens, and out to the river and its people to find out more. I want to see the dragonflies of Great Wheal Seaton!
The Red River below the combined sewerage and wastewater outflow.
During the months when I’ve not been able to travel, I’ve been thinking and working on notes made early last year, and on what I’ve been reading while teaching the MA course ‘Writing Nature’ I run at the University of Exeter. This is now starting to take shape in some ‘finished’ poems which, as they’re published elsewhere, I’ll post online in the blog. The first one is available here.
