The Fish Ladder (15 page)

Suddenly I saw beauty.
A child shook his bag of sweets for the sheer pleasure of hearing the sound. And because it confirmed that the contents were still there. And still his. I stopped worrying about why the English ate so much, and acknowledged that I was starving. The footpath opened onto a round pool, separated by a pea-green walkway from other, crescent-shaped pools. The water was tea-coloured. A pink temple, fronted by Doric columns, knelt above its own immaculate reflection in the gold August sunlight. A statue of Neptune rose before the temple, trident in hand, his face turned away, his gaze angled along his cheekbones. I felt as though I had stumbled upon some intimacy, that my appearance had somehow disturbed the god. I imagined those who were here before me, long ago, now long dead. This was a place for laughter, lovers, whispered trysts.

There was a shifting movement through the trees, a blown warmth, soft as a kiss. I stood still, and looked about me, not sure what I expected to see. The surface of the tea-coloured lake wrinkled; the immaculate reflection scattered. But just as quickly as it had appeared, the pocket of warm air passed by. The water settled. The reflection began to piece itself together. A hush rolled over the woodland.

Notes on
Skell

Tummel

Ten-year-old Dexter sat on the floor outside the bathroom while I lay in a claw-footed bath. My big toe was wedged inside the tap, hot water funnelled round it. I twirled a champagne flute between finger and thumb, and watched it mist and clear. Steam rolled in bales about the panelled walls, the wood forming a buffer against the cold stone beneath.

‘Kate?’ The voice came from the other side of the bathroom door, below the level of the doorknob.

‘Hello, Dexter.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, darling. Are you?’

‘Is there anything I can get you?’

‘No. Thank you. You don’t have to sit outside, Dex. I’ll come down very soon.’

‘You’re all right . . . I’m OK here.’

Later the three boys quizzed me while their father, Chris, made supper. Liz and I sat opposite one another at the kitchen table, working our way down the rest of the bottle of champagne.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Angus.

‘I’m going to follow a river.’

‘Which river?’ said Elliot.

‘It’s called the Dunbeath Water.’

‘Will we see you again?’ asked Dexter.

‘Yes. I’ll come back this way.’

In spite of living just inside the Scottish border, none of the boys had been to the Interior, as they called it. They told me it was full of mountains, forests and lochs. There was a lot of golf. And it rained – all the time.

‘Where are you going to sleep?’

The next morning Liz and the boys heaped me with gifts. There was a well on their land and Elliot, the oldest boy, brought me eighteen litres of spring water. Dexter and Angus made me sandwiches. I didn’t see Chris. He was up at the farm, harvesting. As I got into the car Liz leaned in with a half-f bottle of Rioja that we had opened the night before.

‘You might want this in your hip flask,’ she said. At the end of the drive I turned and looked back at the house. The three boys waved to me from the upstairs windows, their bare feet dangling beneath blond sandstone sills.

The Forth Bridge was exciting. The fields and hills of Scotland unrolled like a rope of silken handkerchiefs tugged from a magician’s sleeve. I had reached the A9 that wound from Perth to Wick. All I had to do was follow it and I would come to Dunbeath. After a couple of hours the road, which had been hugging a river, took me through a town. A sign read:
Pitlochry Welcomes You In Blood
. It seemed very visceral. And then I realised that the sign said:
In Bloom
, and referred to the baskets of flowers that lined the streets and hung from lamp-posts along the riverbank. There was a Fish Ladder marked on my map. Incongruous images flourished in the space between the otherwise familiar words. I parked the car and walked down to the riverbank.

The water was fast-flowing, shallow, pebbled. Dark trees reached from either bank as though attempting to touch. The air smelled of wet leaves. I could taste malt. A distillery was on the other side of the river. I was slightly hung-over from the champagne and Rioja that I had drunk with Liz the previous night, and the fumes from the distillery triggered waves of nausea. I began to walk in the direction of the fish ladder. I had an image in my head of utilitarian tanks, rising in even steps, industrialised and smooth, each filled with glittering salmon, bright as aluminium. I envisaged the fish leaping up through perfect waterfalls alongside a shining dam.

