Birds perched on the telegraph wires. In a silent cacophony, they took off into the sky. High on the hills were white towers, farming the wind. I walked through the still-standing forecourt of a bulldozed petrol station. Farther on, I reached the area referred to as “out the line.” Here you followed the ghost track of a vanished train line right next to the river. The ballast stones were loose underfoot. The rusted rails and decaying sleepers were overgrown with weeds. Even knowing it had been closed for decades, I still had the urge to look over my shoulder, for safety, as I walked along it. In March 1957, as part of their border campaign Operation Harvest, the IRA hijacked a Great Northern Railway cargo train in Donegal. Ordering the crew off at gunpoint, they fired up the engine, picked up as much steam as they could, and then leapt off it. The train carried on at full speed into the Foyle Road station, bursting through the barriers with such force that it ended up twenty feet deep in the concrete. People posed next to the wreckage afterward. A crumpled poster on a pulverized board still invited “Fly BEA to the Sea.” The trains were now long gone. So, too, was the station. Even British European Airlines was gone. Maybe even the bandits.
I passed an abandoned halting site, full of rubble, named Daisyfield. An electrical generator marked “Danger of Death: Keep Out.” A white heart sprayed on a low wall. A fraying wooden sign demanding “Justice for the Craigavon 2.” A fenced-off crane. A poster half-peeled off with a faded face: “Rewards available for information.” Satellite dishes on the walls of houses, tinged with rust, still speaking to satellites in a silver halo of debris around the planet. A plaque boasting “Best-Kept Neighbourhood 1980.” The year I was born. Year of the Monkey. It looked like a place devoid of meaning or history, but this innocuous stretch was once a perilous one, being a small patch of waste ground in a valley overlooked by higher ground. A soldier keeled over here, shot from a rooftop up on Bishop Street. Another was shot at the filling station by a sniper in the cemetery. Another at a street junction, from the grounds of the college. A middle-aged bus driver, a reservist in the UDR, was dragged off his bus to the frantic protests of his passengers, bundled into a car, and found bound, gagged, and lifeless here. Two men were seen limping across the fields at the border, one with a rifle, and the army opened fire, leaving a body near the customs post. A man went on an errand for his pregnant wife and did not return home. He ended up here. Once, I had thought of this as a place devoid of any history, but nowhere really is.
The tide was out and just about to turn. Even this far inland, the river was tidal. At points it looked so metallic, you could imagine walking across, but at other points there were mudflats and very slowly stirring patches of slack water. Half-buried bicycles and shopping trolleys appeared like postapocalyptic wreckage. Scavenging birds left their tracks in arcs across what was, for any heavier creature, a dangerous mix of mud and silt. Descendants of the dinosaurs teetering around out on the surface. I thought of the tale of a girl, apocryphal perhaps, who slipped in and became stuck in what locals called the “glar” and slowly drowned in effluent, panicking to extricate herself but succeeding only in forcing herself farther down before they reached her. The incident, and the fear of slow drowning, was talked of with the same fascinated childhood dread as quicksand, or the tales of mammoths and dire wolves getting stuck in tar pits.
Then there were the suicides. Perhaps it had always been an issue, the river always there, beckoning the lost to escape to somewhere else. In recent years, post-Troubles, it had become an epidemic, especially among young men. There was simply no future for them, or rather the sense of no future prevailed. Their reasons were as complex and nuanced and individual as each case, but there were certain universals. A sense of despair. An absence of any opportunity for a better life. The vertigo that might come at considering leaving the city, and the anger that came with having to. Drink and drugs offered the appearance of an escape in the same manner that digging further into a hole might. They were the left-behind in a city left behind. In the days of the Troubles there was a conspiracy of silence: don’t say anything, lest you say too much. It was the age of hard men and squealers. In the supposedly halcyon days that followed the conflict, the mantra became, Don’t speak, in case you spook the horses. Everything is fine. Indeed, you are privileged, or the perpetrators of everything wrong in society—a view expounded from both left and right. Suicide became, and remains, by far the biggest killer of male Derry youths. It is a voiceless epidemic.
