A River Runs Thru It

I joined the Dowlais Male Voice Choir last night…

Y’know…as ya do…

Many of you will know my appallingly anti-social habit of singing at passers-by on my walks. It would be fair to say though that I haven’t turned my singing voice to any useful purpose since school, when, as a member of the choir, I used to scare the bejeesus out of the music teachers with my over-enunciation and positively comical mouth-movements. Joining the Dowlais choir though was something I always thought I’d do once we moved back to the Valleys. Why Dowlais? Pure literary vanity, really – In Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood there is a line, spoken by a dead Welsh sailor, who, as his one question to the world of the living and dry, asks “How’s the tenors in Dowlais…?”

Plus, if I’m honest, it was the only choir of high standing of which I was aware, right on my doorstep – almost literally, as it happens, because for all they’re the Dowlais choir, they don’t, in fact, practice in Dowlais any more: they practice within spitting distance of our flat, down in Caedraw! This will only mean something to those with a reasonable grasp of just how entirely Merthyr is made up of upward-sloping hills. Truly, even the downhills go up in Merthyr. Dowlais is pretty high up on one of the uppier bits, whereas Caedraw is about as down as Merthyr gets before you have to start calling it something else. So for the downwardly inclined (see what I did there?) potential chorister, being able to combine the Dowlais choir with Caedraw practices is something of a gift.

Of course, nothing’s ever entirely straightforward in the life of a Disappearing Man. My brother, bless him, decided early yesterday afternoon that some air was called for.

“Wanna go for a stroll?” he offered. I looked up at him over the edge of my computer screen, where a particularly tricky edit was taking place. I raised my eyebrows at him. I would have only raised the one in trademark quizzical fashion, but mine don’t seem to do that – they work as a team, or not at all. I like to kid myself my meaning was clear though – “A stroll, you say? You interest me strangely, O brother mine…”

He grinned, just a little. Then he saw my Interest…and raised it.

“Or a Walk?”

“I’ll get my shoes on,” I said, a little unsure about who had just called who’s bluff.

Now, as the countdown to my Night Hike does that scary comedy movie thing where the hands start whizzing round and round on the clock, I should like to point out one very important thing. I…am an Urban Walker. There, I said it. Give me pavements to pound, give me parks to cross, give me Stuff To Look At with a reassuring tendency to stay still, and stuff to stand on that carries that tendency to something of an extreme, and I am a Happy Walker. The Great Outdoors, on the other hand, seems to me to rather miss the point of tarmac and walls.

Nevertheless, we started off quite promisingly – we went to Cyfarthfa Park, which you’ve read about me walking around and around until the G-force or the ducks or the crazy people got me. Then we started heading towards Cefn, which was the launching point for my accidental walk one mad weekend to Cwm Cadlan. Then he grinned at me again.

“Tell you what?” he offered.

“Do,” I said, still in relatively good humour despite the burning calves of lack-of-practice.

“Let’s follow the river!”
“O…K,” I said, in notosmuch good humour as a sense of gently dawning dread.

It turned out that “following the river” involved a bridge, a dark muddy path, the negotiating of a moderately steep downward bank, a single file procession along a somewhat dubious wall running along the side of what was either a sewage outlet or the secret spring from which all leek and potato soup is sprung into the world, and another bridge.

“We should ignore the bridge,” I said, my habitual cowardice coming to the fore.

“Yes…” said Geraint. “I’m sure you’re right…” And he walked over the bridge.

“This is exactly how the first twenty minutes of a low-budget east German horror movie would go!” I told him. Then I sighed and followed in the young buck’s bootsteps.

As it turned out, we weren’t so much “following” the river as “stalking it, going through its garbage, taping its bank records together and sending it creepy love letters in which we cut off its head.” The river – sometimes sluggish, sometimes intense and thunderous, was right beside us, though, just for safety’s sake, it did keep its distance at the bottom of a steep damp muddy ravine which was always just one mis-step away from taking us down to meet its wet friend.

“I know where we’re going!” said Geraint with the practised confidence of a parent used to bullshitting a not-entirely-gullible five-year-old about the world.

“Really?” I demanded.

“Welll,” he said, waggling a finger experimentally in his ear. “I know where the river comes out, so…erm…yeah, let’s say I do and crack on, eh?”

“Yes,” I muttered darkly. “Let’s…”

So on we cracked, following pathways while there were pathways, and tracks when there were tracks. When there weren’t tracks, he forged ahead, largely powered by bullshit and optimism (which, now I think about it, are probably one and the same…). Then:

“Ah.”

“What?” I said, immediately alerted. “What’s ‘Ah’? That sounds like a bad ‘Ah.’”

“Wellll…” he said again. I prepared for more bullshit, but this time it was worse. This time he tried The Truth.

“I’m a little concerned,” he explained. “You remember back there, where you said there was an uphill path, and we chose the downhill one cos it was closer to the river?”

“I do remember that, yes,” I said. “I remember that really rather vividly. What about it?”

He sniffed, gazing across the sudden expanse of field that had made itself recently known to us. The river ran through it

“I think that might have been a mistake,” he said.

“I have to get back to the accepted definition of civilisation by seven,” I reminded him. “I’m singing tonight…”

“Hmm,” he nodded, mystically. If we hadn’t been miles from anywhere, and if I hadn’t been entirely dependent on his optimistic navigation skills, I might have gently stoved his head in for that mystical nod.

