Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Never Give Up

This Sunday, I went on a 18 mile training hike for Walk the Bryson Line -  a group of 'mostly Americans' living in Britain preparing for a 569 mile/30 day trek through the British countryside to raise money for some fantastic UK charities.

This June, we'll be walking an average of 19 miles a day and this February training session, with hail and epic amounts of mud, gave me a taste, but only a taste, of how 30 days non-stop at this pace and distance will feel.

But this Sunday, I also read a moving and beautiful article in the Observer Magazine about walking in Britain by Stuart Heritage that got me thinking - about my Mom. The story starts out, "My mum was a great walker. Now I'm following in her footsteps, to help me get over her death." And here's one of my favourite parts of the article:

"But walking suits me. It's a pursuit that rewards persistence over ability, the methodical grinding down of obstacles over the showy exploding of them. Hood up, head down, keep going ... You find a spot in the distance and point yourself at that. Repeat those steps enough times and eventually, you get to where you want to be ... Trust in the route. Trust in the plod."

And I'll add here, Trust in your genes. Like Stuart Heritage's mum, my mother was a walker - in Bhutan, Nepal and on Everest as in the photo above. But those 'walking' genes aren't the ones that will get me from Cape Wrath in Scotland to Bognor Regis on the south coast of England. What will, I wrote about shortly after my mother's death in 2015 and recount below.

Why We Travel

When I was growing up, my parents often travelled to faraway lands. It didn’t worry me during the day, but at night I dreamt over and over again that they died in a plane crash.  I dreamt it so often that I taught myself how to control the story. Just as the plane was about to hit the ground, I would tell myself to wake up and not to worry, it was only a dream. One night, probably from boredom or just curiosity, I let the dream finish its terrible trajectory.  This night the plane crashed. Everyone aboard was killed. At the funeral, my father was quietly lowered into the ground. My mother, by contrast, sat straight up in her coffin right before they closed the lid and said, “If you think I am taking this lying down, you are sadly mistaken.” She got up and walked out. I never had that dream again.

So you can imagine the shock when she did die.  Not violently in a plane crash but quietly in a bed following a stroke. The doctors had prepared us for what was coming, but I didn’t believe them. After all, she had defied so many expectations and predictions. After a skiing accident, they said she might not walk again. She walked. Snow blind on Everest, she found the path. In jail in Algeria, she got out. Dead in my dreams, she quit her own funeral.

So you can see why I thought, of course, she would make it. When I arrived at the hospital following the call from my father, she was singing “A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down” from Mary Poppins and asking for bourbon. Even at the very end, even when the nurse whispered, “I think she’s gone” and began to check for a heartbeat, Mom took a huge, deep, gasping breath that made us all jump out of our skin. See, I thought, she isn’t ‘gone’. Not my mother. But a few minutes later, she was.

But this is supposed to be a travel story – about an adventurer - an old-school, lady traveller to be exact. Please note that I did not say old-school woman traveller. My mother didn’t set much store on feminist activism. I think she was bored with it. Instead, she just did her own magnificent thing. As the Reverend Tom Midyett said at her service, “Nan was an artist” with all the individuality that statement implies.

The sweetest words my mother ever heard were always, “No, you can’t do that.” Maybe she never intended to do it. Maybe she didn’t want to do it. But the minute something was forbidden, she would get a really fun, terrifying glint in her eye. I think she lived for those moments. And then she was off, to Africa, to Antarctica, to New York, to altitudes and deserts and rivers and castles, to all the places that for all kinds of reasons she was not supposed to go. She was Boudicca in a Chanel suit, Sacagawea leading Lewis and Clark, Gertrude Bell mapping the Middle East - always leading the charge against convention and expectation. 


And just when you thought she’d done it all, she’d head off again. ‘Where’s  your mother now?’ was my favorite question as a child. It still is. So where’s my mother now? It’s hard to say. Off on some adventure, causing trouble, I suppose. I hope. 

I like to think of her this way. On her very first trip - 15 years old, excited, apprehensive, about to board the train in North Carolina bound for New York City and Julliard and my father and us, her children, and everything that happened after that including Antarctica and Algeria and Everest. My mother taught me this. We travel because God gave us two feet, a strong heart and a sense of adventure. We travel because, aware of all the hazards, we still want to do it.

What I was thinking about while I was walking in the mud and the hail this weekend was this. Your mother would never have given up. 

And neither will you.

https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/brysonline