I hate goodbyes. I nearly cried to say goodbye to Eric and the other horses last night at Torlundy, and was glad that Siobhan and Charlie hung around with me at the station to wait for the bus to Glasgow this morning. It delayed saying goodbye to them, too.Siobhan invited me back, and is going to look up TTouch info. She seems pleased with the progress I made with Eric and Celene. I felt sad to be leaving them all, especially Charlie. I like his Taurus energy and unabashed, creative enthusiasm.
The gloriously sunny weather we enjoyed last week has left Fort William this morning. I face another travel day that starts out overcast and pale, but it warms and brightens by the time I reach Glasgow for the train south out of Scotland. Next destination: St Bees, and the beginning of my long-anticipated Coast to Coast (C2C) trek across England.
I use the time on the train for postcard catch-up. I am finally getting through the pile I’ve collected over the past weeks. I feel happy and relieved and like I’m surfacing from another cocoon. My monthly also finished yesterday, which I’m grateful for. I didn’t want to be dealing with that on the C2C walk.
The fellow across the table from me on the train is carrying a bottle of whiskey. He pours himself about two fingers neat, then pops open a half liter can of Stella Artois beer. He’s now looking zoned out with a headset on. The train is rocking quite a bit on this stretch of track. His scotch glass skates side to side on the table. The light amber liquid is pretty with the sunlight shooting through it.
I go to the dining car and must grab onto seats and handholds because of the rockin’ rails. On the way back, I meet a man and his 12-year-old daughter standing in the area between cars. The girl is peaky and sweaty, keeping her eyes closed and looking like she is trying hard hold her lunch as well as her balance. Dad is encouraging her to keep breathing. Motion sickness. I would be there too if I hadn’t taken a Bonine before I got on the bus today.
I’m feeling oddly happy to be leaving Scotland. Not sure what that’s about, considering the sense of belonging I first experienced on arrival. Perhaps I’m just finished here. I have less than a month left of the trip. I’ve been here two months already. Wow, two months. It seems like both a short time and forever.
Found a copy of Sky Burial in my bedroom at Torlundy last week and read it over a few nights. It’s about a Chinese woman who went to Tibet to find her missing husband and stayed there 30 years. My body tells me I’m on the verge of that kind of life—nomadic, unrooted, grounded only in Self. I feel scared and worried about it right now.
So much fear of inadequacy I still have around the idea of contributing gainfully to the world in ways other than through corporate writing. But now I see that that’s the same kind of awe and trepidation I once had around writing until I got into the industry. Not a paralyzing fear, really, but a bring-your-butterflies fear that can be my friend and guide if I let it.
I change trains at the Carlisle station, where I sit in a café with three other guests (one on a mobile phone in a corner, and a middle-aged couple stopping in for two medium-sized takeaway coffees), and listen to lyric strains of Enya’s Wild Child play between monotone railway announcements.“Ever feel alive, and you’ve nothing missing? You don’t need a reason. Let the day go on and on.”
“Now arriving at Platform 1...Northbound train to Glasgow Central. Platform 1.”
“What a day, what a day to take to. What a way to make it through. What a day, what a day to take to...a wild child.” Da da-da da da-da...
Soon my own southbound train departs and we are winding along the west coast of England overlooking the Irish Sea. The weather turns hotter the farther south I travel, and sweat dampens my face as I heft my bag off the train at St Bees.
I am thrilled to discover that the walk to my B&B is the shortest I’ve had this whole trip. Barely one block after crossing the tracks, I find the street-side gate into Stonehouse Farm. Makes a dim memory out of that grim hike for lodging around St Austell a month ago.
As I dump my bags into the bedroom of the round-the-back, self-catering lodging that overlooks the facility’s horse-trekking stables, reality starts to sink in. I’m finally at St Bees, and the beginning of the C2C walk is finally here. Well, two days from now, really. I’ve booked two nights in St Bees, to give myself Tuesday to settle in, regroup from Torlundy, meander around town, buy the Wainwright/C2C book I want, and read all about the walk before I actually head out on Wednesday.
This fine intention is shattered shortly after my arrival. My proprietress, Carole, informs me that a heat wave is predicted for the next several days, and suggests that I split the first section of the trip, 14 miles to Ennerdale Bridge, into two days. She also tells me that I’ll need to walk the first four miles of the trail around the whole head of St Bees—an extra bit of path I hadn’t anticipated.
“What, I don’t just go to the sea and start walking due east out of St Bees?”
I root out the Footprint maps I bought weeks ago in London to check the veracity of her story. Damn. It’s corroborated. Four miles of coastal walk that actually heads me west and north before looping back east and passing through a place called Sandwith. Carole pronounces it “Sennith” and says that the railroad tracks beyond the village should be my destination for tomorrow, which puts me at mile six on the trail. It also puts me at a spot that adds more than two miles just to get home from the first leg, then the same two miles retraced to return to the trail on Wednesday. Rowr. Already I’m not particularly liking this business—I expected the path to be a little more straightforward. And a heat wave, too. Damn. I’ve already been reminded at Jura that heat, hiking, and I don’t mix well.
I unpack and head for the coast to scout out the caravan park that marks the beginning of the C2C trail. The beach is about half a mile from the B&B. OK, so tomorrow’s hot, six-mile hike is already adding up to nearly nine miles. I try to let go of the crankiness this raises.
Ice cream helps. I duck into the beachfront shop for a double-decker chocolate and honeycomb crunch on a pointy cone to go. I also buy their last copy of the quintessentially quaint C2C book—A. Wainwright’s A Coast to Coast Walk: A Pictorial Guide. They have the revised edition.