Hundreds of attempts, too many of them successful, occurred each year. Almost one a night, it worked out. Rather than offer everyone the possibility of a future, plans were touted by the council and local architects to cut off access to the river, with decorative walls and fences. Hem them into this life. Well-meaning messages were put up along the river in desperation, with instructions, “You are not alone. There is hope.” Perhaps they even worked once or twice. Yet the deluge kept coming.
On the columns of the flood wall I passed faded letters, each four feet high, marked “A,” then “R,” and finally “I.” The river was still calm, but slowly it was turning, as if its gyres and currents were wheels and gears winding up. The slightest trace of turbulence behind the jetties revealed a glimpse of force under the stillness.
The winter sun was low, struggling over the horizon, but it was enough to begin to crack and melt the sleeping ice on the trees. They began to drip, and initially I mistook it for rain. Soon the trees crackled. We forget how strange they are, rising out of the planet toward space. All of them have turned subtly south over the years toward the sun’s arc. One side was speckled with moss; the other burned with shadow. I ran my hand along the fissures and grooves of the freezing bark. It felt like the braille of some untranslatable language.
There was no sign of the boy.
I wondered what the first people to live here called the river. How many names it’d had down the years. Archaeologists knew from the remains of raths they found, when digging up fields for housing estates, that Bronze Age people had ventured out of their forts on higher ground into the woods to forage, to hunt birds and hogs with flint, but above all they relied on the river for trout and shellfish, sailing on currachs of canvas over wood and pitch, taking them back to salt for the hard months. This source of sustenance must have had names. On Ptolemy’s study of the world in the second century A.D., the river was marked Widwa. The Foyle came later. It commemorates Feabhal, the drowned son of the ancient chieftain Lodan. Death is written into its very name. Every river is a threat as well as a gift.
I arrived at the old railway station. It was long defunct, and even the museum that had replaced it was now long closed. This was the end of the line, the terminus, of one of the extinct railway lines that cover this island. An old County Donegal Railways timetable was framed on the wall. The times for stations that no longer existed. “Meet your friend in Letterkenny.” “High Mass in cathedral at 12 noon.” Monday, June 29, 1931. The Socialists have just won in Spain. The German government informs the British that their banking system is in danger of collapse. Prohibition in America. The HMS Poseidon sinks in the Yellow Sea. Salvador Dalí unveils The Persistence of Memory. Up ahead was a surviving steam engine, albeit hollowed-out. Its red and black paint flaking into rust, sidelined and fenced off to prevent vandals or drinkers from going near it, dying a slow death in the rain. I sat on the cold stone of what was once the platform and surveyed the rising water.
The river was like quicksilver. As I leaned against the railings, a bird came flying down, foraging amid the wildflowers and weeds on the tracks. Looking at its dark wings, I struggled to differentiate in my memory, though I had seen them all countless times, the difference between ravens, crows, and rooks. It turned and leapt up onto the wall, and I could see it was a jackdaw, with its unmistakable doll’s eyes, which look as if they are painted on. It flew off, splicing the sky into a montage with its wings.
Waves were striking and swirling over loose bricks and slabs, like masonry from fallen towers. T
he little islands of rocks—“skerries,” as they were known—were vanishing. A lone bird swept along the surface of the water, its fragmenting twin keeping pace below it.
Before the water rose too high, I stepped over the railings and, holding on to them, reached down and hauled up a gnarled piece of driftwood. I held it up to the light. It was covered in tiny holes. “Gribbles,” they called them. Shipworms. This had been part of something. It had a story within it, probably a century or more old. I swung my arm and launched it, spinning, onto the river and watched as it floated speedily away.
There is the slightest trace of oil on the river, its color like abalone shell. The light falls into the depths, processing all the things it has reflected, like photography.
