Strange Rivers

(from 2012)

Daughter and son in law and large bouncy dog have spent a week with us in our little home – which seemed even smaller after several days of trying to dry wet clothes in our British summer. Believe it or not, until a week ago there was still a hosepipe ban in some parts of the country, after what has been described as “the wettest drought in history.”

Daughter wanted to visit several places she remembered from her childhood – and with the aid of a detailed map and Occasional’s creaky memory, we manage to track down several places in the national park nearby – all hills and trees and – in current weather conditions – torrents.

Two places we visited carried memories for both her and her husband of incidents that could have put paid to their particular piece of history.

Daughter’s first. We managed to find a mountainous walk to spectacular falls that we hadn’t done for well over twenty years. The last time, when she was about ten years old, we’d crossed a small stone bridge, and she – in her wisdom and contrary to parental directive –decided to cross upstream on slippery stepping stones.

Of course, she suddenly lost her footing. She was swept under the bridge and down a series of natural steps in a rising torrent in what appeared to be a split second. What happened next remains to this day a blur. I apparently charged down the bank and partly into the stream and ignominiously hauled her out just before she would have gone over a steep fall. Immortal lines of conversation come flooding back: “I’m all WET!” “I want to GO HOME and I want to go home NOW!” (In less than kind moments – usually in company - we still remind her of the conversation all these years later!) One shaken, wet and ice-cold child with chattering teeth stomped along the bank with us back to the car and that was the end of that particular day out as I remember it now.

Then there is her husband. Shortly after they met, he and a gang of friends were travelling in the same mountainous area and overturned the car on a hairpin bend – as of course you do when you are young and feeling immortal. There have been quite a few fatalities along that stretch, but they climbed out of the vehicle with only scratches.

Within about a year of this incident he and she were married.

You do occasionally wonder – what if?

On the “what if” front, there is a John Stewart song called Strange Rivers which is all about chance and coincidence and “men making plans while the gods laugh.” While I don’t subscribe to the sentiments in their entirety, one verse comes to mind (which I trust fair use will allow me to quote here):

Did you ever turn the corner
And you wondered why you did
'Cause you haven't been that way, now
Since you were just a kid
And nothing really happened
But then you've got to say
That you wonder what would've happened
Had you gone the other way

Chorus:

There are strange rivers...etc.

Joan Baez recorded a version with a nice touch of slide guitar but she changed the hook line in the chorus to turn it into a love mantra, and sort of obliterated the point of the song.

But that’s another grumble, another story.