Spring Tide

I.

The tide came over the path on Tuesday the way a bill arrives, expected and still a surprise, and the marsh stopped being a place you walk through and became a place you look at from the wall.

Two boys rode their bikes into it until the water got serious about their pedals. A woman with a spaniel turned back and said to nobody in particular, well, that's that then, which is the most English sentence I have ever heard and I have heard a great many.

II.

Spring tide, they call it, though it comes in winter too. Nothing to do with the season. It means to leap, which is the only time this landscape gets a verb like that.

The channel filled and kept filling. The reeds went under in rows, politely, like an audience sitting. The heron was not there. The heron is never there on the days you would most like to see it cope.

III.

By four o'clock the path was a rumour under brown water and the dyke wall was doing the one job it has left, badly, adequately, the way most of us work.

I thought about the man in the council van, the notebook, the slow honest accounting of decline, and I went home before the light went and did not write any of it down until now.