You are a walker. You walk, its rhythm the rhythm of your thoughts.
In rain, cloud or sun, your feet step out. On Woodland paths, old Drovers’ trails, the tracks of hills and mountains, railway lines left bare by Dr Beeching, your mind winds through its gears. You escape your body to some place other, better, best.
Once, you remember, you were an athlete, the gazelle, an urban hero. You ran, but in that last fall, your knee popped out. The surgeon said, “No more free running for you, young man.” You had run your last rooftop, slid your last handrail, made your last leap from building to balcony.
You moved back home. Walking became therapy. Walking was some way back to something. A yard or two, then to the end of your parents’ garden. You leaned on a tree, hunched double, choking as your heaving chest protested. The spring air smelt of wisteria.
A girlfriend drove you out and put you on your first canal towpath, introduced the smells of boats and water and the sound of country silence.
By summer, you could walk a mile without pain. You loved it. For a while, you confused it with love for her.
“Let’s do The Roaches,” your friend said. Her name was Marion, her smile persuasive. ‘The Roaches’ sounded as illicit as the weed she bought that fetched the aches from your joints.
The Roaches were high. Their tangled rock escarpments, towering summits, and bleak moorland rinsed all petty concerns from your head. You walked them. Rushing on in front, forgetting your companion.
No one, it seemed, understood what walking meant. As strength returned, you tackled the northern lakes, the Lapworth Circuit, Rhossili Bay, Mousehole to Lamarna.
In the holidays, you walked the Tennyson Trail on the Isle of Wight, fourteen miles up and down in the heat of August. Here, a walker caught in the moment thinks the thoughts of poets passed. Rhythms and rhymes seep into your steps.
Then, at journey’s end, Carisbrooke Castle bursts the horizon. King Charles once sat imprisoned here.
But less of death and more of life. You walked Brightstone Down, Alum Bay, The Needles. These you remember. When you left your holiday, Marion was gone. Her, you forgot.
You had the habit now. You walked on alone through the ochre shades of autumn, stopping to talk to walkers along the way.
“Are you here for a day out?” they’d ask.
“We’re here with the Essex Ramblers,” they’d say, or name some other distant club. “We all came for the gardens.”
Or perhaps, “For the view.”
Or, “The lake.”
“The hills.”
After a while, you realised, they don’t feel it. No one else does. It’s not about being here to be somewhere or with someone, it’s just about being.
They’d just hoist their backpacks onto their shoulders. Carry on.
“You talk like that guy,” one woman said when you told them. “Doesn’t he talk like him?” She turned to her husband, a nodding parcel-shelf dog for everything she said.
“Wait a moment, what guy?” you asked.
“Him,” they said in chorus. “Haven’t you heard? The Walker.”
As soon as you heard the name, you knew he’d understand. You asked for details. They had none. Only the rumour.
November snows closed the season. You sat impatient, wandering virtual chat rooms in your father’s study, listening for his presence, hoping that someone would know. But no. The Walker remained a title and a whisper. And Christmas came.
*
Weeks in your parents’ house, smoking for medicinal purposes, wondering about the mystery man. The winter fired you for the New Year, charged your determination, rested your knee.
You peeped out on the softening world like something reborn. I’m a walker, you said. You forgot the runner-past. If anyone asked, you’d deny it.
With the first march, you vowed you’d meet this man. You started along the Pennine Way, 250 miles from the north to south. The wrong way to do it! The guidebooks told you, walk with the wind at your back, but also said the last section over the Cheviots was wild; you wanted to do that first. It was where you’d meet the scattered walkers coming north.
You told them about your obsession. They were impressed. Unlike the old heroism, it was enough that you inspired their efforts. You showed the surgeon’s scars on your knee, but shared no story how they came there.
“Good luck,” they said, “good luck. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
On Good Friday, skirting Hadrian’s Wall, you met a couple who said they’d been rambling 30 years. In three decades, you’d think they’d have met the Walker several times.
“Son, what are the odds? There are 175,000 miles of public walkways,” the crusty husband told you.
