Book 11 - Cheryl Strayed, Wild:a journey from lost to found

Wild starts dramatically when, 38 days into her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed knocks one of her boots down a steep mountain slope into the forest canopy below. In shock and anger she throws the other one after it. “What is one boot without the other boot? It is nothing. It is useless, an orphan forevermore and I could take no mercy on it.”

At that point, only a couple of paragraphs in, I worried. “Orphan?” You cannot call the remaining boot an orphan - it makes no sense. Things did not look good; could I trust the writer not to over write? But breathe in - relax - let go of hasty judgements - don’t let the grumpy old man out of his box. All you have to do is read one word after another to see how far you will get - just like going for a walk. In the end I was glad I did as I finished the book with enthusiasm. I’m a sucker for stories of redemption and this is good because it focusses on one event: a journey of courage and endurance; a period of withdrawal from normal life, which allowed wounds to heal and a life to be reset.

When she made the journey Strayed was 26 and it had been 4 years since her mother died. The use of orphan to describe the boot was a link to herself. After her mother died she had drifted around, useless, unable to keep the remaining family (two siblings and a step dad) together, pushing away her husband so they divorced, falling into using heroin. It had become unbearable. By chance she saw a book on the Pacific Crest Trail, something she was unaware of, and something grabbed her imagination. Her subconscious was telling her what she needed. Without ever having backpacked before (as opposed to day hikes) she decided this was something she had to do. It might have seemed remarkably foolhardy but from where she was what was there to lose?

The story of her preparedness, is nuanced. It is easy to get the impression she was clueless but this is not the case, it is just that before doing it she did not know all of what would be involved. She was not an urban softie who thought it sounded like a neat idea she could do on a whim. She had been bought up in the countryside and knew the outdoors. She also had the guide to the trail and thoroughly planned her route and what would be involved, to the extent that she prepared supply boxes and gave them to a friend to post to various pick-up points along the way. It was not a matter of waking up one summer morning and wandering off - if nothing else she had to work hard to save money from her waitressing job. It was a thought out plan. On the other hand she had not been on a backpacking trip where you have to carry everything with you and what that would mean in terms of strength and speed. The book is about how she coped with that and learnt to know what she was doing. Just by carrying on she became more able to carry on.

It is not a book about how to walk a long distance trail, though you will learn quite a lot from it (especially the need to pack as light as possible!). It is really about how it is possible to do something because you feel you have no alternative and that you simply must, even though it might be overwhelming. In the motel, at the very beginning of the walk, she packed her bag for the very first time and found that she could not lift it to sling it over her shoulders; she had to crawl into it and lever herself upright. She then wondered how she was going to walk for a hundred days with that load but that did not stop her. She walked out of the room and began - because there was no other way.Once you are in the wilderness there is no other way. You have to go on. You have only your own physical reserves and the pace you can walk. There are on other aids and if you are alone there is none else you can turn to in tight moments. You must find extra resources from within. This she did and the reward at the end was knowing she had those resources.

One of the reasons I like the book is that it is not overwritten (as I thought it might be at the beginning). It is well written and it doesn’t make too many claims for the transformative effects of what happened (though the transformations are there). She does not say she became a new person, or was reborn, instead it is more about finding the person she was before she became lost after her mother’s death. I was worried that it might be a bit New Agey but it is not,  though there are a couple of New Agey encounters. This is good, I like my literature to keep in touch with the earth even if the subject is essentially emotional. It may overtly be about walking but really it is about walking as a way into emotional truth. As she said to one of the people she met:

“Thank you for all your help with lightening my pack” I said to Albert when we had a moment alone before he departed. He looked wanly up at me from his bed on the tarp. “I couldn’t have done it myself.”
He gave me a weak smile and nodded [Albert was suffering with a stomach bug during this encounter]  “By the way” I said “I wanted to tell you - about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died - she was only 45  and she got cancer suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten off track. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would help me to find my centre, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my hans, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.
“Well, you've got your bearings now, haven’t you? he said, and sat up, his face lighting up despite his nausea.

That is also something that should be mentioned about this story. It is not just about her being alone and finding herself. She met many wonderful people who offered help and support. It is a story about decency.

But back to the beginning and that boot. The scene is true and a tease. True because it happened and she had to walk for a stretch in tapped up sandals but also a tease because the boot loss was not absolute. The boots were had been too small and messed up her feet. Other people had told  her her they were too small but her thinking was that she couldn’t do anything about it because she didn’t have the money, until someone told her that the shop she bought them from, REI, had a total satisfaction guarantee, and if the boot were wrong they would change them. They actually mailed her, free of charge,  a new pair, a size bigger, which she picked up later. A little amazing story, within the bigger amazing story and a reason, perhaps, why the boots deserved to become a character in their own right.

