At the moment I’m reading Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck’s account of travelling ‘in search of America’ in 1960 when he was 58 (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962). Charley is the writer’s French poodle who is his travel companion and mentioned frequently.
Steinbeck has introduced me to a Spanish word that immediately struck a chord. ‘It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando’, he says. ‘If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.’
Yes, I like this word. As I’ve said before it is the process of walking: the seeing, hearing and breathing in the moment that wins me over every time. It is the means and not the end. And it makes me – like the great Nobel laureate – a vacilador.
I’m outside the Winyard’s Gap Inn in the empty beer garden looking over the green and brown hills between Crewkerne and Beaminster while a buzzard makes passing loops in the sky and the sun lights its white undercarriage.
It’s been a week of freezing temperatures and sunny days with the near world covered in a layer of ice that sparkles richly in the sun. This morning it was -5 C in Dorset.
God, I love this weather: the air is so fresh it makes the skin tingle and a deep breath seems to clear the head and lungs and make my eyes water. It reminds me of exciting days and nights in the Alps or The Carpathians of Eastern Europe.
Water filled, ice covered tractor tyre tracks have strange swirls under them like contours on a map and crack and groan underfoot when I pass over them to get through the gate.
Through the gate I’m in Chedington Woods. It is a wood of old oaks, ivy clinging to the trunks and their bare branches twisting upwards. When I come out the other side there is the lonely, haunting mewing of the same buzzard echoing as it loops around again. It is only the two of us here. Why does it call out? Above all is a hard blue sky – clearer, brighter somehow in the cold air – and a half moon clear and strangely surreal in its incompleteness in the middle of the sky, its craters the same blue as the sky around it. What were those great lines by Shelley?
‘Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth
Wandering companionless’
In the foreground the grass is white, stems and leaves frosted with hundreds of little white shards. They crunch underfoot as I make my way down the hill, my fingers starting to sting.
The last time I was doing The Monarch’s Way was in July when I passed through Broadwindsor a few miles south west of here. It is where Charles II stopped the night at the George Inn in October 1651 after his failed attempt to escape by boat from Charmouth to France. While they were at the pub forty soldiers arrived en route to Jersey (where there had been a long and intense conflict as part of the English Civil War). That evening a woman that was travelling with the soldiers went into labour, another bit of luck that allowed the King and Lord Wilmot to avoid detection and escape back to Trent House near Yeovil.
By returning to Trent, the King had made a huge loop, as the path does and as have I.
I think of lovely Trent and it makes me travel back in time. It makes me think of those strange dream days during and between lockdowns. It’s where I swam amongst the lily pads in the River Yeo while doing the Monarch’s Way that hot day in June 2021 (recorded here). It’s where in the same month I met C for the first time in the beer garden at The Rose and Crown only a few hundred metres from Trent House.
She wore a silk skirt that caught the light of the sun as she walked over to me in the garden. She smiled. I smiled. And we paused.
These moments. Seemingly insignificant at the time and imbued with meaning in retrospect. Little did I know it in that moment but my life would never be the same again.
The icy air shocks me out of my reverie. I’m past Wyke Farm. I’m onto a track. Then past lots of felled trees and churned up ground. Then I notice that the light is fading and it’s only 4.30.
On my way back I’m stopped by something. The shape of the land, meadow, hedgerow and tree here have created a wonderful symmetry. The gap and horizon are a frame that pulls my eye towards the form of the tree. A perfect tree. I think it is a sycamore, not dissimilar to the Sycamore Gap tree that for many years stood next to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland and was inexplicably felled by someone on September 28th last year. That also had a perfect symmetry to it. As does the sycamore on Burrow Hill near the cottage in Somerset. This in many ways has a contrasting symmetry to the Sycamore Gap. Whereas this was most often viewed in the middle of a perfect U made by the land, Burrow Hill sits in top of and in the middle of a near perfect shaped mound to compliment the shape of the tree.
My breath is loud and great plumes come out of my mouth but I am as motionless as the tree. And the ice lingers in the hedgerows while the sun fades to a smudge. I shake myself, rub my hands together and head for home.
The Slow Walker 