There's Something About Rivers?

Yesterday, we took our dogs down to their favourite swim for their spring splash-about. First salmon will soon be up from the Ribble estuary; back from whatever salmon do in the ocean. It’s time for them to re-start the cycle; thrash their way upstream to mate and spawn and for most, for their efforts, be allowed to die there. Anyway, that’s the way things are and short of Armageddon, ain’t nothing out there strong enough to alter them. Though sometimes, when it suits her, our misnamed Mother Nature decides to screw things up. Get in her way and you’ll get the ‘have that’ treatment.

We are here purely through the chance bonkings of some prehistoric amoebae, earth’s first life forms – not through a sprinkling of fairy dust or ‘Ms Nature’ doing us any favours. She will, without rancour, destroy, burn, maim, drown or infect thousands – all the tree-hugging in the world will not placate her. She has done it many times before; when she’s had enough, pretentious guardians against global warming et al will suffer the violent rigours of her next spring-clean.

My heart goes out to the people of Japan.

And on a lighter note...

... Down went our little car for what the Rhodesian authorities defined as a low-level bridge, which in reality meant the bridge was too small;  for that, read: ‘wide enough for one vehicle’.  And for chrissakes don’t be half-way across when a thirty-ton, trailer dragging Oshkosh is coming the other way – or when the river’s flooding. Neither of these would be good – especially if one is of a nervous disposition...

‘What in God’s name is that!’

‘A bridge, my darling.’

Mother waggled her fag at the windscreen. ‘I meant the name, dearest. Not the death trap we’re about to drive over.’

Dad got his lips around the pronunciation; ‘Umzingwani River.’

The bridge was a long one; a sort of tarred strip on concrete legs – trees wrapped round from the last flood – jammed underneath. The water was brown, not too much of it but deep enough to hide crocodiles and other boy-biting creatures. Mother stayed quiet. I think she held her breath all the way across. Then we rose up, phoenix-like and crested the far bank.

‘Goes all the way down to join up with the Limpopo,’ said Mother, with what was now her favourite map pressed against her knees. ‘And there’s another big river just before we reach Mashaba.’

I craned my neck and tried to read the names.

‘What is it called?’

‘The Lundi,’ mother chirruped, pleased with her map reading. Her cigarette wriggled south-eastwards over the paper. ‘Then it joins up with the Sabi down here in the corner.’ She folded the map and shoved it under the dashboard, for the time being satisfied with her discoveries.

The clouds had turned a sort of, ripe plum colour. I watched them boiling up in front. Outside our car nothing moved. Trees hung their leaves straight down and dead still. Just the drone of our little engine hummed through the quiet.

‘We’re coming into some rain.’

Mother thought it necessary to lean as far forward as possible and peer upwards through the top edge of the windscreen – just as sixty million gigawatts of lightning blatted the sky. For the second time that day mother screamed and bust her cigarette...

Sons of Africa; an extract:

... ‘We will never make it across!’ Catherine shouted, and looked upstream to where the storm had blackened the skyline. The Lundi River, though at that moment almost empty, was wide enough to take a span of sixty oxen standing nose to tail – dry reaches of white sand strung between the shallows, but from the high carry of a north wind the first fat drops of rain slapped vindictively to the wagon-tents.

‘We have no choice,’ countered Magdel. ‘We cross now or wait for how many days or weeks it takes for the river to empty.’ She looked to her daughter. ‘We must lighten the load or sink to the axles. Carry what you can on the horses.’

She turned to Mhlangana. ‘Double span the first wagon. And hurry – our time is running out.’

Within the half-hour both wagons had been stripped of irreplaceable powder, shot and cartridges for the rifles and double-loaders. Sannie horse-backed their essential provisions across to the far bank and set them down where she knew the water could not reach, then covered the precious cache with a light canvas sail to keep powder and cartridges safe from the rain.

A sky the colour of black iron engulfed the wagon-drift – fingers of white, excited lightning crackled inside of it and like the African night, the rain came swiftly. It fell with violent disregard for everything in its way so that the once dry earth was thrashed to the colour of raw meat. As an ominous wall it moved across the landscape – deep ravines were flushed of debris and creatures slow to move were drowned in their burrows. Gullies that had seen no rain for those long dry winter months were filled beyond their banks, linking one to the other, rivulets to streams to hurrying glides amongst the trees so that everywhere the earth moved as a single expanse of living water. The air filled with smells released by the deluge and amongst them hung the acrid fizz of ozone from the nearness of lightning strikes. At the lowest point of the valley, the impotent riverbed waited; poised to take that first spate...