There is a yearning in me
And it wasn’t purpose, per se. It was, maybe, a simultaneous sense of profound belonging and un-attachment. At once a knowing and not-knowing. An ability to both arrive and depart with every step https://emergencemagazine.org/practice/arriving-with-every-step/
There is a yearning in me, a call for the mountains as they call it.
I have never felt such hunger and drive for it, never understood it. For me life is a balance of suburbian life and walks or cycle in the nearby farmed countryside. I don't need to escape to the hills, to grand vista and empty places. I have never needed to, content to learn the world within touch of my feet or wheels.
I was looking at a photograph of the Brecon Beacons and cried. There they were. The mountains in their pixelated glory and all I could do was cry.
I remembered sitting within view of FIND NAME, enjoy lunch as corvides (I need to spend time learning to name them) flew above and sheep grazes below. I was tired. It had been a long year or deconstructing myself to learn how to be anew. I am afraid of mountains, small as they are in Wales. I am in awe of them as I am in awe of the ocean. They are places of danger, places that could swallow me up with no ifs and buts. They do not care for me. And yet, I am drawn to the vastness of those places. I never feel quite so alive as when surrounded by what is too easily call emptiness. Only then do I truly feel alive. I remember who I am. Human. This place I call home is more powerful than me. It doesn't matter what we do to it, it will endure. I am only passing through.
It is a place I feel strangely safe in. It would be too easy to say it is because there is usually nobody else around, that I am not watched, free to be who I am. Sure, there is some of that. It empties my head and grounds me. I am reminded of my frailety and in this very fact of my humanity. I am of this world. The spongey ground I touch is a part of me as I am of it. We belong here and neither of us has a higher right than the other.
I cried then too. Covid had hit in 2020, my world narrowed down to my garden. I learned to live surrounded by houses. In 2021 I learn about autism and myself. And in the craddle of that mountain, thinking about all of this as the late August warmth breathed on me, I thought about all this, about the resignation letter I was about to send, about the place ticket I had bought to see my family in over two years, of how much I had missed being outdoors. And I could not contain it. I cried and I smiled and I laughed.
Here I was, standing on a mountain, not quite sure of where I was, but quietly confident I'd make it back to camp in the evening to listen to the wind in the trees, my body always a little too cold, the ground always a little too hard, and yet much more right than my bed can ever be.
It is now 2022 and for the first time since the start of the pandemic, I am looking at maps in a concrete ways. I am not looking at lines known, I am not dreaming of new places. I am planning for time away. I am apprehensive about it. What if I get scared whilst wild camping? What if my body gives in and I'm not able to do this any longer? What if I hurt myself? What if I... the questions hurl themselves at me, endlessly. I have to fight their onslaught and remember I used to do this without even a second thought. A nice week-end ahead and no plans? No problem. I'd through my things together and off I'd go. It was effortless.
Stationary as I have become, I am afraid. Afraid I will never regain what I had. The world as we knew it is gone and I have to redefine my place in it. Do I still belong outside? It sounds stupid when I say it aloud because of course I do. Of course I can.
I have never been more grounded in the world around me as I am today. I took a walk earlier with my partner and without any second thought, I heard and named a woodpecker, I saw a fleeting great tit and recognised it. I climbed and walked on an iron age hill fort and explained it to my partner, I turn left at a t-junction without looking at the map because that what made sense to reach our destination. I looked at trees and noticed similarities between trees far apart. I cannot yet name them but I recognise they are kin. In the two years of being bound by my immediate suburban locality, I have learned to notice the small things. They were not fleeting but recurring. I made time for them. I walked again and again in the same footsteps and that bird I didn't quite see fully, revealed itself later on. I perused identification books and picked up tips on recognising one flower whilst looking for another one (as yet unidentified).
It is trivial, almost laughable. This balance I thought I had but never had. The world outside my suburbian life was just green, blue, bird song, and mice scrambling. I did not know a thing about it. It was not alive and I was not truly a part of it.
Talk about the French presidential election. The collapse of care and how diving into nature and care for it, for us is finding a way to heal. Reading 'Braiding Sweetgrass' and it feels like a gift given to me when I need vision and understanding.