As the tide came in, it reclaimed the territory it had lost below the wall. The seaweed waved and vanished. The last things left were at the tideline. Blue mussel shells. Dog whelks. Periwinkles. Among the dreck being swallowed up were “nurdles,” hooked onto the plant life. “Fish eggs,” they were called, or, if you were romantically inclined, “mermaid’s tears.” Man-made plastic pellets that take millennia to wear down and choke the insides of marine life. A lasting, purposeless remnant of mankind.
Over the pathway, a bird, with its hollow bones, is buffeted by the wind. One second fighting against it furiously, the next allowing itself to be swept up in it. For the briefest of moments, it achieves an equilibrium, levitating in clear sight.
Downriver some planks had been washed up. The timber looked relatively fresh. Dunnage, perhaps: material they used to stabilize cargo in the containers that kept every city functioning. I had watched the long, thin ships move slowly in so many places around the world, from the Baltic to the South Pacific. Always there, always unnoticed.
A slow cataclysm of time was evident at the shore. I gazed back out the line and could see the land that the city was built on. Layers of rock had been riven and peeled away. It was cracked and hewn and sculpted, as if by some mad god. Even the concrete behind it would not hold out forever. Everything they built was in defiance of atrophy.
It was not unusual to see creatures at the river. On the more easeful stretches, especially of the lough, you spotted herons, even storks with their spindly legs that moved oddly, almost mechanically or surreally, like Dalí’s elephants. Several times I saw a drove of sheep led astray, ambling along, some sprayed with color. Once I came upon horses that had somehow made it to an isolated part of the river. I couldn’t quite work out how they’d gotten there, between a large banking and the river on either side. They were scuttling on the rocks. Four, five of them. I assumed the tide had come in and stranded them. Their reflections mirrored on the water as they stooped to drink. They were skittish as I approached, so I held back. I hiked up onto the fields to see if anyone was looking for them or if there were stables nearby. When I returned, they were gone. Nowhere to be seen.
My grandfather used a phrase to describe waves out in rough conditions: white horses. The equine sea. Many myths linked the two, almost always with some menacing result. In northern Europe, the bäckahäst was said to drown anyone who climbed on it by plunging into the water. The Celt-eating kelpies could be escaped only if you fled across running water. Mythology was not just the graveyard of religions. It served purposes. Old ditch-haunting drunks explained away blackouts and disappearances with tales of falling into the crazed dance of a fairy ring for a few days (hence the still-used phrase “away with the fairies”). Myths explained dinosaur bones and ruins dug up on farmland. Superstitions. Fictions. Alibis. Yet I took no chances and stepped across the little streams leading to the river.
There was snow on the Donegal mountains, hulks of sleeping granite, in the distance. The treacherous scree we once scrambled up, as boys on adventures beyond the border, was welded fast and sleek as glass now. It would be spring before it would thaw properly and the ravines would reactivate into waterfalls and streams. Down here, ice had coated the roads, turning the dew on the grass into ripples of quartz as if the wind had frozen mid-motion. Spiders’ webs had turned crystalline. Even now, though, before sunrise, the frost had begun to retreat to the shadows. The salt on the roads was already staining the leather on my boots.
Driftwood sailed by, gnarled and mutated, from a forest somewhere in the past.
I walked along the shore and stopped to pick up a flat stone. The sun was glistening on the river, shining on sinners and saved alike. I skimmed the stone across the surface, once, twice. At the third instance it sank beneath the waves and settled there, likely for centuries.
For a split second, I swore I saw some glint of movement below the surface of the river, life in the universe beneath. It moved faster than time, faster than thought, and vanished again until I was left doubting I’d seen anything at all.
A boat suddenly appeared, carving a “V” in the water. It slowed, almost cutting the engine, to pass under the bridge, between the supports, then fired up again and took off, bouncing on the surface, curving between the buoys. As the wake came in, the reflection of my face fragmented.
The low golden winter sun cast long, languid shadows. The wind slowly grew in power over the undulating grass. Birds rose off the fields like smoke. I trekked back up the rocks, almost losing my balance once or twice on the precarious slipways and outcrops, before making it onto the relative safety of the path.
