One of the interesting things about The Great Outdoors Challenge is that it preferentially attracts older people, for a variety of reasons. Of course, there are many exceptions. But I’m not one of them.

You get to meet people of one’s own cohort who’ve lived very different (but oddly familiar) lives. I met Brenda Manders.

We ran into each other where Glen Avon meets Glen Builg, late in a day in which BB-size hailstones had fallen three or four times.

It was sunny, however, when I crossed a bridge over Burn Builg, looked left and saw someone coming. I waited and Brenda approached.

She is a 59-year-old woman, a semi-forcibly retired accountant who lives in Nottingham, England. She was born in 1955 and is roughly my baby-boom equivalent, not counting the difference in sex, nationality, and lots of other things.

Brenda came from what she called “a very working class family.” Her father was a mechanic who, like her mother, left school at age 14. His father was a farm laborer, and Brenda’s father followed him. He learned how to maintain and repair tractors, which were a new addition to agriculture in the 1930s. He was young at the outbreak of World War II and got into it near the end. His mother was unhappy because his brother was already serving. Brenda’s father spent time in Egypt, repairing airplane engines. Both men survived.

After the war his brother opened an electrical appliance shop in Lincolnshire, where they were from. Brenda’s father worked there for a while before returning to being a farm mechanic. The shop, amazingly, still exists, with the Manders name on it.

Brenda has an older brother and one six years younger. When she was young they lived on farms in “tied cottages”–houses that came with the job (and were taken away when a farm laborer’s contract expired or wasn’t renewed). Universal moving day on English farms is April 5, which was also Brenda’s father’s birthday. Brenda moved more than once on her father’s birthday. They moved a lot because, she said, he didn’t think he was paid enough for his skills.

Brenda’s mother entered “service” at 14, becoming a scullery maid and all-around chore-doer for a unelectrified manor house in Lincolnshire. “She could do nothing for herself until everything she had to do for the family was done,” Brenda said. One of the last chores of the day was shutting up the chicken coop.

She worked in service, making almost nothing (but getting room and board), for seven years. “This was considered a good situation,” Brenda said. When she got married she stopped.

Food rationing still existed when Brenda was an infant, but she doesn’t remember it. I asked her if she remembered hardship. Her mother made her clothing, but that wasn’t hardship. My own mother made some of my sister’s clothing, and my sister made some of her own clothing. Neither was hardship; it was learning and using women’s skills.

But Brenda did remember one thing.

After moving many times, her parents decided they wanted a house of their own. It would require saving money, of which they didn’t have much. Her parents got everyone together in a family council. Brenda’s younger brother was an infant; Brenda was around six and her other brother was older.

“We’re going to save money this year to buy a house,” her father said. “We won’t be able to increase the amount of money we give you children. We’re going to have to economize.”

“I asked my father what ‘economize’ meant. He said: ‘It means that if you have a piece of toast, you can have either margarine or marmalade on it, but not both’.”

At the time, Brenda and her older brother got eight pence a week as an allowance. “It was enough for a few sweets,” she said. These were “old pence”–before English money went on a decimal system. There were 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound.

In one year, her parents saved 100 pounds, enough for a down-payment on a 900-pound post-war terrace house. It had two floors. The downstairs had a parlor (where all the good furniture was and which was used only on special occasions); a living room; and a kitchen. Upstairs were three bedrooms.

The house had cold running water, but no indoor bathroom. There was an outhouse in the back. A few years after they moved in, Brenda’s parents got a small second mortgage to have an indoor bathroom built. They lived there for 35 years before moving.

Brenda left school at 16. “My father didn’t think it was a good idea for me to stay in school if I didn’t know what I would do with it. Of course, parents don’t think that way now. They want all the education they can get for their children.”

My own mother would have sympathized. Her father didn’t consider college necessary (even though both of his sisters had gone to college). So she went to secretarial school.

Brenda went to work. She eventually decided she wanted to become an accountant. One of her employers allowed her to go to school one day a week. The rest of the courses she took at night and by correspondence.

“It was very hard,” she said.

Brenda is not married. She has no children. She saved early. The only money she ever borrowed was for a mortgage.

She has experienced three “redundancies,” which is the euphemism for layoffs. She has always liked walking and camping. After one layoff, she walked the Pennine Way in England. After the last one, she took a break and then couldn’t face the prospect of going back to work full-time. So she didn’t. Now, she takes contract work. She’s squeaking by, and has some pensions to look forward to.

“Luckily, I would prefer to wild camp as spend a night in a hotel,” she said. She started the Munros–Scotland’s 284 hills higher than 3,000 feet–in the 1980s. She has 30 left.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an up-close picture of Brenda. Only this one, when I stopped to explore an abandoned farm and she walked on.

Postscript:  I saw Brenda at the post-Challenge dinner and took a picture of her.  Here she is:

 

 

Some people approach the Challenge with an excess of planning and conversation. (That, I suppose, would be me.) There are many, however, who do it without brouhaha, and with a certain amount of spontaneity. At the extreme, there are people like Stevie O’Hara, who do it silently, like a hard piece of manual labor.

Stevie–“Scottish, from Irish stock”–is 56 years old and making his fourth crossing. I met him briefly the third day when I stopped at a hostel for tea and lunch with a couple other people. He was wearing a wool hat and dirty gaiters and carrying a tiny pack. He had a big jaw and wide-set eyes and looked like a mountain man. He didn’t say much.   He’s on the left.

I ran into him a couple of days later when I was preparing to leave my camping spot beside the River Findhorn at a place called Easter Strathnoon. We were both going up and over the watershed and down into the valley of the River Dulnain on the other side. This is the view up from the river.

