Coast to Coast

I wore a red and black windbreaker when I was six, maybe seven, years old. Sometime around that age, I had a recurring dream in which I was wearing this coat and standing at the top of a steeply sloped valley. In the distance, at the bottom of the valley, was a sparkling lake. I’d open my coat wide, wing-like, and jump into the air, gliding down the valley, then skimming across the lake. Well, never quite across the lake; I’d always wake up when I reached the middle and realized that I could drown. Even as a dreaming child, I was pretty risk-averse.

Still, hiking in the Lake District reminds me of those dreams. Cara and I passed through there a few days ago (and by ‘passed through,’ I mean that we slogged up and down 50 miles of mountains over three days). Hour after hour, we’d find ourselves at the top of dreamlike valleys with views across all of England, and, if it’s possible to swoop on foot, we’d swoop down them-sometimes to lakes, but always to quaint villages with happy pubs and comfortable beds.

My gear is not as simple as it was in my dreams when I was six and flying on polyester wings. Now, I am garbed, armored perhaps, in various layers of exotic materials: Gor-Tex this, Vibram that. My pack is made of something unpronounceable, no doubt salvaged from falling space shuttles, and is so light that it carries itself. It’s already a pretty sophisticated looking piece of kit, but I’ve added a complicated web of straps to form a holster for my camera, holding it snug to my chest and giving my ticklish trigger finger a gunslinger’s access. The result is that I have almost as much bulk preceding me as I do clinging to my back. Now, walking ought to be a simple activity--it is, after all, the evolutionary party trick that we homo erectus have been dining out on for a couple of million years--but my fellow hikers could be forgiven for thinking--what with all the life support I’m carrying--that I was planning an ascent of Everest, and that I took a wrong turn at Dover. I have so many straps, buckles, buttons, clasps, clips and zips that getting ready in the morning is like rigging a six-mast schooner.

Thus, Cara and the Good Ship Watson wend their way across the land. Strangely enough, given my already-reported ineptitude with this kind of thing, I am the navigator for this trip. We’re supposed to be crossing the country from West to East, but Cara hasn’t checked my work recently, and we’re quite probably headed to Land’s End. Still, we seem to have made it through the Lake District without too many mishaps. I’m pretty sure that we’re now in the Yorkshire Dales, though I have to confess I don’t actually know what a ‘dale’ is. Whatever they are, these ‘Dales’ are quite beautiful (a few too many dead rabbits around, though: it’s like some kind of rabbity Ghengis Khan has been marauding just ahead of us) and a welcome change from the boggy moorlands of Cumbria that were our soggy home for the last two days. Eight more days of walking, ‘til we reach the safe harbour of Robin Hood’s Bay. At least, that’s where I think we’re going. I’ll let you know.

Heaven and Hell

We’re sitting on a bench in a garden in the heart of Devon, England. We’re overlooking a pond that is flanked by giant, gnarled Oaks. The trees are made hazy by a green flush, the first leaves pushing forth into the spring warmth. A hill rises up just beyond the pond. On its slope is a circle of trees that just perfectly frames a patch of meadow in the sunshine. It’s a stage upon which half a dozen rabbits are playing. They are, indeed, playing, not browsing or performing some unrelated function that I am anthropomorphizing. They’re flinging themselves into the air, kicking out their hind legs, in joyous abandon. ‘Binking’ it’s called by rabbit cognoscenti. There’s a robin in the bushes singing its head off; there are doves cooing somewhere behind us; there are ducks escorting ducklings across the pond; there are lambs-just a few weeks old-bleating in the meadows around us; daffodils practically explode from the grass before our eyes. It’s achingly, absurdly, pretty. It’s like Walt Disney sat down with the Telly Tubbies over cream tea to conjure this up.

Like Disneyland, Theme-Park Gaia here commands an exorbitant entrance fee, one that you pay at The Stables.

The Stables are inside an immense concrete warehouse divided into twelve cells, each of which is fitted with iron bars that slide shut with a maximum-security clang. The Stables haven’t been used in a couple of years, so every horizontal surface is caked with pigeon shit. The walls, where they are visible through the cobwebs, are yellow with animal grime. There are thousands of feet of this. Thousands of feet of shit-covered floors and grimy walls. Our job--the fee that is exacted for our hour in paradise--is to wash all of it and then paint it brilliant white.

We scrubbed for four days, and now we’ve been applying white paint for five. Endless stretches of white. Like Nelson Mandela in the white limestone quarries of Robben Island, we are going blind from all the white. Our bodies are contorting to the shape of the brush and roller; Cara can no longer make a fist to shake behind our oppressors’ backs.

Two things make our labours harder to bear. The first is that our hosts--the owners of our idyllic pond, and these Hellish Stables--are rich. They own a Porsche that our hostess parks overnight in the stables, moving it in the morning so that the yokels won’t get paint on it. Our hosts own 91 hectares of some of the finest grazing land in Britain. Our hosts own three thoroughbred horses (from ‘proper pedigrees’ we’re told) that have their own stables adjacent to those we are now painting. Our hosts built our stables, the ones we’re now painting, for their daughter so she could run a commercial “equicentre.” Our hosts, then, don’t need free labour; they could pay someone to paint these stables; they could pay us to paint these stable. Hell, they could pay Mark Rothko to paint these stables. Instead, we’re painting them for groceries and a room at the back of their 17th century house. That’s the second thing that is hard to bear: we don’t need groceries and a room. There is nothing in our material circumstances that obliges us to submit to this Depression-era arrangement. We’re professionals, dammit! If we wanted to, we could leave this place, book a B&B down the road, and pay someone to cook our breakfasts for us.

And yet, here we are. Washing shit-covered floors and painting grimy walls. And that, really, is the third thing that makes this hard to bear: we are the masters of our own misery; we are our own tormentors, our own oppressors. Our wealthy hosts have provided the means for our incarceration, but we ourselves are own judge and jury, and ultimately, our own jailers.

Update

Aw crap, nearly a month since my last post. Seems I've not done anything stupid enough to warrant writing about lately. Still, an update's probably in order, so short and sweet:

I'm in Oxford, England visiting my parents.

Cara's in Aberdeen, Scotland building a drystone wall. Not exactly intentionally. She signed up to volunteer for a week with the National Trust, thinking she'd be helping to plant a garden. Instead, she's building a wall. Sadly, it's also snowing up there. I don't know how she's doing, actually, since she's remote enough that she has no internet access and no cell phone reception. For the next few days, therefore, I can only hope that she's surviving the experience and that she hasn't run away without me to some warmer climate (she's been talking a lot lately about a return trip to South Africa).

Backtracking slightly: we had a very interesting, though cold, time in Portugal (hence the recent interest in SA Take Two). We arrived in the UK on March 9th, then went almost immediately to a lovely bed and breakfast in a tiny village called Lee on the North coast of Devon. We spent a week doing hard labour in exchange for room and board, actually a very nice change from a somewhat indolent and luxurious year.

Here's a picture of Cara undertaking the world's largest weeding job. See that field? It used to be covered in 10 year's worth of brambles. Now it's not.



Once Cara's done the Papillon thing up North, we'll both be heading back to Devon to clean a horse stable, again in exchange for room and board. Chris, take note.

Then, on the 23rd of April, we'll be starting a cross-country walk across the very narrowest portion of the UK possible. No doubt I'll find something to write about then.