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.