Learn to read the water, you don’t know what you see

Like a fool in a swim short, I walk onto the beach. On the other side the skyline of Rotterdam, on my head a strong diving mask, -7, the jamot glasses extra thick. In times of chatgpt it is the writer’s job to go there where there are no data yet. Descend to the depths of the soul, for example, or take a dip in the riddles of the Nieuwe Maas.

The water is still winter cold, biting my ankles. I would have liked to have outsourced this splash to AI, but that modern oracle is unfortunately still too stupid. Recently I found here on the tide line, for example, the rotting head of a beast, the crows danced around it. « A porpoise, » Hallucinated my identification app, « 100 % sure. » But the canines of the animal poked in your fingertips, the lump tubes felt bumpy exactly like with omnivores: it turned out to be the skull of a boar. O that siteblind self -confidence of the computer brain. You fall for it like this, but you have to keep looking out of your caps yourself.

And that is why I jump into the water now, with one, simple question: what does the river look like under the water level?

That question was whispered to me by the book How to read water from the British nature guide Tristan Gooley. That book changed my daily life a bit. In that life I cycle almost daily to my workplace in the bend of the river, half an hour, half an hour back. Along the way I do visual beach juts. I search among the basalt blocks for sludge -stained laughing gas bottles and stolen license plates; to willow branches with beavers of beavers; to eels chopped by ship screws. I thought I knew the river: the rhythms of the tide, the salty rotting algae, the crows and seagulls that hunt for crabs in the pools.

But you no longer see the things you see, it turned out when I was How to read water weld. Gooley tells how you can read traces in the water, such as the Vikings or the Polynesians. Gooley herself climbed the Kilimanjaro as a teenager and later crossed the Atlantic Ocean solo – both by plane and by sailboat. Such extreme boy scouts are often shit, more concerned with records than looking around. But Gooley is a generous, curious nerd. He tells how the Polynesians peered at the ‘wrinkle cards’ at the sea and could distract on the basis of the golf patterns whether there was an island for miles away. But luckily you don’t have to go to the Pacific: water behaves the same everywhere so you might as well peer at the ripples of a duck in a ditch. Or the waves of your local river.

Looked in a mirror

Until I read this book, I had broken my eyes on that simple question: what color does the river have? Green -brown of course, I thought, as a mast tree bark. Or yes, sometimes also muddy than the Amazon. Okay, often also dark blue by the evening, tends to my indigo-filling ink. On time and then along with silver litter, in very exceptional cases azure blue, like a lagoon, or orange of the hissing sun.

And so on. All those answers were perhaps beautiful and true – all equally wrong.

Gooley let me do this simple viewing exercise: stand on the quay of a wide river, first look straight down to the water and then let your look slide slowly to the other side, paying attention to the color of the river. You will notice that the hue is changing, depending on the corner of your gaze. Just like when you look diagonally at a telephone screen, it explains: then the screen becomes a mirror. You also notice that effect in water, it is not for nothing that it is called a ‘water level’.

Shocking: If you look at water, you rarely see the water itself, usually the air above it. That is why the river looks blue under a blue sky and gray when it is cloudy. If the wind strokes the water, towards you, the water seems darker (about the velvet from light to dark when you stroke over it).

Then there is the swimming pool effect: a swimming pool looks like sky blue, but the tiles are white and water has no color. How is that possible? Because water is filtered away. Blue remains the longest. The river can also be such a swimming pool, with clear light and water. Sometimes, if you walk along the bank and look perpendicularly through the mirror to the yellow sand on the bottom – yes then that Dutch river river can also seem azure blue. But then lower a bottle of water to a string and lift it up again and, look, the river water is as colorless as tap water.

I had not seen the river at all thousands of times: all the time I had looked in a mirror.

The book taught me to watch as a detective and turned the bike ride into an exciting series. I knew that the new Maas is a tidal river: the difference between high and low tide is as large as the length of a person. But thanks to Gooley, I learned that apart from the moon and the sun, there are hundreds of other factors that determine which piece of beach is drying out today (some variables occur once every eighteen years, note: in 2033 there is another super tide!).

Anyway. I went to pay attention to such things, on the way. How you can see ‘cat feet’: dark spots on the water where there was a gust of wind; How a tidal river can sometimes flow in two sides at the same time: in one place the water still flows towards the mountains, a few kilometers away again towards the sea; How to grow on the orange and gray lichen on the quay how high the water is; that cormorants hunt with low tide; How helicopters when they fly above cities often follow the river, they draw meanders in the sky – and so on.

