9 May 2023: Musing on a Very Wet Walk

This post is out of kilter for all sorts of reasons. I have failed to report on the whole business of moving from Hauts-de-France to the Champagne region. And there are relatively few photos to illustrate my rain-fed musings here as rain is not conducive to photo-taking.

No doubt any mention of Champagne raises expectations of a good life and favourite quotes like ‘Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.’ (Variously attributed to Mark Twain and Scott Fitzgerald by Google – hope someone will tell me who, if any famous writer, did really say that or has it been manufactured by some Ad agency?)

But all that will have to wait. Because I suddenly find myself with a possible answer to THE question, the one that every long distance walker is asked by friends, family and well-wishers: WHY? Why do you do this?

9 May was wet – seriously wet in the Marne department of North-Eastern France. A small group of walkers, six to be precise, found shelter for the night in the one gite in Conde-sur-Marne. Others (at least two) walked nearly 40 kms to the bigger town Chalon en Champagne, and at least one resorted to wild camping in wild weather.

I staggered into our gite at 3 pm, with what seemed to be half the soil of the district clinging to my boots. Then gratefully collapsed in front of a wood-fire heater with a huge warm cup of coffee. Everyone had sodden boots. Some had achy knees. But every one of the six people would be out on the road again the next day, walking 20 kilometres or more. It was just the kind of night to pop the question: why?

I remember asking the same question at the end of a long and sweltering day on another long walk in France. The question always elicits interesting, and perhaps seasonally variable answers.

Some walkers currently hiking the VF have a clear purpose: a life-long unionist is walking to raise awareness about Palestine; two life-long friends are walking to raise funds for ovarian cancer care – both their mothers (and mine, too) died of the disease. Fantastic projects.

But there is something wider, bigger, less tangible, in all these contemporary footfalls along old routes – perhaps something poetic which may be gleaned without necessarily being entirely comprehensible, understood in the ordinary sense.

In the first ever published essay dedicated explicitly and entirely to ‘Walking’ (The Atlantic, 1862), the naturalist philosopher, Henry David Thoreau associated the pleasure of walking with the love of nature and explicitly eschewed ‘roads’, writing ‘I do not travel in them (roads) much, … , because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.’

For those of us walking the Via Francigena, there is no real distinction between walking in woods and walking to get somewhere – indeed we are in a sense always walking to the next tavern and grocery – along the way we might just get hours in the forests, or on river banks, or on roads of the kind that Thoreau dismissed as being designed for horses! And we are, of course, going vastly longer distances than those Thoreau saw rushing down the street for a beer, indeed mostly quite a bit longer than Thoreau’s own four-hour daily walk in the woods. I wonder too if this Grand Old Man of Walking ever walked in pouring rain and then got up in the morning and slipped his feet into soggy boots to set off again.

I have, doubtless, said in earlier posts, when things confound, Bengalis turn to Tagore. And this rainy day on which I am bogged down to a slow crawl just happens to be Tagore’s birthday, the 25th day of Baishakh on the Bengali calendar, which this year falls on 9 May. Tagore’s birthday is an occasion for mass cultural festivities and a public holiday, in both Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Bengalis expect rain in the month of Baishakh – it is monsoon now all over Bengal and the time of the deadly ‘baishakh storms’, কাল বৈশাখী.

Long walks are often introspective. Lots of rainy days and drizzly songs play on my mind as I trudge, eyes strained on slippery ground. Somewhere along the way, a gust of wind fetches up these song lines of childhood.

আমাদের খেপিয়ে বেড়ায় যে কোথায় লুকিয়ে থাকে রে?।
ছুটল বেগে ফাগুন হাওয়া কোন্‌ খ্যাপামির নেশায় পাওয়া,
ঘূর্ণা হাওয়ায় ঘুরিয়ে দিল সূর্যতারাকে ॥
কোন্‌ খ্যাপামির তালে নাচে পাগল সাগর-নীর।
সেই তালে যে পা ফেলে যাই, রইতে নারি স্থির।
চল্‌ রে সোজা, ফেল্‌ রে বোঝা, রেখে দে তোর রাস্তা-খোঁজা,
চলার বেগে পায়ের তলায় রাস্তা জেগেছে ॥

In my inadequate English, it might go something like this:

Who goads us this way, hiding away?
Like the wind that blows where madness grows,
A whirlwind sends the sun and stars astray. Crazed rhythms set oceans dancing.
Our steps match the beat, we cannot stay still. Walk on ahead, let go the burden, forget about finding the street, Our strides awaken the way beneath the feet.

Of course, this is neither a logical nor a full explanation of why so many of us, from so many different places on earth are walking a thousand miles or more through inclement weather and variable terrain. And I am pretty sure that Tagore did not intend to explain long-distance hiking! But as I am sloshing through the mud, rain obscuring my view, I can sense the mad magic that is made by footfall on the path, any path, almost regardless of place and surroundings. And magic can’t be explained, it can only be felt.