During our recent backpacking trip across northern England, my buddy Bruce and I overcame mild hypothermia, frightening falls, nearly constant rain, gale-force winds, aching feet and ankles and knees, multiple blisters, blackened toenails, and one extremely crummy hotel with no hot water, but in some ways the most dispiriting thing we faced was the number of villages we passed through that lacked any kind of local business.

Not so many years ago, almost every small town and village in England could boast both a pub and a post office, which doubled as a general store. In recent years, however, such establishments have been disappearing at an appalling rate. The Sunday Mirror reported in March that three post offices were closing every week, and Nia Griffith, a Labour Party member of Parliament, was quoted in The Telegraph a couple of months later to the effect that losing a post office “rips the heart out of the community.”

The same could be said of the loss of the village pub. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), an English consumer group, says that 29 British pubs close every week, a remarkable figure that actually represents an improvement over the 53 closures per week reported in 2008. According to CAMRA’s research, “84 percent of people believe a pub is as essential to village life as a shop or post office.”

Well, you can count Bruce and me among the believers. We didn’t buy all the Ordnance Survey maps covering our 200-mile route ahead of time, confident that we’d be able to purchase them as needed in village shops along the way. And we also thought that if we decided to forego our usual on-the-trail lunch of a piece of fruit, a Kit-Kat bar, and a few sips of water, we’d be able to stop at a village pub for a hot bowl of soup, a hunk of crusty bread, and a half (or full) pint of cider instead.

As it turned out, we were wrong on both counts. Several times we wandered off the edge of our most recently purchased map, only to discover that the next village(s) or town(s) through which we passed had no post office (or any other shop), forcing us to rely on the vague, inaccurate, and sometimes outdated information in John Gillham’s slim book Lakeland to Lindisfarne: A Coast-to-Coast Walk from Ravenglass to Holy Island, of which we each carried a copy. Occasionally we simply had to guess which direction to head, trusting in our common sense and our compasses; the former, sadly, proved somewhat less reliable than the latter.

And on several grim mornings, as we struggled through horizontal rain and howling winds, chilled and soaked to the bone, the thought of that soup and cider awaiting us at the pub in the next village was just about the only thing that kept us going… only to discover that the pub in the next village no longer existed, and that our lunch would be a cold and grumpy one, consumed as we sat shivering on a piece of turf or, if we were lucky, an actual bench by the side of the road.

The decline of the small, locally owned business is not only a concern Across the Pond, of course; it’s happening here, too, and there are good reasons to deplore it. An article by David A. Fleming and Stephan J. Goetz of Penn State University in the August issue of Economic Development Quarterly argues that small, locally owned businesses have a much more positive effect on local economic growth than do large, non-locally owned businesses (i.e., chains and large corporations). “Local ownership matters in important ways,” explains Goetz. “Smaller, locally owned businesses, it turns out, provide higher, long-term economic growth.”

That was also the conclusion of the New Rules Project, a program of the Institute for Self-Reliance, which found that locally owned businesses recycle more revenue into the local economy, create more jobs, and require less infrastructure than chains. A 2009 study of financial data from fifteen locally owned businesses in New Orleans concluded that only 16 percent of the money spent at a SuperTarget store stayed in the local economy, as opposed to 32 percent of the money spent at local retail outlets. (A 2003 study of eight locally owned businesses in Maine concluded that three times as much money stayed in the local economy when customers bought goods and services from locally owned businesses.) Another 2009 study concluded that the opening of a Walmart on Chicago’s West Side led to the closure of about one quarter of the businesses within a four-mile radius.

I don’t think that all chains and large corporations are necessarily evil, but I do think that we need to find an alternative to the tyranny of the bottom line. We need to create a system in which efficiency, global reach, economies of scale, short-term return on investment, and the like are not the sole determinants of business success, a system in which a locally owned business in a small town or village stands a realistic chance of survival against the Big Box just up the highway. What would it actually take to create such a system? I have no idea; Heather and I are, after all, perhaps the only two people ever to have graduated from Williams College without taking a single economics course. But I think I have an idea of what that system could look like.