Date first published
2012

Link to last book

Professional cycling, among other things, is about long distance endurance and the will to carry on. This is another take on that spirit from someone who is not an exceptional athlete.

Book 10 - Ellis Bacon & Lionel Birnie (eds), The Cycling Anthology vol. 5

I have a good local reason for reading The Cycling Anthology: editor Lionel Birnie lives a few miles up the road, in Harpenden. A combination of cycling and localism is irresistible.

The idea is simple: allow cycling journalists to wander the byways of the sport rather than being restricted to the main highways of race reports, big names and doping. It pays off because there are so many rarely told stories both from cycling’s history and amongst today’s peloton (there might be a limited number of winners, who are the focus of our attention, but there are so many other stories).  Also I believe that, in the English speaking countries at least, in a golden age of cycling writing. As the sport has moved from an obsession for slightly cranky enthusiasts to something more widely recognised, there has been a chance to explain to a new audience the current workings of the sport and the glories of past heroes. It’s as if members of an underground clique have emerged, blinking, into the daylight to find that people are ready to listen to what they have to say. Now any self respecting bookshop has a shelf of good book. Cycling is cool, cycling is increasingly middle class, to be cool you have tone informed, and so there is a demand for literature

This book, or should I say these books as we are at number five in the series, are probably aimed at the enthusiast. In the beginning they were sold through cycling shops and were a bit outside the mainstream but they have obviously crossed over, as they are now published by Random House. So what do you get?  In the current edition there are ten articles, half of which are related to the Tour de France and of the rest most are historical: cycling in World War One, the search for a past rider, the history of an old team. Eight of the authors are British, one is French and one American. As with any collection, there are hits and misses. I don’t want to dwell on pieces I didn’t like so well. (Oh OK then - I wasn’t that impressed by a piece on panache that where the writer was not really sure what it meant but whatever it was it could never apply to Thomas Voeckler - that just seemed a bit mean). Instead I will mention a couple of the stories that really caught my eye. The first was about the Linda McCartney cycling team from the 1990s who talked a good match, promised to challenge at the highest level and wore the badges of big money sponsors, but collapse when the talk was shown for what it was - just talk. There was no big money, the team was run by a fraudster and sponsor’s names had been used without agreement. There were good riders and but no infrastructure to support them. Promises and dreams, promises and dreams and many of us sporting romantics are prone to fall for them. The interesting thing though, is that only a few years later many of the same promises were made by British Cycling when they formed Team Sky but this time it was organised, managed and funded, and it succeeded.  Reading the story Linda McCartney just hammers home the message that to succeed you need the right structure and proper management. You can’t wing it and hope things work out in the end, or rather you probably can for a short time but eventually things will fall apart. Going back to the previously mentioned article, it could be said that Linda McCartney had a certain amount of panache because they had victories in spite of their flakiness but Sky don’t have panache because they are more calculating. Doing things properly sometimes means you lose the love.

The other article I particularly liked is about Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet who was in charge of the Tour de France for just one year. What a weird story it is. From 1903 to 1986 only three people had run the race: the first was Henri Desgrange, the founder, after the war it was taken over by his deputy Jacques Goddet, who was joined in 1962 by Félix Lévitan, who looked after the financial side. When they left, after some scandal about the cross subsidising of a failed Tour of America, it was thought a fresher, more businesslike approach was needed and, for whatever reason, they appointed Naquet-Radiguet, who had no previous connection with the sport. The outsider, coming into a set-up that had been running in its own way for decades, with his own ideas, is a classic recipe for jealousies, politicking and turmoil (think only of the succession of long term football managers like Alex Fergusson or Matt Busby). And so it was, Naquet-Radiguet lasted only one year. But, and to my mind this is a very big but, he should be given the credit for setting up the most exciting finish in the race’s history. He didn’t like the tradition of the last day being a procession and thought it should be raced until the end. he shook things up with a final time trial on the Champs Elysées. As it so happened, in 1989 the two leaders were close enough for this to matter and for there to be an outside chance it might change the result. Laurence Fignon led Greg LeMond by 50 seconds, which should have been enough but you never know, especially as Fignon did not seem to be as focussed on the disciplines of time trailing as LeMond. His pony tail flapped out behind him, causing an increase in drag (LeMond wore an aero helmet), he was  on the drops (LeMond had aero bars). Small things matter and LeMond won by 8 seconds - the smallest margin there has ever been, and probably ever will be. Brilliant. If that was Naquet-Radiguet legacy than that would have been enough but he saw that the race needed to adapt to the modern media and sharpen its image. Something his successors have been successful in doing ever since.

