The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  I must be honest, though. I doubt very much whether Mr Keats and company ever actually heard a specimen of the bird in full song, because if they had they would have searched around for a more suitable subject for their rapturous verses. True, the song starts off promisingly enough with a few very sweet, piercingly loud whistling notes, so loud in fact that it sounds as though the bird has been miked up. But having got one’s attention, so to speak, it then burbles into a hotchpotch of shrieks and shrilling, mixed with hisses, rusty creaks and catlike yowls, for all the world as though engaged in some life-and-death struggle with a tomcat and a couple of angry kettles. It is certainly not the lyrical outpouring, a singing ‘of Summer in full-throated ease,’ that Keats would have you believe – more like the Emperor’s clockwork nightingale in the last stages of mechanical seizure.

  And while we are in a mood for honesty, let us dispel once and for all any fanciful notions on the subject of dew. It is all very well bedecking with fairy jewels the morning cobwebs, glistening on cowslip leaves or lying in a pearly blanket over the back lawn, but no one ever seems to mention its chief quality, which is that it is simply damp. It is especially damp when you turn over at four in the morning and find that the other half of the pillow is sodden and clammy against your ear, that the foot of your sleeping bag is squelching with condensation, and that the wretched nightingale is still hacking and wheezing away above you at full volume like an elderly squeeze box falling into a cement mixer.

  Note, too, that dew comes accompanied by slugs. There was hardly a morning that I did not arise to find myself heavily encrusted with glistening black slugs sitting stickily on my lower belly or insinuating themselves gently into my left ear. On one occasion I woke and was puzzled to find that despite all my attempts to open my eyes and greet the dawn they appeared to be gummed shut. A groping hand soon discovered the cause: a fat slug lying across each eyelid. Worse still were the snails which would crack with a soft and dreadful splitting noise if I inadvertently rolled onto them in my sleep. The joys of outdoor sleeping, the stars, the night breezes, the smells of grass and water and cool air, were somewhat offset by these natural details that rarely make it into the odes and sonnets of the Romantic Movement.

  My morning routine falls into a steady pattern during this period of fine nights and hot days. I roll my mattress and sleeping bag – they are damp now but will be dried later in the midday sun – I climb out of pyjamas and I slip into a comfortable old pair of bather shorts. I don’t bother with a shirt or vest, as already by seven o’clock it is warming up and I tend to row bare-chested to show off my new tanned, demigod-like torso. I also make a point of shaving daily, sitting on an old stump by the canal. Then, to wake me up properly, a bailer of river water over head and shoulders (bronzed, demigod-like shoulders, did I mention?), a last quick stow of odds and ends and I’m off , gardening gloves on hands, stroking steadily through a light polleny mist rising off the canal as the sun strengthens. All that is left to show that someone has spent the night is a flattened patch of grass on the bank where even now the crushed stems are slowly stretching and unbending and breathing again and half-a-dozen bewildered slugs are heading slowly back to bed.

  The Tunnel of Mauvage, through which I had been forbidden to row, proved to be only a minor challenge. The problem was to work out how to prevent Jack from bumping into the concrete tunnel wall as I hauled her on a rope along the walkway. I solved this after a short period of trial and error by attaching two lines to her, one to the bow and another to her stern. I then shipped her rudder, holding it at an angle with an elastic strap on the tiller, so that she was constantly steering away from the towpath. Thus, though the bow rope was pulling her into the bank, the rudder and the stern rope were urging her out again, and between the two she kept a straight course about three feet out from the wall.

  The other end of the tunnel led out into the green, warm, moist, grass-smelling world of daylight again and I found myself at the head of a gentle valley, winding away into a blue distance. Beech and ash woods rose steeply on either side, but the valley floor was flat, consisting of sunny meadows and pastures, seeded with grasses and a thousand wildflowers – poppies, buttercups, scabious, lady’s bedstraw, crosswort and valerian. Overhead two crows flapped out of the wooded hillside and began mobbing a large bird of prey soaring and tilting just above the treetops. Whatever was it? Too big for a kestrel, but not the heavy blunt build of a buzzard. Then I saw the forked tail, the tapered scimitar wings, the glint of red bronze on its back – a red kite, no less. For the next four hours I would have one or two of these princely birds above me, sometimes stooping to pluck something from the canal, sometimes circling effortlessly high over the valley; on one occasion staging an aerial battle with a rival kite for some morsel held in its talons.

