ENCOUNTER 1

The Fox

An epiphany in six

“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

William Blake.

The Fox 1.

These are the facts. It was early morning. Just light. I was lying in bed looking at my phone. I heard something moving about outside the bedroom window, which was just above where I was relaxing. I pushed the covers back, sat up and looked out. I could see two black, white-fringed ears showing close to the glass. I sat up higher and saw a large fox standing on the plant troughs outside, perhaps two feet away from me through the glass. He – I believe a ‘he’, he was so large – saw me but stayed for a moment, looking intently, directly into my eyes. I managed to take a photograph as my phone was to hand. He jumped down out of sight.  I got out of bed and went as fast as could into the kitchen where we have a glass door looking into the garden. There he was, close up to the door. When he saw me, he backed down and away, and began to trot up our little path. Again, I managed to take a picture of him. As I did so, he stopped and turned and looked at me, again eye to eye. I put the phone down. There was a still moment. Me and him looking at each other. Then he trotted away into the back of the garden, into the bushes and I couldn’t see him anymore. That is what happened.

The Fox 2.

I saw a fox just outside our bedroom window. I sat up in bed, having heard some noises just outside. It was a large fox, standing on the plant troughs below the window and not two feet away from me through the glass. He looked at me for what seemed a few seconds. Then he jumped down into the garden. I ran through to the kitchen to see if he was still around. There he was, right outside our glass door. I approached the door slowly and he stayed for a while until I was very close. He turned and walked away up the garden path. Then he stopped and turned back and looked at me. He looked into my eyes. At that moment everything changed. When the fox turned to look at me I found myself in another kind of existence. I had walked into a world of mythic reality. Everything – the garden, the sky, the surrounding houses – throbbed with a powerful potential, with the fox at its centre. The fox looked into me and he knew me. And I knew him. We understood one another. This exchange was both shocking and thrilling. It was as if I had fallen in love, a devastating love at first sight. In this I had projected everything I may have thought good or profound or terrifying within me onto the fox and it echoed back. Everything was echoing.  It seemed that somehow the same thing had happened to him. He knew how I was, how isolated, how ultimately lonely was the void in the depth in my psyche. And he was the same. The horror of the world was all there, the majesty, the comedy and the trivia. But we were also aware that we both knew nothing at all about our existence. Nothing about the nature of the world we had been hurled into. This utter ignorance stunned our minds into silence. For those moments we were known to each other, we shared our predicament. The fox had been animated into the god he was by my perception, my projection. I was transformed into the god I was by reflection. It was real and had significance. What that significance was, neither of us knew. This is also what happened.

The Fox 3.

Of course – I would say ‘of course’ – when the fox trotted away up the garden, although this glowing, numinous atmosphere stayed with me for some time, it had to dissipate. One man living in society cannot live in an alternative, mythic world for too long without losing his grip on the mundane social networks he lives in. Those imposed habits which enable him to get washed and dressed and go shopping. And yet this alternative existence seemed as real as any perception of what we call the material world. The organised society we have dreamed up and live in is not immutable. There are other dreams and the brain is capable of many ways of perceiving and projecting. These experiences are there, just out of sight most of the time, only waiting for a moment of confrontation, some slippage, to enable them to be come in to being and be lived in, if only temporarily, as a unique epiphany. Within those moments one feels utterly engaged with being alive, and all existence seems to have an unnameable significance. But they do not last and we must always reluctantly return to our cells. We are obliged by our situation to live pivoting between the mundane and the ecstatic or in equilibrium between the two.

The Fox 4.

The fox turned and looked at me. What was it about this single, simple gesture that transformed my perceptions and allowed me to enter another sphere of experience? Had I been waiting for and wanting something like this to happen? Was it a subconscious build-up of frustration, being tired of the imposed ways of seeing and connecting, tired of that which is dictated by our chance birth into whatever society and set of acceptable emotions and reactions surround us? Was it the fox that burst the dam and washed me into a world of emotional vibrancy and wonderment? A sudden shift away from a left brain, analytic dominance, to the freer, open eyed perceptions and connecting power of the right brain? And this suddenly, without warning? This event of hemispheric switching would need some prompting catalyst. And in this instance it was the fox. The fox who turned and looked at me.

The Fox 5.