It’s pocket-sized, which I like, and full of pen-and-ink illustrations and descriptions written in Wainwright’s hand. He’s the one who pieced together the walk, spending many years criss-crossing the country and a year writing up his favorite trails so that others could follow the path. That was in 1973. It’s one of many books he’s written about walks through his most beloved part of England.I try not to drop the ice cream as I slip his book into a slim paper bag along with a few postcards that illustrate the C2C path and stops I’m about to take for the next 19 days. I’ll mail them to a couple of friends back home with my itinerary, so they can track my progress.
Outside, my ice cream melts rapidly in the heat, and I use an extra paper bag as a napkin (“serviette”) to wrap around the cone. I sit on the grass outside the shop and people-watch across the beach’s lawns, cement boardwalk, and water play areas. Not many people are here today, but it’s the usual beach fare. Picnic blankets and sunbathers, swimmers and splashers, tots screeching over dropped ice cream, teenage boys butting around footballs, a row of friends talking on the stone wall. Only instead of the sand that I’m used to, there’s river rock and gravel because the tide is so high. In the distance, St Bees Head curls toward me around the bay.I watch children and teenagers run around in swimsuits and shorts and skimpy tops with what seems like total unself-consciousness. I lament the loss of that freedom in my teens, when, like so many of my peers, I became uncomfortable with my body, embarrassed by it. That restrictive Baptist high school, plus messages I got at home. I recall a magazine article I read at Torlundy about body image—that women are more sexually attractive if they like all of their bodies.
I see what they mean. Not every girl is model thin or beautiful here, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Teenagers wear midi tops over thick, rounded waists, and skin bulges over the tops of their jeans. No unpadded bones stick out at hip or shoulder. I see no attempts to suck everything into starved nothingness, no signs of competition for the thinnest, sexiest body. Even middle-aged, fleshy bellies sport belly button rings and flow out like a Rubens painting below bra-like tank tops. How refreshing to be at a beach where women seem to neither hide nor flaunt their skin or their body shape.
The tide is close in today. I walk along the sidewalk to the stony beach at the base of St Bees head. I sit with my legs outstretched on warm smooth rocks and watch a diapered toddler pick up stones—some of them very big for his size—and dump them into the water. Kerplunk! He giggles, squeals, waves his hands. Picks up another. Kersplash! More laughs, more hand waving. He plops his bum down into the sea to reach another rock. A big flat one. Another overhand throw that flips from his elbow like a fore-shortened catapult. Another hollow, satisfying kersploop! into the shallows. His disposable nappies are so wet from the sea that they sag as if his middle were wrapped in bread dough. He is oblivious and content.
I seek out a special stone among the hundreds around me. This is a ritual of C2C’ers—to carry a small rock from the Irish Sea at St Bees and toss it into the North Sea at Robin Hood’s Bay almost 200 miles away. I am reminded of the Aesop’s fable about the thirsty crow that drops rocks into a pitcher until the water level is high enough for it to drink. How remarkable that all of us C2C’ers are actually removing and creating coastline, one stone at a time.
I pick up a few stones. Feel them in my hand. Wonder at where they came from. Naw. Not this one. Not this one either. I settle on a rosy sandstone that’s local to this area, with rings like water on both sides. Watermarks for each coast.I’ve wanted to do this C2C walk for three years, since first reading about it in a Smithsonian magazine in 2003. As early as 1999, I’d earmarked this year’s summer to be spent in Britain, and reading the article crystallized an important part of the trip. It is to be my ending anchor point, just as my London stay and TTEAM training week were my beginning anchor points.
After arranging my airline travel, planning the walk itinerary and overnight stops was the first thing I did from home. The C2C is an unguided walk, with no set schedule to follow except what each walker wants to do. It seems that most people take about 14 days, the average vacation period for Americans. I decided on 19 days, which includes a day of rest in the middle at Keld.
I figure this will give me lots of time to take in the views, not hurry, and go easy each day. My longest day is 16 miles, instead of the typical 20, and I’ve got one day near the end that’s only six miles. This means I’ll be slowing down, instead of rushing and pushing, as I reach the end of the walk. I’ve also booked an extra day at Robin Hood’s Bay, so I can soak in my accomplishment instead of running off to the next thing on the travel agenda. Which, at this point, isn’t defined yet, anyway.
Having hauled my backpack with me for the past two months, I am particularly glad that Sherpa Van, the company I used to arrange my C2C bookings, is driving my luggage point to point for the next two-plus weeks. I’ll just carry a daypack with lunch, water, maps, and trekking poles. It seems a bit of a luxury expense now, but I know I’ll welcome it later.
Beyond reading a few snippets of other people’s experiences on the walk, I deliberately broke my pattern and didn’t do a lot of research to prepare for the C2C. I didn’t buy every OS map while in the US and plan every detail of the route ahead of time (although I thought of it). I didn’t take a crash course in orienteering to learn every nuance of compass reading and tracking (although I brought a few cheat sheets on it). I didn’t order and read the Wainwright book ahead of time (although I idly sought it out in London bookstores). I didn’t even crack open the C2C Footprint maps to study them until today. I know almost nothing about this path except what that Smithsonian article said and what I gleaned from the Sherpa Van website.
This feels both scary and daring to me. And a little bit stupid, given my old belief that I must plan everything to the nth degree to keep anything from going wrong.
But like so much on this trip that I have avoided planning for, I want to be completely open to what’s on this path ahead of me. I don’t always do so well with surprises that change my plans (as I note my lingering crabbiness over the extra miles to be gained by splitting Day 1 into two parts). I also have a deep fear of getting lost—a big life issue that I know I’m looking metaphorically in the eye.
My one security is knowing that I have lodging waiting for me every night and that, because of that concession to planning, someone will be looking out for me in case I don’t show up of an evening.
The rest I’m leaving up to the universe, daily perseverance, and, I hope, good signage and meeting other friendly C2C’ers along the way.