“I’ll walk them all,” you said.
The wife lent her iPhone and you Googled for the latest sightings. There were none. You sprinkled questions in your favourite chat rooms. Everything was about last year. You wondered if, like you, the Walker walked in seasons, not rising until the spring.
The Pennines were conquered by May, but that wast but a fraction of the walkways to which you’d sworn. The South West Coast Path runs 630 waymarked miles from Minehead to Poole Harbour. It is but a nibble at the task, yet still the biggest bite you could take. With all its climbs and falls, you’d scale the height of Everest four times, cross 302 bridges, top 920 styles. You started in June. In July, you were done.
Meeting weekenders became commonplace. You talked of walks you’d done and why you’d done them. You were full-time on their part-time journey. They started to treat you with an arm’s length awe.
But a swelling came with the summer, ballooning in your weakest joint as the honeysuckle and lavender took the harvest air. Your knee filled with fluid. You knew you ought to stop, but you didn’t. You couldn’t.
You met two girls at a campsite, students from Stuttgart. You cooked on the fire in front of their tent. You dunked a wash towel into boiling water, hoping to use its heat on the swelling. You rolled a marijuana cigarette and offered them a drag.
“Sure, I know someone, this guy, who met him,” said the doe-eyed girl. Her friend had refused the dope in favour of sleep. “In Scotland, I think. I don’t know quite where. It is not my country to know. He has a wooden leg, this guy said. All those kilometres on a wooden leg. It is a miracle.”
This special someone settled in your mellow brain, the barb of his hook bit the core. You smoked so much the night turned purple. You built thoughts and thoughts around the idea. Someone had walked farther than you on even less, continued with greater scars.
In the morning, you woke up next to the doe-eyed girl. Your leg had locked solid.
After the hospital, you walked no more until December and then you were confined to your parents’ treadmill, the one your father bought when his BMI broke thirty. Yet still your mind kept flying.
Come Christmas, you looked again for online mentions. You asked questions. You began to get detail in reply. It seemed he’d drifted south. Some Cornish campsites reoccurred, places with names you recognised.
He talked now not just to ramblers and walkers, but to the coast-bound campers, surfers and kiteboarders too, addressing the wandering youth.
“He’ll share a smoke without prejudice,” they said. “He always has a word or two to give.”
*
So now, the winter thaws and you unfreeze. Your knee bends and unbends. You dream of the outdoor paths, mirrored lakes, bluebell trails and lowering boughs of forest trees. The Walker draws your thoughts from the shadows of your pain.
You’re ready now to tell everyone everything you stand for, louder than before. You’ll tell them how you made it back. Walking defines you.
Renewed, you walk the Cotswold Way, Pembroke’s Coastal Path, the line of the Thames.
Somewhere near Cricklade, a young woman screams. You take a rowing boat onto the river and pull her struggling dog to the side. You untangle the weeds from its legs.
In Windsor, a few days later, you come across a gaggle of ambulances and police cars. A boy has fallen into the waters. You are too late. Nothing to be done, but catch a glance of pale skin before they cover him, smeared with the river grime, the mother comforted by an arm in a high-visibility jacket.
As walker, you see life and death. You see everything. You tell campers you meet about the dog. If you hadn’t saved the dog, you’d feel worse about the boy, but still, thinking about the boy is bad enough. You tread it under the rhythm. You drop the boy from your conversation after the sleepless nights. You talk about the dog instead.
In four months, you walk two thousand miles.
*
“You need to stop this madness,” the surgeon says. He’s showing you what science says about your knee. “Look at it.”
You look at it. All you see is limitation.
“I may have to go in again.”
“No,” you say.
“You’re not listening, are you?” he says.
Your mind is on the road somewhere in the endless paces that repeat and repeat, where thought loses sense of time. And breaks free. Second and minute lead to hours and days. They give the illusion that change is all, but what comes after today has no hold. The truth does not lie in chronology. Creation bathes in something greater.
With the next new spring, you are across the water. Ireland. Walks in a green and wilder country. You walk. It rains. You walk. The wind blows. On Errigal Mountain. On Dingle Way and Diamond Hill.
