Walking Up the Mountain

Just another day in the mountains

I grew up on the side of a mountain. I've always had access to a mountain path and during my childhood i spent as much time as possible scrambling up trees, rolling down hills and playing hide and seek in an environment that was made for the game.

When the topic pulled out of the hat read; "Taking a walk up the mountains" I smiled, puzzled. I can't really remember in depth my interesting and fun moments as a child. I can't really write about my childish, adult times up mountains, either because I obviously care too much about what you think of me, don't I?

No.

That's why im going to start with a short tale of my walk home following a house party. There wasn't too many people there, just a dysfunctional couple joined by a friend each. We played games and got very, very drunk. The next day I woke up and walked home and here's where the tale middles.

The walk is a particular favorite of mine. The path lies adjacent to a river and the noises are sweet and soothing. The water varies from a trickle to a miniature torrent as I press on. The chirping of at least 4 different kinds of bird can help you ignore the most fierce hangover. Curiosity takes charge and you start focusing at random parts of any tree to try and find the source.

I crossed a bridge and continued south, adjacent to the river when i noticed a heron fishing. I tried to stay quiet but i was made and the heron zipped away. My eyes followed the heron as it flew with a clumsy grace back to his nest.

I decided to find a bench and take advantage of the calming scenery and write in my diary. It was a slight relief to take off my trusty but heavy rucksack and sit down. I flipped through my diary only to find that I wrote in it the night before. Having slight flashbacks of sitting on the stairs with a pen and nothing to write, I read what i wrote. It was difficult to navigate my drunken handwriting but i could make it out.

******* is pissing people off because he wont leave the music alone. I knew he wouldn't. I love how much he's a weird control freak.

***** is well after me. She's trying to read my diary. I may try and read her clitoris. All i have to do is ask.

I laughed through the hangover headache at these drunken mini paragraphs. I still don't remember the night but im sure i didn't ask her if i could read her clitoris. I should have, probably, but i didn't. Im too nice. I read the back of my diary and she left me a little message, bless her. I won't write it here because they're not my words but she was kind and doesn't deserve to have me write about her clitoris like i have.

I realise that this isn't much of a story about a walk in the mountains. It's more of a thing that happened. Lucky for you, i have prepared something else.

It has a similar leading story, set on a night out. I was out with two of the three writers of this blog. They got drunk and i didn't. I plan on keeping it that way for a while. We went back to their house where we met the last writer who stopped off there after going to a wedding. I had my mind set on walking home this night because we were recording the podcast the next day and home was where my material was. Plus i wanted to be weared out as i was having trouble sleeping.

As i tried to leave i had my wearing out began and it got intense. I found myself in a 2 on 1 handicap match with the people i went out with. I could tell that the third one wanted to join but he must not have felt it fair. "Don't walk home you'll die" was their logical reasoning. I knew it had a kernel of danger but my heart was set on walking home and i am very stubborn. Long wrestling match short, I got my way and i left, to the dismay of my caring friends.

It was two am and i took the mountain path instead of the road. I figured that was the best way of avoiding people and cars. The air was a fine mist and the smallest droplets of rain were running down my face. It was the kind of rain that would keep your back dry as long as you didn't stop moving forward. 

It was as black as the back of my mouth. And this night i learned that the most important thing a man can have on his key-ring is a small LED light. Mine has never proved mighty useful until now. It was so bright at the source that i couldn't hold it out in front of me as my eyesight would get polluted and i'd make out less of my surroundings. My remedy to this was to hold it high above my head and point it forward like a walking angler fish. This way i could see where each puddle was and know that it was leaves that were falling and not Deaths hands.

The walk got interesting when i reached Trehafod Park. The home to all sorts of scenery that i never thought to look scary until now. I shined my angler bait over the lake and shuddered. The most terrifying noise helicoptered right next to my ears. A noise that i was sure i'd have to fight and run away from in the pitch black surroundings. It turned out that i had a similar effect on the noise's source. A duck flew away.

I gathered myself and kept walking, composing a soothing song next to the rhythm of my footsteps. The arching tunnel of trees got less and less scary with every step. My eyes had acclimatized to the darkness and i could make out the puddles without my torch. I figured that if i don't scare the animals, they wont scare me. My song had hit it's middle 8 when i felt the need to stop dead. Something was close. I shined my torch, not thinking about it's brightness, having to blink to adjust. As i looked down i noticed a cheeky little frog sitting right next to my right foot. I inspected it closer, tucking down to get a better focus. It was fearless. It didn't care that i was there, it just stood there, breathing slowly and it moved its arms forward to touch my shoe. I tittered to myself and said my goodbyes to the frog, which is now named Frog, and carried on walking. 

I carried on to where a path meets a bridge when i saw a small shape. I shined my key-ring in it's direction and saw a little rabbit sizing me up. It thought the better and ran off. Wildlife is most excellent when it's past their bed time.

I started nearing civilization. I could tell because the mist that was in the sky was trapping the street light, making it easier for me to see. I had to cross a second bridge that give me a birds eye view of the ferocious river beneath. I couldn't resist the feeling. Who has done what i was about to do before? No one under these conditions, im sure. So i stood in the middle of the bridge, unzipped my jeans and peed over the side into the river. My childish, fulfilling moment was over and i carried on walking. My inner song had developed lyrics and now i was singing my way home.

