Down By The River

Life must be tough for a pond skater on a Dartmoor river in winter.  I’m crouching down next to the peaty flow of a watercourse that’s been up and down like my mood, pushing its way through the valley, lapping at its brim by night, leaving a line of stranded dead rushes and detritus by day.  I’m watching two pond skaters wavering back and forth across the calmer, glassy current at the edge of the river, just above the stepping stones, where those chunks of cloven granite bunch up the water ahead of them, slow it up a little, depending on the flow. 

This is an important spot for me.  I love to be by the river, and even better to be standing in the middle of it, invigorated by the rushing, the gurgling, surrounded by amber bubbles and scudding water that carries my eye with it down the valley.  When I retrieve my gaze and cast it back upstream, the curve of water endlessly drags it back past me and around the bend.  But in winter it’s not often that I can get across.  Even when uncovered, the stepping stones are grey and treacherous, so often covered by rising water at this time of year that they retain a slimy film of incipient algae that, with luck, will dry by summer when the river finally drops.  They show the marks of the traditional feather and tare method by which they were split by hand with hammers and iron spikes long ago.  Three quarters of the way across the river there is one stone that has tilted, presenting a narrow peak for the warily reaching foot to tread on.  I’ve seen an old man fall in here, and labour to right himself, clothes weighed down with water, embarrassed, refusing my help.

The pond skaters are keeping away from the middle of the river, where the flow is strongest, and who can blame them?  The tiny hairs on their highly adapted feet not only prevent them from plunging through the meniscus into a fatal underwater world, but they also enable these curious insects to judge the strength of the current and avoid being swept downstream.  These two are doddering back and forth, sweeping the shallows, literally treading water.  Their two hind pairs of legs cross-brace the surface like someone spread-eagling to avoid falling through ice.  The front pair is bunched up by the beak-like mouth parts, ready to reach out and snatch.  It’s hard to see what these little predators are feeding on in the depths of winter.  Being mainly scavengers of stricken insects that have fallen into the water, they must struggle when there are few insects on the wing.  With that and the hugely variable flow of the river, the sudden nocturnal floods, they must hardly rest.  Why are they out and about anyway?  Aren’t they meant to be hibernating?  Perhaps the milder temperature of the last day or two has been enough to revive them and send them out onto the river.

I’m just leaning further over the water to get a closer look when my Jack Russell, who has been watching the pond skaters with interest, jabs her snout forward and swallows one of them.  Its struggles are over.  I manage to call her off the other one and remain long enough to note how this little brown insect continues to slide across the clear margin of a larger turbulence that it must sense as a surging peril to be avoided at all costs.  It pings heedlessly back and forth over a patch of submerged sand that seems to glow, despite the murk of the January day.  So like a fragment of vegetation itself, beneath its feet shreds of dead brown grass and rush revolve and pulse in the current.