It would seem to be an innate and insistent urge in the human animal, retaining its primate base, to escape from the transactional social state that we have developed for our tribal benefit and herd nature, into a world of solitary emotional invigoration, a world without words or calculation. A world where an achieved inner silence allows sharpened senses to engage, and an expanded experience lived through. A world where transcendence is possible.

We create special places and rituals which can act as portals to the wider vision. The sacred groves, temples, churches, concert halls, drugs, meditations and, as in this instance, unplanned and startling confrontations with the natural world, are gates through which we may pass through to a potential release from the bondage of a limited social consciousness. They are witness to our need to reverse the expulsion from the garden. Perhaps the fox was repeating, ‘I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly’. Socrates is reputed to have said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I would say that an unlived life is not worth examining. Fox: you were the open door through which I could pass, for one short moment, into a vibrant, lived life.

The Fox 6.

Perhaps early one dawn the Great Fox will come back. He will turn and look at me, seeing me, as I will see him, transformed by sublime illumination. Or perhaps he will return and he will look at me and see a man in a garden. And I will see a fox.

………………………………..

ENCOUNTER 2

The Tarn

An epiphany among mountains

One cannot say the unsayable nor name the unnameable. But both the unsayable and unnameable exist, and a confrontation with either can be as powerful as any more easily described experience.

To Sprinkling Tarn

I was walking up and out of Upper Langdale in strong sunlight, past the stream in the wood, past the birdsong and the insistent cuckoo, and wondering, at a crossroads, which of two paths to take. One, a right turn to a long dogleg via the Stake Pass to my destination at Angle Tarn.  The other, to the left, a shorter, steadily steepening rise up and through the rocky Rossett Gill to the same place. I stood waiting for guidance but none came. Without thought, without words, I turned left and found myself beginning to feel the weight of my pack as the ground rose before me towards the Gill.

The sweat came and dripped off my nose and something told me that at about a third of the height I should stop and drink some water and bite on a fruit bar. I sat by the path side. A man and his young daughter, who was about 10 years old, were descending and stopped by me. ‘Wild camping?’ the man asked. ‘Yes – I’m heading for Angle Tarn’. ‘That’s a lovely place, but Sprinkling Tarn is even finer.’ ‘And it’s not much further on’, said the girl. ‘I think I am getting a little too old for this lark.’ I said. The girl looked at me and said, ‘Don’t be downhearted. You will get there’. I said that I thought I would. They carried on down. It was some time after, with the struggle up Rossett Gill behind me, that the lovely words of the girl struck home. I had said nothing to her that acknowledged her kindness and now the chance had gone.  An empty space where a smile and a simple thank you should have been. An empty space between me and the girl, created by what I had not said.

I arrived at Angle Tarn and sat for a while. It was early in a long summer day – around one o’clock. Too early to camp, and what would I do for the next nine hours of daylight? I pushed on up to near the Esk Hause pass and then began the descent under the huge cliffs of Great End towards Sprinkling Tarn. Great End’s bigger neighbour, Great Gable, on the other side of the Styhead pass, began to dominate the view. And then there was the Tarn just below. It seemed small and unassuming and welcoming. A few late walkers ambled passed and a family swam among the tiny twinkling lights of the tarn surface. Then they were gone.

I stood looking at the surroundings, seeking out a good place for the tent. Another lone camper, a young woman, had already staked out a claim by the path on the far side of the tarn. I could see a lively dog scurrying around her tent. To my right was a flat space with convenient boulders on which I could set my kitchen. The tent went up and all my gear organised.  The late afternoon crept on. The sun streamed across the Styhead pass from above Wasdale and turned Great Gable into a massive bulk of blue-grey brightness, with its ridges and buttresses barely visible through the haze. At one point the woman opposite stood up outside her tent and was silhouetted against this massive wall of light. Her tiny figure’s presence transformed Great Gable into something monstrously huge and overwhelming. She stood still for a while, then turned back to her tent. Behind her silent, slight and graceful movement, the mountain remained, weighed down by its own gigantic mass – immovable, solid, indifferent. What subtle, unfelt movement of the brain’s synapses were responding to this unwritten drama?  The woman and the mountain.

To Beck Head and beyond.

Rising and packing up the next morning I presumed I was in for an easy day, descending to into Wasdale. And so it was. Crossing the pass at Styhead I had my first far distant view of the shining white speck of the Wasdale Head Inn where I would arrive two hours later. I would drink cool beer, eat well and stay that night, not camping as I had thought, but stretching out in the one single room they had available.

