The Salt Path Read online

  The fairy gave a weak little cough.

  ‘I didn’t forget, I just had to send a text. Anyway, you love the limelight.’

  The shepherd took his hairnet off and put a beanie on as the van screeched to a banging halt outside a pub.

  ‘Okay, campsite’s up the road. Have fun walking! Let’s get the beers in.’ They were gone and we stood on a road in an unknown village in the dark.

  ‘So, why are we here?’

  ‘Surreal.’ Moth had his head torch on and Paddy in his hand. ‘This must be a first, I haven’t looked at the map all day. Oh look, it even says “open-air theatre”, but Treen’s half on half off the map.’

  We followed the lane to a campsite at its end. Close to midnight and most tents were in darkness; we crept around putting ours up in silence.

  ‘Why are we here? We don’t have any money.’

  ‘Don’t know, we just went with it. Shower now and away early?’

  ‘We’ll have to.’

  Sparrows squabbled in the hedge in the first light of dawn, a soft yellow light giving the broken clouds a luminescent glow. A faint mist was clearing but everything hung heavy with dew, the grass iced with droplets of reflected light. The Channel stretched away, no longer Canada, now France forming the boundary for the tide to rebel against. Sitting on the edge of a picnic table in the sleeping bag, warmer than I’d been all night, I could feel the change of season. At the other end of the campsite a man on a bike with blond dreadlocks piled on his head, wearing layers of washed-out faded cottons, rode from tent to tent checking payment slips tied to guy ropes. He came closer and closer. Nowhere to hide.

  ‘Where’s your payment slip?’

  ‘We haven’t got one; we got here at midnight. We’ll be gone within the hour.’

  ‘You can’t pitch a tent without paying first – can’t you read the signs?’

  ‘I didn’t see them, and it was late …’

  ‘Camping without paying is space theft. Go and pay now, fifteen pounds.’

  Space theft? What the …?

  ‘We’re just packing, we’ll pay on the way out.’

  ‘I’m watching you.’ He cycled away, a shell of laid-back hippy cool, but underneath a frustrated box ticker.

  It was a perfect campsite; in another life we’d have happily put up a bell tent and camped for a month. But in this life, we jumped the wall and hurried back towards the cliffs.

  Cliffs gave way to jumbled rock, tree roots and jungle undergrowth. Sweaty, fly-infested woods were preferable to the open air where the heat was climbing. Not as hot as the searing days on the north coast, but the wind had gone and without it the air was suffocating. We sweated, drank all the water, gathered more from streams, sweated some more. Repeat. The baking jangle of boulders fell to sea level, then rose again, only to fall back. We stayed under the shelter of the trees for as long as we could stand, but the flies became unbearable. We were heading back out to the heat when we saw a woman sitting on the ground, propped against a fallen branch. She was pale, hot and in much worse shape than us.

  ‘Hi, are you okay?’

  ‘I’m good, just resting.’ She was a large lady, probably in her seventies, with a strong American accent. She got up and leant against a tree. ‘I’ve been looking for the house of my old friend John le Carré. I stayed with him when I was younger; we’d spend summers here, just writing, swimming. Great days. I come and walk your path every year, I’ve searched for him again and again, but I can’t seem to remember where the house was.’

  ‘But surely you’ve got great walks in America, much better than here, real wilderness, the Appalachian Trail, the PCT?’

  ‘Yes, but you can never get out of the trees. Walking at home, it’s all about the woods.’

  ‘People from here fantasize about doing the big American trails.’

  ‘That’s ’cause we never appreciate what we’ve got, whichever side of the water you’re from. We’re the same on that. I’m gonna take this trail uphill; maybe David’s up there.’

  ‘David? I thought you were looking for John.’

  ‘That’s his pen-name, silly. Everyone knows his real name’s David.’

  The lady set off, in search of summers long past, always just around the next corner. On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same; perhaps we were all looking for something. Looking back, looking forward, or just looking for something that was missing. Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was. Were we searching this narrow margin between the land and sea for another way of being, becoming edgelanders along the way? Stuck between one world and the next. Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death. At the edge of existence.

  ‘Get a grip, Ray, you’re turning into another Cornish sage.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the answer.’

  ‘Thought we were just walking because we’ve got nothing better to do.’