“Tell you what?” he said again. This time I just raised my forehead at him – the eyebrows came reluctantly with it, as if roused from sleep at far-too-early o’clock.

“Let’s cross the river here, and…erm…see, shall we?”

I should say about my brother – he’s not always this godawful gung-ho spirit-of-adventure type. With a good slouch up, he can be as wretchedly, sullenly cynical as the best of us. But there’s something about the Fresh Air that I do my best to avoid that gets him all…fired up. We cross the river, and yomped on, upwards, the ground getting perversely muddier and squelchier as we went.

“Ah! Bastard!” he yelled suddenly. I saw him do a kind of gazzelian quick-step, from squelchy bit to rock to leaning-on-stick to dry land. It was very impressive, but I figured I had a better way. There was a ridge, and I went up on it.

“Aaaaaaaaargh!!” I yelled.

“Yep,” he said, too calmly for my liking, “that was why I…”

I’d walked straight into a patch of clawing, evil bramble I stepped sideways to escape its clutches.

SQUELCH!

“Goddamnsonofabitchin’bastard Great Outdoors!” I yelled, adapting my wife’s favourite obscenity to fit the occasion. There was a cold, inevitable glooping sound as my left foot sunk beneath a ripple of liquid mud that filled my shoe. “Aaaaargh!” I yelled. “Did I mention Aaaaargh?!”

“You did, in all fairness.”

“Then double aaaargh with bloody bramble-thorns on!”

He lent me his impromptu walking stick and I punted my way to safety, if not to dryness.

I sighed, gave him back his stick, and we yomped on.

About a hundred yards further on, he paused.

“Can you hear banjos?” he whispered.

“No I bloody can’t, what are you on about?”

He grinned again. “I’ve never actually seen the end of that film…Deliverance. Our DVD player wasn’t’ up to much at the time we rented it, it kept stopping.”

“It probably didn’t want to spoil the surprise for you,” I said, pushing past him and taking the lead for once. A few hundred yards further on, I stopped.

“Er…Ger?”

“Yeah?”

“Y’know that idea you had?”
“Which one?”

“The one about ‘following the river?”

“Yeah.”

“There are two rivers.”
“Are there?”

“Yep!”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m almost certain that’s not supposed to happen.”

“So now what?”

He came and took a look, surveying data from scouting trips over two decades earlier that had been implanted in his brain by some distant Akelah.

“Well…if that’s what I think it is…” he said, gesturing at the side of a valley with his stick, “then we’re almost certainly nearer to civilisation than you might think. Let’s go this way,” he gestured, striding boldly forward and taking one of the two paths.

“You’re sure?” I asked. “Cos we could always split up and die separate horrible deaths…”

“Well, we could…” he agreed, “but you’ve got choir practice tonight.”

“Good point. Well said. Lead on, Macduff!” He led on, letting my misquote pass in silence. We walked, and in some cases squelched, and then he turned rapidly right, up a pathway I hadn’t seen was there…and civilisation gave a friendly pat on the back. Tarmac! Beautiful, black, a ribbon of Man’s indomitable determination to conquer the squelchy bastard that is Nature. We walked some more, and eventually, there were houses, and pubs, and chip shops, and little bastard urchins on scooters, and all of it was tinged with a wonderful new light, because we’d lived to see it again.

Later on, he came to sit in on my first choir practice. It’s worth bearing in mind at this point that the last time I was at one of these practices was just last Wednesday. I was convinced the hall where the choir practised was attached to a car park. I walked around and around the car park, peeking in every building that abutted it. Geraint followed now in my footsteps. Round, and round, and round again.

“They’ve moved it!” I declared to the car park.

Geraint wandered off. I did another dog-like circuit of the car park, refusing to accept what was becoming increasingly inevitable.

“Ant!!” he called to me (like many people, he calls me Ant, having known me since before I decided to truncate my name to Tony). He waved. “Found it!!”

“HOW?!” I called.

“I followed someone that looked like a chorister,” he explained. Man, I hate it when people do sensible things and turn out to be right. Clearly, the hall was nowhere near where I’d thought it was.

Wednesday, OK? Four days, and my brain had wiped all accurate route information from my memory. Meanwhile, my brother relied on hazy recollections from over two decades ago to ensure we didn’t die in the godless wilderness.

“Ant?” he said.

“What?”

“You are…and I say this in the kindest of ways…but you’re completely clueless, aren’t you?”

“You say this like it’s new information,” I muttered, and we went in. I sang, he listened. I had a great night. We had a pint together before going home and collapsing.

Without getting hopelessly sentimental about the thing, it’s been horribly good to have my brother home for this time. Horrible inasmuch as the reason he’s home is unabashedly grim. But really good too, inasmuch as it’s been like an evolution, like our boyhood projected forward through time into a fashion of manhood. When you’re separated by distance, it’s depressingly easy to forget all the good stuff about your family. This time, sparked by Dad’s illness and subsequent death, has really felt like a welding experience, a re-melting of our family unit together (with my sister-in-law and nephew calling in on Skype from Real Life.

The next two days are the peak points of this experience. Good and bad together, in all probability. At least I know though that if I get lost in the cemetery, at least one of us will know the way….