The Williams

We drive north on blue metal and bitumen for Dungog, then Salisbury, where the road narrows, crouches and bends for hill country, then opens and glides by milking sheds on river flats. At the foot of the Barringtons we leave the car and walk into a forest of blue gums—lime-washed pillars they hold the roof high, and their clerestory windows call the sky to preach. We pass on the sermon, leave the track and press on into canopied shade, stepping around lawyer vines, looking for the wreckage of rocks that's the Williams in its upper reaches.

Offline for the Dorribang,

for untrammelled song. On the brink

of a fall, bright waters down

from the Tops, are playing for time—

they forgo forward motion.

Touch the flank of a flooded-gum.

Tumbled granite with the weight of a mountain, we find a seat and cleave to the sounds of the stream before us—a riffle that runs short and fast for a pool, whose mouth is a sculpted chute cut into stone. Directly opposite I spy a rock whose Neanderthal brow shades an unwavering gaze. When I point it out, you decide it's a not a vengeful water-spirit, but a gnome wearing a brown felt hat. You tell me you're going in search of an eel where the water loses its way over a pebble bottom, and the wide reaching branches of a river-oak—it knows all about the trilogy that's The Lord of the Rings—create a patchwork of light and dark.

As a boy in New Zealand

you'd tramp far in the rain

to set lines in a brook. Hungry,

you'd smoke your catch over boughs

of tea-tree brush—alive to

an unworded world within.

The day will be hot, the sky is unclouded and the wind from the north. On the river the breeze is cool, and every so often we walk into a mulled-wine body of air, dark and sweet with odours from the forest floor.

Stone by stone the river bed

conducts, each one a heightened

moment, the broken ankle

that might have been. Fear of falling

and a love of flight, our steps

and our leaps, make like a rapids.

We stop by a tributary, a creek whose last moment is a waterfall, which throws a spume like a wave breaking before an offshore wind. Me and you, we've some catching up to do, and it stings when I tell you, how slow I've been to comprehend, that intensity is no measure of love, and ease with the ordinary an under-appreciated form of beauty.

All rivers are inclined

to dissolution. Muddy and

mythic some grow a delta,

others bifurcate for a north

and a south arm—their final

act the confluence of friendship.

Upstream of us, slabs of tilted strata jut into the path of the river, and we decide to see what's on the other side. You're still on the hunt for an eel—short-finned or long, it doesn’t matter. You tell me of their life cycle, how after twenty or maybe thirty years, the eels leave the pools and rapids that are their home, for breeding grounds in the Coral Sea. They cover thousands of sea miles, and all the while they're dying.

In the manner of the stream

it lives in, an eel is quick and

slow. Like water it carries

a memory of where it came from

and where it's going—back in

the ocean, all it hears is home.

The drive home unfolds with the mind of a river, and while it lasts I let the car flow. Together we marvel at the story of baby eels. Glass eels they're called at first—tiny filaments of light almost undetectable in water—and when they grow a little, and turn opaque, they’re elvers. The magic bit is how they find their way back to the stream where their ancestors lived—and that nobody can quite explain how they do it.

Evening light and jersey cows—

languid they cross the road udders

groaning. Idling there a while,

we settle for the rhythms

and smells, and we smile at

the farmer's curt nod to move off.

Close to Dungog we slow for a poorly patched side road, a detour across the river and then along its eastern bank. Friends of mine used to live near here, and my memories are fond. We stop and walk the rolling under feet pebble bed of the stream. I pick a few polished stones and work them like worry beads—I'll take them home.

The low deck of a timber

bridge over the cobble bed

of the Williams. She-oaks mid-

stream—foliage a wave. If I fret,

I'll suck a river pebble—

the tang of everything it's been.