That was not the only surprise of the morning. The couple of horses that had been at the far end of the field the night before seemed to have become curiously distended in the night. And spotted. And now surely there were more of them, though these newcomers had shrunk to the size of Great Danes. And the whole menagerie was being tended by the ugliest red-faced dwarf that could be imagined; even now he was shaking a fist at me and shouting across the field in some unearthly language of hoots and shrieks. It was only when I saw the striped red and yellow canvas of the Big Top that had sprouted overnight in the field like a giant gaudy mushroom did I realise that I was looking at the trappings of the celebrated Circus Trumf. Two llamas, five palominos, three Shetland ponies and a furious baboon – my enraged dwarf – were now tethered in the field. After such a bizarre and delightful start, I had high hopes that the day could only continue to enchant.
It didn’t. A mile upstream I came to a large lock that refused to open. On climbing ashore and making my way up to the concrete tower where sat the lock-keeper, I found out the lie of the land. Here, it seemed, the waterway split into two. The River Main above this point curved around in a great seven-mile bend like a capital C, and a new stretch of canal had been constructed to short-circuit this bend in a straight cut of about four miles. It was this that I could see from the control tower where we stood: sheer-sided concrete walls dwindling away into the heat-hazy north. The problem was that only powered vessels were permitted to use the cut; all other craft had to go around by the old natural river route. The young lockkeeper explained this to me very nicely and rather apologetically but assured me that the river route was terribly pretty and here, have these chocolate-coated energy muesli bars that his wife had packed for his lunch but he didn’t want. Buoyed up by his enthusiasm for the delights ahead of me, I accepted the snack bars, returned to the dinghy and set off into Hell.
I suppose it is not fair to expect that your average German lockkeeper will be completely au fait with the subtleties of English usage, especially the semantic difference between the two verbs may and can. Were this particular young man ever to ask for assistance on this matter, I would perhaps give him the following example:
2. Unpowered boats cannot use the river loop.
See? Simple.
Yet again, as on the Rhine, the lock-keeper’s insistence on the scenic nature of the river loop failed to explain the very essence of that scenery: namely, rapids. Possibly the gift of the energy muesli bars was a gesture from the wiser subconscious part of the man’s brain, which knew full well that I would need every ounce of extra energy I could muster for the hours ahead.
For the first few miles the river slipped away beneath me smooth and beer-brown as I hauled myself along, singing Poor Wandering One with gusto and tucking into one of the muesli bars. But by the fourth mile the current had become seriously strong and it was all I could do to make any headway. Then the nature of the river changed. Along the right-hand bank, tapering groins of loose stone projected about twenty feet into the river at right angles to the bank. These spits were set at intervals of about one hundred yards and had created calm stretches of water lying along the right-hand half of the river. Consequently, the left half of the river flowed all the more fiercely. Nevertheless, by sticking closely to the right bank I could row in relative stillness for a hundred yards at a time. But then problems arose. To get around the tip of each groin into the next backwater required a combination of hydrodynamics, trajectory motion and sheer brawn that would tax a twenty-pound salmon with a degree in higher physics. The trick was to get a good run up to each spit, emerge at the last minute into the current that ran fiercely around it, and row like blazes. A moment’s hesitation and the current would take the bow and swing me round to the left and broadside to the flow, waltzing me fifty yards downstream again. If I was very quick and very clever, I could so manoeuvre the boat that the current caught the stern instead and turned me neatly into the next backwater, there to sit shaking and sweaty and panting before setting out up the still stretch to try the whole thing again. (Remember in addition, dear Reader, that all this fine calculation of distances and angles of approach had to be made while facing backwards in the boat. At least salmon get to face the way they are going.)
After several hours of this erratic progress, during which time I don’t think I noticed the pretty scenery once, the current grew so strong that I simply couldn’t get past one of the stony points. After three attempts, and three subsequent swirls downstream, I noticed an opening in the right-hand bank that I had been too sweat-blind to notice before. This led through into what appeared to be a large shallow lagoon enclosed by high banks, and it curved away out of sight to the north, the direction I was heading. And sure enough, I could see further up the river beyond the worst of the current what appeared to be another opening in the bank. The other end of this secret lagoon, perhaps? A serene bypass of this impassable rapid? This could well be my Northwest Passage. I abandoned any further attempt at rounding the rocky spit that had so mocked me and struck out for the gap into the lagoon.
I found myself in what had possibly been an old clay pit. The broad and sluggish water shimmered with dragonflies and water boatmen and smelt of mud and weed and rotting vegetation. But there was still possibly a way through, although the water looked shallow in places. It was. Three strokes later I had grounded on mud. I floundered for a little with the oars, but this served only to settle us further onto the sticky grey bottom. There was nothing for it but to get out and haul Jack off by hand. With a resigned hey-ho I climbed out into ankle-deep water and promptly disappeared up to my waist in mud.
