As regular readers of this blog know, we believe firmly in the pleasures—and, even more, the importance—of cultivating the kind of deep knowledge of people and landmarks and events, present and past, that only comes with long residence in a particular locale. Neither Heather nor I is a native Austinite, but we’ve lived here almost thirty years; and while the city has changed and grown dramatically during that time (not always in ways we’d wish), most of the time I can convince myself that I have a pretty good sense of it.

In reality, however, there are plenty of places in Austin where I feel, well, out of place. My knowledge of the city has been largely restricted to just a few neighborhoods: West Austin and Tarrytown, the UT campus, downtown, South Congress. Though I drove a Meals on Wheels route in and around the Rosewood neighborhood for many years, and though two of our kids now live east of Interstate 35, most of the traditionally African American East Side remains a blank spot on my mental map of Austin. I can still discover pockets of mystery and surprise within the city, places of unexpected incongruities and collisions.

I discovered one such place a few years ago while driving my Meals on Wheels route. In recent years, young white families and individuals have been moving east of the interstate in search of affordable real estate. As a result, the East Side has become hip: sort of the local equivalent of Brooklyn. But there are still parts of the East Side that have resisted gentrification, that still look much the way I imagine they did fifty or more years ago. Among them was the home of a Hispanic family, at least three generations living in what I can only describe as Third World squalor, right there about a mile from the proud dome of the State Capitol. Most of the paint had long since peeled off the exterior of their house, and the floor had great holes open to the dirt underneath; I could detect no air conditioning and no heat, but no matter the temperature the air in there had the same sour smell of hopelessness. And yet this was not the Third World at all; almost literally next door were newly renovated bungalows and spiffy new condos with Vespas or Priuses parked in front. The juxtaposition was utterly breathtaking, and utterly heartbreaking.

I discovered another such place, considerably less depressing, just a few days ago, when my friend Richard convinced me to join him and our mutual friend Dick at the Little Elmore Reed Blues Band’s weekly gig at TC’s Lounge on Monday night. The band was scheduled to go on at 10, so Richard suggested we meet at our church (rock and roll, baby!) at 9; he would drive Dick and me over to the club, since neither of us had been there before, and he even promised to leave after the first set so we’d be home by midnight.

Austin likes to bill itself as “The Live Music Capital of the World,” which has always struck me as a wee bit pretentious, though the city does support a rich and thriving musical culture. Among the legendary local musical assets, both current and departed, are performers like Willie Nelson, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Alejandro Escovedo, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Asleep at the Wheel; venues like Antone’s, the Armadillo World Headquarters, the Continental Club, the Cactus Café, Threadgill’s, and the Vulcan Gas Company; and the annual South by Southwest conference and ACL Music Festival. But this musical bounty is largely wasted on Heather and me.

Oh, we attended a modest number of shows over the last thirty years (I more than she, given her aversions to loud noise, smoke, and crowds), but more recently, as middle age has crept up on us—or, more accurately, leaped upon us unexpectedly, howling like a banshee—we’ve left the live music to the younger crowd and the occasional eccentric friend like Richard. I think the last show we saw featured Los Lobos and a reunited True Believers at Antone’s. It was amazing: amazing because we love both those bands, amazing because it was perhaps the loudest concert we’ve ever attended, and amazing because we couldn’t believe that the guy puking copiously into the garbage can next to us managed to stay more or less upright for so long. What fun!

In part as a result of such experiences, I’ve spent years turning Richard down when he asks me to come out with him to hear music. I always feel guilty about saying no, though, so when he told me about this outing, I took a deep breath and said yes—I’m still not sure why. But once I said yes, I was fully committed; I even took an afternoon nap, as Richard suggested. (My usual bedtime is 10 p.m., and things can get pretty ugly the next morning if I’m up much later than that, as our dogs and cats expect us to be up and moving by or before 6 a.m.)

TC’s Lounge is an unprepossessing (perhaps “ramshackle” would be a better word) spot on Webberville Road. It serves beer and setups, though most of the crowd bring their own bottles of harder stuff. The Little Elmore Reed Blues Band’s Myspace page describes it as “the last real old school blues dive remaining in Austin” and adds,

Bands work for love and tips. There’s no air conditioning and heat is provided by the mass of human bodies. There’s not a level surface in the place and when the joint gets to rockin’ you can actually feel the building move. It’s perfect.

