Walking with Plato

by Gary Hayden

  But then I fancied I caught a look in her eye, which aroused my sympathy.

  I have a distinct memory, from when I was about eight or nine years old, of standing at the window, at home, looking out into the street, and longing – literally longing – for someone to play chess with.

  I had recently learned how to play, and had borrowed a bunch of chess books from the library, but I had no one to play with. And it was torment.

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that Wendy, as she gazed out of the tea-room window, was feeling the same way. Not that she wanted to play chess, of course. But she was longing to be out there.

  The nineteenth-century American psychologist and philosopher William James wrote:

  I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’

  If that’s true – and I believe it is – then it’s the easiest thing in the world to define Wendy’s character.

  Wendy is, at heart, a wild woman.

  She is never more active and never more alive than when she is striding along a mountain track with the wind in her hair.

  I often think that what she really ought to be doing with her life is digging wells in Africa, or rehabilitating gibbons in Thailand, or fighting bush fires in Australia. But instead, she’s a teacher. She’s a committed one, and a caring one, and a good one. But, in my opinion, it’s not really her.

  And there she was, after five years cooped up in a classroom, longing to roam, and having to sit cooped up in a café, gazing out upon it all.

  It was four whole days before she was ready to walk again.

  That was fine by me. We had arrived in the far north of Scotland in the middle of a heatwave, which was as conducive to lounging around on a campsite as it was non-conducive to lumbering along an A-road.

  I remarked earlier that the End to Ender gets little time to explore the museums and harbours and beaches along the road from John o’Groats to Inverness. But we had oodles of time to do those things at Dunbeath.

  We picnicked at its sleepy little harbour, mooched around its sleepy little museum, visited its sleepy little heritage centre, and drank real ale, each evening, in the Bay Owl’s sleepy little bar-room.

  I enjoyed it all immensely. But for Wendy’s sake I wasn’t sorry, on the fifth evening, when the Bay Owl’s landlord asked, ‘Have ye no’ gone yet?’ to be able to respond, ‘No. But we’ll be leaving in the morning.’

  When we eventually hit the road again, we understood our limitations. We weren’t yet strong enough, or tough enough or fit enough to string together twenty-mile walks. Not with backpacks, anyway.

  So we scrapped the punishing schedule we had set ourselves, and opted instead for a few days of short sensible walks: eight miles to Berriedale, then eight miles to Helmsdale, and then nine miles to Brora.

  We walked the first section, between Dunbeath and the tiny village of Berriedale, in reverse. Keith and Rona, the retirement-aged proprietors of the Inver Caravan Park, drove us to a layby on the A9, just past Berriedale, and from there we returned, on foot but without backpacks, to the campsite in Dunbeath.

  Apart from an outrageously steep section of road just north of Berriedale (a 13% incline over 0.8 miles), and the fact that it poured down with rain whenever we weren’t wearing our waterproofs and turned hot and sunny whenever we were wearing them, it was a nice easy reintroduction to the trail.

  The following morning, Keith and Rona drove us back to the same layby, and waved us goodbye as we ventured onwards – this time, alas, with backpacks – to the fishing port of Helmsdale.

  The A9 hugs the side of some coastal hills here, which makes for some pretty scenery. But it was wasted on us. We were too busy hopping on and off the narrow, litter-strewn verge, dodging traffic, to take much notice of it.

  There’s no campsite at Helmsdale. So we had to splash out on a B&B. This was a splendid treat even though we couldn’t really afford it.

  From Helmsdale we walked nine miles, with the sea to our left and moorland hills to our right, to a beachside campsite just outside the village of Brora.

  It’s impossible to walk along the A9 and remain interested in the world around you. Your eyes get drawn downward, to the road.

  And when your eyes are drawn downward, your thoughts turn inward. This is all very well if you’re the cheerful, happy-go-lucky type who thinks cheerful, happy-go-lucky thoughts. But if you’re the brooding, introspective type, it can be a problem.

  Personally, I’m the brooding, introspective type. So my natural tendency, when my eyes are glued to a tarmac road, is to depress the hell out of myself.

  I’ll look back at every dumb, misguided thing I’ve ever done, and I’ll replay it and replay it. Then I’ll replay it some more with variations – usually involving a wiser, better me who does everything so much better, second time around.

  It’s a bad habit. It’s unhealthy. It’s unhelpful. It’s depressing. But it’s strangely addictive.

  Bertrand Russell discusses this kind of introspection and its pernicious consequences in the opening chapter of his 1930 book The Conquest of Happiness. He opens the discussion by describing how unhappy he was as a child:

  At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.

  By the time he reached adolescence, he hated life so much that he often contemplated suicide. But, despite this inauspicious beginning, he learned to enjoy life as he grew older, and attributed this largely to a diminishing preoccupation with himself. Whereas in his youth he would brood upon his faults and failings and make himself thoroughly miserable, as an adult he learned to fix his attention on external things such as world affairs, various branches of knowledge, and other people.