  In Full Flight

  I was falling in love with the dragonflies as well, miniature sun-fuelled helicopters. The females were bronze-green-gold with black stripes; the males were iridescent blue – kingfisher, sapphire, turquoise refracted in a glass splinter. There was a third type, though these might have been damselflies; they were deep, deep satiny midnight-green and their wings were of fine inky gauze. They looked like rich jewelled assassins in mourning veils, and they were everywhere.

  In the mid-afternoon a steady following wind sprung up that polished all the canal to clean hard blue and silver. It was the first breeze in eight days, and the kite above me was making the most of it, angling and tilting on the wind’s plane. Mile after mile I sailed as the valley widened out and flattened, past a small, ugly town, past a huge industrial quarry where no fewer than eight red kites wheeled and squabbled, and so at last to a three-mile run along the curving flank of a hill high above a valley.

  Here there was an aqueduct of grey stone and steel, carrying the canal in one graceful span across the valley floor far below. I really should have stopped to take down my sail, but throwing caution to the gods I ploughed on regardless. A second later I was regretting my rashness. For as I sailed onto the aqueduct, the wind speed increased dramatically and I shot across that dizzy height like a pea through a pea-shooter. Each side of the channel was nothing but a stone kerb, six inches high and less than a foot wide. This was all that separated me from a ninety-foot drop to the river far below and I was ricocheting along this watery tightrope at a speed suffi-cient to send my wake slopping over the rim in a great running wave. No sooner was I onto the aqueduct than I realised the folly of this sailing in the sky but could do nothing about it; I hung on and held my breath. Two minutes later I was over, and was relieved to find myself in another wood, windless and still and safe. I could not help wondering what a strange and splendid sight I must have made to a distant watcher on the hillside: an aerial ship with scarlet sails, like Skillibladir in the old stories, sailing on the rainbow’s bright arch to bring Frey home again from distant lands.

  And so to the end of a long day, the last hour spent rowing to the little halte fluviale at Pagny. I fell asleep under an apple tree, and at three in the morning it began to rain, a thin wetting drizzle, the first for almost three weeks now. It was my last night in the Arcadia of the French canal system. Farewell to ferny locks, to walnut trees, to midday snoozes on grassy banks. Farewell to cuckoo-echoing woods and elder-froth, to pleasant, sleepy éclusiers, to slugs and dew and the strange enchantment of Philomel beneath the stars.

  Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades

  Past the near meadows,

  over the still stream,

  Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

  In the next valley-glades:

  Was it a vision,

  or a waking dream?

  Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?

  I slept. And the next day I reached the start of the River Moselle.

  A Jollyboat in Germany

  Oh, sweet is thy current by town and by tower,

  The green sunny vale and the dark linden bower;

  Thy waves as they dimple sm
ile back on the plain,

  And Rhine, ancient river, thou’rt German again!

  —HORACE WALLACE,

  Ode on the Rhine’s Returning into Germany from France

  From the town of Trier, the Moselle loops along its steep-sided valley all the way down to Coblenz on the Rhine, and this stretch of river was perhaps the most beautiful part of the entire voyage from Wales to Romania. The gorge was so winding and sinuous that often I found myself travelling twenty kilometres and ending up one or two kilometres from where I had started, just across some high ridge or saddle. The valley walls were clothed on either side with terrace upon terrace of vineyards, all stripes of greeny-gold like young gooseberries, draped over the curves of each hill, and here and there in their midst a tiny shrine or chapel or crucifix, or a statue of the Virgin to bless the harvest. As the miles passed, the hills became steeper and craggier with great cliffs and buttresses of reddish sandstone breaking the terraces and looming over the water, but even here the vine rows straggled along the narrowest ledges, stringing along inaccessible ledges and filling gullies and ravines so that it became impossible to guess at how the grapes could be harvested without the aid of mountain-climbing equipment. At one point, in fact, I saw flimsy ladders swarming up the cliff faces, seemingly as frail as willow sticks, and on some cliffs were painted giant sundials, presided over by yet another plaster Mary, watching the slow shadow tick around through the long summer days.