The September 26 issue of The New Yorker contained a lovely story by Peter Hessler about Don Colcord, a druggist in the tiny town of Nucla, in southwestern Colorado. “He is, by the strictest definition, a bad businessman,” writes Heller.

If a customer can’t pay, Don often rings up the order anyway and tapes the receipt to the inside wall above his counter. “This one said he was covered by insurance, but it wasn’t,” he explains, pointing at a slip of paper on a wall full of them. “This one said he’ll be in on Tuesday. This one is a patient who is going on an extended vacation.” Most of his customers simply don’t have the money. Each year, Don writes off between ten and twenty thousand dollars, and he estimates that he is owed around three hundred thousand dollars in total. His annual salary is sixty-five thousand dollars. Over the course of many days at the Apothecary Shoppe, I never saw a customer walk in whom Don doesn’t know by name.

“It’s just a cost of doing business in a small town,” he says. “I don’t know how you can look your neighbor in the eye and say, ‘I know you’re having a tough time, but I can’t help you and your kid can’t get well.’ ”

By most standards, Nucla, Colorado, is not much of a town. Since its uranium-mining heyday in the Fifties and Sixties, writes Hessler, the population has dwindled to a few hundred, and is still dropping. The school board, strapped for funds, recently decided to cut back to a four-day school week, and the last local doctor died fifteen years ago. But the people of Nucla are fortunate indeed to have a man like Don Colcord in their midst, someone willing and able to look beyond the bottom line in his devotion to his community. Unfortunately, there aren’t many such people around, which means that Bruce and I, on our next backpacking trip, will probably find even fewer places to buy a hot lunch on a cold, rainy day, and will take care to buy all the maps we need before we leave.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gregory Orr, The Blessing: A Memoir
Martin: Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas

In the three weeks since our last post, I’ve been off backpacking some 200 miles across northern England with my friend Bruce Bennett, a veteran of several previous coast-to-coast walks and a man who knows the Lake District better than many natives.

Two Septembers ago, as I related in an earlier post, Bruce and I hiked from Ravenglass, on the Irish Sea, to Scarborough, on the North Sea. This time we followed a different route, once again originating in Ravenglass but heading in a more northeasterly direction to Lindisfarne, an island off the Northumberland coast, just below the Scottish border.

This year’s trip was a good bit more exciting, and not necessarily in a good way. We endured the usual blisters and blackened toenails, but also a scary fall; the gale-force remnants of Hurricane Katia (that’s Bruce in the photo above, being buffeted by the wind as we made our way from Garrigill to Allendale Town); mild hypothermia; an almost constant rain (not that I expect much sympathy on the latter from Texans who’ve been dealing with heat, drought, and wildfires in our absence); and, perhaps cruelest of all, an ice-cold shower in Hexham, as our crummy hotel’s hot-water heater was broken. In addition, the book we were more or less using as our guide, Lakeland to Lindisfarne: A Coast to Coast Walk from Ravenglass to Holy Island, by a fellow named John Gillham, proved to be frustratingly vague and hard to follow.

We certainly enjoyed some wonderful moments along the way: a beautiful day’s hike from Wasdale Head to Elterwater via Styhead Tarn, Sprinkling Tarn, and Angle Tarn, with incredible views of the Lake District from Great Gable; a convivial dinner with Heather’s English cousin Tony Jowett at the Haweswater Hotel; the unexpectedly fabulous (except for the squishy beds!) Temple Sowerby House; sharing a breakfast table at our B&B above the Garrigill post office with a young German couple who were hiking the Pennine Way from south to north; a conversation in the bar of the Cheviot Hotel in Bellingham with our new friends Ian, an Anglican priest, and his wife Jackie, who live in Wales; the lovely Oronsay House in the charming and bustling town of Alnwick (pronounced “Annick”); beautiful walks beside the River Coquet and the River Aln; our customary pint of cider in the local pub at the end of a long day’s tramp; up-close views of Dunstanburgh, Bamburgh, and Lindisfarne castles on the North Sea coast; and more. On balance, however, I’d have to say that this year’s walk was not an experience that either of us would wish to repeat.