  He writes:

  External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

  I know from my own experience, and not merely upon Russell’s authority, that external interests are key to happiness, and that the times when I have thrown myself wholeheartedly into computer programming, or teaching, or philosophy, or writing, or even chasing a rubber ball around a squash court have been the best times in my life.

  But, unlike Russell, I never did kick the habit of brooding. In fact, as I have grown older, I have found myself, more and more, whenever I have leisure to think, ­ruminating upon my faults and failings, and falling prey to self-­disgust.

  So, for me, pounding along the A9, staring for hours at a ribbon of tarmac, wasn’t an uplifting experience. Nor, I’m sure, did it make me the most pleasant and stimulating of companions.

  From Brora, we walked six or seven miles to the coastal village of Golspie.

  We’d intended to walk eighteen miles to Dornoch that day. But Wendy’s blisters would have none of it. So at eleven o’clock we stopped at Golspie, rang around, and found a room at a B&B.

  We were checked in by midday, and able to enjoy a picnic lunch and a long lazy afternoon at Golspie’s attractive little harbour and beach.

  The next day, we managed a seventeen-mile hike to a campsite on the southern shore of Dornoch Firth.

  Happily, we were able to detour off the A9 and onto small country roads for much of the day, including a delicious three-mile section along the shore of Loch Fleet. This beautiful sea loch with its mudflats, wading birds, wildfowl, and basking seals was a slice of heaven – and a harbinger of better things to come.

  From Dornoch Firth, we hiked eighteen miles to the village of Evanton.

/>   Once again, we were able to leave the A9 and walk along minor roads, through woodland and farmland, for much of the day. It would have been quite pleasant had the weather not been so energy-sappingly hot, and had my feet not, by then, become so tender.

  By four o’clock, when we passed through the small town of Alness, our mental and physical reserves were sorely depleted. Yet we still had four miles to go.

  We dragged our tired bodies into a café, flopped down at a table, and ordered coffee and shortbread. Thirty minutes later, we emerged – to my astonishment – with renewed vigour. I never dreamed that a brief sit down, a hot drink, and a couple of biscuits could work such magic.

  Sadly, further trials awaited us.

  Half a mile further on, the heavens opened. Within minutes, the dry and dusty road had turned into a shallow stream, and the gutters had become a torrent. Passing traffic sent waves five feet high crashing over us.

  We battled through this deluge for a few hundred yards, and then stopped to hold crisis talks in the scanty shelter of a bus-stop. Clearly, this wasn’t camping weather. But what should we do? Should we stop and try to find a B&B? Or should we press on and hope there was room in the bunkhouse at the Evanton campsite?

  We elected to press on.

  We arrived to find a fully occupied bunkhouse and a sodden campsite. Everything – the grass, the trees, the caravans, the campervans, the bunkhouse, the laundry, and the children’s playground – was wet through and dripping, in the dreariest manner imaginable, with water.

  Wettest of all was the field set aside for tents, which, for reasons I can’t fathom, was situated at the bottom of a small incline.

  The tents already pitched there lay in puddles two inches deep. A group of children in waterproofs and wellies were using the field as a paddling pool. And all the while the rain continued to pour down.

  The situation appeared hopeless. Luckily, however, the guy who ran the campsite came along and pointed to a small patch of ground at the top of the incline, upon which it might just be possible to squeeze our backpacker tent.

  It was wet and muddy, and it was getting wetter and muddier by the minute, but it wasn’t actually submerged.

  Grasping at this straw, Wendy and I set up a base of operations in the camp’s laundry room, and spent the next hour running to and fro with bits of tent and camping equipment. Eventually, we managed to set up a passably dry shelter, and, after strewing our wet clothes around the laundry room to dry, passed a not entirely uncomfortable night.

  I recall listening to the Philosophy Talk radio show once, and one of the hosts, either John Perry or Ken Taylor, remarked that one of the most important things he had learned during the course of his life is that ‘good times never last and neither do bad times’.

  This phrase became something of a mantra to me as I walked, often wearily and sometimes painfully, along the road to Inverness.

  Whenever the going got tough – whenever my muscles ached, or my feet hurt, or my energy levels dropped, or my spirits flagged – I reminded myself that bad times don’t last.

  I felt that this first, tough section of JoGLE – and, quite possibly, JoGLE as a whole – could be seen as a microcosm of human life in its constant switching back and forth between hardship and comfort, toil and repose, pain and pleasure.

  The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, in his masterwork The World as Will and Representation, gave a striking illustration of the human condition. He said that we can think of our journey through life as being like ‘a circle of hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly’.

  His point, in keeping with his reputation as the most pessimistic of philosophers, was a negative one. Namely that lasting happiness is impossible, that the best that life has to offer is the occasional period of respite from the pain of unfulfilled desire.

  But, as I limped along the final stages of our journey to Inverness, I thought of Schopenhauer’s circle in a more positive way. Whenever I got tired, or sore, or fed up, I would picture myself passing over the hot coals, and think, there’s a cool patch just around the bend!

  And, surprisingly enough, that thought was sufficient to make the hard times feel not merely bearable, but also – in a weird kind of a way – worthwhile.

