Walking As Therapy (2)

Camino, Spain

If you watch how nature deals with adversity, continually renewing itself, you can't help but learn. DR BERNIE SEIGEL

Walking has saved my life. This may sound like hyperbole, but I happen to believe it to be true.

At a time when I drove the length and breadth of England as a sales executive, walks in Derbyshire's Peak District, or climbs in the Lake District, or strolls along the Grand Union canal were absolutely essential to me - welcome and necessary escapes from the confines of the car and a pressurised job. Walking saved my life.

When my father died I spent months alone at the old, family home, sorting out his things and preparing the house for sale, I was also working six days a week. On the Saturday, the day I had off, I used to roam the fields and woods nearby, and hike the disused railway embankment - all former childhood haunts. Walking saved my life.

My three Caminos in France and Spain were a direct response to mental turmoil and huge, seemingly intractable personal problems. These pilgrimages may not have taken the problems away, but they gave me relief, and insight into a different way of looking at things. Walking saved my life.

I find walking to be one of the best therapies. This is an approximation of a conversation I once had with the Camino ...

Camino: Buenos dias, mi amigo! Welcome to the Path. You know, there are so many pilgrims who walk along me praying I'm going to give them enlightenment and strew epiphanies at their feet like poppy petals. They want to find God instantly, or at least when they reach Santiago. And when they arrive at the end of the trail, and don't realise it's just the beginning of another, different trail, and when they find that great cathedral just alienates them, because it's too crowded, or because they're too tired, or because they're lonely and pining for the pilgrim friend they met in Burgos whom they've never seen again - they return home deflated and disappointed. Now, are you this kind of pilgrim, my serious friend?

Solitary Walker: Well, I don't know. It's too early to say. I've only just reached Hontanas, and I've other things to think about, such as the hole in my sock, the water in my boots, the pain in my knee and whether my stomach will protest about the oily fried eggs and rough, tongue-curling wine I'm about to consume in this albergue. And whether those bloody pilgrims are going to keep me awake for yet another night with their snoring and grunting and being sick from smoking too much weed. However, I did think you might stick around and provide some psychotherapy for me from time to time, my wise Camino guide?

Camino: Oh dear. Big mistake, peregrino! I'm afraid I'm not much of a psychotherapist, though a lot of people seem to think I am. Can't you see, dammit, that I'm simply a track? A little muddy, a little worn round the edges, a bit rocky here and there, it's true. But I'm not the most difficult track in the world, and I'm always well signposted. In fact in some places you'll find a scallop shell or a yellow arrow or a graffitied 'Ultreia!' every few metres. Sometimes all together. You'd have to be blind to get lost. (Though a surprising number of blind pilgrims do walk me. And actually they never get lost.) I think you'll have to look to those American new-age gurus for psychotherapy, mi amigo - you know, the ones you see on Oprah with names like Star and Heartsblessing. As I say, I'm no therapist. I can only trip you up, torture your feet, exhaust your limbs, graze your skin and, occasionally, bring you moments of such enormous joy that you feel radiant with hope, love and well-being. For true therapy look within yourself, my tired pilgrim.

Solitary Walker: Thanks anyway, Camino. I think we're getting used to each other's company, even if your answers do sometimes disappoint. I'm also getting used to your annoying habit of answering my questions with another question. What kind of answer is that? For instance, the other day I asked you how far it was to my destination, and you replied: don't you think your destination is right here and now? And recently, when I asked you how many more kilometres were left to walk along the path, you answered: you think there's a path? 

Camino: Well, as I've told you, my questing friend, I'm no sage. Though you'll discover a little sage - and thyme, and rosemary too - growing along my verges. Now, why don't you gather some and add these herbs to your instant packet soup tonight?

Solitary Walker: I've already said - I'm eating the hospitalera's fried eggs soon. Then I'll feel so tired I'll be crawling into my sleeping bag by nine. I'll rejoin you tomorrow, my twisting, winding, enigmatic friend.

Camino: Till tomorrow. Just remember what John Muir once wrote, that  In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. And sleep tight.

Sandwood

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. JOHN MUIR

The beach at Sandwood Bay in the far north west of Scotland is one of the loveliest you might ever hope to find, and this is much to do with its remoteness. You can reach it only on foot. You park in a small car park just south of Sheigra - the tiny inlet where I'd wildcamped the night. (There's a small toilet block there, with facilities for a wash and brush up and for filling your water bottles.) Opposite the car park begins a path which takes you 4 and a half miles across grassy, heathery peatland, past a series of jewel-like lochs, to Sandwood Bay.