The reality was different. The fish ladder was indeed comprised of concrete tanks, thirty-four of them, and they did rise in uniform shallow steps. But they were blackened with moss and slime. The water screamed and boiled. Signs warned of:
Strong undercurrents, Danger of drowning, Water level may increase significantly at any time
. Some of the tanks were larger than others, resting places for the fish. One of the tanks contained a viewing chamber. It was a dingy room, dripping and cold. I thought of submarines. The sound of the water was all around me. A wall of thickened glass opened into the tank but it was grimed over on the inside, the interior difficult to make out. A chute about the width of a barrel funnelled water from the tank above. A second chute exited on the other side. A fallen branch turned and span, buffeted by the flow; trapped in a cycle, it would remain there until the waters broke it. I felt sick. There were no fish in the chamber.

Dad had been an engineer. If he had been here today he would have explained what we were looking at, described the fluid mechanics of the tank. He could have lifted away the fear that clung to me in wisps. Dad would have found the viewing chamber wonderful. And also the dam that was behind it. I im­­­agined him chuckling at the simplicity of a vision that gave electricity to thousands of homes by the simple act of bricking up a stream. It was like a halter thrown over the head of a horse. As for the fish, displaced by the illumination of the Highlands? Well, of course, they must be helped. The fish ladder was an engineer’s dream.

I turned away from the viewing chamber. The hydro-electric power station was between the fish ladder and the dam. In front of me a section of the river had been fenced across to stop debris from being drawn into the turbines. A man with iron-grey hair in a blue woolly jumper was looking over the metal rail, and he was pointing to something in the water. I realised he was speaking to me.

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘They’ll not turn against the flow.’ He was talking about the salmon. ‘If they slip through these rails they get trapped.’ They were young fish, mostly, he told me, coming back after just one winter at sea. Or cock fish, slimmer than the spawn-packed hens.

I looked down. There was a salmon. Every so often it jumped, its head black against the slate-coloured water, its grey eye cold as a pearl.

‘Why’s it black?’ I asked him.

‘The longer the salmon are in fresh water, the darker they get. The silver colour you get at the supermarket is caused by something called guanine; crystals laid down beneath their scales. It protects them while they’re at sea.’ The salmon also had a breeding livery, he told me, of russet and gold. The few that survived and returned to the sea were known as black salmon, or kelts, yet they began to change colour as soon as they left the breeding grounds, swiftly rebuilding the armour that would shield them from the corrosion of the salt. It was mostly females who survived; as soon as they had spawned they turned, ravenous. Salmon rarely ate on their upward journey. Even so, only around one in five of them would return to the sea. But the males stayed in the high pools, fighting among themselves, seeking out fresh females until their lives were spent.

The man told me that his job today was to free the fish that were caught in the turbine pool, to open the gates in the metal grille, and try to flush them out. The thin black salmon leapt again. I studied it for a while.

The Celts believed the salmon had all come from a well. The same well Boand provoked by walking around it widdershins. Nine hazel trees encircled it; their fruit contained all knowledge. As the hazelnuts ripened and dropped into the water the salmon that lived there ate them. As a result of this they embodied all the wisdom of the world.

When the well rose up, and Boand drowned, the salmon were washed out to sea. Not one of them remained. To this day they are trying to return. The spots on a salmon’s back tell the number of hazelnuts it has eaten. Not all salmon are wise. But if you can catch one, and roast it, then the first three drops of spitting fat will confer all the knowledge in the fish. The rest, alas, is poison. One of the best-known versions of the story is that of the Irish hero, Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Fionn, which means the Fair One, was a young man, and hungry, and wandering in the forests near the River Boyne. A Druid, called Finegas, known as Finn the Seer, had waited seven years to catch a salmon. That afternoon he had succeeded, and was roasting it on a spit. He saw Fionn, and asked him to oversee the cooking, making sure not to eat any of it, while he went to attend to something else. But three drops of fat spat from under the crispy skin and landed on Fionn’s thumb. He put the injured digit into his mouth, and acquired all the knowledge of the world. He carried the salmon to Finegas who immediately noticed something different. There was a brightness to the boy, an alacrity, that hadn’t been there before.