I met him at the gate blocking the track up the hill. (All the gates are unlocked; you just open them and relatch them after you go through). He was taking off his long underwear and generally getting ready for a strenuous climb. I considered waiting for him. However, I intuited he was a fast walker, and that waiting would either obligate him to walk with me, or would be pointless because he would outpace me in a few minutes. So I just said I’d see him on the trail.

I walked a while and looked back. He was a black spot at the bottom of the hill. You can’t see him, but this is the view.

Very soon, of course, he caught me. We talked for a while then, and later on. What follows is from those conversations.

Normally, Stevie walked alone. On the Challenge last year, however, he’d walked for a while with a woman named Heather, a nurse, and found it pleasant. Just yesterday he’d walked with the two Germans who left after me from Strathcarron (and whom I still haven’t met).

“I’m learning new habits I never had before,” he said.

Stevie lives in a place called Wishaw, in the Clyde valley, 15 miles southeast of Glasgow. He said he runs “a wee small ground-works company” that builds foundations and driveways. It’s basically him and a few young men he hires when things get busy. The business allows him to take off when he wants. (“That’s why I started it.”) Nevertheless, he admitted this is a busy season. “There won’t be any more holidays this summer.”

Stevie’s father was a bus driver, and his father’s father, too. He learned to love the outdoors when the family would rent a cottage in the mountains for two weeks and he would run around with his shoes off. From an aunt, he said, “I learned to love wild birds.” He described some he’d seen in the last few days, including a once-endangered red kite.

When he was young he walked with his brother and a cousin. Often, “it was a rush to get to the next town and the next bar.” As he got older and they got busy, he walked alone. He was married once; “It wasn’t for me.” He has no children; “That’s my one slight regret.”

Stevie caught up to me at a new, green bothy. We sat inside looking at maps. Mine was newer than his, and it showed that the track went the summit of a nearby hill, but not over. Stevie was disappointed it went that far. “I was hoping for a bit more navigating.”

He was working on climbing all the Munros, which are the 284 hills in Scotland that are over 3,000 feet. Early in the Challenge he’d climbed four in one day. He’d started walking at 8.30 in the morning and finished at 10.20 at night. He climbed into the tent, made a cup of tea and fell asleep.

He looked at my backpack. “You’re not going over many Munros with that rucksack, mate.” I explained I was carrying seven pounds of electronics. It’s my standard excuse for this unusual form of American obesity.

Stevie may have become more sociable, but he nevertheless took off alone toward the summit of Carn Dubh ‘Ic an Deoir. I followed a while later.

There were great views from the 750-meter top. There was a pyramidal cairn of rocks in the lee of which I had a lie-down in the sun. When my eyes were open, this is what I saw.

There was also a cement piling with a triangulation point put by the Ordnance Survey, which is the British mapping agency. It is used to take cartographic measurements. I put my Ordnance Survey map on it and took a bearing for the road down the other side, where I was heading. It probably wasn’t necessary, as the road would likely be in view the whole way down. But if fog rolled in, I would know what direction to go. (And I hit it exactly, following the compass.)

I turned east and walked up the glen until I reached a building called the Red Bothy. I’d had lunch and didn’t have to stop. But I have a “leave-no-bothy-unexplored” rule, so I walked around it. There, in the lee, in the sun, was Stevie.

He’d taken off his boots, fired up his cooker, and had had some noodles and sausage (and a lie-down).

I sat down in the sun and we talked briefly. But I didn’t want to get too comfortable, so in a few minutes I got up. It was my turn to head off alone.

“I have to get more of this track behind me,” I said.

He nodded understandingly: “You go’ qui’e a big ki’.”

Quite a big kit–that would describe it.

I left at 2.25 in the afternoon. I crossed the River Dulnain and started another long walk up a hill on a gravel road. The top of that watershed was the border of the Cairngorms National Park, and in the distance, the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland’s biggest range.

Stevie passed me at 3.33 p.m. He had taken off his shirt and was carrying his pack bare-chested. “Cracking on,” as they say. And then, on the final pitch right before the turn down the other side, I found him sitting on a rock pylon beside the road. There was another a reasonable distance away and he gestured to it. I sat down.

We looked back at the summit of Carn Dubh ‘Ic an Deoir. If you enlarge the picture you can see the faintest hint of a nipple on top, which is the cairn. That wasn’t where we’d started from that morning, and we still had quite a ways to go. We agreed the Challenge was challenging.

After a few minutes, Stevie said: “I like being in the moment, but it’s on reflection that it’s fucking brilliant. Maybe in the pub tonight, or in a few weeks, you forget the pain and remember only the beautiful days. And this might be one of them.”

We stayed together going downhill. A mountain biker on his third outing on a bike just arrived from Colorado passed us on the way up an ascent it was painful to contemplate. He was making a loop; we saw him again a couple of hours later at the bottom.

Stevie and I walked into Aviemore, where I had a B&B room booked and he had no plans other than to meet his friend Heather, a Challenger arriving by another route. Stevie doesn’t plan ahead much. He buys his food along the way, often walks farther than his announced itinerary, hopes there are rooms available if he wants one.

We stopped at the Cairngorm Hotel, a stone building that looks like a small castle. He bought the beer and I bought the potato chips, and we sat outside at a table and toasted the long day behind us. He decided he might fancy a bed that night, and went inside and booked a room. He convinced the desk clerk to give him a discount because the room was over the bar and likely to be noisy.

He came back outside to await making contact with Heather. He offered to buy another beer, but I said I needed to be off to find my B&B.

I saw Stevie three days later in Ballater, my next in-town port of call. He and Heather were in the pub at the Alexandra Hotel.  It was just after last call.

