by Gary Hayden
In The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell describes seeing a London child taken out for the first time into the countryside: ‘In the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the wet grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight.’
The child’s joy, which Russell describes as ‘primitive, simple and massive’, seemed to be at work in Wendy: softening her features, brightening her eyes, and placing the hint of a smile permanently upon her lips. Suddenly, I felt glad – heartily, almost tearfully, glad – to be there.
Later, on a secluded section of the Abriachan Forest, two-thirds of the way to Drumnadrochit, we came across a wooden post with the words ‘CAFE & CAMPSITE’ painted on it.
As we walked on, we came across more signs, all hand-painted, dotted at intervals along the path. Some of them promised ‘REFRESHMENTS’, ‘HOT CHOCOLATE’, ‘COFFEE’, ‘TOASTIES’, and suchlike; others offered words of encouragement such as ‘OPEN’, ‘365 DAYS’, and ‘ALMOST THERE . . .’
They were a welcome sight, especially since we now had persistent rain as well as sore feet to contend with. But they also had a somewhat sinister air. The forest seemed such a remote and unlikely place to house a café that I couldn’t quite shake off the feeling that we were being lured into a trap.
I told Wendy that, if the café turned out to be made of gingerbread, or if there were any chainsaws thereabouts, we ought to keep right on walking.
As it turned out, the café did exist, and it wasn’t made of gingerbread. But it did have a clonking great buzz-saw lying around.
The word ‘café’ is actually rather misleading. It suggests a building of some kind, with tables and chairs, and a kitchen and a counter-top. Whereas, in fact, it was just a ramshackle collection of sheds and outhouses in the grounds of someone’s partially built eco-friendly home.
The coffee, which came with complimentary shortbread biscuits, was good though – and all the better for being served in non-matching crockery by the good-natured eco-homesteaders, Howie and Sandra.
As I sat slurping coffee, munching shortbread, and ignoring the hungry looks of the farm dogs, I thought again about Epicurus, and about the intense delight that simple pleasures can bring.
In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus wrote: ‘Bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips.’
Of course, you don’t need to be a philosopher to understand that bread tastes great when you’re hungry and that water tastes great when you’re thirsty. But Epicurus understood something more than that. He also understood that the converse is true, that the most sumptuous fare ceases to give pleasure when it’s too abundantly available.
I can vouch for that.
Before setting off on JoGLE, Wendy and I lived for five years in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, a city where it’s possible to live very well on an ordinary ex-pat salary.
In the UK, an international buffet with free-flowing champagne at a posh hotel would be out of the reach of people like us. But in Ho Chi Minh City it’s really quite affordable. Consequently, we ended up doing ‘free-flow brunch’ quite often, whenever we had visitors, or whenever a friend had something to celebrate.
The first time I sat down to champagne, lobster, and whatnot in a plush hotel, I felt as though I’d died and gone to heaven. But, after I’d done it every couple of months for five years, it ceased to be very exciting. Certainly less exciting than coffee and shortbread at the Abriachan Café. And I have no doubt that, if you did free-flow brunch every day, it would cease to be exciting at all.
This is a specific instance of the general truth that the more you have, the less you appreciate it. A truth that prompted Epicurus to write, in a letter to his disciple Idomeneus: ‘If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.’
So, when Epicurus and his disciples devoted themselves to a back-to-nature lifestyle, and to a simple, wholesome diet, it wasn’t because they thought there was any virtue in denying themselves pleasure. Quite the contrary. It was because they wanted to maximize the amount of pleasure in their lives.
They wanted to sit down each evening to enjoy the intense pleasure that wholesome food brings to a tired and hungry body. And when the occasional treat came their way (‘Send me a little vessel of cheese, so that I can feast whenever I please’), they wanted to relish it to the full, with unjaded appetites.
So, as Wendy and I left the Abriachan Café behind, and walked once more past its curious assortment of half-welcoming, half-scary signs, I thought that perhaps Howie and Sandra ought to add one more sign to their collection: one with the same message that Epicurus’s disciples placed at the entrance to their garden.
This garden will not tease your appetite with the dainties of art but satisfy it with the bounties of nature.
The vision of Wendy at her wild and wonderful best, and the Epicurean delights of the Abriachan Café, had got my first morning in the Highlands off to a cheerful start. But as the afternoon wore on, and as the minutes passed more and more slowly, I began to feel a familiar sense of ennui.
I found the walking pleasant. But I didn’t find it nearly stimulating enough. I found myself wishing the day away: counting the hours until we reached Drumnadrochit. Even worse, I found myself wishing JoGLE away: counting the days and weeks until we reached Land’s End.
A few miles from Drumnadrochit, the trail dropped down out of the trees and gave us our first unobstructed view of Loch Ness: a long expanse of water, lying serenely between the hills, forests, and fields of the glen.
But footsoreness, weariness, and boredom had blunted my appetite for nature. Not even Loch Ness, the most famous of all lochs, the second-largest lake in Britain, and the stomping ground of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, could hold my attention.
We plodded on for a mile or two along the banks of the loch, and then turned inland along the final stretch into Drumnadrochit.
