Notes from a long walk
At the end of May I walked for four days along an old drovers' path, a little under a hundred kilometres from one market town to another. I had wanted to do it for years and kept finding reasons not to. This year I took the week off before I could think of a new one.
I carried a paper map, folded to the right section and kept in a clear plastic sleeve. My phone stayed in the bottom of the pack, switched off, for emergencies and for the train home. I had expected that to feel like a sacrifice. It felt, after the first morning, like putting down something heavy.
The first day was all impatience. I walked too fast, checked the map too often, and kept composing little reports in my head as if somebody were waiting for them. By the afternoon my feet hurt and I had covered more ground than I had planned, which only meant I arrived at the guesthouse early and sat on a bench with nothing to do. I was annoyed about that for an hour, and then I was not.
The second day was better. I noticed that the path had been laid out by people who cared about water and shelter rather than distance. It bent around hills it could have climbed, and every few hours it passed a spring or a stand of old trees. Once I stopped treating it as a line between two points it made a great deal of sense. I am not going to pretend that this was a lesson about software, though I did think, briefly and against my will, about a migration plan I had written in April.
On the third day it rained from breakfast until dusk. There is not much to say about walking in steady rain except that it narrows everything down. You watch your feet, you watch the next stile, you think about dry socks. I passed two other walkers all day and we exchanged exactly the same three words.
The fourth day was short and downhill, and I was sorry when the town came into view.
A few practical things, for my own future reference. Two pairs of socks are not enough; three are. The guesthouses along the route all serve breakfast at eight and not a minute before, so an early start means carrying something. The section between the second and third villages is badly signed where it crosses the forestry track, and the map is right where the signs are wrong.
What did I think about, with four days and nothing to read? Less than I expected. Whole hours went by in which, as far as I can tell, I thought about nothing at all. I came back with no plans and no big decisions, only a strong sense that I should do it again, and a sunburn on the back of my left hand that will be there for a while yet.