The dirt parking lot was still mostly empty when we arrived. We paid the five-dollar cover charge and grabbed three seats at a table near the front; I soon discovered that my jeans were virtually glued to the metal folding chair by some sticky substance I hadn’t noticed before sitting down. (A part of me really wanted to know it was, but another part of me really didn’t want to know.) Dick bought the first round: club soda for Richard, who’s a teetotaler, and beers for the rest of us.

Soon the room began to fill up with young hipsters (I was the youngest of our trio, and we three senile delinquents substantially raised the median age), and eventually the members of the band straggled in. The regular lineup includes founder Mark Hays (a veteran of the Gary P. Nunn, Smokin’ Joe Kubek, and Guy Forsyth bands, among many others) on drums; Pat Whitefield (a founding member of the T-Birds and a member of the first house band at Antone’s) on bass; Willie Pipkin (South Austin Jug Band) and Mike Keller (Marcia Ball, Double Trouble, the T-Birds) on guitar; and Katrina refugee Dale Spalding (Snooks Eaglin, Canned Heat) on vocals and harp. It turned out that Keller was absent tonight, but Eve Monsees, a young guitar-slinger, sat in for him. Whitefield stopped by our table to shake Richard’s hand, and I took the opportunity to tell him that our mutual friend George Jones (no, not that George Jones) had asked me to say hello.

The music was great; these guys know their stuff, no doubt about it. They played a few originals, but mostly covers of the great old blues and R&B classics like Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” Little Walter’s “My Babe,” and the Falcons’ “You’re So Fine.” The dance floor filled up almost immediately: there were a few couples doing some serious swing dancing, and also a lot of really, really drunk people attempting what Dick delicately called “vertical copulation.” I was particularly amused by one young gent, somewhat the worse for wear, who was dancing with a statuesque young woman, in somewhat better shape; his hands kept sliding south of the border, so to speak, and every time they did she’d patiently reach back and move them back up to a more acceptable latitude. Dick pointed out an attractive blonde who drained most of a bottle of Woodford Reserve bourbon straight from the bottle during the first set, and during the break, as were leaving, I noticed another young woman, in a red and white cocktail dress, wandering the parking lot swigging from a bottle of red wine. The air was a thick fug of amplified music, sweat, booze, and lust. This, I realized, is probably as close as most of us in this predominantly white crowd would ever come to the kind of legendary Mississippi Delta juke joint so beloved of scholars and fans in search of the “authentic” blues.

Two well-dressed young women, one blonde and one brunette, came and sat down at the next table; a slightly older, but even more beautiful, woman soon joined them. Eventually, the blonde stood up and asked Richard (the only unmarried member of our trio) to dance, and when the first set ended he went and sat with them. At this point Dick and I wondered if we should start thinking about alternate means of transportation, but with a concerted effort we were able to drag him away from those Jezebels. (No, no, Richard, no need to thank us; that’s what friends are for.) I finally made it home, bleeding only slightly from the ears, by about 12:15.

A couple of days later, Dick commented, “Well, that was just great, from a musical standpoint, an ambience (pardon the expression) standpoint, and especially a people-watching (girl-watching) standpoint. I’m up for going back.”

Me, too, Dick. Even though Tuesday morning was kind of rough, I suspect it does a body good to wander off the map every once in a while. Just please don’t tell Richard I said so.

What we’re reading
Heather: Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn
Martin: Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur

I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.

Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the Texas State Historical Association, mostly researching and writing local history.

Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.

Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.

In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—Playland at the Beach! the Surf Theater! Winterland! Zim’s!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian madeleine. As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”

Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—Emperor Norton and Sam Spade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harry Callahan, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.

But that very notion of being from someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the Beringian land bridge in pursuit of mammoth and bison.

In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.

And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into Abraham Lincoln, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into Mark Twain, and so on. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the end of the frontier in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove the great migration of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.

Back to the Left Coast. In Infinite City, Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.

All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in Infinite City, are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of flat places!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.

That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move in, not just on, this small part of the planet.

This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be here.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

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

One of the things that we hope will characterize Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment is a strong sense of place. It’s right there, implicitly and explicitly, in our mission and vision statements, just off to your right.

But how does one develop a sense of place? One answer, at least in part, and for those of us of a certain age, has been by reading the local newspaper. But the newspaper as we know it seems to be going the way of the 8-track and the VHS tape. Increasingly, people opt to get their news in a way that doesn’t leave ink smudges on their hands, or require drying in the oven on rainy mornings. In other words, they’re reading the “paper” online.

In “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper,” in the November issue of Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the decline of his (and my) hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the historical importance of the newspaper in American life.

