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sibilities, what I could do, who I could become, all else just leads to jealousy, resentment
and, in the end, more pain. It sometimes seems sentimental to count one's blessings in the
midst of crushing blows, but they were there all the same. Since it had become difficult for
me to work, I had inched my way towards a masters' degree, I had had the leisure to learn
to swim well, to practice yoga, to be in shape. I had volunteered with elderly people and
with people with developmental disabilities and I had made two life-changing trips to New
Orleans to help as best I could after Hurricane Katrina. I had discovered a talent for and
pleasure in demolition! On another level I had also moved on, beyond the worst wounds of
divorce after a long-term, painful marriage. Now I had a relatively new, healthy, surprising,
relationship with Chris, and with him I had taken up hiking again! Hiking was one of those
pearls of a great price, I thought I had cast to the swine because I could no longer see well,
but here I was on the Coast to Coast, on top of Kidsty Pike, feeling marvelous and looking
with enthusiasm into the rather blurred future ahead.
At our feet were the remnants of High Street, the highest Roman road in Britain. It has
always caused my brain to do a flip, my breath to falter, to accept that conquerors from
such a multi-cultural, far-flung empire, strode across Britain's moors and hills. I react this
way not because I have a misplaced belief that the Brits were in some way indomitable, but
northern England is not the territory of the wine dark sea or the sun kissed goblet, but of
the blasted fells and the winds that whip up a tunic or flare a toga. Why would anyone from
the sunny slopes of Italy want to linger here? Reason told me that the story had to be the
complicated weaving of power and oppression, of people escaping and claiming, of a few
dubious interests being served at great cost. But in retrospect, the whole web of intrigue,
narcissism and power play had nudged Western civilization a notch or two further on. We
rarely make progress on pure motives. As I looked at the carefully engineered paving, it
was strangely like feeling the vibrations of those fighter jets a few days earlier; my life was
put into relief by human and cosmic achievement. People from distant times and shores
had left their imprint here. What hopes and tensions, clouded, cursed and coursed through
their lives I wondered? Did we walk alone through the fells and hills of history or were we
intimately implicated? And if they had left their mark was I less significant? The lines of
human hopes and handicaps were etched into these hills, and reading them I was not dis-
couraged or made to feel inconsequential, rather privileged to add my own few words to
the text.
By now I was at least figuratively contemplating my navel, (no fluff, just sweat), dwelling
on the follies and frolics of the past. But reality has a way of blundering in. A pair of
fell runners breezed by, as if to say, “Come on, you haven't seen anything yet! You've
got places to go. Press on.” So we did press on, sharply down and down to the head of
Haweswater reservoir and lunch.
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