Indeed, when Bruce’s wife Margaret picked us up at the airport upon our return to Austin last Saturday, she asked, “Did you guys have any fun at all?” After a brief but thoughtful pause, Bruce and I responded that yes, we did, but I think our salient feeling about the trip is a good deal of pride in just having survived the bloody thing.

And I use the term “bloody” advisedly. On our very first day on the trail, as we made our way to Wasdale Head, we decided to deviate from Gillham’s route along Whinn Rigg and walk up the eastern shore of Wastwater instead, since it was foggy and raining up top. What we didn’t realize was that the footpath shown on our Ordnance Survey map as proceeding up the eastern shore of the lake soon disappeared in a huge field of enormous, razor-sharp, rain-slick rocks. It took us about an hour to pick our way slowly and cautiously across this pile of scree, during which I almost fell many times and Bruce fell twice; the first time, he gashed his left hand pretty deeply, cut his eyebrow, and gave himself what quickly turned into a spectacular shiner, though he somehow managed to avoid breaking his glasses. (We decided that, if anyone asked about his injuries, we’d attribute them to a bar fight, but no one did.)

Three days later, while making our way from Troutbeck to Haweswater, we had another, erm, exciting experience. As we were ascending Nan Bield Pass, we encountered howling winds so strong (Bruce estimated them at 70 miles per hour, though of course we had no way to measure them) that we each got knocked off our feet, and I almost—almost—became accustomed to the eerie sensation of the wind picking up my backpack and trying to move me a few feet sideways. Just as Bruce reached the summit, a particularly strong gust from behind propelled him stumbling over the top; when he regained his balance, he threw his head back and yelled, uncharacteristically (Bruce is usually the mildest of men), “This is un-f—ing-believable!” Whereupon he turned around and saw the shocked faces of an English family who had preceded us up the pass and were huddled in the little shelter at the top. (He apologized profusely for his salty language.)

A couple of days after that experience, we had our third and final scare. We were hiking over the North Pennines from Temple Sowerby to Garrigill on a day that quickly turned cold and wet and windy as we were ascending Cross Fell. With limited visibility, we lost the path in the rain and fog, and found ourselves wandering about the top of the fell for a half hour or so, hoping to strike the trail again. By the time we did, we were both soaked and freezing; with our teeth chattering uncontrollably, we stumbled into Greg’s Hut, an old miner’s shack maintained as a shelter for walkers.

Greg’s Hut was as chilly and bleak and bare as it is possible for a hut to be; I had been fantasizing about teakettles and crackling fires, but the only furniture in the place was a few plastic stacking chairs scattered about. Nonetheless, we took advantage of the fact that it was out of the wind and rain to exchange our soaked shirts and socks for dry, put on every layer we had with us, and eat all the Kit-Kats and apples we had with us before venturing back out. I don’t know if Greg’s Hut actually saved our lives, but it might have. (We bought a couple of those airline-sized bottles of Scotch at the next opportunity and carried them with us for the rest of the trip, in case of similar emergency, though we didn’t have occasion to use them, thank goodness.)

All in all, it was quite an adventure, and it was a relief to return to Austin, hot weather and all. A mutual friend reports that Bruce said he’s never doing one of these trips again, but we’ll see how he feels in a couple of years. If he’s game for another coast-to-coast and still needs an out-of-shape middle-aged sidekick to accompany him, well, he knows how to reach me.