Drumnadrochit is a pleasant, touristy village. Its attractions include a Loch Ness museum, something called Nessieland (‘an exciting new interesting, systematic, formulated and factual exhibition on Loch Ness’, apparently), and the magnificent ruins of nearby Urquhart Castle.
But for Wendy and me, with our tight schedule and our even tighter budget, its one unmissable attraction was the Drum Takeaway: a great-value fish-and-chip shop, which we stopped at en route to our campsite, just outside town.
The following morning, we could have opted, as many walkers do, for a modest fourteen-mile loch-side walk from Drumnadrochit to the village of Invermoriston. But instead, mindful of the five days we’d lost at Dunbeath, and strangely unmindful of our battered feet and heavy rucksacks, we plumped for a twenty-two-mile forced march to Fort Augustus.
It was a splendid day, full of sunshine and birdsong. The trail, which lay close to the west shore of Loch Ness, offered some glorious sights: wild expanses of moorland strewn with yellow-flowering broom, shady forest paths dappled with sunlight, rugged hills clothed in a patchwork of light-green meadow and dark-green forest, and the grey-blue ribbon of the loch itself, stretching out along the contour of the glen.
It was a day – if ever there was one – for experiencing the ‘primitive, simple and massive’ joy that contact with nature can bring. In fact, looking back now, in my mind’s eye, at the yellow-flowering broom and the dappled forest paths and the grey-blue ribbon of the loch, I feel a kind of joy.
But at the time it was largely lost on me because of my feet.
In John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century religious and literary masterpiece The Pilgrim’s Progress, there’s a passage in which the hero, Christian, and his companion, Hopeful, stray from the straight and narrow way that leads to the Celestial City.
Footsore and weary, they turn aside from their rough and stony path to tread for a while upon soft green meadows.
But, in departing from the Way, they unwittingly trespass upon the lands of Giant Despair,
a pitiless monster who imprisons them in his dungeon in Doubting Castle and starves and beats them for many long days until they discover a means to escape.
When I read that passage as a child, I was amazed that Christian, who had braved fire and water and lions and dragons and darkness and hunger and nakedness and sword, had succumbed to the temptation of something so seemingly trivial as a bit of springy turf underfoot.
But now that I too was a pilgrim, of sorts, I understood.
There comes a time, after walking long distances, day after day, with a heavy pack on your back, when you become preoccupied with your feet. The scenery around you – be it never so beautiful – ceases to engage you.
If the way is stony, as much of the route between Drumnadrochit and Fort Augustus is, you spend your time scrutinizing the ground, looking for patches where the stones are not so large and angular, or for patches of turf springing up through the path, or for anything, in short, that will lessen for a few precious moments the pain in the soles of your feet.
Bunyan, who was a tinker by trade, and therefore well used to walking long distances over rough ground, would have known this, and would have known – as I now do – that, to the tender-footed Pilgrim, a detour along soft meadows is no small temptation.
When we finally arrived, late in the evening, at the village of Fort Augustus, I felt that we had pushed our worn-out bodies too hard. We had taken a pleasant two-day walk and compressed it into a painful one-day slog.
Fort Augustus is home to a dramatic series of locks (gated water-filled enclosures, used to transfer boats between stretches of water at different levels), which connects the southwestern end of Loch Ness to the Caledonian Canal. It’s a fine sight, and attracts a lot of tourists. But Wendy and I passed it with barely a glance, and pressed on to the nearby campsite.
The following day’s walk was supposed to be an easy ten-miler: first along the towpath of the Caledonian Canal, and then along the banks of Loch Oich to a free camping site at Laggan Locks. Unfortunately, the weather was foul. So what should have been a gentle stroll turned out to be a wet and windy tramp.
I enjoyed it though. Partly because it was nice and short, which meant that I had plenty of free time to look forward to at the end of the day. And partly because this section of the Caledonian Canal is so very interesting.
Before setting out on the Great Glen Way, I had assumed that the Caledonian Canal would be like every other canal I’ve ever walked along: a narrow waterway populated by cute little barges.
But it isn’t.
The Caledonian Canal is actually a shipping lane that runs the entire length of the Great Glen, enabling boats of considerable size to navigate their way across country from the northeast coast to the southwest coast of Scotland.
It was designed and built by Thomas Telford during the first half of the nineteenth century, and consists of twenty-two miles of man-made canal connecting thirty-eight miles of loch. Along its route there are three lochs, twenty-nine locks, ten bridges, and four aqueducts.
Work on the Caledonian Canal began at the turn of the century when the sailing ship was still king. But, by the time it was completed, steam-powered ships ruled the waves. Many of these were too large to navigate the canal, which meant that it was a commercial failure. It soon began to establish itself as a tourist attraction, however, and now attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.
On a map, the Caledonian Canal looks like an enormous zip-fastener running between the northern and southern parts of the Scottish mainland. In fact, it seems to me that, were it not for the twenty-nine locks stapling the two land masses together, the northern part would effectively be a separate island.
