The clocks have gone back for the winter and the salmon are leaping forward. It’s a fine October day: high cloud in a blue sky, a brassy glow in the trees. A couple of days of rain in the Welsh hills is now pouring over the weir. I join a small group of people holding phones and cameras, gathered at the railings of the weir, watching the water with rapt attention.
The river crosses the weir in two steps. It licks smoothly over the lip, down a slope with a rough surface that makes dancing spiders of foam, then riffles taut and quick across a shelf to plunge into roiling white-water before resuming composure downstream.
A fish, as long as my arm, breaches the race. A missile of glistening skin and amber fin he leaps from the chaos in slow motion. And he sees. What does his fish-eye see as all the other cameras click to capture his ascent?
The salmon leaps from the bardic tradition, a fishy story that’s sung from mountains far into the oceans. Part outlaw, part sacrifice, named by the poet Ted Hughes the “king of infinite liberty”.
Above the weir’s thunder I can hear Shrewsbury railway station. On the platform is a poster advertising the Heart of Wales Line with an image of a cheerful fishmonger holding a gutted salmon looking as if he’s telling a joke: the Salmon of Wisdom.
I recall the taste of the salmon I had had the day before and try to link it to the animal I can now see mid air, propelled by an instinct stronger than death and older than this river.
The fish rockets higher to see beyond the weir’s lip to the calmer route that takes him home to spawning pools tasting of peaty rainwater.
He crashes on to the shelf with a slap, rights himself, faces into the flow defying the river for a few seconds before allowing himself to be cast backwards into the maelstrom.
He tries again. The water forces him back and although it all looks so overwhelmingly hopeless this is what keeps the world alive: salmon leaping time to a standstill.
