Illustration: Alex Abadjieva
Never in my life have I thought about walking as much as in the past two months. Its limits, not walking and how many trips up and down my stairs might count as Ben Nevis. Furtive little thoughts creep through my serene lockdown alter-ego, about past walks, now impossible. The Nebrodi mountains, South Tyrol and the Rockies all loom like tempting spectres from an unobtainable past. Reading as escapism has a firm precedent for everyone and now more so than ever. Where it was once a pleasure, books are the lifeblood of captive days, as they might have been a hundred years ago. From within this fresh context of planetary paralysis, some words have begun to leap from the page more vividly than ever, particularly those which romanticise warmer climes and the adventures of youth. Words which bend oddly around memory to enhance that marker of authorial brilliance: the sensation that it had been written about or for you. Nobody has bettered Laurie Lee in walking or writing, he evokes one with the other so vividly, that to read As I walked out One Midsummer Morning, is to step into a youth which you never knew you had forgotten.
‘Ill-shod, badly clothed and lumbered with junk,’ was how Laurie Lee allegedly set out from Perpignan to cross the Pyrenees and join the International Brigade in Spain. I realised I was in the same ill-prepared category only as I removed my bloodied hiking socks on the last evening of a similar, albeit less dramatic, adventure. Unlike Lee, we had set out in peacetime and high summer, when the countryside below was filled with lavender and the grapes were beginning to show colour on the vines. However, even in the warmer months the mountains are home to treacherous storms, whipped into a frenzy when warm air from the Spanish plain meets the cool mountain breeze. We had stumbled across what could have been the same ‘rough little stone-built shelter,’ where Lee had hidden from a blizzard, eighty years ago. We were greeted by an eager Labrador with warm, wet licks on our shaky legs. His owner, a Catalan guide, could just as easily have been one of Lee’s contemporaries, with a face ‘like a weathered pole,’ he gestured to shut the door with a bolt. Just like that we were shut in, with what Lee versified as the ‘faint smell of charcoal, woodsmoke and mules and an indefinable whiff of pepper,’ but beyond the choking woodsmoke, the bothy had only the tang of leather and unwashed bodies.
From outside, where we heated dinner over a small burner, I could see how far I had carried my small library. The 32 kilometres of that day alone, and the two previous days when we had covered fifty kilometres, all hidden by the six ridges we had climbed. It seemed insignificant, and cast into shadow by ‘the great peak of Canigou,’ which like Lee, we had used as a ‘sighting post,’ keeping it always behind us to reach the coast at Banyuls Sur Mer. Despite carrying my beloved edition of As I walked Out… by an accident of overpacking, the only words of Lee’s which sprung to mind at the time were from a little ditty which he wrote amid the scorched Spanish south:
‘Rinsed sweat from the bare Sierras
Courses a curled furrow in the dust
A sun-dazed wanderer
Staggering to the sea…’
Our first two days we had hiked almost without human contact, at first along roads, which soon grew to steep peaks, pine forests and vertiginous colls. We camped out first night on an outcrop with not so much as a telegraph pole in sight and we toasted the vast sequined sky above us, which stretched inconceivably, forever. I say we were almost alone, as the following day we stumbled across an old stone farmhouse with neat beds of courgette and pumpkin, with trellises for beans. A man carrying a watering can and wearing nothing but a cap turned his bottom on our cheery greetings. The guidebook had forewarned of the nudist colony, but we hadn’t expected it quite so rudely. The Pyrenees are not entirely free from fresh encounters to Lee’s time, clothed or otherwise.
Past a field of proud-looking white horses, with an abandoned tractor, we found a crest of tall brambles, along which we foraged ‘loads of fat blackberries’ to mash into our morning porridge. Breakfast consoled us of the unfriendliness of the locals, though we regretted the cool shade of the bramble, as we soon found ourselves again between rocky goat tracks and dry forests of irreal cork trees. Stripped of half their bark, the dark and light ochre of their trunks added to the patchwork dark and light of the tree’s shadows, which shifted with the sea breeze, or perhaps with the illusion of my dehydration. That evening we came to the relief of Las Illas, set amongst a dewy river valley, where we found comfort in an open shower and a glass of delightfully cloudy pastis.
Our penultimate day was inevitably our most arduous. Leaving the deciduous cool of the valley, our final ridge climbed through towering primeval forests, adorned with moss to the dry pass where La Perthus lay desolate, effaced by the beating sun. The descent to La Perthus was scented with wild thyme and we stopped where the tumbled stones of a Roman fort had become a rockery for the sweet herb. Stuffing our backpacks, we also adorned our hats and the outside of our packs with its little diamond shaped leaves. We marched into the little boarder town of La Perthus ornate with the trappings of three days in the wilderness, replete with staffs of weathered tree branches. We bought rioja and saucisson to celebrate our final night before beginning our final climb.
Our final major ascent was 1200 metres onto the last ridge before the sea and it was only as we discarded our bravado with our makeshift sticks, clambering through the heat of the afternoon, that I fully recalled ‘a sun-dazed wanderer/ staggering to the sea,’ all the walkers from Hemingway to Hannibal who had hiked this pass, and were testified in the medieval towers, and impressive star-shaped gun forts. The heat is a very important consideration in a warm climate and only with hindsight could we truly read the error of our timing, certainly I thought at different times that I was Hannibal or Hemingway caught in brilliant sunlight. But inch by grudging inch we stumbled between cracked ridges and rich forests, where wild horses tossed their forelocks at us with glamour, until the land gave way to mountainous pine woods and we sensed that we were near the peak.
People doubt whether Lee ever really made his crossing of the Pyrenees, but it is hard to be cynical as you gaze down the ‘range after range of little step-like hills, falling away to the immensities of Spain,’ or when you are huddled in a bothy, ‘listening to the wind rising to an almost supersonic shriek.’ Perhaps the only thing Lee truly evokes is a nostalgia for an idealised youth, maybe he never did cross the Pyrenees. Yet his writing has a joyful incandescence, a lesson in evoking place as memory rather than fact, such that even when we cannot walk, we can feel something of those adventures. He invites us to overtake him, to partake in remembering and to walk out. Sun-scorched, blistered and with mouths full of dust, we made the sea the following day, and we collapsed among the copper bodies on the beach with final contentment. At least, that is how I remember it, or that might have been Laurie Lee?