  Since Porthcurno, the coast had taken on a different atmosphere, whether it was the effect of the heat on the wet undergrowth, or just the lack of wind. It was hard to tell, but the air hung heavy with a still melancholy. Sitting amongst an outcrop of rock at Carn-du, our first Channel sunset was different too. No golden orb dipping into the sea, just light skimming the water in different tones. We camped in a field and watched ships move across the horizon. The nights were getting colder, much colder. Moth’s back and shoulders were stiffening painfully again, only easing with the warmth of the sun.

  Soft rain drifted in as we headed into Mousehole, pronounced Mousle, so the woman in the post office said. We found a small, quiet village shutting for the end of summer. We checked the bank account and took the thirty pounds it offered, but held on to the hope that food might be cheaper in Penzance. A tiny old house built of chunks of granite looked out to sea with a ‘To Let’ sign bolted to the front wall. An old lady passing with a bag of shopping saw us looking.

  ‘They want a thousand pounds a month for it. Daft – it’s been empty all year. They won’t drop the price though, say if they don’t get it they’ll just turn it into a holiday let. Like all the others, I s’pose. Never been the same since the lifeboat. All the press here, too many outsiders saw the village and wanted to come.’

  On its maiden voyage, just before Christmas 1981, the Union Star cargo ship’s engines failed just off the coast. The wind was blowing a hurricane force twelve, with waves sixty feet high. The wooden-hulled lifeboat Solomon Browne was called out from Mousehole. But after radioing in to say that they had rescued four people from the vessel, neither the crew from the lifeboat, or the Union Star, were heard from again. A public appeal resulted in huge donations, creating an argument that raged on as the government attempted to tax the fund while bodies and wreckage were still being found along the coast. The tiny village was worldwide news for weeks, while the villagers were mourning the death of sixteen people, the eight lifeboat crew and eight from the Union Star, including the captain’s family. On the anniversary of the disaster, the Christmas lights are switched off as an act of remembrance, but there’s an air that hangs heavy in the village, as if the locals would like to close their doors to any more intrusion.

  Newlyn heaved with harbour industry. The fishing boats of one of the country’s largest fishing fleets stood in sandy mud, waiting for the returning tide. Trucks stood on the road waiting to be loaded with fish in plastic crates. Plastic crates stood on the path waiting to be filled with fish. Gulls circled in profusion through streets cloaked in the strong smell of raw fish. We kept walking as Newlyn became Penzance.

  Packs full of food, we scoured the outdoor shops for a canister of gas. They didn’t have the right one, so we bought two insulation mats for four pounds, then searched the rest of the town for gas, eventually finding one lone can in a dark corner of a hardware store just as it was closing. We bought a pasty from the oldest pasty shop ever, probably, and headed back to
the coast through the Bolitho Gardens, a patch of green amongst the concrete. It was early evening and the nearest green after this was miles down a concrete path, beyond Marazion. It was hard to say how far the tide came in; after the storms, the tidal litter covered the sand and over the sea wall to the road above, so camping on the beach was too risky. We settled on a bench in the gardens and waited for it to get dark. A man with wispy grey hair and a full rucksack sat on the bench next to ours.

  ‘Backpackers, are you?’

  ‘Yeah, you?’

  ‘No, I live on the path.’

  ‘On the coastal path?’ He had a big pack, but it wasn’t excessive. ‘What, in the winter too? How do you keep warm?’

  ‘No, I’m done for the summer now, I’m in this garden tonight, then away on the train tomorrow.’

  ‘Where are you heading?’

  ‘Thailand.’

  ‘Thailand?’

  ‘Yeah. Always warm, great beaches and the girls are gorgeous.’

  ‘Really?’

  We left the old man to his night in the garden and followed the walkway, eventually giving up and putting the tent up freestanding on the concrete. The newly added layer of insulation mats under the self-inflating mats was surprisingly comfortable, without a single bump, and not as cold. Concrete was undoubtedly warmer than sand. Maybe that’s why street sleepers stay in the towns. Perhaps a cardboard box behind the bins wasn’t such a bad idea for the winter. Or maybe we should go to Thailand. We should have asked him how he paid for the airfare.

