Ein letzter müder Wanderer
Hello friends -
I told you I'd write a final essay one-to-two weeks after I got home. Well.
I have been back for a month, everything is the same, just that it's colder. We had snow shortly after I arrived; I remember thinking on the hike that it's "absolutely possible to walk in November", and not understanding why everything was shut. Winter arrived in Berlin the day after I did, and now I'm glad I didn't start hiking later.
When I arrived in Spechtsbrünn on day 6, the innkeeper described her November clientele as all business travellers "und ein letzter müder Wanderer" - me, a final, weary, hiker.
Spechtsbrünn, outside the inn.
This is the first hike I've done where I actually finished my plans; I've typically cut them short after six to ten days, because I was bored, or probably, full. Full of experiences. No room for anything new anymore; need to stop collecting and start condensing.
I tried to do that condensing on the way on this trip a little (these emails)! But I felt, regardless, over the last three days of walking, the vaguely dissociative feeling of "this is nice but I've seen it before, I don't really care anymore".
When that happens, I need something powerful, something which inspires awe, and that came right at the end of the day on the Thursday (seeing the sunset from the mountaintop after a whole day of fog) and again at the end of the day on the Friday (stumbling across a flooded quarry, solemn and spectacular), and again on the Saturday as I descended (rolling hills and fields of some Brassica or another). Something to focus your attention.
A field full of Brassica. I have to tell you about how everything is secretly mustard sometime.
You get this sense of awe, of reawakening, in the mountains too sometimes - but I have never felt it at a summit. Instead, it is climbing over a narrow pass in the ridge and seeing your view open onto a new world. It is turning a corner and discovering the flowers that have made a home in the small cavities in the rockface. It is sometimes a pristine lake on a plateau.
In the Alps, Sept 2019. I hope you can sense the anticipation that I felt when I was taking this photo; you know it's going to be spectacular on the other side of that gap.
hello, little friends
There is one lake where this resonated for me especially - on the way from the Mädelegabel to the Kemptner Hütte, right on the German/Austrian border. Not still, but almost silent. Clear. Extremely cold. I arrived there in September 2019, two days after it had snowed last; there were holes in the snow from where the thistles had conducted sunlight into the earth. There were tracks from an Ibex that came there to drink. And a single set of shoeprints, mine.
if you look, real close on the right, you'll see my big clunky bootprints and the day-old tracks of a lone Ibex next to them.
I went back to that lake in July 2020. Walked the eight hours back, said hello to the family of Ibex on the way who, a year later, were again in the same place. It is different in the height of summer, and still remarkable.
July 2020
Is this what I'm really looking for in walk? Is it a ritual of focussing my attention on something that's so much wider than I could ever hope to be? A mountain range, a specific mountain, a specific lake on that mountain, a specific lake on that mountain at that moment when the snow had fallen in a certain way in the cold September air, when that one thirsty Ibex came by?
Nan Shepherd writes, of lakes in the mountains:
And a second time I let my eyes travel over the surface, slowly, from shore to shore, beginning at my feet and ending against the precipice. There is no way like that for savouring the extent of a water surface.
I wonder if I'm doing something similar.
Is it focussing your attention on a forest, on the small interactions within that forest, on the Spruce and the Beech and the bark beetles and the mushrooms, on the way people have interacted with the forest for centuries, on the history of the country you migrated to, on the road being made whole again in 1990, on the history of shale quarrying in the region, and the stories of that one guy in that pub in Lehesten?
Lehesten at sundown
Is it the act of wandering, wondering, watching the weeds change? I couldn't help notice the Orache in the valleys and the Yarrow and the Autumn Dandelion in the fields on the hills, and that strange patch of ... something that looked like Wild Fennel or Dill but turned out to be Spignel, on the side of the path in that one field on the way out of Spechtsbrünn.
Spignel. You can tell it's related to Dill / Fennel; the leaves are iconic it tastes mildly aniseedy.