Are you doing something about it? Nothing, I thought first, reading the water is just fun, just like you can use a pine cone as a barometer. Schaubben wide open? Nice weather. Schaubs closed? Rain on the way. (At home one jokes: pine cone wet? It rains! Pine cone away? A tornado).

But you will benefit from it, I know now. Firstly, your life becomes less boring if you know what to look out for. Then your eyes get insiders and they catch more and more. An cormorant with an eel in the mouth that winds itself around the neck of the bird like a strangle snake. Oystercatchers who forage where a repeat current loves sand and flourish korfmussels behind a breakwater. A swarm of dozens of collar parakeets that shaves low above the orange river like a green cloud (I am still waiting for a peregrine falcon to dive on the cloud: the swarm is told to me, then splashes like a flaring in all directions).

Compulsory school subject

Drunk from watching I arrive at work, as if I cycled for miles through aquariums. What is the world fucking beautiful, I write down. I can blame Silicon Valley for my screens addiction, but maybe I had made that other screen, my natural field of vision, unnecessarily boring.

And furthermore: your sensory self -confidence increases as soon as you know the logic behind the sentence.

Drunk from watching I arrive at work, as if I cycled through aquaria

According to Saint Thomas van Aquino (1224-1274), two ways sailed to God: reading the Bible and reading the book of nature. I read that last book on the way. And I will automatically believe in the gods you can feel on your skin. The sun shines, in the water I see the Glitterpad, which consists of thousands of waves that all act as dancing mirrors. Halfway through is the glitter lane narrower, which is logical – I now know thanks to Gooley – because a ship has just passed by. A ship flatten the water: fewer mirrors.

Everything is connected to everything: there is nothing floating about it. And if you can even see the logic in apparently aimlessly, it gives grip, in a world that seems increasingly chaotic.

For that reason alone, this environmental literacy, this skill of water reading, should be a compulsory school subject.

Everything is correct if you look closely. After a weekend with sun, more laughing gas bottles float. After Diwali, the Lichtjesfestie, orange earthenware candle cocons rinse. After Easter, the basalt almost breaks open from the Heermoes and ferns and grasses. After full moon there is more driftwood, because the flood then comes higher.

Between that driftwood I have recently seen a lot of twigs and samples of willows, cracked by beavers in the nature reserve a little further. Beaver letters, I call those branches. Sometimes I pick up a few, try to read the hieroglyphs they have squeezed in the willow bark.

They write that they are doing better again. Almost two centuries ago the last native Bever was beaten to death because he would have undermined a dike. Now there are six thousand again. A few also live in Rotterdam. And you see twigs and branches tubing for.

Clogs gift

I used to think: what a willow to be eaten by a beaver. But the more I read the river, the more connections I see. Because those twigs and branches get stuck along the bank. They shoot carrot. New fresh willows grow. Warempel a win-win, the beaver eats the willow, the willow multiplies itself while it is eaten. Something like that is called symbiosis.

Not so long ago, people did this interaction. Taken good care of the willows and got clogs and baskets from Wilgenhout as a gift. That was in the time when we still read the water and talked to trees like now against Chatgpt. The one is not more idiot than the other.

I hunt as a cormorant, twist like eel, paddle as a beaver, shoots like a zander

It is not an idiot idea to kiss those old skills, to walk on a river beach barefoot. From the shape of the sand ribs under your bare feet you can deduce which way the water has fluttered, I learned from Gooley, just like the Tuareg in the Sahara down on the shape of the dunes to the wind. You don’t have to belong to the Tuareg or the Maori or the Polynesians to experience a commitment with your environment: we are all somewhere native, at most some have forgotten that.

There is a revolutionary power in attentiveness, reading in water. Every beach is a crack in the quay. You read that the river is not flat, not a flat highway, but a being with depth.

A sandy gap of half a kilometer wide and sometimes fifteen meters deep winds right through the city. To date, I only read the cover: the water level. Today I dive to that depth with laser eyes, I hunt as a cormorant, twist like eel, paddle as a beaver, shoots like a zander. Ship engines bump into the head, I see nothing, only sand and green-yellow light and weird shadows-I see I see what does not see any computer.

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