  Moth stretched out of the tent as dawn broke, moving more easily after a warmer night. We should add ‘don’t get cold’ to the already extensive list of things to do to counteract CBD. What had the consultant said just three months ago? ‘Don’t tire yourself, or walk too far, and be careful on the stairs. Don’t carry heavy weights, or plan too far ahead.’ But how could I not look too far ahead, when my whole ‘ahead’ contained him? I couldn’t accept it; we were beating it, or if not beating it then at least keeping it at bay. No, the doctor should have said walk every day, do weight-bearing exercise, fight it, keep your mind active, look ahead, fight it. Then if it beats you, when it beats you, you’ll know you gave it everything, you didn’t lie down in front of the train. Moth took more ibuprofen and we carried on, the sun rising in medieval drama behind the ancient St Michael’s Mount. The tide was ebbing quietly away, freeing the mount from its seabound island existence, attaching it again to the mainland by the manmade stone causeway.

  The day passed by on the harbour of the mount, racing back across the causeway to beat the tide, then out of Marazion and away from the urban, to Stackhouse Cove and a tiny grassy promontory above the sea. Oystercatchers on the rocks called all through the night, but it didn’t matter; I wanted to feel the nights and the days and every second in-between, to soak up all the moments we could have before the cold realities of winter overtook us.

  Over Cudden Point, Land’s End was just a memory hidden in blackening cloud. The curve of the Lizard headed away south-east, down through Prussia Cove, once the home of smugglers and coastguards, picture-postcard cottages set in the hillside. Holiday cottages now, half of them empty. I could have lived there, at least for the winter. The rain came, a light coating of drizzle at first, then vertical, heavy-falling stair-rods. Rain that beat our not-waterproofs so hard it was deafening, hurt our heads as it fell, soaked us to the skin. Porthleven finally appeared after what felt like two hours in a power shower, the streets running ankle-deep in water, our feet no longer just wet but actually submerged. The place was deserted. Advertising describes Porthleven as the up-and-coming haven for foodies, with rumours of celebrity chefs on the way. We bought a pasty and sheltered in a shop doorway. Then it really rained. The harbour wall disappeared, then the harbour, then the other side of the road. When it finally eased enough to see our feet we headed out, eventually finding some shelter at the foot of the cliff on the shingle beach of Loe Bar.

  The morning brought cold mist, but the rain had gone, leaving the fog on the headland. We could hear it buzzing like wet air around a power line, and walked into the mist expecting to find an electric transformer, but what emerged were men armed with strimmers, whipping down the wet undergrowth. They stopped to let us pass.

  ‘Great job, guys.’

  ‘No problem.’

  The first one took his helmet off to shake free his sun-bleached, shoulder-length hair, then the one with the Australian accent did the same. They could have been in a shampoo advert – just replace the seagulls with parrots and a waterfall. Definitely worth it.

  ‘How come you boys are here doing this?’

  ‘It’s winter at home; we get the contract here for your summer, strim the miles, surf the breaks, then home for our summer at the surf school.’

  ‘That’s a good life.’

  ‘It’s a great life. No ties, no problems.’

  The strimming surfers struck up the machines and we carried on through the fog and the coves, Gunwalloe Cove, Church Cove, Poldhu Cove, Polurrian Cove, Mullion Cove. The fog didn’t clear; grey headlands, grey sea. We sat in a busy café in Mullion Cove and ordered tea for one with two cups. Exhausted and damp, the attraction of a chair in a dry café was too strong. A man in his twenties waited tables, cleared tables, politely dealt with grumpy customers, cut cakes, swept the floor, helped old ladies to their seats, took payments. We stretched the tea, too cosy to leave. The owner came in.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? There’s two tables out there uncleared. What do I pay you for? You’re fucking lazy.’ The man cleared the tables without complaint. The owner left, followed shortly afterwards by most of the customers. It was a few minutes before closing time when the man came out of the kitchen with two paninis and put them on our table.

  ‘Sorry, mate, we didn’t order those.’

  ‘I know, but you look like you need them. You’ll just need to eat them outside; I’m closing up.’

  ‘Sorry, but we can’t afford them, we can’t take them.’

  ‘Yes you can, I’m not charging you.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘I can because I’m leaving. He can stuff his job.’