I was so close to getting home. I could actually see street lights. There were also floodlights from a construction site beaming brightly into the sky when i saw my final bit of wildlife. The path ends next to a small, rarely used car park. There was one car parked quite well which i originally thought belonged to the surveyor of the construction site i'd walked past. I was wrong. As i walked past, making sure to not get too close and look suspicious, i saw a couple sweetly dogging on the back seat. The lady saw me and gathered herself enough to lock the door of the car before returning to the thralls of ecstasy. 

I walked past laughing and made my way home, where i showered and slept like a log.

*****

This extract is taken from the memoirs of Lord-Professor Vivian Smartie-John.  

(The transcript of an after dinner talk given to The Royal Assembly of Ambling Gentry.)

Gentleman, it is undoubtedly, a pleasure for you, to be here today listening to me.  [Applause].  I, as you know, am Lord-Professor Vivian Smartie-John.  I am here today, to talk to you about the use of hand looms in rural England [polite applause].  As you all know, the use of hand looms was integral to [murmuring off stage].  What?  Oh, yes, mountains.  Haha!  Mountains.  Yes, well, hmm, let me see...

Mountains, as you all know are very tall [applause].  I first encountered a mountain when I was a child.  My dear father, the previous Lord Smartie-John took me up a mountain as a child and I knew from that moment on that I wanted to go walking...up the mountains [cheers, applause].

Now, the thing that drove me, ultimately, to my years of walking up the mountains was the death of my dear manservant, Pulli.  It was a tragic end, my attack on him, and, had I my time again, I would have hit him much harder the first time.

This, resulted in my timely ascent to the mountains of the world, as the local authorities will never apprehend an ambling gentleman.  

I will now tell you my favourite story about my time up the mountains [raucous applause].

It was during my time in the Him-mah-lee-as, where my eyes were opened to the wonder that can be found in the walking up of the mountains.  

On the first day of my arrival, having gotten lost on my way home from Kenya, I was met with the moving sight of the greatest mountains I had ever seen.  In that moment, I knew: I would walk up them. [Applause].

And so it was that, having discovered the Him-mah-lee-as, I became the greatest mountaineer ever known to man.[Applause]

And so I began to walk up the Him-mah-lee-as.  It was an arduous journey, but not for me, because I knew what I was doing and I eat my greens.  

So when I was doing my walking up the mountain, I saw many wondrous sights, some of which are too good for you.

One thing I will tell you about is the existence of the abomniababable snowman.  Abonormal snow...abinormal....Yeti.  

I met Yeti during my walking uo the mountains.  It is an often contested point of whether or not the Yeti is a myth and I have absolute proof that it is no such thing; I have seen it.  [applause].  Stop throwing knickers.

I have also tangible evidence of old Sassy cwatch's existence.  

One evening as we sitting around the camp fire, playing mountain chess, which is a kind of chess designed not to be effected by low oxygen levels, developed by me, Lord-Professor  Vivian SmartieJohn, Yeti walks into the camp.

“Good even chaps”, said Yeti, “I see you're playing mountain chess, that chess what is not effected by the levels of the oxygen”.

“Whoever you are, you big hairy blister prick, you grammar is appalling.”

“Don't be silly, Smartie, it's me, Lord Frederick Mound, you went to school with my ancestor, remember?”

“Ah, I see, you hairy little blumpkin, you're a Yeti!”

“If you like,” he said, with a cheeky ape grin.

So we played chess for hours and hour, the Yeti and I.  I always won, because I am far better at anything than anyone. [Applause].

However, I realise that you will all desire more tangible evidence, and you are lucky enough for me to have realised this at the time.

During our last game of mountain chess, Yeti made the terrible mistake of cheating.  After having moved his pawn, he took his beastly finger from the piece, then, seeing how vulnerable he was to my terrible air-strike technique, he moved the pawn back a square [murmurs of disgust] and I was incensed with righteous anger.

“Smartie, what's wrong?” asked the furry fucker, but I didn't answer him, no!

Discussion is the symptom of a weak mind.

I went to my pack and fetched my good pick.

I can't quite recall what happened next, but at the time I could only think about my poor manservant and the bedpan.

When I looked down on the body of Yeti, I felt regret...

I fetched my blunderbuss and shot him in the face to make sure that he would not rise again.

Where were we..ah, yes, evidence.

I intended to skin him and, upon removing the pelt, which I wear now as a wonderful coat [aaah], discovering that it was a coat and that underneath it's white coat was my friend, Lord Frederick Mound, whose ancestors I had schooled with.  I felt sick at the discovery that the Yeti had swallowed Lord Frederick whole, and I have made it my lifelong duty to always drop fire bombs on mountain tops, obliterating the indigenous population of Yetis, Sassy-cwatch's, and other dangerous apes and snowmen.  [cheers, whistling]

In conclusion, my dear Gentry, I leave you with this pearl of wisdom, walking up the mountains is good fun, but one must always be firm with great apes and manservants, and one must always ensure that one's arsenal is at hand while playing mountain Chess.

Thank you. [cheers, applause, screaming] STOP THROWING KNICKERS!

*****

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 ambition amazingness 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.

*****

Dafydd Evans

Gethin Down

Adam Gilder