Pilgrim by Graham Mort

You know the walk, I imagine. The OS map luring you with its hills and footpaths and place names. With its absence of cities. That curious blankness tattooed by contour lines that gather and congregate and expand in your head. Imagination. The ability to form mental images. That colour-coded, two-dimensional graphic booming in your mind as you plan each trip. Then the  paper map unfolding into the patchwork greens and browns of actual, experiential landscape. The senses hyper-alert to the reality of sky, valleys, summits, lakes, villages, the sinuous course of rivers washing the land to the sea, shaping it at the inhuman, infinitesimal pace of geological time.

Driving through the village and up to the moor. Parking in a layby, near the old pub. Moss on the roof, a CLOSED sign on its red door. Locking the car, squeezing through a kissing gate into the fields. The mountain looming over you, sparse mist blowing off the summit like an old man’s hair. Sea in the far, grey distance. The brutalist square of the power station breaking the horizon.

Sunday. I’m with my son and grandson. Three generations of us passing through the gate and onto the fells. Following the churned path. Swaledales tearing hay from a feeder. An old lime kiln with its open mouth. A big swallow-hole falling away from the track. I explain to Sam what happened when the glaciers melted. How a stream plunged underground here. How it would emerge far away, under another hill, above another valley.

The path leads through a series of gates, climbing a limestone pavement infested with ash and hawthorn trees. Then a peat bog, a timber causeway laid across it, heading east. Pools of dark water on either side, sky-mirrors, the peat sodden with rain. Michael, a long way ahead, carrying the rucksack. I stuffed my sandwich and thermos inside that before we set off, when he wasn’t looking. Sam thought that was funny when I winked at him.

Sunday, so there are lots of walkers. People make a mess of things, don’t they? They come to tick off the Three Peaks. They collect Wainwrights or Munros, wearing away the paths, making gullies that rain washes out. Then those sponsored charity hikes, dozens of walkers in legions across the hills. You can get the T-shirt, and they do. They have the right to roam. Roaming with their dogs, scaring curlews and lapwings from the moor, driving ravens from the crags towards extinction. Navigating with smart phones, walking in state-of-the-art jackets and boots and sports glasses. Walkers, runners, cavers, climbers. Competing. Consuming.

I know, I know. Don’t say it. I know what that sounds like. And, after all, there are still quiet places to find, especially in the winter months. What I’m driving at is consequences. After the causeway, which is bad enough, the path’s artificial, formed from sandstone slabs. A couple of years ago, I saw a digger on Whernside, excavating and laying a new path. The slabs have been brought from a disused mill, so you can see the holes in them where spinning frames or weaving machines have been fixed. They tamed my family, those machines. They shouldn’t be here, taming the last wildness from the land.

The slabs transform into steps that rise towards a ridge and I must admit, it looks daunting. I haven’t climbed the hill from this side before. Sam’s whingeing a bit now because he doesn’t have the right snacks and his dad is gently berating him. It’s funny how kids’ energy rises and falls. One chocolate bar later and he’s laughing at me as I pause for breath, his hair tousled. Full of life again. Him, not me. Meanwhile, there’s Michael, my son, hunched in the distance. Pushing on, like he’s got something to prove.

I’ve got nothing to prove. I’m on blood pressure tablets and have these dizzy spells. Having to steady myself each morning when I do my exercises, the room swimming. It’s not going up that I worry about, though that’s gruelling, it’s coming down. The slope drops sharply behind me through mud and wet rock and wind. I’ve climbed about three-quarters of the way. Over slabs that bridge the streams. Past dry-stone walls where park rangers have built buttresses to hold back the mountain.  It wants to slip into the valley, after all.

I decide to leave them to it, calling Michael back for a moment. Yeah, yeah, all good. I’m ok, just a little spooked. I don’t want to hold them up. I’ll message them when I get to the car. Then that little slap on my elbow, part relief, part rebuke. So, it’s a kop out. Or it’s experience triumphing over something. Over what? It’s just common sense isn’t it? Even so,  I’m turning back. From the mountain. From something I haven’t achieved. Something I’ve relinquished. Why that sense of surrender that I need to justify? It goes against me. Or does it? Never force the blade against the grain. One of the first lessons I had from my father, using a jack-plane in his workshop. That old saying seems suddenly more complicated now.

It’s bit hairy getting down from the ridge. The wind is pushing me now and my knees feel stiff, unreliable, creaky. Walkers keep passing me on their way up, invariably cheerful, invariably young. When I reach the steps again and pause there, a figure approaches in a red kagool, making his way on two sticks. A skier without skis. He wears a purple bobble hat, but I know his face and he knows mine.

– Graham?

– Terry.

