In the Beginning - Hiking England's Coast to Coast Way: Landscape, Laughter and Love - page 2

blue sky decorated with Constable clouds (as so often painted by the late 18 th century Brit-
ish landscape artist) and strung with birdsong. My dad led us on a path that wound slowly
up a hillside. At first, the unaccustomed effort of it winded me, but after a while, the chal-
lenge of it excited me. I could go higher and higher. We walked for a long time on what
seemed like a carnival day. Troupes of other walkers shared the paths with us, cheerily
greeting one another in the uninhibited way of outdoors folk. The air vibrated as birds
chirped, insects hummed, and languid sheep called each other without alarm. The grass was
vivid green, the flowers streaks of sunlit yellow and laundry bright. All was very well with
the world. Occasionally, we paused and debated whether to press on or turn back. I urged
us higher, higher, yet higher until, at long last, to my mother's shocked surprise, we came
to Striding Edge, the knife-edge path that leads to Helvellyn, the Lake District's highest
peak. My dad delighted in regaling us with stories of hikers who had mis-stepped here and
slithered to an untimely end. My mother quailed, but before very long we had somehow
reached the summit and felt like conquerors of all we could see. It was my first taste of the
thrill of hiking achievement: the endorphin rush, the wind in my hair, the glow of health,
the endless possibilities. It was wonderfully heady stuff. It felt like clear, dewdrop joy.
We were utterly unprepared to climb Helvellyn, carrying, as I recall, neither food, nor wa-
ter, map, nor compass. By all the lore and legend of hiking, we should have been in peril,
but our luck held. The weather remained perfect; we were safe, our limbs ached but did
not twist, sprain or break, and we even found a happy café in the late afternoon after our
descent, that served us tea and bacon sandwiches. Ambrosia of the gods!
And so, in quite the wrong way, my love of hiking was spawned. Maybe it was inevitable.
Fated. Programmed in the genes. Who knows what is predestined or the outcome of a string
of inconsequential choices? I was raised in the curdling milk and gritty honey of industri-
al Yorkshire, but as I learned later, my predecessors had escaped the mills and the mines
whenever they could to walk the fells and dales. They had courted with the open spaces,
the whipping winds, the soft breezes—as they courted one another. Men who had returned
from the insanity and gash of war were gentled and steadied by the rhythm of striding up
to high places. Broken spirits and broken bodies received some balm. Unlike the farmers
and millworkers before me, I was privileged with a formal education, financial and phys-
ical security, no alarms of action on a foreign field; but as I discovered hiking, I began to
realize that we shared a visceral joy, a joy to which poets and mystics aspire.
As the train neared St. Bees, the scenery rushed backwards past me in a blur. I felt dis-
located. My mind too was a blur, as if someone were vigorously unspooling my life. So
much had led to this. Not just the teenage, youth hostelling jaunts, the weekend hikes of