The next morning, I was surprised to see that not many people were about, in spite of the good weather. Today I was making for Beck Head, the pass between Great Gable and Kirk Fell, then further on to a mountain called Haystacks. Ahead and above, I could see the path slanting up the side of Great Gable. A gentle stroll through stone-walled, sheep filled fields took me to the beginning of the rise. And so it began. Slow, small steps. Keep going. Do not stop unless you need to. Slow small steps. Don’t look up. Or, if you do, choose a goal not far ahead where you can rest. No other thought. Nothing. A steady rhythm and an empty mind, an echoing space with perhaps some plaintive sounds moving in and out of focus. Was that all?

A question was raised some years ago which asked, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’. No-one could answer. But what about, to me, the more pressing question? ‘What is it like to be me?’

There seems to be constant activity in my brain, only fully conscious in part, with fleeting moods, emotions, images and sounds arriving and fading as if continually rising and sinking in and out of a deep sea. Physically it is the same. My senses, via my brain, were telling my conscious self that I was surrounded by green grass and silver-grey scree and a wide mountain landscape. I could hear the burble of a stream and the bleating of sheep. I could feel the sun beating on my head and the sting of salt sweat in my eyes.  I could feel my clothes and boots. I was aware of some parts of my body. The aching calf muscles, the thigh ache, the gallstone sting, the steady deep breathing and the near addictive flushes of pleasure to be had from mild discomfort and mild pain. And, although I have used words here in retrospect, at the time all this was without any of these mental, visual and physical sensations coalescing into language. This must all be part of what it is like to be me. But I am not sure. Not sure at all. Does language block any way to experience what it is like to be me?

The climb went on. I rested. A sheep walked close by on the path as I sat there. It stopped within a few feet and looked at me. What is it like to be a sheep? What is it like to be a sheep looking at me looking at it? I couldn’t tell, of course, but I am sure it didn’t have the words or grammar that can clutter the pre-frontal cortex in my own brain.  Was the muted cacophony and misty imagery I was partly aware of below the spoken experience, some semblance of what the sheep was experiencing? Strip out the words and what is left?

To Haystacks.

Having reached Beck Head I could see, on the other side of the pass, the long line of my path stretching across the hillside – ‘Moses Trod’ (a famous said-to-be smugglers’ route from the Honister slate mines to Wasdale). The main work of the day had been done and I strolled along in some content towards the next objective. Haystacks looks a diminutive and uninteresting mountain given its surrounding higher peaks but none the less, a place I had wanted to visit for some time. One reason was that the ashes of a famous walker are scattered there, and I wanted to see why he had chosen it. It was also on my route towards Buttermere and in a good position to break halfway and camp.

The Tarn

My map had shown what I had thought would be an easy walk and scramble up a short distance from Blackbeck Tarn to the higher and, from where I was heading, a small hidden lake. Through winding rocky passes and gullies, I made my way up. It is one of the delights of these walks that the first sight of the desired objective can give rise to a mild sense of achievement, relief and a muted joy that very soon one can throw off the pack and not put it on again until the next morning. All this is more so if the objective emerges such as the one which now appeared. Innominate Tarn. My first sight of the water was almost at eye level and the surface a thin sliver of light. As I mounted the last few feet, it opened out into an expanse of calm water in a small depression surrounded by rocky outcrops. It looked as though it had been lifted above the surrounding landscape in a bowl. Like a wash bowl of a giant. A bath for a minor god. Perhaps a drinking pond for an enormous, fabled eagle. But it was just as it was.

I threw down the sack and sat on a boulder for a while at the edge of the tarn. A few late walkers passed by from time to time. None of them stopped to look. Even on first impressions, this place had some powerful charm but nobody seemed to sense it enough to stop and ponder. The number of passers-by gradually dwindled to nothing, and I was left alone.

All the chores of camping were gone through. Tent up, sleeping mat laid out and sleeping bag put in place. The food and cooking gear set out. Water filtered ready for cooking and drinking. Not least making myself comfortable. Boots off. Everything loosened and relaxed. Cooked a meal, washed up and propped myself against a rock and sat.