The Cycling Anthology doesn't have a theme and one article doesn't lead into another; they all stand alone. But these two essays are linked in that they both deal with times of transition. Linda McCartney happened at a time when British cycling was emerging from its old isolationist, amateurish ways and embracing the sport with a new attitude. A transformation which would eventually lead to the development of champions. Naque-Radiguet was about a change from the old guard and some of its old ways. Times of transition are hard on the people involved but usually throw up good stories. The cusp is an interesting place to be.

P.S. By coincidence the pieces I have highlighted were written by two of the three hosts of The Cycling Podcast, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe (the other host is Richard Moore). If anyone has the slightest interest in professional cycling I would thoroughly recommend it.

Date of publication
2014

Book consequences

At first sight there might seem little connection between this week and last: cycling and a polemic about the virtues of working with your hands but there is a clear link. The bike is wonderful because it is one of the few remaining machines where all the working parts are in clear view and you know how it is meant to work. It is something you can take apart and put back together again, something you can understand. It is the exactly what Matt Crawford was talking about

Book 9 - Matthew Crawford, The Case For Working With Your Hands

“He picked up a chunk of wood and, putting it to the lathe, worked a foot pedal and held a sharp, bent knife to the rapidly revolving wood. With surprising speed he cut the outer shape of the bowl; then, taking a different knife, he cut out the inside as you might cut the inside of a turnip. The bowl was roughly finished.
‘It wants titivating up of course,’ he explained, ‘and the inside will make another smaller bowl.’
The alder sapling sprang back, vibrating: a clumsy, primitive, marvellously efficient invention, and in it - and many more now lost to us - the secrets of those beautiful handcrafts of antiquity which remain to astonish us and to confound our modern machinists.
‘Boys won’t learn this now,’ he said ‘It’s not as easy as it looks, and unless you learn when you’re a lad you can never catch the knack of it.’

That was H.V. Morton, in last week’s book, describing the work someone he described as the last bowl turner in England. Using a lathe and methods dating back to Anglo Saxon times it seemed like the end of a line, but sometimes things die off only to be revived slightly differently.  There is now a growing interest in recovering ancient crafts both out of curiosity, an attempt to reconnect with history, and as an antidote to the modern sedentary/virtual world.  Rediscovering the feeling of making something by hand is an experience to be valued. Here is an example of a bowl making course you can go on to be part of the tradition.

This leads directly on to this week’s book in which Matthew Crawford examines why he has found more satisfaction and even mental stimulus in manual labour than knowledge work. As someone with a PhD who has earned a high salary at a think tank and given it up to open a motorcycle repair shop, he is placed to make this comparison like few others. It is not about the mysticism of high end craftsmanship but is instead about everyday trades like an electrician or a motor mechanic. However many of the satisfactions of a craftsman and tradesman are shared, such as: control over what you yourself are doing, an objective standard to know if you have done a good job, and the feeling of doing something useful.

His thesis is that modern knowledge work is as alienating as the labour described by Marx, whereas skilled manual worker (i.e. outside the factory) actually has more autonomy. They make their own judgements of the physical world, using the evidence of hand and eyes, guided by knowledge and experience. It is same sort of encounter with the natural world as gave rise to natural science. The carpenter for example learns the characteristics of types of wood and their fitness for different tasks, he also learns the general skills of angles, what is plumb, load baring and stability. This is aside from his ingrained physical skill in executing the task. In early Western tradition sophia (wisdom) meant skill and you can see the connection. But we have now lost the concrete sense of the original and put more of our eggs into the theoretical basket.

If we accept this how should we see work? Not only should we value the practical, we need to  look again at offices and see what a person has to do to be connected to a task in a way that makes them feel useful. Directly useful, not as part of an amorphous team effort. It is about individual agency. But this is not happening,  the social river is rushing in the opposite direction. Higher academic qualifications are increasingly being demanded just to get on the the ladder and checklist, plans and inspections constrain the practice of professionals. Personal qualities are emphasised rather than specific skills. This book raises its skinny fist at that trend.

But is this trend new or has it just grown bigger and more rigid? This quote from Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption) suggests our ways of thought don’t change much.

“Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussion has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatise on the basis of a few observations”

I think that describes the problem with most of what I read on social media!

But this quote goes to the heart Crawford’s argument about skill and why it needs to be celebrated: skill = the ability to see. More than once the author says that a more experience mechanic has often pointed out something that was right in front of his face but which he lacked the knowledge to see. The raw sensual data is the same but without a framework of meaning features become invisible.

“The cognitive psychologist speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate … in the real world problems do not present themselves unambiguously. Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you might be mistaken. this is an ethical virtue.
Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly and this requires a kind of unslelfing. “Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue”  … This attempt is never fully successful because we are preoccupied with our own concerns. But getting outside her head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanics task too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination “not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.” This is the exhilaration the mechanic gets when he finds the underlying cause of a problem…
Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility .. our vision is improved by acting, as this brings any defect in our perception to vivid awareness.”

