The river ·
The heron and the post
On standing still by the river long enough to be mistaken for part of it, and what the river does when it stops watching you.
5 min read
I have been trying, for most of this year, to be mistaken for a post.
There is a heron that fishes below the weir on most mornings, in the hour when the mist is still lying on the water like a sheet somebody forgot to fold. For months it left the moment I came round the bend in the path. Not hurriedly: herons don’t hurry. It would lift one foot, consider me, and then unfold itself into the air with the weary dignity of a man leaving a meeting that has gone on too long.
So I started arriving earlier, and standing further back, and staying longer. I brought a flask. I stopped bringing the dog.
What the river does when it stops watching
The first thing you notice, when you stand still for long enough, is that the river was watching you. The moorhens had been keeping to the far bank. The small fish had been somewhere else. A wagtail had been going about its business with one eye on the path. None of this is visible until it stops, and then the whole bank seems to breathe out.
The second thing you notice is how loud you were. Not your footsteps, which you knew about, but the rest of it: the zip of a coat, a cough, the click of a flask. The river does not mind you. It simply does not count you until you stop moving.
A morning in October
It took until October. I came down at a quarter to seven, stood by the alder that leans over the path, and drank my tea very slowly. At ten past, the heron came in low over the water and landed perhaps twenty metres away, facing upstream, and did not look at me at all.
It fished for half an hour. It caught two small fish and missed a great many more. Once it froze for so long, one foot raised, that I forgot to breathe and had to do it rather loudly. It did not care. I had become, as far as the heron was concerned, part of the bank: a post that drank tea.
I don’t know what I thought I would learn. Something about patience, probably, which is what people always say they learn from herons. What I actually learned is that being ignored by something wild is one of the great pleasures of being alive, and that it costs nothing but time and a flask.
I went home and drew it, badly, and then less badly. That is the drawing at the top of this page. The heron is still there most mornings. I am still a post.
