2/25/2024 0 Comments Instaling Doomed LandsWe would camp in the heather, by cairns and old mine shafts, hundreds of feet above the orange lights of civilization, and I would dream. With the gale and the breeze, with our maps and compasses and emergency rations and bivy bags and plastic bottles of water. Much of the time, we would be alone with each other and with our thoughts and our conversations, and we would be alone with the oystercatchers, the gannets, the curlews, the skylarks, and the owls. We would follow ancient tracks or new trails, across mountains and moors and ebony-black cliffs. Every year, throughout my most formative decade, he would take me away to Cumbria or Northumberland or Yorkshire or Cornwall or Pembrokeshire, and we would walk, for weeks. My father was a compulsive long-distance walker. Only later do I realize the complexity of the emotions summoned by a childhood laced with experiences like this. All of this, he tells me, will make me into a man. He was always there, somewhere up ahead, but he had decided it would be good for me to “learn to keep up” with him. I do find my way home I manage to keep to the path and eventually catch up with my father, who has the map and the compass and the mini Mars bars. Twenty-five years later, I still have a felt memory of that experience and its emotions: a real despair and a terrible loneliness. It is raining and the cloud is punishing me clinging to me, laughing at me. My rucksack is too heavy, I am unloved and lost and I will never find my way home. The black bog juice I have been trudging through for hours has long since crept over the tops of my boots and down into my socks. I am on some godforsaken moor high up on the dark, ancient, poisonous spine of England. I can’t see more than six feet in either direction. I am alone, I am scared, I am cold, and I am crying my eyes out.
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