Terry, Terence, Tosh. In Yorkshire everyone gets a nick-name. I remember him from cricket. A tall lad. A slow bowler with a deliberate action, giving the ball plenty of air. He liked to talk. Those games when he captained the side seemed interminable, the over-rate glacial, the shadows lengthening. This mountain in the distance darkening as dusk gathered above the village.

– Is it Graham…Tiger?

Tosh looked doubtful, wiping his mouth with his glove. Tiger. That’s me. Don’t ask.

– It is. How are you?

A wry laugh at that.

– Surviving. Aren’t we all?

He rests on the sticks, grinning crookedly. I remember that he’d been thrown out of officer training in the army – or was it the air force? – for asking too many questions, for being subversive. He’d worked in demolition and re-cycling after that. He’s still talking, knitting his eyebrows, surprised at himself. Half chatty, half pensive.

– I’m still chugging…put it that way, lad.

His voice has a low Yorkshire burr. Clear, articulate.

– Keeping my head down, you know.

– There’s a lot going on.

I say that, because I’m not sure what to say. There always is, of course.

– They’re a lot of bastards. War-mongering bastards.

That comes out of nowhere, as if he’s remembered something about me or touched a painful memory that won’t let go. We stand aside to let a group of walkers past. A family group with young children, a couple of retrievers.

– You won’t be enjoying the news then.

War in Gaza, war in Sudan, war in Ukraine. Endless conflicts that circle the world. The vulture states that prey on others or implode into civil war. He gave me the sharp look I remembered from when he set a field.

– No, no. I’m not. You’re right, there.

He tells me how he’s been getting rid of stuff. His smartphone, his television, the laptop, the Internet. Things he no longer needs in his life. He can’t even bear the radio, the news of that other world.

– It affects me.

He taps the side of his head. I notice a silver loop in his ear I hadn’t seen before.

– You should get rid of those boots, then. Go barefoot. Do it properly.

That look again, as if he’s remembering me. Laughing softly.

– They’re my old work boots. Pinching a bit.

They’re covered in plaster dust.

– Still working, then?

– Now and then, just when I need to. What can I say? I cook. I bake bread.

He shrugs.

– I read a lot. But the more I read, the less I know.

– Amen to that.

– To be honest I’m not living, I’m existing.

Tosh looks at the sky and shrugs, taking off a glove.

– Sometimes, I think it’s game over. We’ve lived too long. Things are not good, are they?

– No, things are not.

– I’ve got to go on, lad, or it’ll be dark before I’ve finished. I’ll shake your hand, Graham, because…who knows?

We shake hands and he walks on uphill, limping slightly, bent against the wind, cloud streaming from the mountain. If I hadn’t turned back, I might not have met him. I remember he has one of the workshops under a viaduct in the village where he stores his things. His tools, old oak beams, heaps of reclaimed stone, a pickup truck. Maybe I’ll track him down one day. I have some books that he might like. Or he might not.

I get to the car in about forty minutes and message Michael. At the car. He replies at once. Just heading down. My phone’s almost done. Take it easy. Watch out for Sam. I plug it into the charger and switch on the engine. A plume of white smoke snakes out of the socket. I snatch it back. There’s a smell of burning plastic. Acrid, making the air bitter. I bought the cable cheap on the Internet. Luckily, the phone seems ok. But, the cable’s done for. There’s a hole ulcerating it above the USB. That’s a real pain in the arse. I’ll order another one tomorrow. Sam’ll think that’s funny, his granddad struggling with technology.

I ease the window down, letting in the wind. There’s the rain, pattering against the windscreen. An unrelenting stream of cars and motorcycles and mobile homes heading past, seeming to steer into me where the road curves. I’m hungry, remembering my sandwich and thermos in Michael’s rucksack. So much for that wink. I think about the pub, then remember it’s been closed for months. My band used to play there, back in the day. It’s always been a wild spot.

Then I remember Tosh, slogging up the ridge on his walking poles. I’d forgotten about him for years. Now there he is in my mind, like the landscape. Existing. A loner now. A dogged pilgrim trying to expiate something. Kicking mud from his boots, breathing hard. The wind snatching his thoughts away, shredding them into impressions that accumulate and dissipate, step by step. Watching streams fall away from the fell. Seeing gulls steer into the wind, the mountain shed its cloud, rain pearling against his waterproof. Entering the stasis at the heart of all this mass of rock and vegetation and rain and moving air. Not living. But existing. Step by step by step.

***

Graham Mort has published ten books of poetry and three collections of short fiction. He is emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural Literature at Lancaster University and lives in North Yorkshire. Follow him on Bluesky  (@grahammort.bsky.social) and read more about his work on his website.

The photograph at the head of the essay is by the author.