I name these herbs because I know them. I know Orache because when our field in the countryside outside Berlin this year was full of weeds, the weeds turned out to be mostly Orache, and after I saw it sold in a plastic bag in a tiny supermarket in Archangelos on Rhodes, I came home, harvested a mass of it, and baked it into a Spanakopita. The Yarrow and Dandelion were a garnish on a pasta dish in the hotel restaurant in Oberhof.
Orache; When we were introduced it was Gartenmelde.
When I think about paying attention to the weeds, and whether they're edible, I think of animal brain attention; there's presence and immediacy and little else. I am as I imagine a sheep to be. My focus is on the steps in front of me, and if I've planned it right I know that I'll have food and shelter and warmth available at the end of the day, which frees me up to walk slowly - to notice things, to pay attention to the weeds. But it is somehow not simple for me to be like this; I am back and within a month, I am worrying again. I am escaping again, into videogames, into social media, into online drama. Into compulsively refreshing my email, into waiting for something to happen. There is evidence of the fact that I was walking - my bicycle was stuck in the highest gear for a while and I was still somehow cycling around effortlessly, probably because carrying 12kg on my back for 190km and a few mountains had trained my thighs extremely well - but I am no longer my animal self.
The word animal comes from the latin anima:
anima: a current of air, wind, breath, the vital principle, life, soul.
When I say 'animal self', I think I also mean animal in the adjective sense; anima + the suffix. I inhabit myself in a different way when I'm focussing my attention like this. There is a sense of groundedness, aliveness, when I'm paying attention to the weeds.
Incidentally, this is why you shouldn't try and walk 35km in a day; you don't have time to be attentive. You need to feel as if the day is endless, to allow the moments to fill the space they deserve. To love the process, to notice the steps - at least some of them. We spoke earlier about how "there is no such thing as a bad hike", and the absurdity of FOMO - well, maximising for speed has the same effect as maximising for experiences. Neither lend themselves to presence. Much better to pace yourself, to mosey. To walk as a sheep walks.
i am as a sheep
On Day 3, I asked what makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage, and wondered how it's different to a journey:
the difference seems to be about some willingness to experience transformation; some expectation of, and openness to, revelation.
I think this is true, but I also believe that a pilgrimage has never happened quickly, and it is hard to not be open to revelation when you are going slowly. This is part of the appeal of walking generally.
A walk will untrain you from the cognitive impatience that you learn in day-to-day life, in the way that a long flight without WiFi teaches you something. We call this "liminal space", but maybe it is
actually
also
boredom,
and submission to the knowledge that worrying about things will not help. A permission to be. It is not that different from the joy of having paid sick leave, and being so wrecked by a cold that you have to stay in bed for a week.
It is being with oneself. Simply being oneself.
Some things you might like
Friends, thanks for coming along for this walk.
I will leave you with three recommendations, for work which has inspired me greatly:
One: I listened to a podcast a few weeks ago where Maryanne Wolfe describes a similar approach to deep reading, she describes it as having the "ancient soul of a child". It is a beautiful interview; she speaks with affection and poetry. You can listen to it at the New York Times, on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, and probably elsewhere.
Two: My all-time favourite poem is Reassurance, by Alice Walker. She's quoting a letter that Rilke wrote in 1903 (here's an english translation of the money quote). I had this printed and stuck on the back of my door as a teenager, and it's been in my mind ever since.
Three: The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd. Written about the Cairngorms at the end of World War II, and first published thirty years later. Full of attention. To quote Nan herself, upon rediscovering the (then unpublished) manuscript in her old age:
Now, an old woman, I begin tidying out my possessions and reading it again I realise that the tale of my traffic with a mountain is as valid today as it was then. That it was a traffic of love is sufficiently clear; but love pursued with fervour is one of the roads to knowledge.
Farewell
I'm hoping to write more things like this next year - I've wound my work back to 4 days a week, and am hoping to spend my bonus day on things like this (and on internet jokes, like this emoji haiku generator I built in 2016 and still think is funny; nice work 2016 Fabian).
As I promised right at the start of the walk - I'll delete this 'walk' mailing list immediately after this email is sent. I'd be happy to send you the things I work on next year though! Just reply to this email and say "put me on the regular list please" and I will do just that.
Thanks again for coming along,
-- Fabi.