It was early in the morning and there were few other walkers about. After a couple of hours I crossed the machair and descended seawards through sand dunes bristling with marram grass. A few rag-tag groups of beachcampers had already struck camp and were heading back towards 'civilisation'. By the time I'd placed my first footsteps on the fine, silvery sand, only one solitary tent remained. I had the mile-long beach practically to myself.

I made for an outlying platform of low rocks half-way between the bay's twin headlands (see pic), then perched on one of the rocks and scanned around with my binoculars. Oystercatchers probed for cockles and clams in the wet sand of the shoreline. Gannets thronged the skies above, gliding on stiff, black-tipped wings and plunging for fish in the turquoise ocean. As they dived, their wings folded back in a streamlined 'W' pattern. Lone cormorants flapped over the bay in direct, purposeful flight; others hung out their wings to dry on a distant sea stack, looking for all the world like giant vampire bats. Twice I briefly glimpsed a large, black and white shape in the water. No sooner did I focus on it than it submerged again. Could this have been an orca, or killer whale? It's quite possible - there are regular sightings of killer, minke, humpback and other whales, not to mention basking sharks, dolphins and porpoises, round this part of the Scottish coast.

I turned away from the water's edge, and walked beyond the strandline and behind the dunes to sheltered Sandwood Loch. Here eight ringed plover scurried along the shingle rim of the loch, teasing out invertebrates among the stones. Every so often, after a spell of frenzied motion, they would freeze, their brown and white feathers and black and white heads (resembling highwayman's masks) merging perfectly with the pebbled background of the loch's foreshore. It was so tranquil here, so unspoilt, so utterly beautiful - I almost felt I'd reached the very gates of Paradise itself.

(Like Ben and Glen Nevis, the Sandwood Estate is owned and managed by the John Muir Trust. It's a very special, indeed unique place. There are two main types of rock: Torridonian Sandstone - formed around 600 million years ago - and Lewisian Gneiss, which is 2 - 3000 million years old. The pattern of rivers and lochs, cliffs and bays, humps and hollows tell a tale of moving glaciers and melting ice during the last Ice Age - a mere 10,000 years ago. The strip of grassland along the coast, known as the machair, supports an astonishing variety of plants and insects (200 kinds of wild flower have been recorded, including eight orchid varieties), and it's also home to such uncommon birds as the twite and the corncrake, and the increasingly rare skylark. Today, amongst the human inhabitants, crofting and fishing are continuing, important sources of employment, and the Estate has fifity-four working crofts.)

Wilderness Connection

Have a listen to Cameron McNeish's inspiring podcast with Ron Craighead of Backpackinglight at http://www.backpackinglight.com/. Cameron is editor of tgo, the UK's leading outdoors mag, and is passionate about the importance of 'wilderness connection'. His informal and enthusiastic reflections range far and wide, from the shielings and ancient standing stones of Scotland to the significance of wilderness writers such as John Muir, Edward Abbey and Colin Fletcher. He's romantic and emotional about the subject - but also pragmatic and realistic about the need to lobby politicians and get them on our side in order to achieve rights of access to the countryside and to preserve wilderness areas.

John Muir

I've been thinking about John Muir since yesterday's brief mention of him. I suppose he's the most famous conservationist of all, creating as he did the American National Park system. In 1892 he founded the Sierra Club. A complicated and at times difficult man, he was a hugely influential and multi-talented Renaissance figure: writer, lecturer, teacher, inventor, geologist, a scientist with religious leanings... When young he walked throughout much of the USA and Canada, taking odd jobs to support himself along the way. I have a big 900 page book of his Nature Writings published by The Library of America, but quite honestly I've only ever skimmed brief bits as it can be dauntingly verbose. I think he's probably best read when his prose is condensed into a shorter, more quotable style - though instances are hard to find. I like this: Most people are on the world, not in it; have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

Into The Wild

One of my favourite programmes on Radio 4 is Something Understood which is broadcast every Sunday at 6.05 then repeated at 23.30. Last Sunday the theme, explored in music, poetry and prose, was Wilderness. The presenter, journalist and writer Madeleine Bunting, described our relationship with The Wild as a complex one - wilderness can be "something to fear, to escape" but also "something compelling, even redemptive". She said that "wilderness is first and foremost in our head." Among other snippets there was a reading from Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild (1996) and a poem by Wendell Berry called The Peace of Wild Things; an atmospheric composition by Norwegian jazz/New Age saxophonist Jan Garbarek and a song about John Muir by the Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan. It's all well worth a listen and can be replayed on the BBC website till the end of the week.