The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher by Colin Fletcher

Author:Colin Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Hiking, Travel, Essays & Travelogues, Sports & Recreation, Special Interest, Adventure
ISBN: 9780804152457
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Next morning I made a reconnaissance. I walked the marshy mile down to the river and found a good campsite a couple of hundred yards below the outflow. From it I could see neither the lake surface nor any of the lakeside tents. Above the line of the outflow, though, the lake-head peaks, with their stark, ice-clad rock walls, remained as visible as they were from my camp on the spit. The river tumbled and whispered past, and the new campsite abutted a twenty-yard stretch of perfect dry-fly water. I had brought my fishing tackle, and within five minutes I had caught two big grayling. That seemed a pleasant bonus. But what the new site promised above all was elegance. It stood on a slight rise and so commanded wide vistas; and all the lines of landscape meshed, far and close, in the kind of concordance that is very hard to explain but that stands clear and dear to the heart of anyone with a feel for such things.

That afternoon I moved camp. It was because of just such a possible transfer that I had brought three backpacks, and what promised to be a chore turned out to be a surprisingly joyful affair. All afternoon, as I packed heavy loads along the lakeshore, I sang and lilted. Having good neighbors had made a difference, of course. Had made a lot of difference. And now that I was moving to a secluded place, escaping at last from the turmoil that had come to seem inevitable on that original spit of land (not to mention on the far side of the lake, where a plane-fed tent colony had now sprouted around the original orange one), I could look back and find everything that had happened almost funny. Clearly, I had misjudged the outdoorsman’s attitude, here in Alaska. I should have known that the hunters would not see solitude as a part of it all. They came for other things. Perhaps I had been oversensitive about my privacy, too, and so had made a series of unfortunate circumstances worse. I was by no means sure about that; but now, for the first time, it at least seemed worth considering. And as I packed my third and final load around the foot of the lake and turned into the last lap, with the sun already easing down onto the horizon, I found myself remembering the story of the oversensitive British Guards officer who, when asked what it had been like at Dunkirk, put his nose in the air and said, “But my dear, the noise! And the people!”

Five minutes later the river came in sight. On its far side, directly opposite my new campsite, there stood—redshirted and garish against the bare, bouldered bank—three people, fishing. Almost at once, one of them whistled. I could not be sure whether the whistle was for me or for a companion who had strayed downstream, but I promptly put my ex-British nose in the air, ignored the people’s very presence, and stalked stiffly to my goal.

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