In the foreground was the water. In the middle distance some rocky outcrops on the opposite side. Then nothing, as if the earth had fallen away and the tarn and I were resting on the edge of an immense precipice. Across a vast space were green-grey mountains in a row. Kirk Fell and Great Gable, with, in the gap between, Scafell Pike. The small ripples on the surface of the tarn appeared and disappeared as they do on all watery surfaces, be they minute as here, or on the vast turmoil out on the sea. It is impossible to ‘see’ moving water. The changes are so numerous, so fleeting and intricate that the eye and brain do not have the capacity to capture the experience. And so these endlessly frustrating mini-dramas of the waves are played out before us without our ever being able to grasp the movement nor experience the reality of it, which is for ever just out of reach.

I let the thought go and sat and stared and listened. A mother duck and six ducklings were circling the tarn, round one way, then back the other. As they approached I could hear tiny pipings from the little ones as they pirouetted in front of me. A flycatcher met a horsefly in mid-air just by me and made off with it. Beetles with metallic green heads and golden bodies landed on me. But slowly, what moving life had been there retreated to their holts and hideaways. Whatever wavelets were there moments ago were now stilled. The tarn’s surface disappeared. The light faded into a silvery white. The distant mountains receded. And a full moon rose over Great Gable, its perfect disc mirrored in the tarn. The light faded again, now a watery pale grey pink.

Nothing. My mind had emptied. I sensed nothing. I had nothing to say. I sat in this demi-world suspended somewhere unknown, without emotion. The unblemished brightness of the sky was perfectly reflected in the tarn’s mirror. It now began to look as if there was a hole in the world and a fathomless brightness shone up from the vast emptiness below.  This illusion tipped the experience over into something full of a terrifying wonder. I felt dizzy and calm at the same time. The world was spiralling, with me in the middle. And the lake had become a void daring me to comprehend it. I couldn’t. ‘That’s enough’ I said. ‘There is no more for you here. You have it.’ I unzipped the tent flap and rolled in.

It was enough. It was enough for Innominate Tarn to lodge into my psyche like a personalised jewel that had been mounted somewhere deep but accessible and that it was utterly mine and safe where it was now resting. Being aware that there was not much more of my life in front of me, I was happy that, at this late stage, I had suddenly been given this unearned gift and that it would stay with me to the end. I zipped up the tent and later slept.

To Buttermere.

I didn’t want to look at the tarn in the morning. The thing, whatever it was, was done and dusted and I wanted to clear off.  I left and started up the rise to the summit of Haystacks without turning back. My aim was to spend one more night under canvas and that that should be at Bleaberry Tarn. To get there I had to climb and traverse the fells of High Crag and High Stile then descend slightly to Red Pike before a notorious scree-run down to the tarn.

I had a rocky and awkward descent from Haystacks, with my big sack making things difficult. On my way down I met a tall, wiry German woman dressed in a lycra outfit who seemed to be running up the route I was stumbling and scrambling down. I asked about her route and whether she had come up Red Pike. She said, ‘Yes. It’s very loose. All scree and slippery and unstable. Steep at the top. You need to take great care. It’s slate so you will need gloves’. And she trotted off uphill. Gloves? This made me think on the coming scree-run with some nervousness which became stronger the nearer I came to it. On steep ground, with my heavy pack, if I fall over there is no stopping me.

I reached the col at the bottom, the Scarth Gap, and looked up in some dismay at the new steepness in front of me. The same game had to be played. Slowly, slowly. Small steps. Rest when you need to, but try not to stop. The ascent turned out to be quite friendly with a good path of stepping stones rising to a levelling off, then the final climb. Now, looking back, I could see over to Beck Head where I had appeared at the pass yesterday morning. Beyond that, the mountains drifted away into a haze. Innominate Tarn was out of sight behind an outcrop of rock. I crossed to High Stile and sat for some food and drink. I looked to the west and there it was. Below me a broad ridge leading to something like a raised and inflamed boil, a sore abscess with watery blood spilling down the right side. The scree-run. Red Pike. I became more nervous.

Reaching Red Pike top I was now in a state of high tension and, rather than traipse to the summit a few yards away and enjoy the view to the Irish Sea and Scotland, I decided I would plunge straight down and take my chances. It was indeed extremely unpleasant. The slope divided into steep craggy gullies with sharp rocks sticking out on both sides, the gullies themselves filled with very loose scree. Negotiating this place, I was forgetting to breathe at times as I stumbled down trying to keep upright. A moment came when sliding down one of the ledges I had to sit down to lower myself off, ripping the seat of my trousers as I went. Once out of the gully life seemed less dangerous and although still slipping and sliding downwards I made it to safer ground. This slowly transformed into a gentle slope and a long stretch down a good path to Bleaberry Tarn.