 

The  other day coming up from Cairn Poullachie over a watershed to Glen Mazeran I came across a stone building, obviously just finished or refurbished.  It was something right out of Dwell magazine.  It wasn’t on my map and I know nothing about it.

It had a turf roof and exquisite stonemasonry.

This is the exterior window.

And this is the view from it.

The road it was on also wasn’t on my map, whose last update was about five years ago.  There has been a lot of construction of gravel roads in the Highlands.  Some of it is to allow construction of windfarms and transmission lines.  Many, however, are built to give owners of the estates better access to remote country for hunting deer and grouse.  “Stalking” (as it’s called here) is now the major source of income for many estates.  Sheep and wool, the money-maker for more than 200 years, are now worth almost nothing.

This building is almost certainly built as a place where sports, paying thousands of pounds for a few days of guided stalking, can have a fancy lunch, brought up by workers from the estate.

The table is 21 feet long.

It smelled of pine sape and appeared not to have been used yet.

There were fancy interior details.

Polished wood framed the sides of the windows.  This piece included a burl.

I brewed up some tea, set out the map and figured the bearing for a trail that was on the other side of the watershed.  The road didn’t go over the top.

Outside, to the left of the door,  was this stone.

I searched for Angus Shaw in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website but didn’t find one from Croachy.  There were several Angus Shaws who died in the war, including one from Islay, off the West Coast, who was in the Scottish Horse brigade and died in December 1915.  There is, however, an Angus Shaw from Croachy listed on a nearby village memorial.

For those who grieved his death, this beautiful building will keep his memory alive for another century.

 

I was awake until 1 a.m. uploading posts, which probably wasn’t the best way to prepare for the first day of my walk around the Cairngorm Mountains.

The Cairngorms are Scotland’s biggest mountain range (although the country’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, is not in them). They are Scotland’s winter playground and the main ski destination. One of Scotland’s two national parks is in them.

The Cairngorms are like New Hamphire’s White Mountains–not terribly high, but with changeable and unpredictable weather, and a history of death among the ill-prepared and unlucky.

I had to buy stove fuel and mail a package in Aviemore, where I’d spent the night at a B&B, so I got a late start. It was almost noon by the time I headed east down the road toward Coyluymbridge and Glenmore and then into the mountains.

I took a cycling and walking path called the Old Logging Road that paralleled the auto route. It was flat and pretty nice. I passed a clay pigeon shooting range, a sledding area, a reindeer park, a cycling trail, an orienteering area, and the visitor center for the park. The last outpost of civilization was the National Outdoor Training Center, which is a place where you can spend nights and get instruction in various mountaineering sports and skills. It was about 2 o’clock and lunch service had stopped. Sale of “bar food” (as the sign said) wouldn’t begin until 5. I asked a friendly woman at the desk of the center whether there was any way to get hot food. Not unless I walked back from where I’d come from and went to the cafe at the park visitor center.

Of course, by then it was raining. The prospect of walking back 15 minutes (even without my pack), spending at least 30 minutes getting lunch, and walking back to where I was just didn’t seem worth it. I knew I had a long way to go. So I settled for two small packages of potato chips (“crisps”), then shouldered up and headed on.

It was the usual two-rut track, climbing slowly and eventually turning more stony, which is hard on the feet even through hiking boots.  The road briefly turned downhill and crossed a stream.  Three tents were set up.  Two were closed.  In the entry to the other was a man working on his feet.  He didn’t look up and I didn’t stop.

The trail became steep.  The wind picked up, blowing straight out of the west along the backside of the first rank of high mountains. I put on more clothing.

The higher I climbed, the harder the wind blew.  The steeper the track became, the harder the wind blew.  It was directly into my right side and a few times it made me stumble sideways.  It was cold.  But at least it had stopped  raining.

I flushed two grouse, who must have been  very disturbed by my presence because it was no weather for flying.  On many tracks this year I’ve flushed one (or, more often, a pair) every couple hundred yards or so.

A peculiar attribute of these round-top hills is that you can rarely see the top from below.  In practice, that means that when you get to what appears to the highest spot it turns out to be only the brow of a ridge.  There is  another ascent,  set back just far enough to be invisible from below.  That was the case on this climb.  It went on forever.

I got the pack down and put on a fleece hat and mittens.  It was in the low 40s or high 30s.  The cold drained the battery on the iPhone, so there aren’t many pictures.

Finally, the ground leveled off.  To the west was the knife-edge ridge of mountain whose top was in the clouds.  Undoubtedly, in the right conditions some Challengers would peel off and climb it.  But not today.  The track was littered with pink granite boulders.  The grass tussocks were blown flat.

The track headed downhill.  I was hoping the bottom would be the Fords of Avon, which was my destination.  But I hadn’t looked at the map closely enough.  I had another climb.  And it was clear as I descended that the stream at the bottom wasn’t big enough to warrant a name on a map announcing it was fordable.

The ascent wasn’t nearly as steep, but it was directly into the wind.  There was a hidden summit, but only one.  Then a descent with a hidden bottom.  But finally I saw a river and three green tents around a pile of rocks on grassy mound.

The rocks turned out to be the buttressing of a “refuge,” which is a wooden box about one-third the size of a shipping container and not tall enough to stand up in.  It contains nothing but a logbook, a dust broom and two shovels.  It is meant to be emergency shelter for hikers and skiiers–enough to save a life, and nothing more.

I looked inside and saw a man and three women, who had stoves out and had finished cooking and eating.  It was raining again.  I exchanged a few sentences with the man about the wind at the top.  He estimated it at 50 mph, which was my guess.

