Owhango


This is Owhango, where I have a room in the Open Only On Fridays pub. I am the sole occupant. Outdoors is cold and wet, indoors is cold and dry. Success. 

Days like this invite introspection. What gave me the idea I would enjoy walking to Bluff? Did I ever imagine I'd be haunting an empty hotel whilst second-guessing the mountain forecast? 

Four books are to blame. 

When I was an undergraduate I borrowed Gordon Russell's 1968 memoir, "Designer's Trade" from the library. After the war he commuted from his home in the Cotswolds to London to chair the new Council of Industrial Design. If the moon was full, he left the homeward train several stations before his stop and walked home cross country. When I worked at Cambridge I took trains or buses to villages near old Roman roads and walked to the next pick-up point, inspired by Russell. 

Around that time I bought a battered old copy of "Appalachian Odyssey" by Steve Sherman and Julia Older (1977). They walked the AT at a time when only a hundred or so people had hiked the whole trail so logistics were challenging. But, they got there. 

In 1988 Redmond O'Hanlon published "In Trouble Again" about his walk to the headwaters of the Orinoco. All his journeys involve the hapless impractical buffoon getting into serious trouble and just not dying by a whisker. But that's the point, even fools can do it. And he is very funny. 

An almost identical approach was used by Bill Bryson when he wrote about his own go at the Appalachian Trail ("A Walk In The Woods" 1998). An unfit bookworm steps outdoors and has conniptions about moose and other wildlife. Again he lived to tell the tale and I laughed like a loon. 

These authors normalised long distance walking for me, that's all. But no, I didn't foresee a nightwatch in a pub with no beer. 






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