This was not what I had expected. The lovely Tarn with its dramatic backdrop of the Chapel Crags, had a kind of beach by the path and there were many people there. Some having picnics, some swimming. The place I had spotted for my camp from above was now taken by a family noisily putting their tents up. The chatter was constant from all sides. I had descended into the realm of language and the naming of things. I couldn’t take it. My last camp was no camp and I set off downhill to Buttermere. Now very tired indeed, the rock slab and boulder path became a hard, seemingly interminable slog. It entered some woods at halfway with an arrow-straight path going down and down into a tunnel of trees. I felt like Sisyphus in reverse, lugging a heavy weight downwards rather than pushing a boulder up.

It came to an end, and I walked very slowly into the village, dragging my feet in the dust while holiday makers in colourful shorts and t-shirts ran around and laughed and talked. This dusty, overdressed elderly man had made it back to the describable, the truncated experience of social exchange and the limitation of words.

I took a room in a hotel and sat in the sunlit bar with a beer, listening to the shrieks of laughter and murmured interactions of my fellows. I sat silent as a man with a secret. Smug, but with no words to explain my smugness. I had, somewhere in me, an image of a small mountain lake which would, I believed, somehow sustain me to the end.

‘Don’t be downhearted’, the girl had said.

I had been to Innominate Tarn. The nameless Tarn.

Garry Kennard

June 2023

…………………………………..

ENCOUNTER 3

What am I doing here?

Thou art the thing itself.

Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

King Lear. William Shakespeare.

But perhaps there is more to it than that.

Day One – Ascent

I stepped out of the shower, dried myself and walked back into my hotel room. The room, to make it look bigger, had one wall fitted with a floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall mirror. I saw my reflection walk into view. There I was, head to toe, naked. I dropped the towel I was holding and took a long look. I had never before seen my body with such clarity. Stepping back for a better view I examined my figure, up and down. The body of a 76-year-old man. Bald head, a broadening nose due to age and alcohol, a short grey beard. Strong shoulders and chest. A flat stomach scarred from operations. My penis drooping from dark pubic hair. Thin but strong legs. Feet with bad toenails.

The room was silent; the voices and snatches of music droning on in my head and the emotional messages flickering around my brain’s synapses could not be guessed at by looking at this figure in the mirror. This was a reflected image of the material me, a hairless ape, standing silently in space.

Then, out of my brain fog and the vague musings on my body, a clear question arose.

‘What are you doing here?’

There was at one level a straightforward answer to this question. I was in a hotel in Buttermere in the English Lake District. I was there with a desire to complete a wild camping walk I had started two weeks before which had been curtailed halfway by bad weather. Now there was a very good forecast for a few days, and I had travelled up from London to carry on the walk from where I left off. The plan was to traverse the fell, Robinson, and cross some ridges to Dale Head. I would then descend to Dale Head Tarn. There I would bivouac for one night, continue the next day via High Spy to Catbells, descend to Derwent Water and take the ferry to Keswick. Bus and train home. Fit young people could do this walk in one day but because of my age, slow pace and my desire to linger in these places, I had given myself a leisurely two days.

That was the plan. If the answer to the first question was to do the walk, a question underlying that was, ‘Why did I have a desire to do the walk?’  That might become clearer during the action, but best leave it floating for now. Before the questions must come the walking.

Usually, I carry a tent and cooking material for these walks if I am to need more than two nights out. In this case, it would require only one overnight camp, so I was only taking cold food, hot soup in a flask and a bivouac bag. This made the sack I was carrying a bit lighter than usual, but not by much.

The first and last steps on these walks are the hardest. Legs creak on the first uphill gradient, even on the tarmac road leading to the start of the path. With the heavy sack I must take things slowly. So it begins.

After climbing the first few hundred feet I became aware of a lone figure way above me on the hill side. I stopped to look. Yes. A figure in red trousers and a white top carrying a huge pack. I couldn’t quite work it out but I had the impression that he or she was going very slowly indeed. Another solo wild camper.

