Cozy and settled in at Allt-na-Leven bed and breakfast in Kinlochleven, we gathered in a circle the evening before reaching Fort William, the end of the West Highland Way.
I cannot know her thoughts, but perhaps with that end in mind, our prompt leader for the evening shared a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. We had been hearing a lot from Robert Burns (aka the Ploughman Poet) along the way since he and his words are immortalized on rock and plaque and hotel walls across Scotland.
Both Stevenson is an equally beloved Scottish literary hero. The more I've learned about him, the more I want to go back and re-read Treasure Island and read anew his other works. The Stevenson piece below is certainly about death. But, it feels to me, it is more about living.
Consolation
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Though he, that ever kind and true,
Kept stoutly step by step with you,
Your whole long, gusty lifetime through,
Be gone a while before,
Be now a moment gone before,
Yet, doubt not, soon the seasons shall restore
Your friend to you.
He has but turned the corner — still
He pushes on with right good will,
Through mire and marsh, by heugh and hill,
That self-same arduous way —
That self-same upland, hopeful way,
That you and he through many a doubtful day
Attempted still.
He is not dead, this friend — not dead,
But in the path we mortals tread
Got some few, trifling steps ahead
And nearer to the end;
So that you too, once past the bend,
Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend
You fancy dead.
Push gaily on, strong heart! The while
You travel forward mile by mile,
He loiters with a backward smile
Till you can overtake,
And strains his eyes to search his wake,
Or whistling, as he sees you through the brake,
Waits on a stile.
After reading the poem, we sat quietly for a moment. The prompt came in the form of a question:
“Is there someone who walks ahead of you? Beside you?”
This writing session was deeply personal, with tears shed, aches and loss felt, and new understandings of how we (the living) move forward with our dead rather than without them. We walking writers are raw near the end of our journey, and I think too that parts of us have died away to make space for things new to be born.
Two writings from the session:
Juliette
My grandmother walks ahead of me and she has on every path I’ve walked since 1983, encouraging me to keep walking forward. I see her now on the front porch, arms crossed over her belly, apron tied loosely around her waist. I follow her with admiration, pulled forward even now that she has gone by the things she once said:
“You don’t have to just because everyone expects it.”
“I don’t need to go to church to pray. I assume God can hear me right here.”
“Would like a little tea? I have chocolates.”
“It’s hard work, but the reward is worth it.”
“Tom used to say . . . “
She walks ahead of me as the young teacher she once was, who in old photographs as her hair pulled back into bun at the nape of her neck.
And also as the polyester-wearing grandma I remember in bits and pieces from my early childhood.
And then again as a mother, gathering up my brokenness as a young woman and nursing it back to heath, one cup of tea at a time with compassion and sometimes consternation.
And as the check that arrived un-expectedly at exactly the right moment in college or at the end of a job or at Christmastime. How could she know?
Later as the aging woman who watched my children from a comfortable distance, never forgot them on their birthdays, and welcomed them “home” every time we popped in to say “Hello.”
I talk to her now perhaps more than I did when she was in this life. She is like an albatross to me, a spirit whose back I climb on, allowing myself to be carried.
On this path, my grandmother and I have had several conversations, mostly me wanting to give up and her reassuring. “I can’t do this (this walk, this thesis),” I whined to her.
“But you are doing it,” came her reply.
“This was a crazy idea,” I think.
“The best ideas are crazy and are born of a lot of failure,” she thinks back.
Every time I drink tea, or enjoy a scone or a cookie or a chocolate on this walk, I invite her to join me.
The funny thing, I don’t miss my grandmother. I feel her here, and just about everywhere, ahead of me on the road. Feeling her there makes all the walking easier, both on this path and on the longer one I’ve been walking just behind her for my whole life.
There’s so much consolation in that.
Cheryl Murfin, West Highland Way, 2019
Consolations
My father loved to walk,
his mother we called “Walking Grandma”.
She loved to travel, early divorced,
seemed to adventure far, laughing.
He learned the woods and birch,
summers at camp in upper New York state,
brown as a nut, Cy, his brother Bern,
(and my brother Mac).
Cy walked every day alone.
Already we were house-dwellers -
he didn’t teach us walking.
Cy studied botany and forestry first
and I loved to ask him the names of things
to please him and I felt proud.
Short and strong, it was all of it
the smells and sounds he loved
cabin camping, canoeing, he a city boy,
he could swim smoothly like a dolphin
slipping into the pond or diving
full of unusual joy and fluency.
Walk on Cy, and do look back for me.
I am coming along.
I can tell by your dark eyes you are walking well.
Jim walks to see things
admiring unusual plants and plantings,
he sees structures, doorways, fine and terse,
roof lines are complicated by dormers.
There is a lot of overblown money
spent on ungainly houses, inefficient,
unoriginal, lots of show.
He sees design everywhere and history
and admires the humble and well-crafted
and feels the pain of the destitute.
The world is breaking down
and paint is peeling, windows jammed,
sidewalks cracked by inevitable tree roots
once built soonest decaying
a thankless truth for the builder.
Jim and I are walking together and
seeing everything we can.
Sharon Murfin, West Highland Way, 2019