River Water

Kathryn Sandilands

1. Beauty: recognize, identify, and enjoy it
          First, a lesson in topography. The Douglas Water spills out from a cluster of minor hills and into a valley of its own making. Everything here is heather-strewn and precarious; the road and river twist around the feeble hills and taller slag heaps, separated at times by the sunken remains of the old railway line. It is a land which has refused to apply itself to industry or agriculture, so that the filled-in pits choke up with mist in the cold of early morning and send spumes of it out across the unlush fields.
          The river struggles in a direction which might vaguely be northeasterly for some miles, growing heavier and more listless. A handful of villages have convened to observe the Douglas Water on its way: some have inherited the appellation of the river, but the last of them, a scattering of houses by a single-arched bridge, is called Sandilands. When Douglas Water encounters the Clyde, it is caught up in the currents and undertows of that old working river and eventually dragged back west toward the sea.
          Sometime in a distant, forgotten past, the river was named after itself: black water becomes dhu glas, dhu glas becomes Douglas. The original language is lost in the meantime, and the word water is fixed needlessly onto the end, an accidental repetition, a stutter across the centuries.
          It is not precisely a beautiful river. Certainly it lacks power; the surface of it is not exactly placid, but there is a frustration to its attempts at anything resembling rapid movement. They were not wrong, those people of the old language who named it for the darkness of its waters. But it is difficult to tell now whether the river is weighed down by murkiness accrued after centuries of brushing against peat and coal or whether its coloring is that of a blue so deep that it seems as though the sky has been consumed rather than reflected.
          In his later years, my grandfather spent a lot of time in the summer house out at the back of the garden, painting landscapes from photographs he’d taken of the local hills. By the time he died, he had amassed boxes and boxes of half-finished watercolors in various states of green: a mild trail of pale, soft celadon for the winter grasses; the dry chartreuse variety to paint the valley in late summer; his darkest olive reserved for the gray-sky river banks. Because of this there was a time when I understood him to be an artist, but this is not a truth that he himself would have recognized.
          I cannot promise that he traced the line of the Douglas Water with pencil and paintbrush, or that he would have stood over it on the little humpback bridge by the hamlet that our family was named for, and raised that old brown camera that I found in the attic of my grandmother’s house. But it seems more likely than not. His studies in Edinburgh gave him a geographer’s eye for the intimacies of the land, and he already had a farmer’s love for it, I think.
          If he had been in his right mind when they admitted him to the Douglas Ward, then he would have been able to tell the nurses about the Clyde, that proud river, and the trickling little tributary that the hospital trustees had, for some reason, seen fit to name this ward after. He might have wondered why such a sluggish current had been so honored. A few days of observing the quiet ebbs and flows of life in the Douglas Ward would have answered that question.

2. Exercise the faculties and capabilities
          Acting as a temporary ward clerk on the Douglas Ward gives a strange shape to those end-of-August days. I sit at the nurses’ station each morning and tick patients’ names from the daily census, answer phone calls from family members, shuffle forms and charts into thick blue folders. The administration of these unfamiliar lives: the daughter’s mobile number, the patient’s date of birth, the precise fluid intake from last Tuesday. Flotsam and jetsam from the last seventy, eighty, ninety years of accumulated form-filling. Patient information passes through my hands and suffers a few more creases or hole-punches along the way.
          There are a lot of wanderers on the Douglas Ward, and most of them find their way to the nurses’ station at some time or another. A woman from the farthest bed likes to sit beside me while I work and ask about her boyfriend, who has promised to come and pick her up soon but is always late. The longer she is allowed to dwell on it, the more irritated she is by this. “Where is he?” she sighs. “Do you think he might have forgotten?” As far as I can make out, the boyfriend is actually a husband who died a few years earlier. The only way to distract her from this inexcusable tardiness is to ask her to recite her favorite poem, which is four stanzas long. She can reel it off in its entirety, barely stopping for breath, and sometimes cycles straight back into the beginning lines without pausing, caught in its steady rhythms.
          By my dad’s recollection, his own father spent much of his time at the Douglas Ward convinced that he was late for a business trip, stuck waiting in the dreariness of an airport for a delayed flight. One Sunday afternoon, he is walking through the hills that he has tried to teach his children to love. By the next he is here. He understands that he is waiting for something, that this is an in-between place, but he cannot remember what he is waiting for. It is maddening that he cannot remember. It sets him on edge.
          He tugs at the cuffs of his pajamas and jiggles his knee impatiently. His flight must be delayed, he thinks. Maybe there is a ward clerk who sits with him at the nurses’ station and asks him to recite poetry. It wouldn’t do to ask the usual polite questions about his family, whom he is misremembering at that moment, omitting the youngest of us entirely and finding a haziness of detail in his thoughts of the other family members.
          My grandfather and I had the opposite problem. I am always remembering things that I shouldn’t. He couldn’t remember anything that he should. We existed in the world together only very briefly, caught in opposite currents from the beginning.
          It is well known in the family that my memory cannot be trusted. I was five years old when he died and could hardly have known him. Once, I think he told me that people who lose their hearing often find that their eyesight is improved, but that for him this was not the case. Or did I hear this old myth elsewhere and think of him, his wire-frame glasses and malfunctioning hearing aids? Is it possible that I remember his hearing aids, or do I actually remember my grandmother’s badly behaved dog? She blamed the dog’s disobedience on my grandfather long after he was gone because his dementia and deafness made him an inconsistent trainer.
          My memories feel often as though they might be constructed of spare parts, so that I struggle to know what I really know. When I think of my grandfather: Is this a person I have built from scratch out of overheard anecdotes and scrap paper, or is he an approximation of the original, only worn down from the retelling? And if the latter, then this might be true of all memories. Recollections are inconsistent things, like the stones at the bottom of the river rubbed smooth by whichever current comes to pass above them.

