I was coiling the mooring rope wrong the whole time Denny was talking, over-under instead of over-over, and by the time he finished I had about four feet of it tangled into something like a fist. Didn't notice till after he'd gone back to his own boat.
We were moored near Selby Reach for the week. Nobody does that really, there's a bend further down with better shelter and a pub, but the rings at Selby are free and Denny's boat needed the bilge pump looked at, so we stopped there instead. He's been on the cut longer than anyone I know, forty-odd years he says, though I've heard him say forty-five before too. He tells you things in that flat way where you can't tell if he believes them himself.
He said there used to be a bloke called Pearce moored permanent at Selby back in the nineties, before the council put the new lock in. Pearce used to count the reed islands out past the towpath, the little humps of silt and willow that sit in the water there. Sometimes six of them, sometimes seven, depending on the flow. Denny said Pearce got fixed on the idea that the number changed even when the water hadn't moved enough to explain it. He'd count them morning and evening and write it in a notebook. Six, seven, six again. Once nine.
Denny said the thing about that stretch is it doesn't want you looking at it too long. Not in a scary way, he said, more like — you know when you stare at a word until it stops looking like a word. Same with the islands. Look long enough and you stop being sure which one you counted first.
Pearce started leaving things out on the bank overnight. Tin markers, a boot, anything to fix a point to count from. Denny said the boot came back the next morning in the same spot but laced the wrong way, left over right instead of right over left, and about half a size too small. Pearce didn't mention it for a week. Then he brought it up to Denny like it was nothing, like of course the boot had changed, the water does that.
One week Pearce didn't answer his radio. His boat was still there, kettle still on, and everyone assumed he'd gone up to his sister's in Selby town without telling anyone, which people did back then, no mobiles. Denny said the notebook was open on the table with the last count crossed out three times and rewritten. Six, then seven, then a mark going round in a circle, like he'd given up trying to write the number and tried to draw the shape of it instead.
Denny told the whole thing sat on his gunwale with a mug of tea going cold in his hand. His sister's dog used to chase moorhens off that same bank, he added, apparently, though what that had to do with anything I couldn't say. At the end he just said, well, and shrugged, and stood up like that was that, and went back inside his boat.
I finished untangling my rope after he'd gone. Coiled it properly this time, over-over, the way you're supposed to. Six loops, like always.
When I looked up to check the count against the cleat I'd hung it on, there were seven.
"Grey Heron, Macclesfield Canal." by Wildlife Terry is marked with CC0 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.