What we’re reading
Heather: Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Martin: Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

We’re now into our third year of blogging; today marks the 106th consecutive Friday that we’ve published a new installment of our musings, including three guest posts, one by each of our kids. (We hope they’ll write more.) Today’s post, however, will be our last for a few weeks, as Heather and I have voted unanimously to grant ourselves a brief sabbatical.

By the time you read this, I will have departed for another backpacking trip across northern England with my friend Bruce Bennett; our itinerary will take us some 200 miles in two weeks, from Ravenglass on the Irish Sea to Lindisfarne (Holy Island) on the North Sea. While I’m gone, Heather is hoping to hole up and work on a book project on which she’s collaborating with her fabulously talented sister, Isa Catto Shaw. For the next few weeks, then, neither of us will be producing a weekly blog post.

Duke Ellington once said, “I don’t need time, what I need is a deadline,” words that have become a sort of mantra for our blogging selves. Some weeks the ideas and words just seem to come pouring out; other weeks coming up with a thousand (more or less) coherent (more or less) words on any topic feels like heavy lifting indeed. In either case, putting together a new post every other week has been a revealing and useful discipline for each of us. I believe that our writing has sharpened under pressure (I think of Louis Howe’s advice to Eleanor Roosevelt on public speaking: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down”), and that we have both found resources within ourselves of which we had no previous inkling; the surfacing of these unexpected ideas and connections has been a great and unexpected pleasure. I also believe that our collaboration has been a great boon to our marriage, especially as our nest has emptied, and that each of us has discovered new ways to delight in and complement the other.

With all due respect to the Duke, though, time—more specifically, time off—is exactly what we’ve decided to grant ourselves (and you) as we all stagger toward the end of this awful summer of record-setting heat and drought.

The gift of time, and of quiet and nourishment, is exactly what we hope our residents receive from us, and pass on, in the form of creative writing, thinking, art, to a wider audience. Madroño Ranch, this beautiful place that we have come to occupy through no particular merit of our own, has been a gift of great richness to us and our family. How could we respond except by trying to share it with others? Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, writes that “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.” This belief is the true underpinning of what we’re about at the ranch.

When we started this blog, in September 2009, Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment existed mostly in our heads; at that point we didn’t even have a real Web site. Since then, and most particularly in the last eight months, we’ve made astonishing progress.

Since we harvested our first two bison in late January, we’ve managed to sell virtually all the meat—close to 600 pounds!—and have seen our herd increase to forty-three animals. We’ve also hosted six wonderful residents, with four more scheduled to arrive in the next few months, and a series of ethical hunting and fishing “schools” which have been featured in Texas Monthly and mentioned in the New York Times.

The residents who have graced us with their presence so far are an extraordinary group: Melissa Gaskill, a science and travel writer from Austin; Stacy Sakoulas, a painter from Austin; Juli Berwald, an oceanographer from Austin; Julia Clarke, a professor of paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin; Sasha West, a poet from Austin; and Jenny Browne, a poet from San Antonio. We’ve enjoyed getting to know each of them, and admire their work tremendously. But you may have noticed that all six are of the female persuasion, and based in Central Texas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’d love to figure out how to broaden our pool of applicants to include writers and artists from other parts of Texas (and beyond!), and also perhaps the occasional male. (Though two of the four upcoming residents are men, and one of them lives in Virginia.)

And we (by which, of course, I mostly mean our ranch manager, the amazing Robert Selement) also need to arrange our next bison harvest, and finish out the Hunters’ Cabins where residents will stay, and install the rainwater catchment tanks at the Main House, and figure out what to do about the invasive pond weed that is threatening to choke the lake, and plant the vegetable garden and orchard, and (most important of all) figure out how to make it rain, and and and….

In other words, we still have a great deal of work to do before we can declare Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment a success—before, in Lewis Hyde’s terms, the gift is fully in motion. We hope and expect to return from this sabbatical refreshed and inspired, but until then Free Range will be on hiatus. We hope that you, Faithful Reader, will understand and excuse this interruption, and will return once we’re back up and running again, presumably in late September.

