Fletcher - The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher

Also by Colin Fletcher

The Complete Walker III (1984)

The Man from the Cave (1981)

The New Complete Walker (1974)

The Winds of Mara (1973)

The Man Who Walked Through Time (1968)

The Complete Walker (1968)

The Thousand-Mile Summer (1964)

F IRST V INTAGE B OOKS E DITION , J UNE 1990

Copyright 1989 by Colin Fletcher
Illustrations Copyright 1989 by Tom Lacey

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1989.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fletcher, Colin.
The secret worlds of Colin Fletcher / illustrations by Tom Lacey.
p. cm.
Reprint. Originally published: 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 1989.
ISBN 0-679-72554-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5245-7
1. Hiking. I. Title.
GV199.5.F54 1990
796.51dc20 89-40551

v3.1

Learn of the green world what can be thy place.

EZRA POUND

A t the bend in the road I pulled over and parked tight against the fence. I got out and began to walk around the back of the car, eyes reaching for the two worlds, and at that moment the sun came easing up over the valleys rim.

Warmth and vivid light flooded the scene spread out before me. Earthy spring smells welled up from wet grass.

I took another step forward and stood beside the fence, already partway excluded and included; stood there looking out over the view that had become so familiar yet always remained fresh.

Many years before, the first time I drove this road on my way to the forest that lay at its end, the view was what had made me brake to an abrupt stop. I am no longer sure whether I sensed, even as I braked, the two worlds that faced each other across the green and plunging space beyond the rickety barbed-wire fence; but I know I saw them as soon as I got out of the car. Down at the foot of the valley lay the flatlands and the houses. At its head, framed between steep slopes, rose the billowing green folds of the forest.

After that first day I took to stopping at the bend in the road each time I drove up to walk into that forest. I would pull in beside the fence and stand for a few moments looking out over the steep side valley. Down the years, this pause became a minor but valued personal tradition: a sign that I had begun to break free from the flatlands and the houses and their world all wrapped in schedules and money and other tinsels; a signal that I had already moved across some invisible line, halfway to the forest; had moved a decisive step closer to a world in which the things that ruled would once more be the creak of pack harness and the rhythmic brush of boots through damp leaves and a glimpse of a squirrel leaping high and free, treetop to treetopa world in which I would know that the hours and days ahead lay safely cradled in no one elses hands but my own.

In time, the side valley itself had become part of my ritual pause at the bend in the road. The bend overlooks the valleys most beautiful part. Beyond tree-green depths my eye meets pale, smooth, steeply sloping grassland, all curves and delight. Wedges of dark woodland confront and dramatize. Between them, bands of warm brown sandstone change texture with every visit but always cry outdawn or dusk, rain or sun, spring or fallto have my hand brushed across their smooth surfaces. The sandstone is pierced here and there, like Swiss cheese, with the mouths of small caves, and I think it is these black and mysterious openings that give the valley its primordial overtones. Far off to my right, out beyond the flatlands and houses, gleams a sliver of the ocean that has been called the eye of the world.

Mostly, the side valley plunges too precipitously to interest flatland housebuilders, but directly opposite the bend, halfway up the far slope, hangs a meadow, and I have heard rumors. So perhaps I also stop at the bend in the road to make sure the valley is still all right, still safe. That spring morning, when I turned away from the fence at last and got back into the car, I knew that all was well.

An hour later I had parked at roads end, swung the pack up onto my back and was walking along the jeep track that led toward the forest.

I walked easily, taking my time. The pack held three days food and all the necessary equipment, but on this trip, even more than most, the number of days consumed would, like the number of miles covered, be irrelevant.

The jeep track crossed a meadow. All around me, again, grass and scented air spoke of springof youth and the future and surging hope. At its center, the meadow cradled a small pond. Although the pond was artificial, time had muffled its man-echoes, and the meadows soft greenness helped mute the lingering noise of the outside, flatland world; helped nourish my unfolding sense of solitude, of inclusion.

Beyond the meadow, the jeep track crossed a small creek, tunneled into an oak grove. Off to the right, a deer snorted alarm. I glimpsed its white rump flouncing away up a steep, brushy slope. From the place it vanished, a stone came tumbling down, bounced high, hit the creeks bedrock with a crash. Then silence returned to the little grove. But I knew that I had not yet really broken free. There was more to it, too, than the groves being on private property and my still having a mile to go before I reached the boundary of the national forest. When I first knew this grove, ten years earlier, only a foot trail had threaded through it. Then the jeeps had gone in, for firewood. Had gone in almost every year. Gone in roughshod. No live trees had been cut, but the glade had lost its natural harmonies and now, for all its convalescing greenness, it was a place of blunt stumps and the gougings of jeep wheels and dragged logs.

At the far end of the grove the track ended and the foot trail beganfaint and indecisive, small and beautiful, just right for its job. Not many people were lucky enough to know the property owner sufficiently well to get permission to cross his land, and the few footprints I ever saw on the trail suggested that I used it more than anyone else.

The trail angled up a slope. Off to my left, a woodpecker plodded away at its work, erratically yet steadily, like a metronome with the queasies. The slope steepened and the trail spiraled around the bole of a madrone. The trees red-brown roots, splayed and curving, formed a cascade of six steps, like the rungs of a turret staircase. I climbed slowly, deliberately, one foot and then the other, up the rungs sinuous and almost sexual curves. I took my time, savoring it, because this little natural staircase had, like the bend in the road, become a private signal. On every trip, as I stepped clear of its last rung, I knew that the unheard noise of the flatlands would soon, if I allowed it to happen, be drowned out by the silence of the forest.