The Caledonian Canal, then, is not your average canal. So, although my feet were still sore, and although the wind and rain were driving into my face for much of the day, I enjoyed watching the numerous pleasure boats scooting along the canal, navigating the locks, and zipping along the expansive waters of Loch Oich.
The weather was so foul that day that we abandoned our plans to camp at Laggan Locks, and instead plumped for the relative comfort of a private room at the Great Glen Hostel, in the tiny hamlet of South Laggan.
We arrived early in the afternoon, which gave us heaps of time to hang our wet things in the drying room, to shower, to cook dinner, to eat and drink, and to relax. This early finish to the day, along with the unaccustomed luxury of a night in a hostel, was a tonic to my weary soul. I felt that, if every day were like this, JoGLE might be a very jolly affair.
Our room was small and simply furnished. It had a bunk-bed, a chair, a desk, and a radiator. And it was heaven.
For two weeks, Wendy and I had stayed in a backpacker tent that was too small to allow us to sit upright. Night after night, we had squeezed ourselves into sleeping-bags, lay down on three-quarter-length inflatable mattresses, propped up our feet on loose piles of clothing, and rested our heads on travel pillows.
But, here, we had a comfortable room, a carpet to stand on, a chair to sit on, and proper mattresses to lie on.
The hostel itself had a kitchen, a dining area, and a lounge. And this too was heaven.
For two weeks, we had cooked our meals on a one-ring burner, sat cross-legged on the floor to eat, and chased the food around our plates using a plastic ‘spork’ (a combination fork/spoon).
But, here, we had a multi-ring hob, a table, chairs, and proper cutlery.
Last, but by no means least, the hostel had towels for hire.
For two weeks, we’d ‘dried’ ourselves, after showering, using travel towels: small, leathery items that push water around the body rather than removing it.
But, here, for a small fee, we were able to dry ourselves with proper fluffy towels.
Suddenly, the most basic comforts, which we had taken for granted all our lives, took on the character of splendid luxuries.
After a glorious night’s sleep, and a glorious breakfast of cereal and toast, Wendy and I set off on a modest thirteen-mile hike along the western shore of Loch Lochy to Gairlochy.
Our route lay mostly along forest tracks, which are generally rather dull work. But not on this day.
The previous evening, I had introduced Wendy to an idea that had been brewing in my mind for a day or two. The idea of ‘Gary-time’.
Gary-time was my proposed solution to two separate problems. The first was that I was finding long-distance walking rather too monotonous, and needed to inject some mental stimulation into my routine if I were to reach Land’s End psychologically intact. The second was that constant companionship – even Wendy’s – was becoming too much for a dyed-in-the-wool introvert like me, and I needed to get some regular doses of mental space if I were to avoid frustration and grumpiness.
My proposed solution to both problems was that each day I would spend some walking time listening to audio-books or music on my smartphone. This would provide me with both the mental stimulation and the uninterrupted periods of solitude I required.
I confess to having had some misgivings about broaching the subject with Wendy. I thought that perhaps she would find the concept of Gary-time offensive. But, in fact, she was cool with it. Perhaps – and this thought has only just occurred to me – she was glad of the opportunity to enjoy some Wendy-time.
So, that day, I enlivened a two-hour stretch of the forest path between South Laggan and Gairlochy by listening to the audio-book Buddhism for Beginners, by the American Buddhist teacher and author Jack Kornfield.
At one point, Kornfield shared a poem by the seventeenth-century Japanese monk Gensei.
Gensei describes taking an autumn walk, coming to a stream, and finding that the bridge across it has been washed away by the rain. Undeterred, he removes his sandals and wades through, delighting in the shallowness of the stream and the firmness of the rocks beneath his feet.
The poem ends:
The point in life is to know what’s enough –
why envy those otherworld immortals?
With the happiness held in one inch-square heart
you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.
The poem conjured up some nice images. Even so, I would normally have passed over it without much thought, and perhaps soon forgotten it. But not on this day. On this day, I felt a deep connection with the poet and his state of mind.
In the same way that he had delighted in the shallowness of the stream and the firmness of the rocks, I too had begun to appreciate the familiar qualities of everyday objects: the soft absorbency of a towel, the firm supportiveness of a chair, the warmth and comfort of a carpeted floor.
I had experienced those things every day for almost half a century. Yet I had never really attended to them, and never really appreciated them. I had never realized that everyday life holds such an abundance of simple pleasures.
I wondered if it would be possible for me to hold onto that realization when JoGLE was over; when towels and chairs and tables and beds became commonplace again.
It occurred to me that the man or woman who, like Gensei, could hold onto that realization, and could take ever-fresh delight in the simple pleasures of life, would require few possessions to be richer than Croesus.
These interesting and pleasant thoughts occupied my mind as I walked through the forests on the western shore of Loch Lochy. At other times, when the path emerged from the trees, the view of the loch and the towering mountains in the distance was enough.
At lunchtime, Wendy and I took advantage of a spell of sunshine and stopped for a picnic on a rocky shore. I can still see her, sitting there, on a rock beneath a bent old tree, in her red wind-shirt and battered sun-hat, with her rucksack at her feet, looking for all the world like the jolly swagman who sat by a billabong under the shade of a coolibah tree.