I can nod along with this and lament the conditions of the modern workplace but the theoretical passages are not what is most vivid about this book. For me it comes to life when it describes his own practical experiences. I loved the way he described the problems he had fixing an old Honda and felt it fitting that a book that extols the virtues of the practical is actually at its best when directly describing it.

Date of publication
2009

Link to last book

The description of a disappearing craft leads naturally to a book that propounds the virtues of trade work.

Book 8 - H V Morton, In Search of England

I chose this book because I thought it would tell me about England between the wars and be a link with the descriptions of the Dorest countryside in ‘Rogue Male’.  It might have been written a decade earlier but there would still be similarities. That was the idea and it seemed good at the time. But I picked it up, read a few pages, put it down and thought I would have to write a post on why I couldn’t finish it.

There is nothing wrong with not finishing a book. It is a strange sense of duty that tells you to struggle on, when you are getting nether enjoyment or edification. It does you no good and it certainly doesn’t accumulate you any celestial points. (Tim Parks dealt with this eloquently in ‘Where I’m Reading From’  where he recounts a letter of appreciation from a fellow author who finished by saying that it hadn’t read the last fifty pages because at that point the novel seemed satisfactorily over). But this book was not satisfactorily over, it had not satisfactorily begun. I didn’t want to continue because I had taken against the narrator. I didn’t like the blustering, breezy tone, the patronising way he described others, his attitude to women and the alarm bells that rang in my head when a sentence in the introduction talked of an average city family disappearing into ‘racial anaemia’. A travel book is a trip and if you need to like, or at least trust your companion. So I put it down.

But it seemed a bit week to give up so easily, I thought I ought to try again, just to be sure. and the second time, for whatever reason, I found it more amusing than irritating and was happy to continue. Instead of thinking of the author as some golf club boor, I saw him as a mixture of Mr Pooter and Mr Cholmondley-Warner - in other words a comic creation.

I took out the binoculars and saw a gallows standing up there, a mark for several counties, firm and unmistakable, as if ready for a hanging.
A gibbet!
Before climbing up the steep road I thought that I would ask a few questions. I stopped a labourer on a bicycle.
‘What is that on the hill?’
‘Gallows’ he said suspiciously.
‘Who was hanged there?’
‘Dunno.’
‘When was it last used?’
‘Dunno.’
Have you ever heard any story about it?’
‘No.’

Before I had thought this a piece of nonsense. Now I found it funny. And the breeziness of the prose which before seemed bluff I now saw as narrative drive. Now I am half convinced that some of the humour is intentional:

[another casual conversation, this time on Plymouth Hoe about Drake and the Armada]
‘I would rather have lived in that age than any other,’ said my companion. He was a frill-looking man, as frail looking almost as Nelson.
‘The world must have seemed such a big place then. If one could have gone with Drake in 1577 in the Golden Hind!’
‘Ah! Now the Mauritania is due tomorrow!’
‘Yes’ he sighed.
‘How,’ I said ‘would you like to have burnt up Vera Cruz, to have sacked the churches, and driven the natives below the hatches, and the held a church parade?’
‘Splendid!’ He whispered ‘That was the spirit of the time … Well, I must be going home.’
He said good night and I watched his lank, dyspeptic, blood-thirsty figure fade into the distance.

As I read on I became more aware of other virtues. There are interesting anecdotes from the past and myths associated with some of the ancient buildings. Morton also has a good eye and can write fine descriptive prose:

A curious characteristic of English scenery is its ability to change itself in a distance of a few miles. Towards Devon the rugged Cornish rocks give way to a smoother, more comfortable countryside, a holier, less disturbing vista of green and red fields.
‘In England once again!’ I whispered as I saw a real Devon man ploughing a field, the colour of red ochre where the earth was newly turned and of cocoa where the sun had dried it. A different country.

I like that detail of the colour of the soil.

But the book is not a report of the nation in 1927. Instead it is a romance - a longing for the tales of the past, of King Arthur and Saxons. It is infused with a particular myth of rural Englishness that has all but died out now (except in the collective imagination of UKIP). Perhaps the myths have a particular potency because of the time the book was written,  only a decade after the end of the Great War. After all the destruction, keeping hold of a picture of what was worth fighting for would have been a pressing concern.

So in the end the book was worth reading but I know that whatever the ironical distance I maintained I still found the underlying attitudes of the author uncongenial. It cannot be shrugged off by saying he was a product of his time and our attitudes have moved on and he must be cut some slack. There is still something a bit off, especially when he talks about women. Nevertheless it shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is still quite a lot of fun to be had

Date of first publication
1927

Link to last book

Rogue Male contained good descriptions of the English countryside between the wars. This follows on.