Time and a river

August 16, 2021, 8:41 am , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz dives deep into a city ravine

• 

I was going to start by explaining what I saw on a busy road. It was about an elderly man, I’d say about 90, hobbling on his walking frame who stopped to check the time. I’ll get back to that later.

So, instead I’ll begin with the heron stepping carefully along the edge of The River Kelvin. No, the wader is not somewhere up in the hills, nor on a river that charges towards the Irish Sea somewhere up in the Ayrshire glens. It’s right smack in the middle of Glasgow, without a doubt a city that’s the beating heart of urban Scotland.

And slicing through the northern part of this beating heart is this heron and a heavily deep wooded ravine carved by The Kelvin with its ten mile riverside track that links all sorts of neighbourhoods- from the fields near Milngavie to the tower blocks of Maryhill to the sandstone townhouses of the West End, past the neat and tidy Botanic Gardens, and down to the museums and university, finally merging with The Clyde, once a powerhouse in the shipbuilding world but now quiet as it mulls over its past and wonders about its future.

The careful heron, patient as a country vicar, has to consume five times its boney weight everyday and it’s joined by finches, pigeons, woodpeckers and, sometimes, the kingfisher with its flash of blue. Joining the birds are runners, cyclists, dog owners, families with their kids, couples heading for a pub or party. And there’s fox and mink if you’ve got the time to sit and wait..and wait…and wait.

There’s little bridges over The Kelvin…

And bigger bridges….

And handsomely imposing ones dressed in sandstone and red granite:

Along the way, remains of the industrial past dot the gorge, such as the terrifically named Clayslaps Mill which was, over the centuries, used for grain, flour and flax softening. And in an elbow of the river is an arboretum with sequoia, mahogany and Corsican pine.

At the top, the walkway- it’s ten miles long- links up with the north-running West Highland Way that’ll get you through Glencoe and up to the foot of Ben Nevis near Fort William. To the south, it links to long distance paths down through the rumpled Ayrshire and Galloway coast that looks west to the Isle of Arran, the Kintyre peninsula and, on a good day, to the Antrim hills in Northern Ireland.

Time to this old gentlemen is still important. Soon, maybe too soon, there won’t be time anymore..

It was when I was leaving The Kelvin paths that I saw that 90 year old guy shuffling his way down a road. It was warm if not hot and he was gamely in shorts and a golf shirt. He reined in his walking frame and took a long look at his wristwatch. I find it amazing that this man (who probably was entering his 10th decade) still packages his life in a timepiece. What is so important that he was worried about being early or late? Or missing someone. Or something.

I can’t put my finger on it. But it must portray in some way our tireless pursuit of how we calibrate our lifetimes. All of it packaged in fifteen minute quadrants. A recent article in The Economist adds context: it says that ‘clocks are rarely built to measure time…they are built with a human goal in mind’. Time to this redoubtable old gentlemen is still important. He still has something to do, someone to see. Soon, maybe too soon, there won’t be time for him. Just an ending. But he keeps track of those minutes and hours anyway.

After a while, he’ll be timeless, without time. A memory, a photograph or an Instagram clip of him gamely blowing out candles and tentatively hugging a squirming little great grandchild. And then the clock, the wristwatch, time itself stops and he’s….’sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything….’