It was difficult to set up the tent, which I put close to the rock pile, although I was not truly in the lee.  I brought my stove and food inside the refuge and made dinner.  The man by then had retired, but the two women were still there and we introduced each ourselves.  They were Stella and Viv.  They soon retired.

By the time I was on the tea course, however, they were back in the refuge.  The wind had plastered the fly onto the roof of their tent, and water was working its way under and into it.   Plus the floor  wasn’t waterproof.  They decided to spend the night in the refuge.

So we talked because it was a little early to go to bed and there was nothing else to do.  But then what’s better than talking when you know nothing about the person you’re talking to?

Both the women are from Devon, in southwest England.  They met in 1982 when they both became Hash House Harriers, which is a kind of running, eating and drinking activity.

Viv Horton, 70, was a retired teacher of social work at the University of Plymouth.  Stella Rasdall, 69, is a nurse, was one of the first hospice nurses in England (back in the day of Brompton’s cocktail) and is now a counselor in a primary care medical practice.  Both are on second marriages, with their own children, step children, and grandchildren.

Stella on left, Viv on right.

This is their first Challenge, although like so many Challengers they have a long history of hard and daring activity behind them.

Viv, who has a sharp eagle-like face, worked in Kazhakstan in 2000-2002 for Voluntary Service Overseas–Britain’s equivalent of the Peace Corps.  She did “community development” among women with dependent children living in dormitories of factories that had closed down after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  About half were ethnic Russians, the rest Kazakhs and Uzbeks.

When she was finished, she and another women bicycled from Kazakhstan to Northern Italy (with a train trip througfh Uzbekistan, which was considered unsafe).  It took two and one-half months, and was done,  Viv said, to help them process what they had done and to ease the return to the developed world (“as it calls itself,” Viv noted).  Stella joined them in Istanbul, and pedaled with them to Thessalonika, Greece.

Stella’s husband had done the Challenge in 2003.  Viv and Stella had come to Scotland to do some hillwalking last year and met some Challengers.  Stella proposed they do it together.

“I hold her entirely responsible that I’m stuck in a hut on a cold night,” Viv said.

Inevitably, we talked about why a  person would decide to do this.  Not surprisingly, like most Challengers I’ve met they gave thoughtful answers.

They stipulated the walk was hard.  Viv said she’d passed part of that day thinking of people who had harder and unchosen (or semi-chosen) physical trials.  Prisoners of war forced to march or work when they were ill and starved.  Solo sailors going around Cape Horn and being dismasted.

“It is extraordinary the resilience and tenacity and perseverence that people can bring to bear,” Viv said.

“There is also the ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’,” said Stella.

“And older people can be quite competitive,” Viv said.

“In a way, you’ve got more stamina when you’re older, or more determination, more patience,” Stella said.

“And you have the kind of confidence that things will work out that comes with age,” Viv said.

I asked about this.

“If you’re essentially an optimistic person, and have gotten to a certain age, you’ve had all sorts of ups and downs.  You realize you’ll be okay.  That you’ll be warm and dry.”

This is an interesting and even profound observation.  At the least, it’s a good explanation for why the Challenge appeals to so many older people.

I thanked them for talking to me, and retired to the tent.  It blew a gale during the night.  The nylon fly rattled against the tent roof with a metallic sound.

When I got up all the tents were gone except one, which was empty.  Just before I left it started to snow.  Just to show who was boss.

 

After crossing Loch Ness I had a long climb up an old asphalt road that announced at the bottom it was not suitable for caravans or heavy loads. This took me out in to some landscape that I can’t recall at the moment; probably farms. Eventually, though, in the middle of the afternoon I got to a sign one wouldn’t expect to see in the middle of nowhere: artist’s studio.

Equally curious as wanting an excuse to rest, I turned into the driveway, opened and closed the gate and proceeded to a green rectangular building that had an “Open” sign pointing to a door that was, in fact, partly open. When I looked inside, however, there was no one there. Another sign said that if the artist is not in the studio, knock at the house, which was a white building a few feet to the left.

This I did, and soon enough a woman with braids came out and asked if I wanted to see the studio. She craned her head in a diplomatic way to see if there was a car in the driveway, which there wasn’t. I explained that I was walking and that, frankly, I was looking for a reason to take a break.

And so began my two-hour visit with Ros Rowell, an example of why it’s always better to stop than pass by.

Ros is a year younger than me and an example of someone who did what I and some of my friends sometimes fantasized about in college–going back to the land, or as it might be called now, going off the grid.

She grew up in northeast England–County Durham, North Yorkshire–which she said is a place more Nordic than English. And, in fact, she looked vaguely Nordic, although maybe that was the braids talking. She’d moved a lot when she was young–I found out nothing about her childhood–and eventually went to the University of Edinburgh, where she got a “First”–honors of some sort–in zoology. She went on to earn a doctorate in parasitology, doing research in malaria. The project she was working on was funded by the U.S. military, which had an interest in malaria because of the Vietnam War. (It still does, for other reasons).

“I actually came to feel it was unethical,” she said. “It was the era of Bob Dylan. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved in it.”

Ros is a free-associative talker, driven by the desire to tell more and make more connections. This despite the fact that she said several times that her health has “never been brilliant” and that she’s now slowing down. In truth, I was keeping her from preparing for a show at a new gallery and the arrival of a group of child art students in the next few days  (although she did continue to work as we talked).

Ros had the opportunity to do further malaria research in Gambia, but turned it down. She had met a geology student named Alan Hutchinson. They lived together in Edinburgh and had “an allotment”–a piece of ground they could grow vegetables on–five miles from town. They used to “cycle tea bags and peelings up to it for compost.”