  The very steepest crags were forested with pines and beechwoods and invariably topped by a grim castle: sometimes complete and restored like a great gingerbread cuckoo clock, but more often just a ruinous tower like the stump of some black and rotting tooth. In the crook of each bend, a little fairytale town glided into sight – beamed houses, a tall onion-domed steeple, a gilded and painted Rathaus, a little pier for boats and a huddle of shops and high-gabled houses, bright with window boxes of petunias and geraniums. Best of all were the roses. Every house and café and gasthaus seemed to cultivate these, great rambling trails and trellises of roses, usually deep carmine and smelling of heavenly wine, nodding over doorways, bending over cool stone archways, drooping down to kiss café tables, swarming up sunny walls. I kept stopping to smell them and thinking of all those Germanic fairy tales: Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and Rose Red, Rapunzel or a dozen other stories where to pluck the enchanted rose was to court disaster.

  I didn’t actually pick any, and disaster seemed to be steering clear on the whole. Unless you count the hailstorm that blew out of nowhere one afternoon and in five seconds flat filled the world with a seething, icy, blinding roar. It stung my bare arms and legs, filled my boat with hailstones and sent me careering out of control down a river that had become a hissing white blistered maelstrom. Fortunately I had just come out of a lock so had not yet raised my sail; had I done so, I have no doubt that the suddenness and force of the wind would have snapped the mast like a matchstick. Even as it was, with the sail tightly furled, the wind was enough to drive me downstream for a few minutes as fast as though I were sailing in a good breeze under full sail. Then, as quickly as this vicious fist of hail and ice had struck, out came the sun and I spent an hour gently steaming and drying out as I sailed along in the warm afternoon.

  Despite such moments of drama, an astonishing question kept insisting: why wasn’t everyone else doing exactly as I was? For there was no doubt about it: this was the most perfect occupation known to humankind. When the sail was out full and I was propped up in the stern on cushions, feet up on the thwart, idly nudging the tiller with my elbow, I was the envy of the valley! Workers high up on the terraced hillsides tying up vine tendrils pointed and laughed and sighed. They were mere dots of bright colour on the green slopes, but I could tell that they resumed their hot work dreaming of sails and pith helmets and lands downstream. On gleaming cruise ships, wealthy tourists from Detroit paused, a glass of overpriced Moselle to their lips; they loosened their collars a little as they contemplated diving in and joining me, to send later perhaps a brief postcard to their bosses back home, saying, ‘Gone to Black Sea. I’ll explain later. ’ Or perhaps no note at all …

  I spent one night in a village purple with columbines and famous for an ancient stone carving of Romans rowing a ship full of wine barrels, and another in a Weinkeller overhung by lime trees where nested a redstart, and so arrived at the jewel of the Moselle Valley: the fairytale town of Cochem. Here, Germanic fairytale architecture comes into full flower. It is a mediaeval town of wood-carved gingerbread houses and steep alleyways o’ertopped by a castle from Disneyland. At certain hours twenty bells in one of the carved gables chime out music-box tunes. The carvings on the gable ends of the Mayor’s house are caricatures of the Mayor’s chief rivals and tell an amusing story which I have now forgotten – as indeed I have forgotten the reason why there is a nearby statue of a goat being crushed in a wine-press.

  Cochem was so delightful that I decided to spend a few days there and replenish my funds with a spot of busking. I got out my tin-whistle, propped my pith helmet in the main square by the fountain, and started to play. I half expected, as the fluting notes echoed through the gabled streets, to hear the patter and chatter, the squeaking and rustling and rumbling, of half a million rats come pouring out on every side on their way down to the rolling river to perish. However, the only result was the occasional clink of a handful of deutschmarks being thrown hatward, and with that I was more than happy. There were many tourists in the town and at one stage a group of Americans came panting into the square following the strident voice and raised brolly of a lady tour guide. Oddly, with the whole square to choose from, she strode over to within three feet of me and my tin-whistle and mustered her flock in ringing tones.

