Covenant of Water

I walk out early on Sunday morning, the streets deserted, washed clean from the rain, the pavements shining wet. In this Victorian part of town, with its small factories, chapels and workers’ cottages, the uneven pavements catch puddles. The steeper streets have rivulets in their gutters, leaving little pools afterwards, next to the smooth-worn granite kerbs. Even the common grit is made lustrous by flowing water. I look into these puddles like a child at seaside rock-pools.

I pass over a brook emerging from a culvert at one side.

There’s a Victorian brickwork arch, almost overgrown. All the streams are full now. At the other side of the road I cannot quite see the brook, as it’s doubly fenced off by factory boundaries. I hear a loud rushing sound, almost white noise. At first I think it’s an air-conditioning plant, but it can’t be, there are no vents visible. Passing through a gate normally locked, I discover a hidden waterfall. The stream narrows, drops several feet before disappearing into the jaws of the culvert, whose teeth are iron bars to prevent children and animals from being swept into that dark channel.

We’ve had drought for several years in these parts, and though it has rained they’ve said that the underground aquifers remain almost empty, and I take their word for it, particularly as the stream which flows through Hughenden Park had become a mere sunken path. In 2005 peppermint grew in that stream, with bejewelled green mint beetles feeding on it, but last summer it dried up. A “no fishing” sign, above a dam with sluice-gates and a little island, was surrounded by dry land. Now that the stream is back, the dog-owners go over the bridges again, and some of the dogs splash across joyfully, though it’s February still. As a child of five I used to go with my cousin down to the “Wishing Well”. Everyone called it that though it was actually a spring, emerging from the mouth of a stone lion’s head into a granite basin. Our ritual was to cup our hands and drink as much as we could, then walk up the other hill in strict silence till we’d gone three times around the Wishing Tree. Then we would each make a wish.

Will the polar ice caps melt and engulf us? Can we stop them by wishing? We still have rainbows, so does the covenant between God and man still hold?

And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud:
and I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh;
and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.

That’s from Genesis, 9: 14-15. I read the full text carefully (verses 11 through 17) and there is no suggestion that the covenant only applies to acts of God. It’s equally applicable to flooding traceable to human interference in nature. I’d like to believe it.