Getting to Grey Owl by Kurt Caswell

Author:Kurt Caswell [Caswell, Kurt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595342621
Publisher: Trinity University Press

Scafell Pike, England (978 meters / 3,209 feet)

Wordsworth and Coleridge were like brothers for a time, and they famously lived in proximity in England’s Lake District composing their greatest poems with the other’s favor and guidance. Dorothy was there too, Wordsworth’s beloved sister, and the three walked miles and miles together through the hills and glens. The height of their friendship was also the height of their poetic industry. Coleridge wrote “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,” and Wordsworth was already at work on the poem that became his epic, The Prelude. They published a volume together, Lyrical Ballads, which was largely a failure then but is a staple of Romantic poetry now. On a walk to Keswick, near England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, Coleridge exclaimed, in typical Romantic bombast: “O my God! and the Black Crags close under the snowy mountains, whose snows were pinkish with the setting sun and the reflections from the sandy rich Clouds that floated over some and rested upon others! It was to me a vision of fair Country.” I had never been to the Lake District, so I anticipated fair country as well, not to mention—O my God!—my deepest immersion yet in all things pastoral, all things Romantic, all things sheep. Well, not all things sheep.

We spent a few nights in Edinburgh, where Scott and I explored the pastoral paintings in the National Gallery, toured the Writers’ Museum, and viewed the work of that intrepid walker, Richard Long at the National Gallery of Modern Art, and where we adventured with a drunk witch from Portland named Sabrina.

Then we struck south for Wordsworth-land to climb Scafell Pike, the last mountain on the list. Scott was nearing the end of his journey, while I would travel on for several more weeks. My sense of security had become so dependent on my companion I could hardly imagine what I’d do after he left.

It was raining, of course, when in Grasmere Scott and I boarded a bus for Keswick, then on to Seathwaite, which was not a town, but rather the end of the road. We passed through the gates of a sheep outfit, where the shepherds kicked their dogs and beat the ewes into a pen, to find unfolding before us a system of trails ascending the hoary crags. We walked easily and steadily in the light rain, up Grains Gill and along Seathwaite Fell. Soon we would make a turn up Ruddy Gill and then onto the Esk Hause trail to the summit. Though Scafell Pike was the lowest of the four mountains, the climb challenged us more, with trails running every direction through the wilds, and the rough going over misty boulder fields.

Wordsworth had his Mount Snowdon, but it was Coleridge who scrambled up Scafell, not the mountain we were climbing, but the one next to it with nearly the same name. Some think of Scafell and Scafell Pike as the same mountain, but each has a distinct summit, the latter fourteen meters higher.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.