After the initial shock I laughed heartily at the comic-book predicament I was in and set about extricating myself. Ten minutes later I was seriously panicking. The mud had a grip on me, a slow, slurping, porridge-like grip, and nothing I could do seemed to make the slightest difference. To make matters worse, Jack, lightened by my disembarkation, had bobbed free, come off the bottom and drifted to sit a little way away, clearly not wanting to get involved. Without her gunwale to support me, I had no way of hauling myself out of that sucking grip. After another twenty minutes I was convinced that the early-morning apparition of the reaper had been exactly as I thought: a presage of Death. It was such an ignominious way to go, I thought. I wasn’t sinking further, but I was certainly not going anywhere. The sun was increasingly hot, the dragonflies had come to regard me as a fixture and were using me as a bridal suite, and being out of sight of the main river I had serious doubts that I would be spotted by a passer-by. I rather thought that in a fortnight’s time some stray picnicker would find a bloated, blackened corpse sticking stiffly out of the swamp, infested only with the swarming life of dragonfly larvae.
At last I stopped writhing, and as soon as I did a gentle breeze, the very faintest of zephyrs ghosted up and sent a shimmer over the stagnant water. The relief it brought from the fierce heat was welcome, but it brought me something better, much better. Jack, having sat motionless on the glassy water above her painted reflection, drifted closer, closer … closer still, nudged by the ghost-breeze … until finally she was in reach. Two minutes later I had hauled myself out and flopped shaking into her arms, smearing grey mud over everything and kissing her all over in sheer idiotic gladness. Then carefully, ever so carefully, I poled her out of that dreadful lagoon and back into the main river.
My troubles were not yet over. I still had the rapids to face, and this I decided would require me to throw myself overboard again (after checking carefully that the riverbed was solid pebbles this time) and stride up the stream chest-deep hauling Jack behind me. Before doing this I dug in the very front of the forelocker for a pair of old sandshoes that I had last seen in Dover; these would protect my feet from the sharp, rocky bottom. They emerged from the darkness covered in something bright red and highly sticky which could only be blood. Appalled, I rooted around further, fully expecting to find a severed head that someone had stowed while my back was turned.
Instead, I found only that a can of toxic red syrup used all those months ago in Whitstable to mend the hole in Jack’s hull had burst and was oozing through my possessions. Putting this firmly in the category of Things To Be Dealt With Later, I ate the second energy bar, climbed into the noxious sandshoes and once again jumped overboard.
I can say this for the next few hours: they were wonderfully cooling. The day had become scorching and the chance to stand up to my chest in cold running water was one that I was thankful for. The next two hours were spent slipping and sliding over submerged rocks, bodily hauling Jack up against an increasing current. Sometimes the stretches were shallow enough to allow a gentle wade upstream, with Jack tugging behind me on her leash like a fretful labrador that has sniff ed an interesting lamp post two hundred yards back. At other times the going underfoot became treacherous and I would find myself plunging chin-deep into some hole between the boulders while the racing water threatened to rip the painter from my hands and send Jack spinning downstream. At one particularly tricky point the banks closed in steeply on either side and the river was too deep to wade except where the left-hand bank was overhung with low hazels. Here the current was steady and strong, a smooth amber muscle of water pouring down, and progress required a painful wade chest-deep among the spiky hindering branches of hazel. Then my foot slipped and I found myself borne away under the black water to end up in a submerged beaver’s nest of roots and rotting boughs, held down for a few horrid seconds by the tangling net of vegetation before breaking through to the surface and the bright air.
In time I reached an impasse. The river ran in a fierce rapid over a shallow bed of pebbles in midstream. It was only waist–deep, but the current was so strong that I couldn’t budge Jack. Every now and then I would try to shift my footing to gain a better purchase, at which point the river would flip my feet from underneath me and Jack and I would end up fifty yards downstream before I could re- surface. This happened four times. Each time I would spend another twenty minutes hauling Jack back up to the same rapid, and the whole thing would happen again. I didn’t know what to do. There was nothing I could do.
At last, above the rush and swirl of water about my knees, I heard the faint drone of an outboard engine and glory be! around the downstream bend came the little rubber Zodiac of yesterday with the unsmiling grandpapa and the two boys. I had learnt by now not to judge a German by the expression he chooses to wear on his face, and this man was no exception. Before very long he had thrown out a line, instructed me to tie my painter to his and then to swim over and hop in with him. With the engine revving madly and a blue cloud of fumes ascending to the afternoon sky, the Zodiac inched forward and Jack slowly rode clear of the rapids into a broad pool upstream.
There were, it appeared, only a couple more kilometres before the weir and lock that would take me onto the main navigable river again just above the new cut, so Papa Grim towed me the rest of the way, keeping a sensible silence above the buzz of the motor. Occasionally the propeller blades would clatter on some submerged rock as we negotiated our way up another rapid, but we finally emerged into the wide and sandy pool below the weir and the struggle was over. I was bruised, battered and cut from a hundred collisions with underwater boulders, my hands were raw with straining on the thin painter, and my sandshoes appeared to have bonded onto my feet with an irreversible epoxy resin. But it was over. I had traversed the scenic section of the River Main and shown that not only may unpowered boats take the route but that they can as well. And very pretty it was too.