---THE GOOD DRAFT---
There is a yearning in me. A call of the wild, a pull to the mountain, or whatever it’s called nowadays.
I have never felt such hunger, never really understood it. I’ve always been at my happiest with a balance of suburbia and farmed landscapes. When out cycling or hiking, I am drawn to human spaces at night, church cemeteries a long favourite of mine to sleep for a night. Remote hills and grand vistas are nice but hard to access and I am scared of them. I have never been taught how to move and be in such places.
And yet, I long for those places with every ounce of my being. I flick through images of the Brecon Beacons in search of information about the Beacons Way, a walk that draws me in for the semi-remoteness of it – nothing is truly remote in England and Wales. I want to lose myself in the hills, forget about towns and villages, and disappear for a few days.
I pry my eyes away from the mountains to look outside. The light is dim, the world bathed in fluorescent streetlight and the occasional passing headlight. The window is open a crack to let in some air but not too much cold. I stare out for a moment, the pixelated images of the mountains swelling in my heart. I tell myself to stop being ridiculous. This is just an image of a mountain, not a particularly good one at that. This is no reason to cry. And yet, I do. Tears escape my eyes and wet my cheeks. I cannot stop.
The images on the screen blur with the memories of sitting at the western edge of the Brecon Beacons with my partner in the late summer of 2021. Ravens flew overhead as sheep minded their own business down on the ground. For a moment, it was just us pulsing with life on hills and the wild silence of isolated (change the word) landscapes. We were sitting on moss, enjoying a spot of lunch while around us the earth rose and fell. The Beacons Way was marked on the map at our feet and on my phone, but there was no trace of it. I’d managed to lose it earlier on in the day, following a sheep track instead of the green line of the map. For the first time since I returned to hiking, I was in a space with no markers of where my feet should land. No gates, no post, no stile, no faint outline of a path. And yet, I was unafraid. I felt safe in the cradle of the hills, the August warmth breathing on me. It was easy to forget about work, the mental drain of dealing with difficult colleagues and inadequate management left in the foothills of the mountains. I laid down on the cushion of moss and soft peaty ground and cried. I cried until I laughed.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah,’ I whispered. I thought of the resignation letter sitting idly in my hard drive, the tickets already booked to visit my family for the first time in over two years, of the new job to come with the promise of stability. ‘Yeah, I’m okay.’ I closed my eyes and focused on the tickle of flowing vegetation and creatures of the earth on my bare legs. I could not hear the incessant drone of traffic here, not even a plane. I knew it wouldn’t last. I would have to come down soon and rejoin the flow of society but not for a while longer. I was out of suburbia and the built environment for the first time since the start of the pandemic and I intended to enjoy it as much as I could, even if it was only for a couple of days. I could breathe again.
---*---
My fingers trace the purple line of a Sustrans map, showing me one of the many paths of the national cycle network. Part of this purple line is known to me, traversing places cycled and walked before. Yet, I have never seen them in April and they lead to new lines never explored before. Trees are tentatively growing buds in the garden whilst the daffodils explode in little sun in their grey and skeletal surroundings. Maps strewn over the floor, my body covering them in turn as I travel through them is a familiar sight at this time of year too. I awake from the long winter and prepare to dust off my camping gear. I have not done this in over two years and I’m doing my best to pretend I’m not apprehensive about it. Is it possible to lose the skills involved with navigating multiple days on the bike with wild camps in between? Is it possible to forget how to sustain my body during day long rides? Am I still fit enough for this – physically, mentally?
The thoughts linger but I ignore them. They echo the worries of my first forays into wild camping and cycle touring. I know those fears. They are the voices of society telling me to remain in place and not trespass into forbidden spaces. They tell me I don’t belong past the boundaries of brick walls, steel girders, and glass windows. But I do. I know I do.
