Essays,
bound to last.

The river was already old when the first bridge went over it, and it will be old when the last one comes down. I set out in January to walk it from the spring to the sea, a hundred miles and some, and to write down only what it seemed to want kept.

The spring is not much. A wet place in a sheep field above Tweedsmuir, a stone someone has set there so walkers know where to stand. The water comes up through the moss as if it were thinking about something else. I stood on the stone for a long time. Nothing I had brought with me — a notebook, a flask, a bad map — seemed equal to it.

By Peebles it has become a river in the sense a child would draw: wide, bright, going somewhere. The town turns its back to it and then, in summer, turns round again. An old man fishing below the bridge told me he had caught the same trout three times in one season. He knew it by a nick in the tail. “It knows me too,” he said, “it just doesn’t hold it against me.”

What does a river keep? The obvious answer is silt, the long patient theft of hillsides carried down and laid out again as farmland. But I came to think it keeps other things. The line of a mill race, dry for a century, still visible in the grass. The height of the 1948 flood, painted on a wall in Kelso by someone who wanted it remembered. The names: Ettrick, Yarrow, Gala, Leader, Teviot, each one older than the people who say it.

In March the river rose and took the path I had been walking. I sat above it on a bank of snowdrops and watched it go past, brown and loud and entirely indifferent, and felt for the first time that I was not observing it so much as being let off, for a while, by it.