In the meantime, many thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a few weeks!

What we’re reading
Heather: T. C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Cowboy boots are on my mind today. And (heh) on my feet.

Of course cowboy boots come with so much symbolic weight it’s a wonder I can even walk in them. The cowboy is the most iconic, romantic, heroic figure in American history. Lean, laconic, and independent, he represents the way we like to imagine ourselves: tough as nails, self-reliant, unafraid of violence but guided always by a rigid code of honor. Owen Wister and Zane Grey helped establish the archetype, and Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, among many others, elaborated it for generations of children (and adults) on screens both large and small. In an increasingly urbanized society the image of the cowboy may seem quaint and anachronistic, but it can still exert a powerful pull.

All of which only partially explains why I just bought myself a pair of Luccheses—NV1503s in waxed and burnished olive leather, if you must know, as in the photo above—and why that’s such an unlikely thing for me to have done. Allow me to explain:

I have traditionally had a sort of ambivalent attitude toward cowboy boots. I have tended to associate them more with a certain kind of urban Texan—plump, loud, razor-cut hair, wearing pressed jeans and a white shirt, driving a too-big pickup—than with the rugged individualist of the bygone frontier. And then of course there’s that whole unfortunate association with a certain professional football team based in Dallas.

Moreover, my feet are famous throughout the tri-county area for their extraordinary width and flatness. They are the Great Plains of footdom. My footprints resemble the round tracks of a hippo rather than the delicately scalloped tracks of most humans.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I have a long and often painful history with cowboy boots. I bought my first pair in London, of all places, at a very trendy boutique on Chelsea’s Kings Road, during our honeymoon many years ago. (I know, I know: what kind of idiot travels from Texas to England to buy cowboy boots? All I can say in my defense is that Heather had just bought a pair, and I didn’t want to be left out. Also, I was young and foolish.) They were a sort of honey-colored suede, with white stitching, lethally pointed toes, and rakishly undercut heels. They were also one size too small, and way too narrow. The shopkeeper—a pox upon his cynical soul—assured me that they would stretch, which was of course utter nonsense. I probably wore them no more than twice, each time suffering horribly while they were on and requiring a great deal of assistance to peel them off my swollen feet, before finally coming to my senses and giving them away.

A few years later Heather’s parents gave me a pair of boots for Christmas. They were made of thick reddish-brown leather, completely devoid of decorative stitching, with squarish toes instead of the classic pointy ones—in other words, they weren’t really cowboy boots at all. They were, however, the correct size. I wore them a few times, usually at Christmas parties and the like, before deciding that they were just too heavy to wear much in Texas.

But these new Luccheses fit my astoundingly wide, flat feet right out of the box, and they are lightweight enough to make me think I might be able to wear them comfortably even when the temperature is above freezing. Moreover, they are quite dazzlingly beautiful: fairly restrained, as cowboy boots go, with decorative contrast stitching on the shaft and more subtle stitching on the insteps, though the toes are sharply pointed.

How often will I actually wear them? I have no idea; I may ultimately conclude that they make me look more like this guy than this guy. Also, we seem to be moving into spring, and my usual warm-weather wardrobe involves shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks, with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers for more formal occasions. Still, I like looking at them in my closet, and it’s nice knowing they’re there if and when I need them.

The bottom line is that these boots are a symbol of my willingness to take on the trappings of my time and place. We live in Texas, and we own a ranch; we are Westerners, in other words, and we yearn to partake of the best of that heritage. I’ve made no secret of my loathing for many aspects of contemporary Texas (just ask Heather). Wearing cowboy boots is a step—a small step, perhaps, but a significant one—in my long journey toward acceptance and acknowledgment of who and where I am. This is my life, and these, believe it or not, are my boots.

Next on my shopping list: a Nudie’s suit!

