Walking up the Mountain

In line with the last entry, this is another recycle of a piece I wrote for The ACRE FourThought.  The other guys contributions on the subject can be found here.


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Uppa Mountain

I don't often walk up the mountain, but it is an activity I have come to value highly, and is something I always come back to.  There are many reasons I've gone walking up the mountain, and many things I hoped to get out of it when I did so.  I plan on muddling my way through a clumsy explanation of some of these occasions and outcomes.

As a child I lived on a street that sat on a hill, with numerous pathways surrounding that led up the mountain.  From the age that I was allowed out to play on the street we, myself and friends, would extend our play up the mountain.  I grew up clambering up grassy slopes, weaving through tress, getting muddy and covering myself in bruises.  I knew the mountain.

Taking a walk alone, I would explain the aim as escapism.  Finding some time alone.  The slow work of walking up a mountain is the perfect backdrop for a change of pace, the perfect context for working through problems that are playing upon your mind.  Sat or lying idle, the mind is a maudlin thing, obsessing over the negative, allowing mood to fester.  If you're in a bad place; frustrated, depressed, angry or similar, idleness rarely helps.  Swimming or exercising are often used to the same ends as I use walking up the mountain, I suppose, I just happened to have a mountain up which to walk.

It was probably when exams started seeming more important that I first started walking the mountain alone.  GCSEs most likely.  They let you off school when the exams are near, and I'd been driven to meltdown due to day after day of housebound revision.  It's a type of academic claustrophobia that I imagine a large number of people go through.  So when I couldn't stomach any more, I walked up the mountain.

I wouldn't consider myself a very visual person; I find that though I look at things, I hardly ever really see them, I'm not being attentive in that way.  When I walk a mountain, my eyes tend to stick to the path, watching for where my feet are going, so that I don't slip on loose stones, or set off a trap, or startle a cave bear.  It's only when I stop and actually explicitly take a look around that I see much of anything.  I'd assume to some extent we are all awed by a huge sweeping perspective view from on high, and that's always a part of a walk that I find hugely satisfying.  The rest of the walk tends to remain in my mind as a blur of colour or texture; vivid, warm and green in sunlight, cold, abstracted and desaturised in the rain.

I tend not to have much in the way of exercise in my life, I suppose I value the mental over the physical and that has manifested itself in the way my day to day activities unfold.  This was particularly true for me as a teenager.  I read, played games and watched television, I'd fallen out of any sport.  Walking up the mountain was possibly the first case of me wilfully putting myself through, and enjoying, an experience that was physically arduous.  There's a different kind of sweat that comes from effort, as opposed to the sweat of being a greasy pudge eating chocolate and playing Vigilante 8 in an overheated bedroom.  I suppose I learnt that relatively late on, unfortunately.

My worldview is fairly ego-centric generally, and I suppose it's time I widened the scope here to include other people in my mountain walk reminiscences.

One of my fondest mountain memories is a ramble I took with a good friend on a scorching day on the eve of an exam (History A-Level, if I remember correctly).  We were both jaded from the exam period, and pointedly anxious about our place in the world, as all people (teenagers particularly so, I would argue) are.  On our way back down the mountain we stopped and sat on a ruin of a small old building, a corner of brick that jutted out from the hillside.  With the sun raging down on us, we sat philosophising and righted the wrong of the world, a friendship, already strong, forged yet stronger in the cloying heat of the hillside.  The next day, at our desks in the neat examination rows, we squirmed with sunburn.

In the summer post-school and pre-Uni, a group of four of us went for a walk up the mountain, reached the top, and carried on.  The usual pathways we walked were clearly defined, yet we reached any number of turn-back points and we found ourselves just carrying on.  Paths ran out, we ran into walls, fences and thick tree-lines, and we simply found our way around, over or through.  A casual walk become something more, and finding ourselves on the opposite side of the mountain, we guessed this was the effort of our entire day.  We hit paths again, and eventually found ourselves in a town at the foot of the opposite side of the mountain.  There's a lot to be said for the daft excitement of finding yourself in a town where you've never been before, a joy that would be ruined by even rudimentary knowledge of local geography.  You never notice how few signposts actually exist until you don't know where you are.  We came home around the base of the mountain rather than going up and back over, and by the time we'd returned, it was dark and we were exhausted through and through.  It was excellent.

The only time I've been comparably exhausted from a walk up the mountain was on a day trip, again as a group of four, to the Brecon Beacons.  We got there early, trudging up the, for me, gruelling first slope, wrapped in a morning mist that turned sunlight to a blinding, all-encompassing blur, was a thoroughly satisfying experience.  I don't feel we made particularly good time, but neither were we lagging.  It is somewhat dispiriting, on some level, to see other walkers passing you, but when they passed us again going the other way, we realised they were playing a very different game.  We didn't go particularly fast, but we kept going, and only realised the folly ambitionamazingness of our approach when we turned around and saw the size and sweep of the path back to the car.  I think it's safe to say I was wiped out at the end of that expedition in a way I've been few times in my life.  Struggling excruciatingly up the last slope before the final descent I unhelpfully made my friends laugh by forcing out the curse "Jesus fuck!" as I ploughed, aching, upward.  It was boiling that day, too.

Though I have these stories of walking up the mountain in which funny things happened, the actual benefit of walking with friends is the one I touched upon in the sunburn story.  Recently I went walking with a good friend on a whim.  Having reached a turn-back point we decided to take a side trail and check out a small forest we'd never been into.  Until that point the weather had been pleasant, and our unconsidered clothing choices reflected this.  It started raining, and we carried on.  We were in the middle of a discussion, a chat, a debate, there are so many ways to label the action of talking.  I was with a friend, up a mountain, having a walk and sharing my thoughts, my problems and sharing in his.  There's very few things I would consider being better than that in the entire world, it is a delightful pastime.  I would even go so far as to suggest that, very possibly, it is the best way to fulfil intellectual and emotional aspirations, swelling yourself in good humour and good company.

Walking up the mountain with friends is by no means the only way you can achieve this, but it is a very good way, I have found.  The views are at the very least interesting, and even if the company sours, at least you had a bit of exercise.

Everyone should make a point of walking a bit more, I think.  Unless they walk a lot already.