New beginnings

It’s funny, I actually remember the bus ride to the start line better than anything else that first day. I remember the welcome warmth of the stale air that circulated the 48 seater coach and its seven occupants—sat as if by opposing magnetic forces in as well distanced arrangement as can be configured by sleepy, independent minds—slowly reversing the effects of the two hours I’d waited since a grey and frigid wind-whipped predawn at Penzance bus station. I was already wearing every layer I’d brought with me. I remember the friendly young Indian couple who’d wandered the carpark across from me, shyly asking me about bus times when the bus was late. We’d sat near to one another after that, silent in our companionship against the wind, them in their jeans and me with my rucksack and waterproofs drawing suspicious looks from the few locals who had begun to move around this early in the morning. It was too soon in the year for tourists. Now, nestled against one another in the seats across the aisle from me, the couple murmured to one another excitedly as we wound the narrow lanes toward the end of the country. Outside, wind whistled through the threadbare blackthorn hedges that delineated barren fields, spattering a steady patter of raindrops against the glass upon which my nose and cheek were sullenly pressed. It was all thoroughly unenthusiastic; I revelled in the deflatedness.

March 23rd. Grey day. Or so I’d named it each year since. A full five of them now from that fateful day on an overnight flight from Indonesia as the world shut down 30,000 feet below. And how life had rollercoastered and writhed those long years in between. Five years lost to illness and disability, now finally to be regained. I remember that bus ride as if it were yesterday: elation and long awaited freedom, somehow seated—very appropriately it had felt at the time—beneath a thick and congealed surface current of melancholy as blue-grey as the weather outside. I guess that any big upheaval comes with nostalgia and grief, even when that to be lost is as want to be so as an organised host of slugs in a prize salad garden nearing its prime.

Now that I think about it, I actually remember very little else of Day 1. I remember exiting the bus to a freezing carpark that framed the rather sad looking run-down amusement park on the cliffs of Land’s End. I remember walking through the paint-worn and empty buildings to the famous white signpost, cordoned off at the edge of the cliffs where it stood nervously above a brooding sea that churned grey and uninviting far below. A quick photo with the signpost—outside the cordons; I was too cheap to pay for the privilege of standing beside it—and off I went. And so I began, with little thought, a brief acknowledgement to my carpark companions, and no fanfare whatsoever. Before I realised it I’d taken that first step, the first of many that I prayed would eventually walk me back to my old life, or perhaps toward something as yet new and altogether unknown. I do recall a brief moment of stark reflection, a few scarce tears that escaped from squinted eyes, drying rapidly amid seaspray on wind-beaten cheeks. A tear for the past, a tear for the future: tears that heralded a newfound freedom, hard-fought and not without a heavy price tag. For a moment I walked beside them both—parallel ghosts of the broken future that might have been, hand in hand with the future that I now sought with every stride: of doing and being, living rather than planning and waiting and wondering if ever I would.

Yet beyond that I remember only dark cliffs in the mist and a sullen sea, biting wind as fierce as can be whipped up short of storm. I remember hills, many many hills, and mile after mile of difficult, technical rocky trail, even on that first day. I remember the friendly spaniel that appeared over the crest of that first headland climb beyond Sennen Cove, followed by an equally friendly owner who clambered over the rocky escarpment as if she’d done it every day of her life.

“Where to”, she asked, long blonde hair whipping about her broad smile as if it lived for the wind that animated it.

“St Ives”, I replied, shifting my gaze for a moment to the meandering edge of coastline that scrawled its way to a rain-darkened horizon. Scotland, or even Devon for that matter, still had yet to pass from the spectres of bedridden imaginings into the solid stock that constituted this new world of real and happening. The 2500 kilometres of trail that lay ahead was an outfit I had yet to grow into.