The other road took me into a fine imitation of wilderness. Behind ten-foot wooden panels were black dunes of coal. Opposite were gas yards and oil terminals, behind cameras and razor wire. At the river’s edge, you could push through the trees to a little cove and walk right out onto a secret view of the city, from discarded concrete slabs, riprap, or accropodes, shot rocks either dumped there or deliberately placed to minimize erosion from the rising water. Future echoes for the buffer zones and breakwaters that will be needed when global warming really begins to come calling. The river had been cleaned up a great deal even since my youth. If pipes were still pumping night soil into the river, they were now discreet. I noticed the wind wisping off the surface and dark clouds gathering. The weather was turning. The sky was more turbulent than the water. A low front was coming in. The barometer in my grandfather’s attic was stirring in the dark.
There were little messages on the wires. I thought they were advertisements. Instead they were inducements to live. It seemed futile, desperate, but who was I to judge?
I trekked through the trees for fifteen, twenty minutes, seeing if I could find anything. By the time I emerged out the other side, the weather had already gotten worse. I put my collar up, buttoned my coat, and fastened my scarf. Clouds like rusting metal hulks were hanging there as the sky raced past them, flowing over the earth, bringing air from far-off places. I’d been caught out by weather before, mistiming a mountain climb, high above sheer cliffs, and getting hit with a storm, barreling down the slope as fast as I could. Another time, high up on a plateau, lightning began to strike, and I realized that I was an hour’s hike from anywhere resembling safety and that I was the tallest object in sight.
I remembered the trees marching right down to the river. There were roots and a stump where one once stood. Others had ribbons tied around them, as a sign of which one was to be felled. The wind had almost blown one away, offering the possibility of a stay of execution. The shadows of clouds raced across the harrowed fields. Swifts whipped through the fields in impossible pirouettes.
The urge for pilgrimage preceded, and will no doubt outlast, the faith. I ran my hand along the stone in some mute forgery of prayer. The path along the docks was a popular jogging run with a bicycle path. Both were empty now, save for a figure in the distance walking a dog. The path was there for the scenic views of the river and St. Columb’s Park opposite, via the curving Peace Bridge, and for its calorie-burning distance. Promenades are for walking and resting, not exploring or uncovering, but traces still remain. A section of train tracks embedded in concrete. Rusted rings for tying mooring lines to, staining the stone be
neath. The iron bollards, heavy as anvils, where the ships tied up, had a fresh lick of black paint. Needles and Joseph—two decades apart—went into the river somewhere along what is now a pleasant stroll. Where the bustling docks were, there is a marina for pleasure boats. Memories that I forgot I retained returned to me as I leaned over the brink. As children, tempting fate, we’d clamber down the stone wall onto a pipe platform just above the river, precariously close to the currents. There we were hidden from view and therefore somewhere precious, as well as dangerous.
The clouds were barreling across the sky. The sun had long been swallowed. I gazed at the river and thought I saw something, then ruled out anything human; a seal perhaps, maybe just an exposed rock in the oil-black river. If it was watching me back, it was awfully still. I walked on. The wind was whistling through the metal fences. A flock of birds formed into shapes then chaos, then shapes again.
I climbed up the steep hill to the road. A mobile-phone mast stood like a blind sentinel. A broken umbrella lay blown inside out. During a lull, I dashed across the dual carriageway and hopped over the metal crash barrier, sliding down the banking. Above me, up at the beginning of the bridge, a windsock whipped around violently. It looked like an unfurled flag of an unformed country. The land along this stretch of the river used to be called Ballynashallog, “the townland of the hunt.” A land of ecotones—transitioning from field to road to woods to river. With the wind coming off the water, I turned toward the trees, hoping to find somewhere to sit it out. A trail, a bridleway, formed by journey after journey of horses and farm machinery, took me round to disused stables, several hundred years old by the looks of them, and then the ruins of the mansion Boom Hall. Its doors bricked up. Its roof fallen in. Its upper windows unreachable, framing the sky. A cat scurried out of the bushes and darted off in another direction.
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