Solvitur ambulando

February 20, 2020 5:59 AM

At 7:32am on Feb 6th 2020 I walked out of my flat in London with the sole intention of getting lost and going on a really big walk across the UK with no specific direction or purpose or ending…
posted by gwint (11 comments total)

that dude is living the dream. one thing that's nice about western europe (of which the uk is to some extent still a part, right?) is that it's possible to just set off on foot in a random direction with the expectation that wherever you go, there's going to be at least some people, probably a pub, and a relatively small number of animals/climates/geological patterns that want to murder you.

doing the equivalent thing in (most of) north america or australia would be an experience, but a very different sort of experience than the one he's experiencing.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 6:43 AM on February 20, 2020 [13 favorites]

Having less stuff/options can be a gift. You concentrate on what you need to survive and not on what you’re potentially missing out on. The city can leave you paralysed by choice. A degree of uncomfortableness makes you feel more alive.

This encapsulates my favorite thing(s) about living rurally. I think it is also one of the top reasons I like camping, there's no option but to just sort it out with what you have, and it transforms otherwise mundane experiences into interesting challenges.
posted by pol at 6:59 AM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

People in small remote towns are often mocked and satirised in TV programmes like Little Britain. This depiction of them is justified.

This is a bummer of an observation but it feels true. A couple of years ago, I did a weeklong bike ride across the whole of Mississippi and parts of Alabama and Tennessee. It was right before the 2016 election and I was hoping that I'd discover the charming, hardworking, proud, humble, generous, kind "real America" that politicians and songwriters like to celebrate. There were definitely some great people and beautiful things along the way, and we never felt threatened or unwelcome (being middle aged cis white guys was undoubtedly a key factor there). But if you put those on one side of the scale they were thoroughly outweighed on the other by F-150 SuperDutys with confederate flags and aftermarket giant tailpipes, big WalMart islands, people chucking cigarettes and empty cups out the window of their moving car, and the-best-restaurant-is-attached-to-the-gas-station small towns.

I hope that we were sufficiently aware that most of this stuff was circumstantial and that we observed rather than made judgments. But it can be hard to do that: it was the first time in the election season that I was far enough outside of my suburban bubble to see that undercurrent of anger and disillusionment that has since become all too clear.

(Some of those gas station cafes were really pretty good.)
posted by AgentRocket at 7:09 AM on February 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

I had an old college friend who had a month off between jobs here in the US and just went and did like, a shit ton of the long walks in the UK. It just sounds so lovely--you set off from a pub in a village with a lunch, you walk 15-20 miles, and hey look, just in time for bed, there's another village and a pub. (Of course, I imagine YMMV in terms of, say, how friendly those people in the villages and pubs are.)

There was a recent ask about doing something like this in the US, and yeah, like Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon mentions above, you really can't. The Appalachian Trail was supposed to be like this with the huts, but that didn't happen. And there's like, one company in Vermont that sets something like this up, but even then, you still need vehicle support.

Part of it is the scale of the US (settlement pre vs. post trains/cars/etc. which lengthens the distance between places to be longer than a day's walk), and then part of it is things like right-to-roam laws which enables you to at least have the legal right to walk across someone's property in some cases. (Again, I imagine, YMMV for how likely it is that you'll get harassed for taking advantage of this right.)
posted by damayanti at 7:31 AM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Threadreader for the Twitter adverse
posted by fiercekitten at 7:50 AM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

But if you put those on one side of the scale they were thoroughly outweighed on the other by F-150 SuperDutys with confederate flags and aftermarket giant tailpipes, big WalMart islands, people chucking cigarettes and empty cups out the window of their moving car, and the-best-restaurant-is-attached-to-the-gas-station small towns.

I hope that we were sufficiently aware that most of this stuff was circumstantial and that we observed rather than made judgments.

Nah, born and raised in Alabama and this pretty much fits outside of a few select areas. Good on you for not being overly judgmental about it but don't think you're wrong per se.
posted by RolandOfEld at 7:51 AM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

This experience is not available to women. I've done some rambling in England, pub to pub along pretty streams, but a lone woman gets utterly different attention. You leave the pub to continue your walk and someone may follow. You *will* worry about your safety.

Unemployed and retired men like to sit on their own (near each other but separated) in pubs all day and talk amongst each other in an unorganised way.. Men, not women. As a female geezer, it would be nice to have the option, and there's a nice music bar near me where I can go have a beer, but that experience of finding a community at pretty much any pub, nope.

If you smile at a stranger in the countryside it’s normal. Not if you're a woman.

It's a terrific story and I wish I could have that experience with the same level of insouciance.
posted by theora55 at 8:21 AM on February 20, 2020 [24 favorites]

Theora55, I don't doubt your experience but just wanted to offer that it hasn't been the case for me. I've done a lot of walking alone as a women in rural parts if the UK and haven't had that experience.

I do smile at strangers in the country but I agree about the gender disparity of pub idlers, which is a shame. However as an introverted type I don't tend to chat - I'm happy to sit and watch the world go by. I'm also not averse to politely asking interloping men to fuck off if they get in my space during said contemplations, but generally people have been respectful.
posted by freya_lamb at 11:29 AM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Grew up in rural-land, and appreciate this wry (spot-on) humor. Mr. Bingo reminds one of Mr. Bean.

Observation: in-city smiling reactions depend on location. EG Starbux baristas try it a lot. Harmless fun. Also, giving neighbors a little wave seems OK. Perhaps it's perceived as vestigial rural.

Barely related humor: At the recent Oscars, Chris Rock said Bezos is so rich that "when he writes a check, the bank bounces".
posted by Twang at 12:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

reading damayanti’s link upthread to the wikipedia article about right-to-roam laws makes me like wistfully heartsick. we need more rights to roam, everywhere, always, for everyone.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:37 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

One of the qualities of the Marvellous, as the Surrealists almost at once discovered, was that it tended to turn up in any place you didn't know or understand: you could enter the domain of surreality not only by exiling objects from their logical surroundings but also by exiling yourself from your own habitat. This insight gave rise to a Surrealist technique called "the cretinizing voyage," in which you boarded a suburban train and rode aimlessly about the outskirts of Paris until you lost your bearings and almost your reason -- until you became, in the going parlance, a cretin. Only in the cretinous state could you begin to perceive the irrational, dreamlike relations of things. Once, the poet Paul Eluard wend on a really audacious cretinizing voyage and by dint of transferring haphazardly from trolly to train to ferry to steamer ended up in the New Hebrides.

-- Dan Hofstadter, Temperaments: Memoirs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Other Artists (2015)
posted by mississippi at 10:46 AM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]