After some time I looked up again and found, to my astonishment, that I was gaining on the person above. It has never happened before that I would be going faster than someone else on a path. But it was true. My steady plod, using my usual small footsteps, was taking me nearer and nearer to the person above.

The more I looked the more intrigued I became. It wasn’t that the load was huge, it was that the figure carrying it was quite small. Eventually, when I was just a few yards behind, the figure stopped and turned. It was a woman. Grey bobbed hair that was being blown about by the breeze. Dark glasses. The white top and the red trousers were half hidden by an enormous plastic map case that swung around her neck and shoulder. She was using expensive walking poles. These were extended to their full stretch, almost her own height and, rather than leaning on them, she held them halfway down their length.

‘Good morning’, I said.

‘Hello’ she said. ‘You are camping. I could tell from the size of your pack and your slow pace. I knew you would catch me up. You see, I am very, very slow. But I don’t mind. I just get on with it.’

‘Well, I must tell you, I have never overtaken anyone in the whole history of my doing these walks. A new experience. Thank you.’

We exchanged solo campers’ usual chat. Weight of sack? What kind of sleeping bag?

Then she said she was heading for Dale Head Tarn. I told her that was also my objective. A fleeting look of disappointment appeared on her face, then it was gone.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I will probably camp on Dale Head summit. Always wanted to do that. I won’t encroach on your space.’ This wasn’t accurate, but solo campers are honourable and she had started first.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. But I could see her relief.

It’s that solo wild campers do just that, they camp in the wild – solo.

After a few more words she said, ‘I suppose we should do the age thing.’

‘76’, I said.

‘You beat me by 4.’

‘I’ll get going then,’ I said. ‘We’ll probably meet later on’.

I started up again without looking back. The track led on up through some zigzags and steeper sections. At one point the bare white ribs, spine and scattered fleece of a dead sheep nestled just by the path. No sign of the head and old enough not to smell. A body with less matter covering it than my mirrored image from this morning. If I am not burnt after death, to this favour I must come. I think the sheep would not have asked what it was doing here before it died. But did it ever feel, in however obscure a manner, unimaginable to us, a sense of unexplained unease about its existence? Or did it live in a state of utter matter-of-factness? Almost certainly the latter, but how would one know?

Before the last drag to the summit of Robinson, one has to cross the Buttermere Moss. This is described in Wainwright’s guidebook as ‘a wide marshy depression from which water cannot escape except by being carried away in the boots of pedestrians’. This proved to be true, and I reached the far side with one sodden foot and wet trousers.

I was nearing the summit dome and stopped to look back. There below, on the green and marshy plateau, I could see the diminutive red and white figure picking her way across the bog. Slowly, slowly but not stopping. An image that silenced me for a moment. I could only hear a slight breeze passing and the harsh ‘ark’ of a raven. Nothing else. The green plain and the travelling woman.

The top of Robison is a blessing. Some parallel ridges of rock make for fine wind breaks and seats, or for backs to lean up against. The weather had been a little overcast to begin the day, but now the clouds were high, hot sun coming through at times and a slight breeze. In other words this was perfect walking weather. I ditched the sack, sat down and pulled out some kind of nut bar and ate it. Some swigs of water, a look around and then a doze.

I woke sometime later just as the woman appeared over the rocky edge. I waved and clapped and she came over and dumped her sack next to mine. I was about to leave but we stood chatting for a while. I got some of her life story in small snatches of language and images as in a fragmented mosaic. I left her to her lunch and wandered off on the large path towards Dale Head.

Her presence had changed the journey. She was like something out of myth. She seemed indomitable and almost permanent although constantly on the move. An essence of the mountains and I had been lucky enough to meet her. Her presence in the landscape gave it a reassuring feel that all was well. Even if it wasn’t.

Now something else was changing. The weather was good, the mountain views extensive in a wide panorama. The sky seemed to expand and welcome me under its kindly wrap. Everything sparkled and I felt happy. Perhaps this was the answer to the question as to why I desired to come here, although I had no idea that this would be in store for me. Anticipated and hoped-for pleasure? But that did not answer the deeper question – what was I doing here?

I walked along the path slowly downhill for a while. Everything had been transformed by now. The hotel and the tarmac road out of Buttermere had been left behind and I was now walking, physically uplifted, in a state of some grace, isolated and independent but with a companionable imagined presence of the woman somewhere behind me. I was walking these hills as a monk treading cloisters.