The last hour of that strange day was spent rowing in windless heat up a few more broad bends of the Main and stopping at a little sandy bay to give Jack a thorough spring-clean. Epoxy resin, slimy mud, hazel leaves, bilge water and the sodden remains of my bread and salami were all slooshed out with the bailer and wiped away with the big sponge. At some point in this procedure a naked man trotted out of a nearby copse, waved in a friendly fashion and vanished across a field. Perhaps the Germans did this sort of thing. Then, with the boat as clean as I could make it, I rounded one last bend, tied up in a little side-arm hidden deep under an overhanging willow and marched off to find a beer and a meal, feeling it had been a good day after all.
When I came back two hours later, some bastard had stolen my pith helmet.
That night I really couldn’t care. I watched a nightjar hawking over the starlit meadow and then slept the sleep of the truly exhausted.
The next morning I cared alright. My pith helmet! Gone! It had been given to me by that same Rupert who had brought me the original Jack de Crow, so the hat and the boat had, as it were, a common godparent. I had worn it poling a dugout canoe through the Okavan-go Swamp, rafting on the Zambesi, hitching across the Mogdagadi Desert and climbing in the Cuillin. I know that it has been, throughout this account, an aff ectation, an eccentricity deliberately adopted. But nevertheless it had become an important item for me in more ways than one. Every hero has his hat: Indiana Jones rolling back beneath the sliding stone door of the tomb to retrieve his old leather headpiece; Doctor Dolittle returning to the unpleasant Throgmor-ton Manor for his beloved topper; Sherlock Holmes striding around in his deerstalker. But the pith helmet had also played a more practical part in the voyage. It had collected blackberries and deutsch-marks in good measure; it had kept off the Picardy sun and the Oxfordshire rain; it had mollified suspicious lock-keepers and been admired by Eton boys; it had done service as a splendid bailer during my shipwreck in the North Sea; and when on countless occasions an unexpected gybe had sent the boom swinging murderously at my head, it had saved me from concussion and possible death.
And now it was gone, pinched I’m sure by some village urchin who had no idea of what a treasure he had purloined. Or perhaps by Lurking Naked Man for reasons unknown. May he get good use out of it, wherever he is now.
I found myself missing it sorely the next day. Temperatures had soared to forty degrees in parts of Germany: Europe was experiencing the severest heatwave in a century of records. And it was through this that I was rowing hatless and sun-struck up the wide, windless highway of the Main. Perhaps ‘drag strip’ would be a better phrase. It seemed that every speedboat, every jet ski, every water-skier in Germany was out in force that Sunday on the Main. They zoomed and snarled up and down, throwing great wakes behind them that sent the trees swaying in panic along the river banks and the coots Stuck Fast scuttling from their nests. Each time one passed, the wake was enough to rock me wildly to and fro, my oars slapping the water helplessly and disturbing the strong rhythm that is so vital to oarsmen in their craft. I hated the boats with a passion as they arrogantly churned by: their virile tanned crew in reflective sunglasses, their bathing beauties draped over the sleek prows. It seemed that without my hat, my wonderful hat, I was no longer a figure of mystery and adventure hailing from foreign lands, deserving a little awed respect from the locals, but merely a hot and bothered middle-aged man who couldn’t afford a speedboat and was turning a rather amusing shade of beetroot.
As the scent of the lime trees was growing sweet and drowsy with the coming evening and the glare had gone off the molten river along with the powerboats, I came at late dusk to a village whose name I did not record. After tethering my boat I wandered through the lanes of this place and found them utterly deserted. There were two inns, large dilapidated buildings; one of them was closed, the other boarded up. The whole place smelt of straw and manure and was strangely quiet. The only living things I saw were three mag-nificent horses, dark chestnut, who cantered nervously and endlessly around a small field sloping to the river. They seemed terrified of something and their fear unnerved me. I sat somewhat uneasily in the next field and ate my supper, and then found growing in a thick bramble hedge around a lightless witch’s cottage a single huge blackberry, almost as big as a small orange. That was my dessert, and exquisite it was. That night I woke to find a silent man standing over me with a torch. He didn’t say anything. As I came awake, he snapped off the torch and s
trode off. In the gibbous moonlight I could see that under his arm he held something long that gleamed with a rod of reflected light – a gun. In the next field the three stallions were still circling restlessly. I could hear them in the night. An odd place altogether.
The next day took me without event to the little village of Elt-mann, and there, through a series of bizarre events too tedious to relate, a succession of complete strangers managed to turn my expected supper of half a stale bread roll and a lonely evening into … wait, I have a list here somewhere … four eggs, seven tomatoes, three bottles of beer, a large carton of chocolate milk, a bag of cookies, a further bag of iced pastries, five apples, a bottle of white wine, a corkscrew as a present and a bank-side rendition of ‘Lili Marlene’ by an elderly grandmother, herself called Lili, who thought I was a good, good man.
Why if I am such a good man did I ultimately come to feel sti-fled, resentful of this outpouring of generosity and interest? Why was I now anxious to get onto the canal and away from this enchanted river where a vagrant stranger could do no wrong, could come to no harm? Why, when I finally sailed away from Eltmann on a morning breeze with one of the many benefactors from the night before still there snapping photos of my departure, did it feel so like some sort of escape?
The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow Page 28
