Читать книгу The Tree Climber’s Guide - Jack Cooke - Страница 11

London’s skin is deeply sewn with watercourses, though many now conduct silent passage underground. The once mighty River Fleet runs invisible beneath office blocks, and the noble Westbourne is piped under London, confined to the ignominy of an iron tube. Like the roots of the trees, rivers have hidden subterranean capillaries, channelled and culverted beneath the modern city. London buried its waterways when they became a hindrance, and long gone are the days when we might have paddled from our front door to the corner shop. The rivers have become mass sewers, and tributaries that once served as transport links now ferry human effluent and the floating fat of restaurant and home.

Trapped and ignored, it is easy to suppose that, like the tree falling unheard in the forest, if a river flows unseen it has ceased to really flow at all. Yet these waterways are older than the city – older than England even. While their springs still flow, a thousand years interred is a fleeting moment in the life of a river. They surface in secret, running in concrete channels or narrow ditches, and a line of trees is the surest way to trace their covert passage. Where there’s water there will grow life, even if that same water is choked with plastic bags, shopping trolleys and sunken glass.

There is a strong compulsion to climb trees over water. Drawn to long branches above rivers and canals, we are imbued with a misplaced confidence, something in the brain associating water with soft landings and summers past. Inner-city streams conceal submerged dangers and still pools stagnate, but these are superficial deterrents. A tree overhanging the current combines the two fundamentals of wood and water, an elemental landscape in the midst of the man-made. These mesmeric haunts tempt the climber like few other urban spaces.

Perched over water, whether in the arms of a weeping willow or a straight-backed alder, networks of branch and leaf reflect upwards, enshrining the climber in a double image of the tree. The play of shadows and light hypnotises the most care-worn commuter as the water wages an endless battle to lick the city clean.

All London’s streams flow into the wide blue artery of the Thames. Look at a satellite image of the city – snaking lines of trees hug the great river’s bends, clinging to the water’s edge as if trying to escape the metropolis altogether. Some of these are being toppled by riverside development, while others stand proud, like the uninterrupted march of London planes that edges the river from Blackfriars to Fulham. Climbing branches over the Thames we hang over the heart of the city and, if we listen closely, a rare natural sound can be heard – running water.

Canals, brooks and creeks offer an alternative environment, tight channels shaded by trees whose roots thread the water like long white eels. The Thames forms an abrupt gulf between north and south, while these smaller, circumscribed rivers are fissures in suburbia, boundaries crossed by irregular bridges but numberless branches. Many species of tree crowd the long, empty stretches of their straight-sided banks.

When storms lash the city the old waterways show their wrath, heavy rainfall swelling their channels and leaking into our streets, bubbling over manholes and seeping through brick and mortar. Sometimes I long for London’s waters to burst their artificial bonds, purging themselves of their sordid cargo and making islands of bank-side trees. J. G. Ballard imagines such a future in A Drowned World, where the city lies buried in silt beneath a deep lagoon and a primordial hierarchy has re-established itself, rampant plants colonising the stairwells of tower blocks. Floating over a street still visible sixty feet below the water’s surface, the narrator describes the sunken lines of London’s buildings, ‘like a reflection in a lake that had somehow lost its original’. Suspended on the long arm of a London plane or in the tresses of a willow, it would be easy to forget a city ever existed on these banks.

Waterside trees are prime lookouts, places to watch canal boats, Thames Clippers, and the tide of objects lost to London’s current. Whether clutching a high branch over the river or perching above a creek, we enact a two-fold escape, climbing off the ground and then leaving the land altogether. Traversing branches over water allows us to cast off in our imagination; the current takes us with it on a journey, floating past long rows of riverside houses, shipyards and factories, beside green fields and long sandbars and then out into the open ocean. The climber is like lost timber, fallen from the deck of a container ship and set adrift.