  ‘Gazzer round, ladies und gentlemen, qvickly if you pleez. Here ve see ze marketplatz of Cochem viz ze byootiful fountain und all ze liddle carvings, ja?’ By this time I was pressed up to the fountain-coping by the woman’s gesturing brolly and she was enunciating with consonants that would chop wood, so I brought my rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ to an end and waited for her to finish and move away. After some minutes, in which I heard the amusing story of the mayor and the gable ends, and an explanation of the bibulous goat, the woman pointed at a far corner of the square and shooed her brood in that direction, urging them to ‘climb ze schteps und ve all meet at ze schloss, ja, gut!’ As they were moving off , I sent them on their way with a medley of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and the ‘Dixie March.’ There were a few smiles and some of the tourists threw some money my way, happy to hear something other than accordions and Oom-Pah-Pah music, played by someone who wasn’t wearing lederhosen with a shaving brush stuck in his hat. But just as I was breaking into ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas,’ back came the tour guide, her brolly stabbing at the cobbles. Over the top of my playing she rapped out a question of which I only understood one word: ‘deutschmarks.’ Assuming that it was something like, ‘Oh, what beautiful playing, and how you enhance our little town with such sweet melodies, I’d like to reward you with some good German deutschmarks,’ I nodded towards my pith helmet to indicate where she could throw a token of her appreciation. At that she strode over to the hat, rummaged around in its depths, extracted three deut-schmark coins and held them up to my nose before pocketing them.

  ‘Zat,’ she explained sternly, ‘is for listening to my tour.’ And with a click of her heels and a curt nod she strode off. Pipers still get short shrift in fairytale German towns, it would seem. Bring back the rats, I muttered, and couldn’t refrain from a quick burst of the Dam-busters theme and a bit of Vera Lynn to send her on her way.

  Later that day I too climbed up the steep steps to the castle. I remember a lot of roses, balconies, carved wood and a lamp fashioned like a mermaid with a lucky red breastbone to rub and make a wish. I did so, wishing for a cooling breeze on the morrow to take me onward on the next stage of the voyage.

  The following morning I woke to find that my wish had been granted. The sun was still bright
but a cool breeze had sprung up from the south to bear me swiftly downstream to Coblenz and the mighty Rhine.

  The scenery now, though still pretty by any normal standards, began to fade a little in enchantment. Swifts screamed in the sky, redstarts were common, and the riverside had become painted with the mauve of scabious and vetch, yellow St John’s Wort and the sinister greater celandine with its livid orange juice bleeding from snapped stems. These are the plants of high summer, of dusty dry highways, and the river itself was feeling like a country road as it drew nearer and nearer to the big city of Coblenz and the highway of the Rhine.

  Approaching Cochem

  In the last twenty miles or so, the wind gave out and my rowlock began to present a serious problem. With almost every stroke of the oars, the timber of the gunwale was creaking and cracking, slowly working loose around the rowlock pin, and indeed as I looked around, I realised how shabby poor Jack de Crow had become. Her foredeck was a mass of peeling blisters, and the prow had been battered into a crunch of splinters by some careless handling in a lock.

  I limped around the last bend, through a great grimy lock and beneath a blackened bridge thunderous with traffic. There, a short way ahead, lay the Rhine River. At this point I panicked. Here on the right bank of the Moselle mouth was a sheer wall of concrete where huge white river cruisers were docking and departing with a flurry of propellers and hooters. On the left bank was a waste of black boulders and weeds fringing a wild sort of park. The chances of mooring a small dinghy safely seemed very small. Furthermore, to carry on down and into the Rhine itself was out of the question. Not only was it impossibly busy with traffic, but it was flowing in quite the wrong direction for me. I suspected that if I so much as ventured out into its main stream I would find myself in Holland by suppertime.