Times of Need

It took me twenty years to notice the river. I’ve lived and worked by the Tyne since 2003, but in all that time I never took serious account of it, or thought of it as anything other than a bland fact of the landscape: I never really felt it. Oh, I noticed things – things about it, and around it. I noticed objects – like the whole tree trunks which came down the engorged river after inland storms, or the mini-icebergs which appeared from the west like arctic fever dreams after deep cold spells. I noticed weather: the morning river-mist clearing to pink and orange winter skies; the way the Tyne appeared to boil like mercury around the legs of the staithes when evening rain set in. And I noticed wildlife – the black cormorants gliding silently, low to the water like guided missiles; or the pair of friendly shelduck which nested just beneath the cycle path, catching the hearts of passers-by as they chaperoned their offspring.

But something was missed in these observations, something I find hard to articulate. Certainly, I too often felt the need to seek out places away from the river – safer, more familiar territory like suburban parks, or little corners of woodland. I spent lunchtimes riding north, away from the Tyne, or wishing that I could cross it more directly, to get to the under-explored south side. On the occasions that I followed the course of the river I found myself entering mysterious and unexpected lands – like the mini ravine crossed by the Hagg Bank bridge, the arched precursor to the Tyne bridge, which on one silent summer day felt like a ruin abandoned to a jungle – or the seemingly interminable incline of the wooded Blaydon Burn dene, a post-industrial wagonway still strewn with slag and coal dust, and overlooked from its high edges by unreadable red-brick ruins. I was intrigued, but in some odd way overwhelmed; I felt an urge – unexamined, then – to consign the Tyne to the status of a mere geographical feature – something to navigate or avoid, but not to meaningfully interrogate.

A lot has changed in the last twenty years, and in recent times I’ve felt anxiety increase, almost as a general growth in the world, but especially in myself, as all the congregating crises of ecological destruction, climate breakdown and emergent fascism become felt in everything. It seemed to be as a corollary of this that I found myself one day, for the first time, really hearing the voice of the river, and feeling a sudden, epiphanic warmth for its slow, majestic heave. I’d been out already that day on a small work-break, and found myself at the riverside, at low tide, watching a procession of teal methodically billing the mudbanks for breakfast. There were three of them in a line, synchronised, probing alternately left and right as they shucked at the mud. As they passed, they seemed to sense my presence without looking, and veered away to the right to continue breakfasting uninterrupted, without a break to their rhythm. This simple, almost comedic moment had already partially lifted a black mood, and so I went out again that afternoon, in warm autumn sunshine, with the tide high and the teal now absent. I walked slowly towards the quayside, hardly thinking of anything, and realised in a moment that I had been half-consciously listening to something, something which had lulled me into a pleasingly vacant state: it was the gentle, ceaseless slip-slap of the water on the concrete bank. And in that moment I stopped, turned to look back to the west, and saw the great wideness of the Tyne curving solemnly through the wooded landscape: charcoal, slate grey and purple through green. There seemed something European about it, like a northern iteration of the Danube or the Elbe – a link to an ancient, pre-glacial, continental past. The river spoke that day, and I saw it as it really was: a great, timeless force of life, nature on a more than human scale, seen for an instant just as the first humans to arrive here must have seen it: something awesome and abundant, to be feared, cherished, and respected.

After this – and after investing in some decent binoculars – I began to pay closer attention to the river and the life around it; all the activity which had been going on under my nose for years, but which I’d blithely ignored. I made regular stops on my early rides to work to watch the birds on the central mud banks, and saw sights and species I’d never seen before – like the greater black-backed gull, huge even at a distance, which held at bay the awesome combined force of a gang of carrion crows and a fiercely vocal crowd of swooping herring gulls, as it tore at some unidentifiable prize deposited on the exposed mud. On my journeys home I’d pause by the old, disintegrating pigeon lofts to listen for the call of the curlew: that note of upland desolation sounding in the heart of the city. And on lunch-breaks I rode to where the New Burn joins the Tyne, and saw the great congregations of black-headed gulls, redshanks, lapwings and oystercatchers circling around and between the scrap metal plant and the new business park, settling and unsettling from the water’s edge with each passing pedestrian. It felt like there was harmony of sorts here: the cranes lifting the scrap in the cold sunshine, the thoughtful riparian planting by the business park, the ever-shifting flocks, and the workers with their lunchtime sandwiches. It felt like, here and for now at least, there was some balance to be maintained, and some small redress for the wild – something, however compromised, that was worthy of protection.

In this new light, I thought again about the strange assemblage of plants along the riverside – always noticed, but not deeply considered: the massed white froth of the sea asters, the bird-sown rowans and cotoneasters, the sprawling fig trees and creeping raspberries – all that unique mixture of the native and non-native, of garden varieties and misplaced meadow plants, of tough woodland pioneers and surprising seaside specialists. It seemed to confirm something I’d long felt about Newcastle and the north-east: a place that can seem dour and austere from the outside, but which has acted, in the past and maybe still now, like a refuge for those that might be in need of it – a colourful and welcoming home for all. Here, a thousand kittiwakes storm the towers of the Tyne bridge and the Baltic every spring, raising their cacophony over the city noise and the traffic – and the locals curse, and run to avoid the falling shit, but wouldn’t change it for the world.