What we’re reading
Heather: William H. Eddy, The Other Side of the World: Essays on Mind and Nature
Martin: Philipp Meyer, American Rust

Funny how things turn out sometimes.

I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, went to college in Massachusetts, and grew up (to the extent that I grew up at all) with fairly liberal political views. I am neither a hunter nor a serious fisherman. I have owned a series of foreign cars, but never a pickup. I have never owned a cowboy hat, either, and the first pair of cowboy boots I ever bought was from a hip boutique on the King’s Road in London. And I really, really hate the Dallas Cowboys. I am, in other words, a Yankee.

And then I fell in love with a girl from Texas, and everything changed. I have lived most of the last three decades—virtually my whole adult life—in the Lone Star State, a fact which still astonishes me and no doubt puzzles many of my childhood and college friends, to whom Texas is a vast desert filled with cacti, rattlesnakes, and gun-totin’, snuff-dippin’, rip-snortin’ Republican rednecks. Dangerous, in other words. But, almost thirty years later, here I am.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at that Massachusetts college, and we fell in love and/or lust during the spring of our senior year. Not only was she gorgeous, smart, and funny, but, being a native Texan, she was exotic, too. Her family lived in San Antonio until she was ten, when her father got a job with the gummint and they moved to the Washington DC area, but her father’s father still lived in the Alamo City, and she had a job lined up after graduation as a reporter for the late and not-terribly-lamented San Antonio Light.

I, on the other hand, had no job prospects whatsoever—planning ahead has never been my strong suit—and figured I might as well follow her to Texas. (I actually wrote to the San Antonio Spurs offering my services as a short, untalented point guard who couldn’t shoot, pass, jump, or go to my right, and received a surprisingly gracious rejection letter from Bob Bass, who was then the team’s general manager.)

After graduation, we embarked on an epic cross-country journey, driving in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel from Williamstown to San Francisco, by way of Washington DC, New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, and Aspen, to visit my (divorced) parents, and then back to San Antonio to begin what we naively thought of as our adult lives.

The trip was full of incident, but the high points were our stays in Houston, where we visited Heather’s formidable maternal grandmother, and San Antonio, where we spent a week with her even more formidable paternal grandfather.

Boppa took one look at me, with my bushy beard, long hair, and earring, and decided, not unreasonably, that I was Bad News. The famous family story is that when we left San Antonio to push on to the West Coast, he called Heather’s father and asked, “Now where are those two going again?”

Heather’s father replied that we were heading to San Francisco to see my parents before eventually returning to San Antonio. There was a thoughtful pause, and then Boppa observed, “Lotta motels between here and San Francisco.”

When we finally made it back to San Antonio, we took him out to dinner twice a week, on the nights when “the help” was off; on Thursday nights we went to the Argyle, and on Sunday nights to the San Antonio Country Club. I drove the car, opened the doors, fetched him the one weak Chivas and water he was allowed per night, and generally did my best to ingratiate myself, but for the rest of his life (he died about six months later), he never called me anything but “Whiskers,” as in “Whiskers, get me a drink,” or “Whiskers, go git the car.” I’d tug on my forelock or fetlock or whatever that thing is and say, “Yes, sir,” and go off wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

That was a tough year, in a lot of ways. I found work as the editor of a little weekly newspaper, the San Antonio Citizen-News, that served the southwestern part of the city around Lackland Air Force Base; since we were living in north-central San Antonio, I neither knew nor cared anything about that part of the city, so my job was not terribly fulfilling. I bought a used Fiat 128, which consumed several quarts of oil a week and was (in the way of all Fiats) almost comically unreliable, so twice a day I’d set off to drive across the city never knowing if I’d actually arrive at my destination, which didn’t exactly help my frame of mind. One hot afternoon the Fiat conked out in the middle of Broadway, and Heather and I had to push it several blocks to my apartment.

