I took a lazy day on the day I entered Carmarthen. I’d walked hard the previous day, nervous of arriving at a bookshop appearance with low energy and the full sweat of a hard days walk dripping from my breathless red face.
I’d picked a likely copse on the map, which stretched either side of a stream, unploughable land that has been left to briar, bramble and bog, steep land with large trees reaching high. It was the only hammock oasis in surrounding expanses of green desert. But it wasn’t easy to find an actual useful place to sling the hammock; the road curled down in a steep S curve to cross the stream, and either side of it rose ground so steep that if I scrambled up to string a hammock between two trees, once I kicked my shoes off they’d roll away out of reach. The flat land by the stream was all thorn and squelch, so I walked further up to the edge of the fields, where cars rounded the rise of gorge and were free to speed away. I was desperate now, couldn’t walk further into the fields without having to sleep on the ground. When I saw the tiny triangular flat patch before the land dropped steeply back down to the water, I knew immediately that this was my place. It comes like a flash sometimes, when all your needs align and you finally see the spot where you will sleep. This one was completely in view of the road, but in a place where all the drivers focus would be magnetised on the blind bend. I would spend the night hiding in plain sight, in particular glee at my magic trick. Evey leaf was coated in white powder, I puffed bursts into the air as if I scattered seeds with every piece of foliage I knocked against. It must have been road dust, breathed into the woods by the huff of each passing vehicle, sinking down to choke the greenery. When I went for a wee nearby, coming close to the rusting pieces of metal which had been thrown from the road, I scuffed at the leaf mulch and uncovered pieces of crockery and broken glass, a handy place for people to dump their rubbish, grown over by layers of fallen leaves, being absorbed into the ground, fossilised.
In the morning I didn’t need to rush, I only had five miles to walk to reach the town and didn’t need to be there until 4pm. So I lay in the hammock long past dawn, waking with a cold nose, surrounded by birdsong, idling there and watching the sunlight illuminate the treetops that formed my bedroom ceiling. The lime green of new oak leaves glowed neon in the sunlight up there and I lazed there, thinking of nothing, too cosy to move just yet.
Packing up had to be done carefully, to avoid setting anything down on the ground to pick up dust. I mooched about in the trees, checking that each passing car didn’t look at me, that my intuition about the hidden spot had been right.
The miles to town passed quickly, mostly on the same quiet back road, untl I reached the town edges and entered industrial estate boredom befre negotiating the car park of a giant supermarket and going in to buy a cheap sandwich, something to fill my stomach with so I wouldn’t be tempted by a full cafe meal in the couple of hours I had to wait before my bookshop appearance. I walked down the side of the grey building and sat back against it at the edge of the parking spaces to eat my urban picnic, legs sprawled out on the tarmac.
A woman gave a little ‘oh’ of surprise as I walked into the bookshop. “Oh it’s you! You’re here!” I became esteemed walker and author Ursula Martin, given a special chair to sit in and fussed over as a sequence of people came into the bookshop to get books signed, buying them for friends, other walkers, sometimes other cancer survivors. A friend, Helen, had come to collect my bag so I could walk a couple of days without it before I reached her house. Another stranger, Caroline, had come to collect me and take me home for a nght at hers. People knelt in front of the table as I signed their books and whispered a story about being too nervous to walk alone, or being scared of heights, or never having the guts to do what I do.
As I packed away my pen I was told a story by a widow, of how all her life had been facilitated by her husband, now four years dead. She spoke of him as navigator, as organiser, as chief travel agent; all she had to do was turn up and have fun at theatres or gigs. Now she has had to relearn how life is, how to walk down a street without getting lost, how to exist alone in public, how to buy a train ticket. We spoke of doing the small things, of the challenge of taking those first painful frightening steps into the unknown, and how they feel so impossible in the anticipation, then so normal once practiced. Three years ago she couldn’t imagine being able to travel to Cardiff alone, a two hour journey, now it’s easy. I thought of the part of my Europe book where I see a bear in the mountains of Bosnia, of what I wrote afterwards about being scared while still doing things that some people called impossibly dangerous.
Skip forward a week and now I’m in a record shop cafe, waiting for my washing to finish in the laundrette next door. I took off as many of my clothes as I could sedately manage so I’m sweatily naked under my down jacket. My greasy hair looked wild and shaggy in the hostel bathroom mirror this morning, springing around my face like a lions mane until I pinned it back into a semblance of neatness. There is something melancholic here, taking all your clothes in a thin pathetic plastic bag and feeding them in to barely cover the bottom of a washing machine. Counting out pound coins, paying an extra 50p for a scoop of washing powder.
“I’m on a book tour” I told the half interested hostel guy who booked me in last night. He asked the right questions to keep me talking while he entered my name into the computer and assigned me to a wooden pod in a shared dorm, writing down the key codes that would guarantee me entry to a greasy shared kitchen, a leaking shower and a plywood box containing a plastic covered mattress and a plug socket, big enough to sit up in and mine for £18 a night. I hang my tarpaulin over the open side of the pod for privacy, and waft the damp smell of leaf mulch into the dorm. I don’t know if the other inhabitants notice, they’re all on their phones.
The next night I went to give a talk about my book at Waterstones Swansea. About twenty people came, a pretty good turnout. I spun the tale of walking 5500 miles, the whys, the maybes, the final achievements. I read from the book and people laughed in all the right places and I read the part where I can’t help crying.
People asked questions at the end: about how I wrote while walking, or how I stopped being scared, or how I could communicate when I didn’t speak the language, or how I felt once I stopped walking, or what I’m doing next.
I signed a few copies of my books for people and then signed a stack to leave in Waterstones with special stickers on them ‘Signed by the author!’. I took a nice picture of myself in front of the shop holding a copy of the book and then headed off back to my pod.
Slipping between worlds, scattering leaves wherever I sit down, welcomed into many buildings, and always by the woods.
Strange life this, isn’t it.
