A Dead River

One of my favorite fish locations was where a lorry wheel caused an obstruction to the flow of the river and gave the fish shelter from the pressure of the current. I once used a white tin tray as a marker to stand by in order to make an accurate cast under a tree which the trout favored; until it was washed away in a flood. I would prefer that these objects were not there of course and that the river was in its original, natural, pristine state.

Rivers are constantly used by unthinking people to dispose of unwanted objects and substances. The river has this marvelous quality of movement that carries whichever offending object is dropped therein away, or under, and out of sight. It is like a garbage disposal unit; except the garbage is not disposed of but appears elsewhere. It drifts out of sight of the depositor and offends the sight of another observer further downstream. Solid objects: Unsightly, but not dangerous.

The dangerous stuff is of the same quality as water – liquid, sometimes clear, and its power to destroy is mostly hidden. Under the foam on that dreadful Sunday the water ran clear and clean; but it was poison: it robbed the water of its life giving oxygen and suffocated the fish. Not just the fish died but every living creature in the river was murdered. On Monday, in two randomly chosen locations, 700 corpses of trout and grayling were counted by official ecology experts. So how many were lying out of sight? In the five mile stretch from Huddersfield to the Calder I would say thousands. My experience of fishing the river day to day suggests that thousands of fish were resident and the poison was indiscriminate and total.

I stood looking at the river on the following Tuesday willing a fish to rise, but all were dead. The river was dead. There were no clouds of flies hovering over the water, even the ducks had left and the water flowed, ever onwards, oblivious of its loss.