They finally decided to go whole hog (and sheep and goat, as well). They bought a croft with a several acres in 1983 for 14,000 pounds. It was called “Edinuanagan” (although the spelling is different on the Ordnance Survey map I’m using).  It translates to “slope of the lambkins.”  The house had two rooms.  When it was built is unknown, but long ago.  At least three families have shown up at the door wanting to see the place where one of their ancestors had lived.

It was originally a “black cottage,” with no chimney and the smoke finding its way through the thatch roof. The exterior stone walls are two to three feet thick. It sits on an incline, and in the first year water sometimes ran over the floor.

Alan worked on the oil rigs in the North Sea. They raised animals and vegetables and worked on the house. Occasionally, Alan would take bags of goats milk to Inverness to sell.   The times were difficult.

“You can’t live off cabbages and potatoes and onions indefinitely. As my mother said, ‘If it worked, everybody would be doing it.’ ”

They stayed, however.

Ros had gotten her teaching credential, and she taught primary school in Inverness.   She rode a motorbike or the bus to work. In 1985, she had a child, Callum.   Four years later, they had another, a girl named Mairi. They put up a building and ran a hostel for a while. They finally got a car. Before that, they’d shop in Inverness by biking in the 15 miles and filling a backpack. Or sometimes getting the man at the grocery to fill a box and put it on the bus.

“It is more difficult to run things with two children when you don’t have a car,” she said.

Here they are with the two children.  On the right is a picture of the croft as they bought it.

Her daughter became ill, requiring trips to Glasgow. Ros stopped teaching school. Alan by then was off the oil rigs, working as a forester. They added on rooms to the croft. Their land became a small agricultural experiment station.

“You can probably find this pattern all over America. Have you found it?”

“Of course. Vermont is full of it,” I said.

“It seems like just a story now,” Ros said. “It’s a long time ago.”

Ros began painting in 1990. She is essentially self-taught. She paints in watercolors and in fauvist oils. Her watercolors of Loch Ness and the glens–valleys–are especially popular.   Art, she said, is partly a way of coping with trouble and loss–illness, the drowning of a neighbor’s son, the death of an 11-year-old friend of her children who was hit by a car coming home from school.

She gave me two cups of tea, and biscuits, while she drilled the backs of picture frames and tied cord on for hanging.

Her son, Callum, studied “human-computer interaction” at the University of Edinburgh and has a good job. He has Gaelicized his last name to Macuisdean, which means “son of Hugh” (which Ros said is what Hutchinson means). He is engaged to be married to a woman who grew up in Greece, the daughter of a German father and English mother who had gone back to the land there. She said her parents “have spent their lives building the ideal retirement villa”–which would describe Ros and Alan’s holding perfectly.  She told Ros: “I knew Callum was wonderful, but what clinched it was coming home and meeting the parents.”

Ros added:  “They’re having a Quaker-pagan wedding.”

Mairi is well now, and is an artist. She is engaged to marry a Californian, who is studying in Edinburgh.

Before I Ieft to slog on down the road, Ros gave me a tour of the place. It includes a greenhouse; a warm, plastic-enclosed “tunnel” (she called it) where all sorts of things grow, including figs.

They have an ancient Massey-Ferguson tractor and an implement that digs potatoes.

On a long, sloping outdoor garden they grow potatoes and lots of other things:  black, white and red currants; pink gooseberries, Saskatoon berries, sloe, raspberries, strawberries, and grapes (from which they make wine).

And she makes art.

She believes in Scotland, although “nationalism” is a concept that doesn’t appeal to her much.

“I’m a socialist. I’m a northerner. I believe in the commonweal.”

 

 

There was more navigation to do on the third day, and more up and over.

It didn’t require navigation–at least not assisted navigation–and it didn’t require GPS. As Roger Hoyle, my advisor in all things Challenging, said, all it required was “going over the watershed” between two obvious hills. They happen to be called Meallan Odhar and An Soutar, a climb of a little more than a thousand feet. It doesn’t look like much from here. (In the distance on the left you can see a bridge over the river I’d spent such effort to stay on the correct side of.)

Here it is up close.

The stream whose watershed I was going up was quite pretty. It demonstrated the fact that almost every surface of the Highlands is a watercourse, given the right circumstances.

It was tough climbing. I did not go along the stream bank, which may have been a mistake. Although there was no trail on the map, there was a clear one going up the east side of the watershed, which is where I wanted to be.

As is so often the case, the big question was what to wear. Or rather, what to wear for the next 20 minutes. The variables were exertion and weather. It often rained once or twice over the course of a few hours. And of course one can warm up considerably walking uphill with 40 pounds on your back.

After a while I took off the fleece vest under my pullover rain jacket, and then, when it stopped raining, the jacket. These changes require taking the pack off, undoing three buckles and one draw cord, stowing or unstowing, closing up, and then heaving the pack back on, which makes it feel heavier than it is.

I was in a zip-front running shirt when I saw a rock cairn along the path I was following. The path looked to be an animal trail–which is to say, made by deer–but the cairn made me think it had been approved by human beings, too. Why that was reassuring is unclear in hindsight (so to speak).

Scotland has one poisonous snake, the adder.  I came around the corner and encountered one.  Like me, it was moving pretty slow.

The path took me slowly up the shoulder of the left, or eastern, slope. The ground was the usual mix of heather and bog. Hard to think that bog plants can flourish on a 10-percent grade, but they can.

It occurred to me that this trail might be headed to the top of the left-hand hill, a route made by someone wanting to bag an undistinguished summit. As the trail got farther and farther away from the stream, morbid fantasies came to mind. If it got too far away–and it was cooling down and had started to rain again–I thought I might want to get back to the stream. That would require going down the sand-and-rock ravines that periodically appeared, or going over the steep and occasionally precipitous heather. What would happen if I fell and twisted an ankle? How about a compound fracture? Could I set up a tent, crawl in and wait for rescue? But I had no water because I operate on the assumption that because there is water every 300 yards in Scotland, there’s no need to carry it. How much oxycodone did I have?

