The Quiet Season

This spring the rivers went quiet in a way none of us had seen. No cars at the bridges, no ghillies in the car parks with their flasks, no visiting anglers working down a pool in the long light. The whole apparatus of the season simply did not arrive. For a few weeks the Erriff and the Bundorragha ran through an empty country, watched by no one, and if you were lucky enough to live within a walk of them you had a strange gift: the water as it is when nobody is looking at it.

And the odd thing, the thing I keep turning over, is that it did not look emptier than usual. That is the whole story, if you want it in a sentence. The absence of people this spring was shocking and total and everywhere remarked upon. The absence of fish has been just as real, and larger, and going on for thirty years, and almost nobody remarks upon it at all, because it arrived slowly, and the thing about a slow disappearance is that every single year looks more or less like the last.

The salmon that ran these rivers in the memory of men still living came in numbers that are now simply not credible to a young angler. In the 1970s something on the order of a million and three-quarter wild salmon came back to Irish rivers in a year. The runs a young person sees today are a fraction of that, a fraction small enough that the scientists have stopped talking in millions and started talking in per cents: the per cent of smolts that leave and come back, which is now down to a figure you can hold in one hand. A river that gave up a fish every hour to a good rod now gives up a fish a week, or a fish a season, or a story about the fish somebody’s father caught.

I do not want to make the virus into a metaphor. People were frightened and people were dying and it would be cheap to press the year into service for a fishing essay. But there is one honest thing the quiet has to teach, and it is this: we noticed the empty car parks because they emptied all at once. Catastrophe, when it comes quickly, at least has the decency to announce itself. What is happening to the wild salmon of the west is the other kind, the kind that comes at the speed of a childhood, so that the boy who is disappointed by this season’s few fish has no idea that his grandfather would have called this same river dead, and the grandfather, if he is still about, has learned not to say so at the dinner table.

Baselines shift. That is the phrase the ecologists use, and it is the quietest and most frightening idea in the whole business. Each generation takes the diminished world it is handed as the normal one, measures its losses only against that, and passes on a world diminished again. The father teaches the son to be grateful for four fish where he himself expected forty. The son will teach a grateful grandson to treasure one. Nobody lies. Everybody adjusts. And the number goes down, and down, inside a fog of reasonable contentment.

There are real reasons, and I will get to them properly another day, because they deserve better than a paragraph: the warming sea, the emptying ocean feeding grounds, and the cages we have allowed to sit in the doorways of the rivers, breeding the parasite that meets the young fish on its way out. Not all of it is ours to fix. Some of it is. The distinction matters more than anything, and I mean to spend some time on it.

But this spring is not for the argument. This spring is only for noticing, for using the strange enforced stillness to see the water plainly, without the comforting bustle of a season laid over it. Go and stand at a pool you have known for years. Not at a fishing pool, particularly; any pool. Watch it for an hour the way you would watch it if you had never been told what it used to hold. It is beautiful. The mountains still come down to it. The light still does what the light does here. And it is emptier than it looks, emptier than it was when you were young, emptier than anyone standing beside you is likely to say out loud.

That noticing is where everything else has to start. You cannot ask a country to save what it has already agreed, quietly and by degrees, to stop expecting. The first task, before the science, before the policy, before the arguing that is surely coming, is simply to remember what a living river is, and to refuse, however politely, to get used to less.

The people will come back to the water; they were back by the summer, and glad of it, and so was I. The question the quiet leaves behind is the harder one, and it will outlast the year. The fish have been going for a long time. Are we going to keep pretending we can’t see it.