‘Have you eaten of the fish? the Druid asked.

‘Well, no,’ said Fionn, ‘but I did burn my thumb and I put it straight away into my mouth.’

‘Ah,’ said the bard, ‘then the knowledge is yours.’ He handed the fish back. From that time on, if Fionn had a problem, all he had to do was suck his thumb and the answer would present itself. The Druid explained to Fionn that the knowledge always found its way to the one most deserving of it. For his own part, he would wait another seven years, and try again.

I walked towards the power station. There was a museum that told the story of the fish ladder, and a cool humming room that housed the turbines. The first fish ladder had been designed, and patented, by a miller called Richard McFarlan, in New Brunswick, in 1837. He had designed the ladder to circumvent the dam at his water mill. The museum also told the story of the electrification of the Highlands. I tried to picture the workers, the men who had come from all over Europe, in the strange, disjointed months and years after the Second World War had ended, to dam the River Tummel and raise the loch behind it. I sensed the caress of rough cotton shirts, and fabric stiff with sweat. The blistering pinch of hobnailed boots. Scratchy trousers, lice and wool, dirt and ice, the cracked-bell ring of a pickaxe.

On the tiled exterior wall was a bronze memorial relief of a kindly, but sad-looking man. The portrait was executed in profile and the artist had shown no mercy in depicting both the softness beneath his chin and the almost monastic severity of his pate. An unpunctuated script read:

Sir Edward MacColl 1882–1951

Engineer and Pioneer Hydro-Electricity Scotland

It was a muted dedication: nine words, two dates, no frills. But the dam spoke. The nine dams of the Tummel Valley Hydro-Electric Scheme. One for each word of his epitaph. It seemed that MacColl had died just before the opening of the Pitlochry Station, and instead of a party with bunting, and a band, and tea and cakes, there had been the respectful unveiling of this monument.

I felt I should move on. I walked back through nodding trees to the car. After a very few miles I saw a sign for the village of Killecrankie. We used to come to Scotland, Mum, Dad and my brother, for two weeks every summer, when we met up with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. One year we had visited the grave of one of Dad’s graduate students. I seemed to recall this being in Killecrankie; but when I got to the village the cemetery was unfamiliar, so I called at the local Heritage Centre, thinking I might ask if there was a second cemetery. But the staff all came from Eastern Europe. Not one of them knew the village, other than as a bus stop on their way to work. I passed a café. A conversation in the kitchen caught my attention. Two ladies, well into their middle years, were in loud and animated discourse with a young man. He was tall, and slim, with black hair and liquid eyes. Neither of the women reached higher than his shoulder. From a string about his neck hung a spiral-bound notepad with a pen pushed through the wire. His hands moved with grace and precision creating pictures, like charades. I realised that he could not hear, although he could lip-read, and that they could not sign. When the women were unable to understand his mime the young man wrote, instead, and the ladies, one at each of his elbows, peered down at the notepad. He caught me looking, and I felt invasive but he grinned, curling his fingers around the idea of a cup and then lifting it briefly towards his mouth. I nodded.

When he came over to my table I told him I was looking for a cemetery, and I described the jigsaw bits of memory I had retained. The cemetery was down a long straight track. It formed a perfect square, and was flanked by trees. I couldn’t remember if there was a church. The young man nodded and opened the notepad, and put it next to me on the table. He drew a square, filled it with crosses, then drew two huge trees and a straight road that ran up the centre. ‘Yes, that’s it.’ He wrote:
Blair Atholl
.