I found Caroline the next morning standing on the canal bank, her eyes focused on a wire above the railroad tracks that paralleled the canal in the distance.
“I saw a kingfisher,” she said breathlessly. “It was a brilliant emerald and bigger than ours in the States.” Her eyes were bright with excitement.
All signs of the previous night’s storm – both the literal and the metaphorical one – had passed. Under the warming sun we cheerfully readied ourselves for the day’s journey. We still couldn’t find the second windless, and I began to worry that perhaps I had left it at the previous lock (the epitaph for me in my family being She-would-lose-her-head- if-it-weren’t-attached). We had no choice but to move on without it and work the locks with only one hand-crank. We would also have to pay a nice fine to the rental company.
Caroline and Gregory went to attend to the gates, while I perched myself in the bow to take a video while the boat went through the lock. Roger had objected – “We need to move fast or we are going to get stuck in all that traffic coming from the north” – but I ignored him. The sun was out and I wanted to record what it was like to go down-country through a lock – that is, with the water draining out.
Roger steered the boat to position us in front of the lock gates. Gregory crossed a footbridge to reach the gate on the other side of the canal, gingerly stepping onto the grass, soggy with yesterday’s rain. He suddenly called out: “Hey, I think I found the other windlass!”
He waved what certainly looked like our windlass – its chipped red paint recognizable even from my vantage point – but it made no sense. None of us had been over to that side of the canal. As the two lockettes tried to puzzle out what could have happened, Roger interrupted.
“Let’s go!” he called over the noise of the motor. “You can talk about it later.”
Gregory and Caroline opened the gates and, as Roger expertly steered us into the lock, I began recording the experience. As soon as they closed the gates behind us, the two of them wielded their windlasses to crank open the paddles and the water started emptying out of the canal.
I couldn’t see the water draining – it did so through the help of some mysterious valves somewhere – but I couldn’t miss hearing it pour out with a deafening roar. Inch by inch we descended, the camera registering the diminishing light, the darkening canal walls, and the dying din of the water as it slowly emptied out of the lock.
By now, Gregory and Caroline had run to the other end of the lock and were lightly leaning against forward gates, looking for that magical moment when the water in the lock achieves equilibrium with the canal water and the gates open with no resistance.
I trained my camera on the gates as they slowly opened, revealing a crack, and then a wider view of the other side of the canal. I panned to the bottom of the lock, to show the prow of the boat nosing out, when something in the camera viewfinder caught my eye.
I zoomed in on what looked to be a man’s rain jacket, caught on the metal plate at the foot of the gate. As the water churned around the boat, I saw that the jacket was not empty. There, bobbing grotesquely in the near-empty canal, was Mr. Hedges, eyes closed under his ever-shaggy brows that were sweeping poignantly toward heaven.
Read on.
LINKS
kingfisher (Common, UK)canal locks (basic operation of)
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