I’ve always loved ‘outside’. The great outdoors. When I was young my Grandad would pick me up after school several times a week, and as long as the weather was fine we would walk the mile and a half to his house. The walk was the point, never just a means to get to his house.
The route was along an abandoned railway line that nature had eagerly reclaimed. We would often stop to rummage around for slowworms, sit on the riverbank looking for kingfishers or see who could spot a buzzard first (it never took long). I loved being outside.
Love doesn’t always mean appreciation, though. The further I got into my teens, the more likely the colours of ‘outside’ were to include only variations of concrete-grey, the ever diminishing hues of green fading in the distance. Then I reached adulthood.
Suddenly, going out means getting in a car. ‘Fresh’ no longer applies to what you breathe when you’re never more than a few feet from an exhaust.
It becomes natural, at this point, to create personalised little worlds within these metal boxes, shut off from everything beyond. They’re not quite sound proof, but when those around you are also similarly enclosed, all with their own humming engines, they might as well be.
Even though you may be sat just a few feet from a stranger you can still sing like you’re in the shower, curse them like you’d never dream of in ‘reality’ — you can even pick your nose (they can see this, but somehow it doesn’t matter). Any glorious, natural scenery in the distance might as well be painted on a curtain.
The Need for Speed
Don’t get me wrong, I always loved cars, too — all little boys are supposed to. It was an unwritten law that you had to learn every make and model that passed you on the roads, and of course you needed a list of favourites (it was always good to have a muscular gas-guzzler like a Subaru Impreza or Mitsubishi Evo on top).
By the time I learned to drive, I couldn’t wait to get out on the roads. But somehow, driving a clonked out old Citroën AX didn’t give me the experience I’d been hoping for. It did, however, let me make a 70 mile round trip, twice, with some town driving thrown in, all for less than the cost of a pub lunch.
Before long, that was more important. Cars had become functional, a means of getting from A to B. The peer pressures of childhood were in the past and the more I learned about the environment, the more I came to resent needing to own one.
Unfortunately, I never seem to be able to find work within walking distance or accessible by cycle routes, and our semi-rural location and poor public transport infrastructure mean cars are practically essential.
The Routines of Parenthood
I drive the kids to school every morning. We used to live close enough to walk, but back then it was just that little bit too far for my daughter’s reluctant little legs to manage.
She could do it easily now, but we’ve moved three miles away and she has a brother. The walk from here would be idyllic — a cycle path, far away from roads, winding along with the river beneath a green canopy and the rolling hills. I loved walking her brother to the (much closer) nursery when he was there, but now they’re both in school the three miles each way would be unthinkable.
The Inevitable Setbacks of Car Ownership
After the car I’d had for their entire lives finally gave up its dusty diesel ghost, I spent what little money we had on a replacement. This one was far less inclined to put in the same hours of service. After dropping the children off at school one day, a faint knocking sound led to a long, infuriating and right now unnecessary story that resulted in its almost immediate and untimely demise. But in the very short term, it meant that I had to find another way to pick up the children that day.
The sun shone, the birds sang and my hamstrings ached from lack of use. I was long overdue some exercise so thought, why not give it a go?
At this point I had an hour before I had to be at the school. Google maps told me the walk would take 56 minutes. It felt like fate.
A screenshot of a section of the walk, from Google Maps. Pretty green, yet 99% of my time in this area is spent on the grey line in the centre.(iStockphoto.com)
I became short of breath more quickly than I would have liked and it didn’t take long to know I’d feel it the next day, but the exercise felt good. As I walked, I reasoned that I could add 50 percent onto the duration of the return journey — it would take longer with their little legs, but at six years old my daughter would handle it well and if my son got tired he was light enough to carry.
When I arrived, they led the way along the street to find the car. When I told them we were walking, they found it hilarious. Then, exciting. I explained it would be fun, but we had to be quick to get home before dark — this was an exaggeration, I thought, but would help motivate them.
We quickly crossed the handful of busy roads that prevent me from seeing cycling as a permanent solution. As soon as we were away from the noise of the traffic, they were enchanted by the bird song. This is exactly what I’d wanted. What I didn’t want, was for them to follow the enticing melodies into the bushes. ‘I can see it! Robin Goch!’
‘Lovely, but we see those all of the time, come on.’
We get a little further and need to stop to examine a pinecone.
‘It’s beautiful!’
‘It’s scabby. look, it’s damp and there are things living in it.’
I was wrong. It was beautiful and had to go in my daughter’s pocket. My son needed one too. But not that one. Or that one. Or that one.
We moved on. A little. There were leaves. Among them, the greatest shape a leaf has ever formed. This, of course, required a lot of stationary attention. Eventually they stumbled across another, identical leaf: incredible! And then another, and another — it was as if the trees were growing them this way on purpose. They all went in the pocket.
You can see the point I’m making. My estimate of how long the journey would take was off — way off. I quickly realised that I was never going to convince them that ‘making time’ was more important than all these wonders, so I let them take the lead — if you can’t beat them, join them.
‘Smell this!’ is never a welcome demand from a child, but on the walk down I hadn’t picked up on any of the aromas produced by the surrounding life. Shamefully, I hadn’t noticed the leaves or the pinecones either. Here I was, taking pride in my decision to walk in the great outdoors and I hadn’t paid attention to any of it — not really.
The World From Their Point of View
It took the eyes of children seeing things as if for the first time to remind me exactly how to appreciate them. It wasn’t for the first time, of course — they’re often outdoors — but the spontaneity and magnitude of our journey seemed to heighten their senses, and mine in turn.
Crawling up a banking to retrieve a child from somewhere he had no business being got my hands dirty. Literally dirty: not the mundane, changing a tyre dirty, but the proper, childlike pointlessness of soil dirty. It’s different; I felt it. Not just because getting dirty connects you with the living world, but because it reminds you of childhood when you were intrinsically linked with it, when you instinctively understood that you’re part of something bigger.
I remembered the joy of walking on pine carpets, of carefully peeling back a tiny curl of bark on a silver birch — far more satisfying even than peeling the cellophane off a new CD, if you can believe that. I tried to remember all the different birds my Grandad had taught me, and to my surprise I could still identify a few through their song alone.
It doesn’t matter how expensive your tie is or how clean you keep your dress — we are animals, in and of the soil. The fact that I’m experiencing something close to an epiphany by doing something so ordinary, after managing to close myself off from the real, living world is an indictment on how I live my life, yes. But the fact my lifestyle is in no way exceptional reveals just how complete our separation from it has become.
A Strange Civilisation in the Wilderness
We carried on: stopping, starting, looking, touching, stalking, listening, climbing, falling, laughing.
Suddenly, one of them noticed the incongruous glow of primary colours among the leaves.
Colourful bunting led us off the beaten track and down to the river’s edge, where someone had been busy. Every tree in sight was decorated with tiny doors, model fairies, beautiful messages and other decorations.
Someone — a group of people with children, no doubt — had taken all of these things out and away from civilization to create a little haven for people to find. I watched the kids as they convinced themselves of the fairies’ real, magical nature for a while before moving on. It was getting dark — I hadn’t been exaggerating, after all.
The journey took over three and a half hours in total, the last fifteen minutes of which my son spent on my shoulders. But it was the most enjoyable trip home from school they had ever had, and the first time I had truly noticed it at all.
Every now and again we go back to the fairies, when the children excitedly suggest we visit. In truth, most of them are plastic, garish and a little tatty, and the weather hasn’t served them well.
But the magic isn’t with the fairies. Just like my Grandad’s house during my own childhood, they may be the destination but never the point of the journey.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Daniel McNestry on Unsplash