Like I said, morbid. One of my specialties.

So I trudged and trudged, reading the ground as best I could as the air got mistier and cold. There were numerous animal paths and I took the downward ones at every chance, eventually coming back to the stream near the col. By then it was so small you could cross it with a dance step.

When I got to the top, the stream disappeared. The view was foggy in the direction of where I’d come and where I wanted to go. The only clear view was of the hills on either side–exactly where I didn’t want to go.

Here, where the water didn’t know which way it wanted to go, episodic runoff had carved a mini-Canyonlands in the peat. The mostly dry channels were, in fact, a kind of peat quicksand. Want to be a 21st-Century Bog Man, and have the contents of your pockets displayed in National Geographic in 1200 years? Step here.

The carved walls and overhanging moss are known as “peat hags.” Well named, I think.

I got down in one of the cuts out of the wind and put on warm clothes, including mittens. As I went on, negotiating the least difficult route in a downhill direction, I became aware of a sound. It was water running. A rill had formed and was going down the other side of the watershed. I followed it.

It got bigger and the walking got easier. Eventually I got to a patch of woods. Not an ugly planting for pulpwood, but a Frodo-land of moss-covered rocks and gnarled pines. I took off my pack and had a snack.

As I walked through the woods, I once again was glad that the deer knew where they were going.

And then something strange happened. Have I told you about my iPod problem?

Last year I didn’t bring an iPod and I became quite tired of my company. This year I brought one and had a great time listening to Arty Hill sing about a “12-pack Morning” and “Me and My Glass Jaw,” and to marvel for the thousandth time at Joan Baez’s rendering of Dylan’s songs in “Any Day Now.” And then it stopped working.

I’ve also had a livelier than normal repertoire of random pocket activations on my iPhone, which holds the map, my route and GPS location on it. I take the phone out frequently to check where I am, and to take pictures. Often when it out it tells me that, sorry, I can’t connect to the App Store because there is not internet connection. Timer is done, do I want to turn it off? How about Undo Typing?

So I’m walking along and I hear the faint plucking of a guitar.  And then some other instruments.

On the first day as I walked up the hills out of Strathcarron I heard a thunderous sound. I turned around and saw a military jet flying up the valley, way below the hilltops. So I was ready for strange things. Was there some sort of loudspeaker in the woods? Blasting from an unseen building?

No, it was coming from my right front pocket. It was my tiny iTunes account playing one of a half-dozen songs I’ve bought. It was Brandi Carlile singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” with the Seattle Symphony, a great version of an incomparable song.

I walked along as it played through my pants. A minute later I came out of the woods into a clearing and saw the river where I would pick up the trail that would take me to Cannich, where I would have a bed.

You may not believe me. But I tell you: this actually happened.

 

The sky was sunny and the surface of the loch was still when I woke up  about 7 in the morning. A few birds skittered along the gravel beach where I was camping–a perfect place to camp, by the way. One sounded like a willett, although I doubt it was. The air was cool and dry, like a late October day in Massachusetts. Now, at 9.30 a breeze has come up and is ruffling the water, which is making a rhythmic sound like breathing. On the tops of the four hills bordering the loch patches of snow are beating the clouds in their brightness.

I doubt I’ll find another place like this to spend a night in on the walk.

This is where I was headed.

I struck camp with reluctance, but not too much as it was such a beautiful day. I walked on the north side of a stream that flowed out of Loch Calavie. It was a two-tire track, sometimes dirt and rocks and sometimes flattened grass. It disappeared a little farther along than where the man who reviewed and approved my route (one of the Challenge’s “vetters”) said it would.

After that it was over heather, sphagnum moss and dried grass. Those three things are what’s underfoot in the Highlands in my admittedly limited experience. It’s not easy walking off the trail.  You  have to lift your foot to get over heather, sphagnum is spongy, and the grass is often hummocky and ankle-twisting.

A person quickly learns to read the mini-landscape–there it’s going to be too wet, that grass is boggy, this is a nano-watershed. You can’t walk a straight line in the Highlands unless you’re on a path, in which case someone else has gotten wet feet and figured it out.

Walking a couple of miles without a trail was good practice for what I knew I had to do soon, which was go a considerable distance with no trail. This apparently doesn’t intimidate most people doing this event, who disdain GPS and are willing (and able) to navigate by map and compass in the rain with limited visibility.

It was sunny and clear when I turned south from Pait Lodge, a nice house on a lake. I opened a couple of gates, passed a building that had some kind of machine (probably a pump) running inside, and passed an old aluminum-bodied Land Rover. I looked into the driver’s seat longingly. It wasn’t clear whether it was abandoned or just in need of preventive maintenance.

I followed a farm road up a hill, stopping at a rock to have a quick lunch (cereal bar and now-lukewarm mushroom soup), continuing on until I got to a metal building with a stone floor, probably something for animals. I took of the pack and took out the map and compass. This was going to be a test of my navigation skills, although with my 43%-charged iPhone in my pocket with my route and GPS function waiting, not a test for keeps.

I should say at this point that, as much as I hate to admit it, my native navigational skills are not very good. This was memorably displayed many years ago when I went exploring Zekiah Swamp in Southern Maryland with my son Will (then about 10) and a Chinese journalist visiting The Washington Post named Li Xiguang.

