181. On travel writing and being out of print
Slowing down.
In which Rebecca explores some of her favourite travel memoirs and imagines striding strongly along the trails.
Dear Reader,
Although I’m not much of a traveller, what I love to read most of all is a travel memoir.
Writerly representations of requited wanderlust fill my readerly brain with tales of adventures experienced, voyages accomplished and journeys travelled, and my shelves are filled with the personal accounts of others of real-life journeys near, far and even further.
It had all started with Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, a gift from my godmother to accompany me on my first long trip away from home. In the unfamiliar surroundings of a plenty-far-enough-for-me-away land, Germany, I took solace in the recognisable and ridiculous nature of late nineteenth-century England, where three chaps and a dog were setting sail along the Thames for a bit of a jolly.
I found immersing myself in Jerome’s writing just as exciting as exploring my new city and culture. In the downtime between getting to know my host family and getting to grips with my new routine I’d be learning about my own country on his pages. I laughed out loud at the heroes’ hapless scrapes: at the distress wrought upon the group by an innocent-looking tin of pineapple, at how once one of their number had struggled in vain to escape – in all manner of creative ways – the lingering smell of a Stilton cheese, and at the tall tales related by fishermen about the size of their catch in an 1880s pub, whose hyperbole I recognised well over a hundred years on.
The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel.
On my energetic reading list over the years Jerome gave way to Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed, and over time I became dauntingly aware that on any trip around Europe (Bryson’s Neither Here nor There) I would encounter peril, frustration and out-and-out hilarity at every bus stop, and that my hypothetical attempt to tackle the Pacific Crest Trail (Strayed’s Wild) would leave me running not for the hills but straight back to my own front door. Bryson’s account of his Walk in the Woods had me giggling throughout, but as I turned the pages my respect for both him and his Appalachian Trail walking mate Stephen Katz – along with anyone who undertakes such a journey – only deepened.
But one day, perhaps? Yes, maybe.
Well, so much for mainland Europe and the United States: it seems that adventures closer to home threaten equivalent peril. The audiobook of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, read in the addictively mellifluous tones of Anne Reid, convinced me that any attempt of my own to walk the UK’s South West Coast Path would have me begging for mercy in very short order, and the wonderful Coasting by
, in which the author describes her run – run!!! – around the coast of Britain, gave me brief dreams of pounding merry miles underfoot interspersed with lengthy nightmares of inevitable I-could-never-do-that failure.
Run it? If I even walked it I’d slow quickly to an oxymoronic crawl.
I loved every page and audiobook minute of all of those books, and they’ve been the source of many daydreams and recalled memories about striding out for entire days of my own sinew-stretching adventures; of the breathless, fresh-air satisfaction of a walk well walked, of miles covered, of spending soothing time in nature.
Every book I’ve finished has had me reaching for another in the travel memoir genre, and it isn’t only the journeys which prick my interest, but the people. The subtitle of Wild is ‘A Journey from Lost to Found’, and Cheryl Strayed’s personal journey had me even more excited than her eleven-hundred-mile walk from the bottom of the US west coast to the top.
After listening to The Salt Path I was keen to get my hands on a copy of 500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington, to which Raynor Winn had referred many times in her own account. Winn and her husband Moth had read it in advance of their own attempt to complete the South West Coast Path, and had been devastated frustrated to learn on their arrival at their starting point that the path stretches for 630 miles, not the mere five hundred promised by Wallington’s title.
My online search for 500 Hundred Mile Walkies showed it to be out of print. Eventually I managed to snag the single-volume Travels with Boogie secondhand, an edition containing both the book I was after and its sequel, Boogie up the River.
Now, I had considered Bill Bryson the funniest travel writer out there, but gosh, he’s got some hefty and hilarious competition from Mark Wallington. In his book, Wallington reports that apart from his walking boots he had borrowed everything he would need for his extra-long dog walk – including, dear Reader, the dog!
Here’s a flavour:
The friend who’d lent me the sleeping bag had boasted of its thermal qualities. An ice age, he’d told me, could arrive during the night and I wouldn’t know about it until I got up in the morning. What he didn’t tell me was that he’d just washed the bag and dried it in a tumble dryer and that all its insulation now lay shrunken into a one-inch-square patch. It was, mind you, a very warm one-inch-square patch, but the rest of the bag was like sleeping in a packet of crisps.
From 500 Hundred Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington.
Borrowed dog and packet-of-crisps sleeping bag aside, a five-hundred mile walk of my own is out of the question.
Although I love to get out into the world; to breathe, to stride, to enjoy nature and to experience all the wonderful things that walking gives me, at the moment I just don’t have the energy. For now, the sheer transportative nature of the travel memoir is serving my needs beautifully; heck, this genre is right up my street trail.
Reader, like 500 Hundred Mile Walkies, the imaginary volume Rebecca: The Energetic Edition – the travel memoir which represents my own journey through the landscape – is currently out of print; its audio edition stuck for a while on pause. I’ve quickly slowed, I’m afraid, to that oxymoronic crawl.
But all is well. When I reach for the next travel memoir on my shelf I know I’ll be transported back to striding miles of my own and conjuring up an exchange of power between my boots and the ground. Gosh, I’m looking forward to getting back out there.
Onwards!
Love,
Rebecca xxx
Thank you so much for reading; I deeply appreciate both you and our journey together on Substack.
❤️
And although I’m not hitting the trails right now, I’m still reading and writing, and I’m engaging – albeit more slowly – with the wonderful written word, whether it’s out of print or not.
😊
See you next Saturday!
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I loved the Bill Bryson book! It was made into a movie, with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte no less - but it did not translate the atmosphere of the book, in my opinion.
I’m with you Rebecca, I don’t think I’d borrow a dog to go that far! Thanks for these great book suggestions and wonderful pictures.