You stop to rest your leg, but pain sets in when you do not move.
“’Tis God’s own country, so it is,” the wayside rambler tells you. She is young and lost. You tell her about walking. She offers you the comfort of her body.
“Have you heard of the Walker?” you ask.
“Everyone has.”
“He’s been here?”
“He’s been everywhere.”
In the morning, you walk on, your knee as pain free as your heart. You have no doubt left this girl with more than wisdom. There will be others. They swarm like bees to sweetness. The aura of your walking draws them, young and old. You can favour but a few.
In a sawdust pub on the banks of the Shannon, you spend a night. You hear a music other than the windblown silence. You are no longer the spiritless stumbler, choking on wisteria scent. You have mastered your art. Your mind is your own.
Back in England, the news that greets you seems impossible. Halfway along the Snowdonia Path, you camp with ramblers from competing tribes. One claims, the Walker is now in the Hebrides; another, citing clashing dates, swears he saw him in the flesh not a week ago, as close as this hand before your face, but on Exmoor.
“Maybe he flies,” a third suggested.
“In planes?”
“Maybe.”
“Or walks on water.”
Their idle talk astounds you. They say he trod the surface of a river, came down the tributaries to London, and raised a dead child who’d fallen from the towpath.
Two days more, you walk alone. Aside Llyn Llydaw, your hard-won silence breaks. One misplaced twist and a skeletal ‘crack!’ sends you crashing to the ground. You look down and see your leg turned backwards. Pain splits your head.
They give you morphine. Now you have no idea what occurs. That fug that comes with stillness drags you into darkness. You dream bad dreams of a white hospital. You dream the freedom you had was stolen. You wake to your mother’s face, your father’s stern expression.
“Oh, my son,” she wails. “There was no way to save it.”
“You had your warnings,” your father says.
They tell you to take it a day at a time, but they don’t understand. You don’t want to wait. You want to fit your stump with the carbon contraption on offer, the mechanical knee and ankle. You want to be gone. To walk again.
*
This time you will not stop for winter. It rains. It blows like Ireland, but colder this time. You’re soaked through before the snow. The noise of weather makes it harder to think, but you walk anyway, unsure if it’s the clattering hail or the limp in your step. It interferes with the mental rhythm you used to find in the first mile. Now it takes two or three, and as many rolled cigarette papers of shredded Mary-Jane.
Your stump comes bloody from its socket every night. Your back holds onto pain. Your body betrays you and your answer is to reach harder for a truth beyond.
Lame as you go, crippled, walkers tell you of the hope you give them. You are an icon, even with a limp, or maybe because of it. There’s nothing like someone who has suffered to inspire the suffering.
Back to The Roaches, where you walked with Marion, you make camp another Thursday night. Someone gives you a waxed box of supermarket wine, a Chilean red. The couple from the next tent come with French sticks and cheese triangles. You thank them before you notice you’ve met them before. The husband quoted you the length of British walkways. You said you’d walk them all. Remember that? Three years ago almost to the day.
People from other tents creep over. You seem to gather a particular crowd. They ask about your journeys, your meetings with the Walker, the sacrifice of your leg.
You tell them your leg is no sacrifice. You have been saved by the silence of those miles, the harder the sweeter. You did it for yourself, but now you say you did it for them. And when they press you for more, you don’t want to disappoint.
“Are you him?” a young man asks.
“If that’s what you need,” you reply. You remember being the younger man.
The gathered drink your wine and eat your bread with cheese. It does for anyone who comes.
*
That night, the midnight hour will light the bandwidth of the on-line world. Twitter and Tweet. A GPS to the Great One’s location. The Walker is found.
You will not know until morning, when TV crews and crowds crush together at the gate of your camp. A young woman will come. She will be with child and she will kiss your cheek and name you.
You will stand, one-legged, and think. You’ll look out on a trail of faces, like a snake down the winding path of the slope. You’ll stare over their heads. You’ll have nothing to give them. He is out there, still.