  We sat outside; he followed us and locked the door, putting the key through the letterbox.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Not sure, but there has to be more than this. I know some guys who strim the path, so I might go to Australia with them.’

  ‘Good luck.’

  The ease with which he’d walked out of his job carried the security of youth. The conviction that anything can be dropped today, safe in the belief that something else can be picked up tomorrow. Does that fade with age, as we look to the horizon and see time running out? He and the strimming surfers made me think of Tom. He should be following the wave to wherever the best surf was, but instead he had become focused on finding work and a flat. Had losing the security of home crushed his dreams? Just another layer of guilt to add to the rest.

  The sun went down behind Land’s End, catching the sea in rich, early-autumn colours, and we slept for ten hours, dry at last on Predannack Head.

  The Lizard National Nature Reserve was created in the 1970s and protects a large part of the peninsula. We walked along the level cliff top, through tracts of rare Cornish heath, full of plants that had Moth in ecstasy. Other walkers of the South West Coast Path talk about miles done in a day, records set, targets met. Our path was getting slower and slower. It could have been the hour we spent examining the rare Autumn Lady’s-tresses orchid, or the afternoon trying to photograph one butterfly, or the evening hanging over Kynance Cliffs watching seals in the cove below, but as it got dark we realized we’d probably only covered three miles, so put the tent up around the corner from where we’d taken it down.

  In the early light choughs swooped and hovered between the cliffs and the Bellows islet, their red beaks and legs clear against the dark rock. Skylarks rose high overhead, hanging just
out of sight, singing endlessly, until they dived back to earth to take a deep breath. A handful of kittiwakes squabbled on the ledges. Shouldn’t they have left by now, heading out into the Atlantic? Could the warm weather have confused them? Didn’t they realize summer was over?

  Reluctantly we dropped down into Kynance Cove and sat on the rocks to boil some water. These rocks, no longer grey blocky granite but now serpentine in hues of dark green and red, a picture-perfect cove of snakeskin rock, calm turquoise water and white sand. Until mid-morning at least. Then they came. Streaming from the hillsides, down every path, every gully. Old people, young people, pre-school children, children that should have been at school, buckets, deckchairs, trollies full of paraphernalia, they all claimed their space by the rocks, then every space up to the tideline, people as confused by the weather as the kittiwakes. A biblical invasion, but what were they searching for? I suspect it was just the last few rays of the summer; if it was anything spiritual they were too late, that wasn’t available after ten thirty. We packed the stove away and walked against the tide of humanity. On across open heathland to Lizard Point and the most southerly rocks of the mainland.

  The bottom, the very base: any further south involved swimming. Wherever we walked from here would be heading north. Heading up country. A place for choices, for directions taken, photographs, and decisions made. A woman called Phoebe Smith wrote Extreme Sleeps about wild camping at every extremity of Britain, north, south, east and west. At the most southerly point she waited until it was dark, unrolled her bivvy bag and had an unsurprisingly bad night’s sleep on a ledge above the waves, then up with the lark, or probably the gulls, a quick walk up the coast and back into the car, off to the next extreme rocky outcrop. I wished I was having a nice meal, then unrolling my bivvy without a care, knowing that however wet or cold I got, it wasn’t going to last. But that wasn’t our path; it was hers. Ours would turn north and involve making a choice about the winter.

  We’d never go back, I knew that. Never walk through the door, drop our bags on the slate floor, feed the cats, cut the grass, walk through the garden on a starry night and see the Plough hanging over the mountains in the north. It was never over the mountains now. It stayed in the north but my perspective had changed; I’d lost my bearings. The country towered above me, a blank empty space containing nothing for us. Only one thing was real, more real to me now than the past that we’d lost or the future we didn’t have: if I put one foot in front of another, the path would move me forward and a strip of dirt, often no more than a foot wide, had become home. It wasn’t just the chill in the air, the lowering of the sun’s horizon, the heaviness of the dew or the lack of urgency in the birds’ calls, but something in me was changing season too. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance. Burnt in by the sun, driven in by the storms. I could feel the sky, the earth, the water and revel in being part of the elements without a chasm of pain opening at the thought of the loss of our place within it all. I was a part of the whole. I didn’t need to own a patch of land to make that so. I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it. The core of me wasn’t lost. Translucent, elusive, but there and growing stronger with every headland.