Having seen my body that morning in the mirror I was more than usually aware of it moving about within my clothing. I could now feel the aches in my legs and, because of the weight of my pack, my shoulders were beginning to complain.

At the lowest point of what had now become a ridge I stopped for a rest. I knew the rest of the day would become more and more painful as my aged muscles and bones began to feel the strain. I was aware that the few walkers passing me had something of a spring to their steps compared to mine. If my artificial hips started to get sore then the outcome of the walk would be in doubt.

I started the slow climb to Dale Head. Halfway I looked back but there was no sign of the woman. Maybe she had given up. Maybe she didn’t exist. But how could I doubt? Within a minute or so there she was, silhouetted on the horizon and then descending towards me. She was still a long way off, so I turned and continued.

I realised that I was now feeling a kind of low voltage excitement. Reaching Dale Head would be a small triumph for me. Something I had planned and would now be able to achieve. This animation added to the free-wheeling spirit I had noticed earlier. As I neared the summit, I found myself smiling. Yes, this was a good thing to do. I stepped up to the summit cairn. As I did so, I registered around me what must be one of the most extensive mountain scenes in the country. The sky was bright and a light wind whipped around my legs. And my body and my embodied consciousness now felt a part of all this.

The journey had already become something added to my personal mythology. It had left the mundane behind. Now I was travelling with a different set of perceptions to those I woke up with in the hotel. It is as if I was slowly becoming naked again. Open to the experience of being a living organism travelling through space and time to an uncertain end.

I sat behind the huge summit cairn out of the wind. A sip of water and a bar of something and another short sleep. On waking I stood up, put on the sack and came around the cairn. There she was, leaning on her walking poles.

I told her that I couldn’t stay the night on the summit as there was no water, no real shelter and the wind was getting up. I said that she needn’t worry as I would move further on from the tarn to give her some space for her solo camp. She waved this away, but I knew that she would have been very disappointed if I tried to share the site.

I moved off and reached the start of the track down. Immediately I could see, way below, a small tarn further along on the path to the next peak and could see I could camp there. I turned and yelled at her that all was well. She waved and I started downwards.

It was late afternoon when I reached Dale Head Tarn, a place of stillness and light. There were two ancient sheep pens by the side of the water and I threw the sack down and propped myself up against a stone wall. The first day’s journey was done.

The sparkling light on the rippling tarn was beguiling me into a half dream. There was the woman standing next to me. We were holding hands. We were both naked at the edge of the water. Her sagging breasts and wrinkled buttocks and my scarred and depleted body showed our ages well. We looked at each other for a moment then walked slowly into the tarn. The shock of the cold did not deter us. We kept going steadily until only our heads were above the surface. Then we sank. For how long I don’t know, but we emerged at the same time. I was some yards from her, nearer to the shore. I looked round and she was smiling at me. She made a motion with her hand above the water which said, ‘Go on’. I turned and moved to the tarn side until my feet took a stand on the rocks below. Now I was ankle deep and looked around. She was not there. I looked down at my foreshortened reflection in the still water. The same naked body as mirrored in the hotel room. But the same consciousness? No. I was a long way from that. I was clean, reborn.

I stirred myself and looked up at the path coming from Dale Head. The woman had not appeared. Or maybe I saw the faint image of a figure moving on the far skyline but I could not be sure. I stood up and lifted the sack once more and moved on several hundred yards up the path by another small pool out of sight. I still thought it best to leave the tarn to the woman even if she didn’t show up.

Lying in my bivouac sack and sleeping bag I lay looking at the sky for an hour or so. The sunset was not spectacular; a slow decline into a deep red on the horizon. Looking up I saw, in the pale blue, a faint star. Then another, and another. But as I watched, a thin layer of cloud drifted over and obscured them. I slept.

I slept for some hours. Waking for no known reason, I found myself in the same position as before. Opening my eyes I looked straight up into the diamond dotted black velvet blanket of the sky. All clouds had long gone and it was very clear. I started the game of trying to find constellations but then realised this was a mistake. It would divide the wide and wild scattering into named segments, thereby destroying the overwhelming image of the whole thing itself. And what was that? Particles and forces is the knowledge. Beyond that we have nothing but our reactions to its visual presence. These responses can vary from ecstatic wonder to a ‘so what?’ It was the wonder of it that was mine for a while. My eventual reaction was to fall asleep once more, this time until day break.