Zekiah Swamp (which John Wilkes Booth went through, trying to throw pursuers off his trail as he fled Washington after assassinating Abraham Lincoln) is a braided stream of many channels. Nevertheless, it has directionality, which is a helpful navigational aid.  But somehow not enoujgh to help me.

This particular trip consisted of paddling as far up the main channel as we could go and then getting out and walking.  Far into the swamp on foot, we stopped for a snack on a downed log that had three mushrooms of different sizes growing out of it. We remarked they were like the three bears in the Goldilocks tale.  When we were done, we pushed on. I was leading.

About an hour and a half later we rounded a corner in the undergrowth and saw the log with the three mushrooms. A textbook example of lost behavior–walking in a circle.

By then it was late afternoon and getting cooler, and I admitted to myself things could get serious.  (It was October, I recall.)  Soon after, however, Will heard a cow mooing.  We followed the sound,  perpendicular out of the swamp. We ended up at a farm, saved by bovinavigation. The farmer kindly gave us a ride back to the car.   We picked up the canoe the next day.

I hoped to do better this day, with navigational aids.  My route was to walk perpendicular to the road starting at the animal house, which was a tiny square on the map.  I would go over a hill and then turn right about 60 degrees and walk until I got to a path along a river.  There, back on a track marked on the map I would go left toward my destination, which was still miles away.

Looking at the map, however, I decided a more efficient route would be to walk what would be the base of an equilateral triangle. So, sitting next to the animal house in the sun I got out the map and determined the bearing with the compass.  It was 132 degrees the first time, 135 the second. Close enough for a beginner navigating a route with a clear line of sight on a sunny day.

I won’t make this dramatic because it wasn’t, especially since I checked my progress twice with the GPS. I figured that if if I opted for purity and found myself 90 degrees off course a couple hours later I would regret it.  Still, it was a small accomplishment.

The top had quite a view (and was quite windy).  This is the direction I was heading once I intersected the path along the river.

I intersected the trail very close to where I’d plotted the destination on the map (as confirmed by GPS).

There was still a long way to go, including an annoying mile-and-a-half climb and descent and crossing of two dams–all to avoid the chance the river would be too high to ford with the more direct route.  (And it was essential to eventually get on the other side).  Should that happen, I would have to walk four miles back to get to the annoying dam detour–not something I was prepared to do.

Even so, I stopped and camped at a place not as far along as I had hoped. There were two tents next to the road occupied by two guys named Steve and Dave.  They had stopped short of their goal because it was starting get cold and the sun was going down.  I admired their judgment.

I was the last to leave, except for two people with German last names who were arriving by train later in the afternoon. As I sit in the mouth of my tent on a gravel beach at the end of a loch I have entirely to myself I expect to see them coming along the edge of the water any minute.

I don’t think I project confidence or experience to the fellow Challengers I’ve met so far. The night before the start there were about 10 in the bar or the Strathcarron Hotel, drinking serial pints, talking about the election, trading stories about previous crossings, describing with modest British ego gratification their gear and how they chose it. At one point a guy came in with a pack the size of two rugby balls, eliciting exhalations of admiration.

All the while I was at my own table tapping away on the miniature keyboard with sotto voce curses and sighs. I introduced myself to no one. At one point a man who had played a couple of reels on a harmonica (quite well) came over and gave me a mini-lecture on the pentatonic scale and how it might be used to unite peoples. (I don’t do his argument justice; there was more to it.)  I closed the bar down at 11 o’clock; it was the only place with good internet signal.

The next morning at breakfast I was seated by the maitre d’ at a table with three Challengers. I introduced myself, and after a while one of them asked, “You’re not doing the Challenge are you?”

“I am,” I said, “although I may not look like it.”

The previous night, and indeed right then, I was wearing khaki pants (but British khaki!) and a collared shirt. They’re my dress-up clothes, or possibly my disguise. In about an hour I would stuff them into an envelope and mailed them to myself in Montrose.

My interlocutor looked slightly incredulous. The three were dressed in wicking, quick-drying, water-resistant fabrics. Britons have come a long way from climbing mountains in broghans, tweed and ties.

After about a minute he asked, “Have you done it before?”

“Yes. I did it last year.”

“You’ll be okay then.”

I thought I might see at least one of these three guys today, but that was the last of them.

When I was finished breakfast and checked out of the room, I went over to the mail-sorting room in a nearby building where the twice-a-week circuit-riding mail clerk had just opened for business.  I gave her the envelope stuffed with twice-worn clothing and a book on how to navigate by map and compass.  I mailed them second class, no rush.

After I checked out, I brought my pack downstairs and put it on a picnic table in front of the Strathcarron Hotel.  It was a gorgeous, sunny morning in the low 50s.  I had an idea.  I went back to the mail clerk and asked her if she had a scale that might weigh a “rucksack” (as they call them here).  She said she might.

I brought mine over and she cleared a space on her desk.  It beeped three times the two times I put it down.  Its limit was 15 kilograms.  She went in the back and came out with a bathroom scale that measured in kilos and stone.  I stood on it and then hefted the pack and stood on it again.   Approximate weight:  19 kilos.  (She rounded it up to 20, but she wasn’t carrying it).  I thanked her and staggered back to the picnic table.

Here’s what I looked like.  (I promise, there won’t be a lot of these.)

Then I left.

On the first pitch off the road and into the bare brown hills I turned around and saw a farmhouse with a bonfire blazing next to it. Spring cleaning. I could hear the wood crackle.

It was a classic Scottish landscape (I say like an old hand) the first few hours of walking.  Round hills covered with heather and moss except for the few geometric patches of twelfth-growth trees. The palette had five colors: brown, gray and green for the ground, blue and white in the sky. There were a few birds, an occasional salamander in the grass, but otherwise no wildlife. Coolness and warmth cycled almost by the minute as the wind blew and clouds covered the sun.