  When walking from Evanton to Inverness, it’s possible, with some straightforward rerouting, to avoid a big stretch of the A9 and take small roads and cycle routes instead. Wendy and I decided not to do that – though I can’t remember why.

  Perhaps it was because my feet had, by this time, become agonizingly tender, making me want to complete the journey using the most direct route possible. Whatever the reason, it was an excruciatingly dull seventeen-mile walk, enlivened only by the crossing, early in the day, of the mile-long Cromarty Bridge, which spans Cromarty Firth.

  The last few miles, along the A9 into Inverness, and then through the city centre to our campsite on the farther side of town, were the most dispiriting and painful of JoGLE so far.

  The final section of A-road is a drab, multi-lane affair. Bearable enough, I suppose, if you’re hurtling along in an air-conditioned vehicle with your favourite tunes blasting out of the stereo. But depressing as hell if you’re crazy enough to be walking the damn thing: grunting under the weight of a fully laden rucksack as you make your way along a grass verge littered with cigarette butts, fag packets, crisp bags, plastic bags, empty beer cans, spat-out chewing gum, McDonald’s packaging, and soiled disposable nappies.

  More depressing still when you realize that it’s a full hour since you first caught sight of the city, and yet you seem to be no closer to it now than you were back then.

  More depressing still when you realize that you still have three miles to go, and your feet are already so sore that you can hardly bring yourself to take another step.

  More depressing still when you finally get to the campsite where you are to spend the night and realize that it’s an ugly compound, surrounded by an enormous security fence, in a seedy part of town.

  All of that aside, Inverness is a splendid city. A 2014 survey identified it as the happiest (and therefore, I suppose, in some sense, the nicest) place in Scotland.

  It has a lot going for it. It’s picturesquely sited at the mouth of the River Ness, and it has a magnificent crenelated castle, a historic Old Town, a Victorian market, and oodles of riverside restaurants and pavement cafés.

  More importantly, for cash-strapped backpackers like Wendy and me, who need somewhere to sit, cheap food, free Wi-Fi, and a socket to charge their electronic devices, it has a Wetherspoon’s.

  We spent a much-needed rest day in Inverness: eating and drinking, buying gel-insoles for our hiking boots, and preparing ourselves physically and mentally to go off-road, onto the trail, and into the wild heart of the Scottish Highlands.

  How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they are never present to a man at the same instant, and yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two, but they are joined by a single head.

  —Plato, Phaedo

  Chapter Two

  Simple Pleasures

  Inverness – Drumnadrochit – Fort Augustus – South Laggan – Gairlochy – Fort William

  The great thing about doing JoGLE, as opposed to LEJoG, is that you get the nasty bit out of the way at the very ­beginning.

  As JoGLErs, Wendy and I left Inverness with the worst of the tarmac and the traffic and the tedium behind us, and with some of Britain’s finest long-distance footpaths ahead of us. LEJoGers, on the other hand, leave Inverness with all of the good stuff behind them, and with nothing but tarmac and traffic and tedium between them and their journey’s end.

  It was with high hopes, then, that we set off along the Great Glen Way on the second stage of our End to End adventure.

  The Great Glen Way is a seventy-nine-mile walking trail that runs al
ong the Great Glen: a geological fault line extending from Inverness on Scotland’s northeast coast to Fort William on the southwest.

  Although the trail runs through the Highlands, it keeps mainly to low ground, sticking pretty closely to the line of the Caledonian Canal. Along the way, it traverses the lengths of Loch Ness, Loch Oich, and Loch Lochy, linking these with sections of woodland, moorland, and canal towpath.

  Since opening in 2002, the Great Glen Way has garnered mixed reviews from walkers. Some rave about the views of Lochs Ness, Oich, and Lochy; others complain that too much time is spent on forest paths where there is nothing to see but trees. Some enjoy strolling, deep in reverie, along the peaceful canal paths; others find the long stretches of towpath monotonous. Some revel in the solitude and tranquillity of the trail; others bemoan the dearth of accommodation, pubs, and teashops.

  But every seasoned walker will agree that the worst day on the Great Glen Way is incomparably better than the best day on the road between John o’Groats and Inverness.

  Our destination, that first day on the Great Glen Way, was the Highland village of Drumnadrochit. Our eighteen-mile route lay mostly through moorland and forest, with a final stretch alongside the west shore of Loch Ness.

  Partway through the morning, when we had left the last traces of urban life behind, I paused to take a photograph of Wendy.

  I’m looking at that photograph as I write.

  She is standing on a narrow path surrounded by rough grass and slender trees. The trees nearest to the path are bent over so that their leafy branches form a natural archway. A fine mist hangs in the air.

  She is dressed in walking trousers, technical T-shirt, and hiking boots. She has a rucksack on her back and walking poles dangling from her wrists. She is eating nuts.

  It struck me then – and it strikes me now – that this was, and is, the real Wendy, that the workaday, lesson-planning, form-­filling, report-writing, nine-to-five Wendy is a mere shadow of the woodland Wendy.