Day Two – Descent

In the morning I rose and decamped early. After climbing the path towards High Spy for 30 minutes or so I turned and looked back. I could see Dale Head Tarn below me but there was no sign of the woman or her tent. I was now cut off from her presence and felt free in my solitude. I had been born into the next day and the next journey’s episode without imagined or real encumbrances or attachments. This freedom felt light on me as would a cool breeze.

What was I doing here? This became shorter – what was I doing? Then again – why do it? Why do anything beyond the necessities of working for food and shelter?

The temperature grew hotter as I walked, but there was a light wind which made the atmosphere pleasant. On reaching the top of High Spy I could see an almost flat path leading me on towards Maiden Moor and I began to swing along this with a fine rhythm. On one side were the depths of Borrowdale with its bright green, stone-walled fields and wooded flanks. On the other the glaciated valley of Newlands. I was traversing a high ridge between these hollows and, in my mental freedom, delighting in it and in a sensed emptying of my mind. Ego turning to a faintly discerned mist, and me wordlessly merging with this elevated landscape. Was this the reason for coming here? What I was hoping for? Some kind of epiphany?

The question returned – ‘why do anything?’ What about doing nothing? Inactivity for most must eventually lead to boredom. And the ache of restless boredom must be the frustration of life’s energy failing to find expression. Can it be that the fear of boredom is a spur to action and even a striving towards something beyond ourselves?

These walks, meditation and my experience of art, especially music, can induce some form of heightened awareness, where my illusory self merges into the whole of my perceived world. In these states I feel I contain, and am contained by, the whole of existence. From the joy to the horror, to the background void, and all within a cloud of unknowing. The whole thing. All of it. And all of it ending in a profound feeling of compassion for all of it.  My transactional daily existence doesn’t allow for this. It doesn’t give me time to give attention to the world and therefore muddies the paths to wonderment.

Was my walk of this nature? A mad bid to escape boredom and, in so doing, attain some kind of transcendence? Perhaps. It had indeed become a rhythmic journey taking me far from the normal run of my life, allowing an opening up of my perceptions to a wider and unaccustomed experience of being alive, beyond the barrier of ego. The loss of self being an unlooked for consequence of putting one foot in front of the other.

I approached the top of Maiden Moor. Now I could see large areas of the shining surface of Derwent Water, way below to my right and, straight ahead, found myself looking down on the very top of Catbells, the last summit of this trip.

What am I doing here? What are we doing here? There is no answer to these questions. I don’t know one and neither does anybody else. The fact that there is no answer leaves the door open through which can be seen infinite possibilities of living and perceiving within the utter mystery of existence itself. The question then becomes ‘what am I doing here?’ And only I can answer that.

I could see a gathering of people on the summit of Catbells and I was on my way to mingle with them. Inevitably the mood of the last two days will be diffused, and the feel of the journey dispelled, as something dissolving in water.

The long descent from Maiden Moor and the short ascent of Catbells was done. Jokes were exchanged and photographs taken with a family celebrating their ascent. The little boy stuck his chest out for the picture, bursting with pride on his first mountain top. I left them all and negotiated the rocky steps down towards the lake with some tension, fearful of a stumble, while overweight, panting people and their dogs passed me. But it was soon over and I found myself wandering through a sunlight dappled woodland towards the lakeside jetty. Here I would pick up the ferry to take me over the water to Keswick.

My body, seen fresh in a mirror in a Buttermere hotel and in an imagined Dale Head Tarn, was now full of aches under my dirty clothes. It had taken up traces of what had just been, but these would soon disappear and leave no signs of the physical strain on this poor, bare, forked animal.

Would the transcendent state I had in part experienced on my walk last any better? No – of course not. When the music ends we find ourselves back in the silence of an empty auditorium. But soon this silence will demand a response and the pendulum swing between the passive and the active, the detached and the engaged, will continue its rhythmic dance – until the clock stops.

One thing stayed with me. The woman. As to who she was and what happened to her, I have no information. She seemed a spirit of the mountains, haunting these high and often lonely places, forever moving, but always there. Our paths may cross on other hills and she and I might briefly acknowledge each other as we pass on these solitary pilgrimages to nowhere and everywhere.

Garry Kennard

September 2024

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www.garrykennard.com

Creativity, Ecology, Environment, Literature, Mind, Nature