I passed a couple of people coming the other way, obviously not Challengers. I stopped for an oat bar and half of my mini-thermos of tea at 2 in the afternoon. The tea was so hot I had to drink it slowly. I pronounced to myself that bringing a thermos was brilliant.

I eventually came to a bothy owned by the Attadale Estate–the gigantic tract of land I was tromping on. Bothies are abandoned stone farmhouses repurposed for hillwalkers. This was a particularly nice one, although most of the stone had been covered in siding.

There was a large central room and one one side a room with a table and candle stand, and on the other side two smaller rooms. Each room had a small fireplace surrounded by glazed tile for burning peat or coal.

 

A plastic-covered notice on the wall from Ewan Macpherson, dated June 2004, asked people to limit their stay to two nights. “It is a refuge for walkers and climbers, not a free self catering holiday cottage.

There were a couple of empty tins, two saucepans and a kettle with a broken handle on the wooden counter next to the sink. A window with four divided panes looked out on the meadow, the barely visible bank of the burn, and the brown hills beyond. I was sorry I couldn’t stay my allowable time.

But it was on to Loch Calavie. This is what it looked like when I came over the hill.

And this.

I was told it might be hard to fine a place to pitch a tent at the eastern end, which is where I had set my stopping point in February, where everything was just places on a map.

As I walked along the northern border looking down from the stone road down the slope of grass and moss, it did in fact seem unlikely there was a flat place for a tent, let alone a dry and good one.  Then I noticed a couple of tan smudges at the end of the lake.

As I got closer, they declared themselves to be gravel beaches, although how big and how slanted and damp was uncertain but they seemed the best bet.

I surveyed three spots, started setting up on one but then moved to another farther down the beach that required moving fewer rocks.  There are few things better to pitch a tent on than gravel, in my experience.  It’s a surface that can be sculpted; it dries quickly, and it doesn’t stick to things.  Its only drawback is that it takes pegs poorly.

But gravel turned out to be the least thing to recommend this place.  I’ll just call it beautiful.  This is what it looks like from my tent, just before 9 o’clock.

There’s nobody here but me.

When I got up and went outside at 10.49, I looked down the loch.  The sky still had a tint of afterglow.  Venus had just risen over the V-shaped slot between the hills that I’d walked through.  The only thing already visible in the night sky, it hung like the bead over a gunsight.

 

At Queen Street Station in Glasgow you can identify fellow Challengers.  They’re the ones wearing no cotton waiting for northbound trains with brick-dense backpacks at their feet, the smaller the better.  Size matters in this business.

I took the train to Inverness, then changed for Strathcarron, a rail stop where you can’t even buy a ticket and where a post office truck comes by twice a week to sell stamps and pick up packages.

There is a village nearby, but I didn’t have to go there because there is a hotel next to the railroad tracks.  Next to it is a single street with blocks of houses, some of them empty.

It was drizzly and cool.  But this morning, the starting day, it’s sunny.  But not likely to stay that way for long.

Here is the route profile of the first day of the hike.

I have an hour to do the final cull and have a small package of rejected items ready for the mail person when he or she shows up at 11. I’ll collect it in Montrose, the terminus, in two weeks, God willing.

Then it’s time (as they say) to crack on.

 

You know you’ve arrived, for good or ill, when your last name is turned into a  noun (quisling) or modified to create one (spoonerism).  Something like that happened to two Scots brothers, William and John Hunter.

William (1718-1783) and John (1728-1793) were both physicians and anatomists.  William was London’s leading obstetrician at a time when few babies were delivered by men.  He also wrote a famous treatise on diseases of cartilage.  John collaborated with Edward Jenner, the inventor of the smallpox vaccine, and advocated the conservative treatment of gunshot wounds.  Each had anatomical collections with thousands of human and animal specimens.  John once bribed the member of a funeral party to give him the skeleton of a 7-foot, 7-inch “giant,” and fill the coffin with rocks.

There is a Hunterian Museum in London and a Hunterian Laboratory in Baltimore (at Johns Hopkins) named after John, and a Hunterian Museum and Gallery in Glasgow named after William.  I took the bus out to the University of Glasgow to visit the latter.

 

William was a bibliophile, too.  The gallery had a show of books printed before 1501 (known collectively as “incunabula”) built around several dozen he acquired.  The university owns a number of volumes in which only a single copy is known to exist.   On display was a book that had revolving paper disks (“volvelles”)  illustrating astronomical phenomena.

There was one with a colored map of the Holy Land in the endpapers.

I and 30 elderly women listened to a gallery talk about one of the first editions of “The Canterbury Tales,” sitting on stools in the dark around the dramatically lit book.

I then went across the road, under an arch, through a cloister and up two flights of stairs to the part of the Hunterian where historical and natural objects are displayed,

There was a hall reminiscent of so many in natural history museums.  This one featured a plesiosaur.

Hunter’s wooden obstetrical forceps (an instrument he apparently thought was overused) was on display.

As was a mastodon tooth he collected.  The quotation behind it is from Thomas Jefferson, another polymath.

As with the books, these objects were beautifully bracketed and illuminated, an art in itself.

Nearby was a case containing relics from a dig at the Antonine Wall, a Roman wall built in AD 142 from turf on a stone base.  It’s a northern version of Hadrian’s Wall, spanning 40 miles at the waist of Scotland.  One of the things found was a rusted but still recognizable pair of sheep shears, a foreshadowing of  the future of the Highlands.

Nearby, unbelievably, was the remnant of a leather tent and tent pegs.

Which reminded me:  It was time to go camping.