Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
Field Notes From the Dredger
A deck hand on the river dredger keeps notes of what the mud brings up, and the objects he hauls from the channel are each a little newer than the last, until one morning the bucket returns a boot still laced to a man's foot.
- dated: The summer the channel was deepened
- narrator: Pim Tobin, deck hand
- reliability: reliable
June 3. Started on the Ostrova reach. The dredger is a squat old steam hull with a single bucket on a crane, working the silt off the channel bed so the barges can get through. Captain Lowe says we'll be at it all summer. The mud is grey and smells of iron and rotten leaves.
June 9. Brought up a clay pipe, a sheep's skull, and an iron pan with a hole in the bottom. Logged them all on the chart. Lowe says the older the bed, the older the find, and we will get to the Roman stuff by August.
June 14. A bottle today, glass, green and heavy. Cork still in the neck. The label has faded but I could read the year, 1851. I asked Lowe whether we should keep it. He said keep whatever comes up, that's the rule.
June 21. Found a coin, a farthing, and then a button of brass with an anchor on it. Then a cup. Then a child's wooden horse, its paint still bright red on one side. The horse had been in the mud a long time but the wood was not rotten. It looked like it had been set down that morning.
June 28. Lowe is quiet this week. He won't talk about the horse. He says the channel bed is coming up newer than it should, that the silt is shallower than the charts say, and that each bucket is bringing up things from a little later in the century. He said it like a man reading a bad forecast.
July 2. Today's haul: a tin of tobacco with the lid still shut, a pair of spectacles, a tram ticket dated last month. I went to look at the ticket again on the way back to the mess. The date was tomorrow's.
July 5. Lowe has stopped the dredger. He says we'll wait for the tide to turn before we go further down. I asked why. He said we've reached the bottom of the bed and what's under it hasn't been laid down yet.
July 9. Went down into the hold to check the cargo of finds for the museum boat. The horse, the spectacles, the bottle, all in their crate. And beside them, on top of the crate, a boot. Brown leather, laced, wet. The lace was knotted in the way my father used to knot his, a double loop, tucked under.
The boot was still warm.
I have been up on deck since. Lowe came up behind me. He looked at the boot for a long time and then said, very quietly, that the bucket had come up at dawn, and that he had been meaning to tell me it's always the last thing to come up before the water is clear.