Windswept by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Tin House Books

For the last few years we’ve delegated the art of navigation to our phones, to Google Maps. But even I know that a mobile phone won’t cut it in the Cairngorms. Our Ordnance Survey map is laminated so it can double as an emergency ground sheet (at least that’s what the online reviews claim). Just looking at it provokes a brief stab of nostalgia: for the days when I travelled with an A–Z, when a set of dog-eared Ordnance Survey maps accompanied us on every walk. We engage with the landscape quite differently when forced to use a map. We see our journey in its entirety. We exercise the place, direction, and grid cells in our brains as we calculate distances and timings. And when we run our fingertips over intriguing routes, rivers, bridle paths, contours, and cul-de-sacs, we sense the narrative arc of our expedition, recognising the joy of the journey rather than the destination. Pinching in and out of an on-screen map can never compete. Nor can blindly following a moving red dot that so cleverly orienteers, navigates, thinks on our behalf.

Hugo and I spend our next day in the Cairngorms learning navigation. Our instructor, Fred from Kent, takes us on a ten-mile hike through knee-high snow. Armed with maps and a compass, we are charged with locating the route and identifying the places and symbols on the map. The snow lies on top of springy, waterlogged moss, creating the wavering sensation of walking across a waterbed. As we go, each foot plunges through twelve inches of sifted-sugar snow, then sinks another four inches into invisible sodden moss. With great effort we retrieve our ice-laden boots and repeat the full manoeuvre, step after exhausting step. My boots begin to leak, and soon my feet are freezing and soggy. Above us, buzzards circle in lazy loops. Below us, white mountain hares sprint and bound, disappearing into the horizon.

Snow begins to fall again and I’m struck by how very white it is, by the kaleidoscopic shades of white. The gashes made by our feet leave a greenish-white hue where the snow has broken through to the moss below. The hills in shadow have a bluish tinge, while the flank of the hill glitters, silver white, in a sudden shaft of light. The sky above us ripples through soft shades of grey white to a pearly white and finally to a bright, gilded white where the sun lurks. And now we are white too, the shades of our jackets—orange, red, black—disappearing beneath falling snow.

There’s something intently tranquil about a landscape denuded of colour. I feel my mind becoming slowly unmoored, its usual fizz and buzz melting away.

I reach over and take Hugo’s hand. He gives me a snowy grin. And in that moment I love him with a breathtaking ferocity. It’s as if this stark, frozen landscape, drained of colour and form, sharpens the edge of my feelings, giving them an additional intensity. The moment is swiftly followed by a pang of sadness, a suspicion we’ll never walk like this again, hand in hand.

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