I have spent years looking at the flowers growing in the cracks of the pavement, listening to the call of birds, willing myself to answer them. Yet they have remained ‘flower’ and ‘bird’ but the enforced stillness of the last two years has wiped away the last of my feeble excuses not to learn more about what I observed daily. I have learned to recognise blue tits, sparrows, great tits, woodpeckers, starlings, blackbirds, reed buntings, swifts, goldfinches, whitebeams, oaks, birches, chestnuts, beeches, willows, bluebells, cowslips, primroses, blackberries, dandelions, forsythias, jays, jackdaws, crows, rooks, ravens, chicken of the woods, chanterelles, roe deer, cormorants, and more. Each new name expands my world beyond pigeons, gulls, chickens, cows, daffodils, tulips, and grass. Greens and browns are replaced by individuals I await and cherish.
I fold the maps and put them away in from handlebar bag, ready for the journey ahead. I pack more than I need, knowing I’m likely to divert my plans as soon as I set forth on the first unknown road. I dream of memories of cycling, of hiking, of being surrounded by nature as we approach the long bank holiday week-end. My mind wanders far from the straight lines of the office, the endless spreadsheets, and the babble of colleagues rising from desks. I want away. I want to put my watch away, to be ruled by the grumbling of my stomach and the aches in my legs. I want the repetitive movement of bodies to soothe my tired mind.
I pack my panniers days ahead of the trip, habits of what goes where still firmly ingrained in me. I am relieved at the idea I can still pack and go last minute if I wanted to.
---*---
‘Where are you going,’ a colleague asks me when he spots my fully loaded bicycle at the end of the day.
‘I don’t know. Towards Gloucester and then Wales,’ I reply tentatively. ‘I think.’
He wishes me luck and I leave. The bike is heavy under the load of everything I need for the long week-end and a little more. I like this weight. It anchors me down, reminding me that speed is not what I’m after. I meander, aiming for a woodland I spotted on the map. I am hoping to sleep there for the night. It is unusual for me to plan where I will sleep but with only a handful of hours until dark, I wanted to have a point of certitude. Still, I asses every field I see on the way for its potential to shield and welcome me for the night.
I make it to the forest to find a warden living on sight. They see me wheel my bicycle with a sleeping mat on the rear rack. I smile and they turn to watching the sky. It is darkening into ever shifting hues of blue as the moon rises and stars begin to reveal themselves to us.
I walk on, past a fenced off area full of growing saplings, until I find what seems to be a good spot. I lean the bike against a trunk and investigate on foot. My head jerks back constantly in search of the bright red of my bicycle frame to ensure I am not losing myself. Brittle leaves echo loudly underfoot. The occasional twig breaks as my body dances between tree trunks and branches. I do not want to disturb the world around me, clear away the undergrowth to claim it as my kingdom for the night. This is not my kingdom but a kingdom of its own. I am merely a visitor, passing through for a night. Eventually, I find a tree I cannot yet name with a big enough patch of ground free of brambles. Remembering the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, I lay my hand on the bark and introduce myself to the tree.
‘Hi,’ I whisper. I am afraid of being heard. ‘I’m Allysse. Can I camp here tonight by your side?’ I feel self-conscious while I wait for an answer. I do not know what signs I’m supposed to look for, to listen for. When nothing happens, I take this as a yes and bring my kit over. I carefully lay the panniers on the ground and begin assembling the tent. The body erected, I realise how perfect the spot is. The tent fits perfectly between the tree trunk, a young sapling, and a tangle of brambles.
‘Thank you,’ I mumbled, awed by what feels like more than serendipity.
I finish putting the tent together, light the stove to cook dinner, and lose myself in the sounds around me. As I lay my head on my makeshift pillow of clothes, a deer barks in the distance. I dream of hounds and daggers, of the fabric of worlds thinning and shifting, of the deer white as snow leading the way.
In the morning, my panniers packed and hooked on the rear rack of my bicycle, I lay my palm on the tree trunk one last time.
‘Thank you,’ I say voice loud and clear.
When I turn to leave, I see a bluebell where one corner of my tent had been. A bluebell that I would swear hadn’t been there the night before. ‘Thank you,’ I repeat my voice muffled by a throat swelling with emotions I cannot name.