Going Through Old Notebooks Part 11: What The River Brings

I started taking long walks along the river every day in the spring of 2021, after something terrible had happened.

Swans on the Seine at Night, digital painting, iPad and Apple pencil, c. 2025

I started taking long walks along the river every day in the spring of 2021, after something terrible had happened. At first I thought I would walk all the way to the Eiffel Tower and back, but most days I didn’t. Most days I cut the journey short by a handful of bridges, crossing over at the Pont Alexandre III, with its sculpted cattails, cavorting water nymphs, and gilded salamanders. Then I made my way back along the other bank.

I came to occupy myself with the goings-on of the river, to slip into the stream of lovers and joggers, urban fishermen, and skateboarders practicing tricks. There was almost no boat traffic, due to the lockdown, and so you could walk for hours without a boat passing or the waves that they create. As a result, the water grew so still that you could see right down to the bottom in places, to the waving river grasses and sunken shopping carts, these secrets of the Seine, the metal crowd-control barriers thrown in at some point, which had turned into algae gardens, reef systems. You could see small fishes darting in and out down there amidst the green.

The previous spring, during the first lockdown, there had been a plethora of mud-caked city bikes and drowned rental scooters thrown down there as well, suddenly visible. These were mostly the ones with bright green accents, which can be rented with an app or a code or whatever. Most of these were pulled out and piled up by the end of that first summer, and sat in rusted heaps, like ships raised from the deep, brown and deathly on the cobbled quais, before finally being disposed of. There had been a whole unseen world down there of lost things, ruined things, hidden by the constant surface disturbance of activity.

Now that the surface was stilled, a different, older world was starting to emerge. Plants used to fighting with the waves were suddenly unmolested, free to grow up to the surface, spread out there, and do their best Monet impression, blooming, sprouting water lilies. Yellow iris grew from cracks in the stones along the river’s edge.