3. Ease the conflict between people
          This summer, nearly seventeen years since his death, my grandfather and I have bumped into each other with more regularity. First, at the Douglas Ward. Then all of those green-paint watercolors begin drifting to the surface of unpacked cupboards as I help my grandmother move house. He has left behind more clues to the content of his existence than most manage. Next to be discovered are the books and the newspaper clippings. Detritus drips through the decades and finds its way onto my fingertips. The most wonderful are the scraps of writing in his own hand. My favorite is the hotel stationary smeared with his hurried scrawl, making fun of the German gentleman he sat with at dinner that 1984 night in Belgium.
          Except, actually, he isn’t making fun of his dinner companion so much as he is making fun of himself for having nothing better to talk about than sheep and milk quotas. He is laughing because he might have called the gentleman by the wrong name and because he thinks the whiskey he drank in the airport when his flight was delayed is at fault for this rudeness. He is laughing also at his ill-fitting tweed coat, a coat that had been owned first by his own father, the farmer, which his only son later inherited. Or, at least, it seems likely that it is the same coat; there is no way to be precisely sure of this fact.
          My grandfather, as I have heard it told from memories more reliable than mine, was quite tall and very nearsighted, a great man for hill walking. He was a wearer of polished brogues, even in the house, and the chairman of all Sunday lunches. There is an austerity to this description, but he is a generous host and a diplomatic presence at the head of that table. He thanks all for their attendance and turns to my mother, who is about to marry into this strange family of Sunday lunchers. He says, “And how are your parents?” A few months after the dementia is diagnosed, it seems that he cannot stop asking this question. He listens to the answer with considered interest every time and then, before thirty minutes pass, he asks “How are your parents?”
          His cocktail party manners, my dad says, are last to go. For a long time, he is able to carry out conversations about the weather, the scenery—then suddenly he isn’t. It is a stark loss.
          This is a man who wrote a eulogy for an old, smelly dog named Jock during a snowstorm and then kept it locked in a writing desk for forty years. He scrawled out pages and pages of his own philosophy: the importance of understanding another man’s perspective on his life, in handwriting so urgent and cramped that it is often difficult to see what he might have written. He left it folded underneath the gas bill for 1987. He kept a binder full of cards that had been sent to him by friends and family members with handwritten notes, all of them saying: phoned to thank, 5th January.
          My dad and his sisters are entertained by these rambling, random segues. I am fascinated by them. When I am meant to be packing boxes of books, I find myself plucking each one from the shelf and going through it page by page, looking for evidence of a life once lived. There are sticky notes and receipts and carefully cut out articles. Those shelves have gone untouched for more than a decade. My grandmother keeps her own collections entirely somewhere else and has no interest in almanacs and geographical accounts.
          But in between the walking guides and tourist brochures in my grandfather’s bookcase, he kept books and books of poetry.

4. Set forth a family
          The last page of my favorite volume contains four lines of advice. Or maybe they are meant to be reminders, maybe goals.
          In short:
          1. Beauty: recognize, identify, and enjoy it
          2. Exercise the faculties and capabilities
          3. Ease the conflict between people
          4. Set forth a family
He has titled this list only as Life, so it is difficult to know how he meant it to be read. It is unlikely, in fact, that he meant for it to be read at all. When he penciled it in behind three-hundred pages of poetry, I did not yet exist. He would have been newly retired, I think, and maybe hiding out in that summerhouse with his paints.
          The book is made heavier by his annotations. Like me, he doesn’t seem to want to put pen to the pages themselves. Instead, he fills it with scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, an old shopping list, notebook pages torn free. On these, he scribbles his favorite page numbers and quotations, the works he feels are missing from the anthologies, the similarity of thought he identifies between this poet and another. The poems he likes best are about curlews and otters, a winter frost some ways north of this valley, the meeting of old friends in the fishermen’s pub.
          He cannot have known he might one day have a curious granddaughter who would read his musings with half an idea that she might harvest them, build of them a tenuous bridge to a man long dead. I am not sure how to go about constructing such a thing, in any case. How am I meant to know which pieces were once integral to the whole? It becomes an exercise in revisionist history, a slippery and useless sort of remembering.
          But in October, after some weeks working on that ward, I take a fancy to see the Douglas Water, and I ask my dad to come with me because my memory cannot hold onto the directions. I can barely tell one hill from another. I know none of their names. We drive first to that little cluster of houses called Sandilands and stop in the middle of the humpback bridge so that I can take a picture up the valley with the camera I was given for my twenty-first birthday. It is one of the first frosted mornings, and a mist hangs low over the fields.
          I have studied maps of the area, paying special attention to the color-coded topography and tracing the blue river-crevice through red-peaked hills to its dull yellow origins. I have no concept of what this ought to look like in person; the hills seemed obvious on the topographical map I found online, sharp inclines summiting at three or four hundred feet.
          They are not so tall as I had imagined, no crags or slopes. We follow the river backward, against the current, through miles and miles of flattened land until we reach the place where it first spills out of some mild, disappointing hillocks.
          “Do you think it’s darker than other rivers?” I ask my dad. “Because the name supposedly means black water.”
          He has stopped the car at the side of the road and is half looking for oncoming traffic, but he squints down at the water. “I’ve never heard that before,” he says. “It just looks like river water to me.”

Kathryn Sandilands lives in Scotland, where she is currently studying at the University of Strathclyde.