My most memorable co-worker at the Citizen-News was Oscar, the sports editor. He was a bald, stocky retired Air Force sergeant, and he cussed constantly and with amazing creativity. He also had a notorious temper; I was told that he carried a baseball bat in the trunk of his car, and if another driver cut him off or otherwise offended him he would pull it out and go to work on their fenders and taillights. Oscar was also apparently a creature of habit; the story was that once, when he came home to discover that his wife had rearranged the living room furniture, he wordlessly got out his toolbox, moved the furniture back to its previous positions, and nailed it to the floor. In fact, he was always perfectly nice to me, but I definitely tried to stay on his good side.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Heather and I broke up after a year or so in San Antonio. She moved up to Austin to begin graduate school, and I, once again flying blind, decided to move to Washington DC, where I landed a job on the staff of Sen. Bill Bradley. I enjoyed my time in Our Nation’s Capital, at times perhaps a little more than was good for me; I’m not sure my liver has ever forgiven me. But I got my feet under me a little bit, found out I could more or less survive on my own in the world, and eventually, a year or so later, Heather and I patched things up. I moved back to Texas, this time to Austin, where I too began grad school, in American studies. We got married a couple of years later, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And now here we are, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I find myself the would-be co-proprietor of an enterprise that seeks to celebrate and emphasize the unique character of Texas, or at least the beautiful part of it known as the Hill Country. Our kids have grown up in Austin, and while all three have elected to leave the state for college (the youngest, a high school senior, is bound for Ohio next year), the older two have already come back. They’ve come back home.

What we’re reading
Heather: Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution
Martin: Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Last month Martin and his friend Bruce spent two weeks backpacking across northern England. Here’s his report:

Bruce, who’s been going to the U.K. every summer for several decades, is a veteran country walker; he’s done the famous Wainwright Coast-to-Coast walk and numerous other routes in England and Scotland. This time, however, we followed (more or less) a relatively new alternate route, set forth by a fellow named David Maughan in his 1997 book On Foot from Coast to Coast: The North of England Way, that took us from Ravenglass on the Irish Sea to Scarborough on the North Sea.

We covered 200 miles in two weeks, which works out to an average of just over 14 miles a day, though there was one three-day stretch when we totaled about 60 miles. We brought only what would fit in our packs, and made our way using Maughan’s book, various Ordnance Survey maps, and compasses. We only got lost a few times, and never terribly badly.

There are, however, limits to our masochism; we decided we were much too old to camp out, and whereas Maughan designed his route to bring the walker to a different youth hostel each night, Bruce rejiggered our itinerary to take us from inn to inn instead. (Well, we did spend one night at the Windermere Youth Hostel in Troutbeck, but it was surprisingly upscale—not at all like the hostels I remember from when I was, um, a youth.)

We both kept journals, but the impressions have already begun to blur: was it in Ainderby Quernhow or Cold Kirby that the village cats came and greeted us? Did we walk through the grounds of Jervaulx Abbey or Rievaulx Abbey? Was it Lowgill Viaduct or Dent Head Viaduct where I took that picture of Bruce walking under the archway? Was it the market square in Masham or Helmsley that was festooned with flowers?

Despite the tricks and lapses of middle-aged memory, however, I know the parts of England that we traversed in a way that I don’t know, say, Pflugerville or Round Rock, even though they’re just up the interstate from us in Austin. Having to make your way on foot, step by laborious step, forces you to pay attention to the land and the sky and the flora and fauna around you. I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert on the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales, but I do feel connected to them in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced.

And, I might add, there’s something indescribably wonderful about limping into a pub late in the afternoon, after many hard miles of walking, and sitting down to a cool pint of Black Sheep ale or Strongbow cider. I drink a fair amount of beer here in Texas—it’s about the best way I know to beat the heat of a Texas summer—but during our time in England, we felt like we’d really earned it.

What we’re reading
Heather: William Boyd, Restless
Martin: James Montague, When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone

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