The press, Rodriguez argues, was the indicator and bestower of civic stature: “It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough to have news.” In addition, the rise of the newspaper was a sign of the small-d democratic nature of American culture, “a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence.”

But, for many, the newspaper seems to have outlived its usefulness. The Atlantic Monthly’s Megan McArdle, in an online (of course) column titled “The Media Death Spiral,” writes, “The circulation figures for the top 25 dailies in the U.S. are out, and they’re horrifying. The median decline is well into the teens; only the Wall Street Journal gained (very slightly).”

She adds, “I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren’t there.”

Those of us who read the Austin American-Statesman have noted the signs already: a shrinking paper, meaning fewer ads and less revenue; the anorexic classifieds (a victim of craigslist) tacked onto the back of the Life and Arts section; the business and metro sections combined.

Why should we care whether or not the Statesman survives? According to Rodriguez, “When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death… it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.”

Does he exaggerate? Maybe. But once the newspapers are gone, he asks, “who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with ‘I.’”

Rodriguez quotes a friend of his, a journalist from India: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”

That statement really bothers me, for a couple of reasons. I can understand the appeal of what Philip Meyer, a student of the industry, calls “the demassification of the media”; in the bottom-up model of journalism, each consumer is free to pick and choose the information he or she deems most valuable, rather than being forced to rely on the judgment of a corporate editor. What could be more democratic?

But such a model does come with a cost. As Meyer writes in his book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, “If we’re all attending to different messages, our capacity to understand one another is diminished.”

And what about that speculation from Rodriguez’s friend, “Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore”? Perhaps not. But I don’t want to live in a world where people no longer feel connected to the land and the people around them. In a society that has traditionally viewed “light[ing] out for the territory,” in the words of that old newspaperman Mark Twain, as the solution to every problem, how do we convince folks that they have a stake in, and a responsibility to, their surroundings? As strip malls and chain stores and fast-food outlets and cookie-cutter housing developments and, yes, the internet make every place more like every other place, how are we supposed to know or care where we are?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think we better find one. People who feel strongly connected to their surroundings, urban or rural or in between, feel that the place is theirs; they know it, feel it, eat it, sleep it, and live it. They’re also more likely to take care of it. I certainly hope that the things that make Madroño Ranch special to us—the hills, the water, the rocks, the trees—will outlive us, and our children, and our children’s children, and we intend to do all we can to make sure they do.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Oliver (ed.), The Best American Essays 2009
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

The first sparks for the idea of Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment were kindled about a year ago in conversations with my mother, Jessica Hobby Catto. She has listened carefully and thoughtfully to my sometimes wildly utopian ideas, offering hard-earned practical advice and persistent encouragement.

Her death on September 30 has left me so stunned that I’m having trouble relegating her to the past tense. I am struggling to stay in the present perfect, which refuses to point to a specific time, preferring instead to drift between the present and the past. This grammatical eddy allows me to dawdle a little longer before I face a present and future without her. At the same time, I know that at Madroño her spirit is always present, always past, always future.

My mother’s love for the outdoors shaped my life. The first house I remember was on a bluff north of the San Antonio airport, terrain that didn’t qualify as even remotely suburban at the time. Since my three siblings and I arrived within six years of each other, my mother must have deemed it a survival strategy to push us out of doors as much as possible. We had no immediate neighbors and spent our time pretending to be lost in the woods, investigating the draws and seasonal creeks that occasionally flooded and kept us home from school, and sliding down the cliff (strictly forbidden) to visit the nearest neighbors who rewarded us with butterscotch candies. The gravel road on which we lived was rural enough that people felt comfortable dumping trash on it. Every few months my mother would send us to drag a large trash can and pick up the trash on the road that we could pick up: we were permitted to leave the large appliances and dead livestock. Her point was—and is—clear: some human interactions with the landscape are unacceptable.

She also taught me that love of place is a perfectly reasonable principle by which to order a life. Converted to the Church of High Altitudes at Cimarroncita Ranch Camp in New Mexico, she began proselytizing to her children in the mid-1960s when we began annual summer treks to Aspen, Colorado. In the requisite station wagon filled with pillows, the reek of Panhandle oil and cattle, and squabbling children, we always stopped at the top of then-unpaved Independence Pass (12,000-plus feet above sea level) to play in the snow.

Aspen then had one paved street, one stop sign, a drug store with a soda fountain, and two fine old movie theaters. What more did we need? On days we didn’t hike, my mother shooed us outside to play in the puddles if it was raining or to climb up nearby Aspen Mountain with raincoats or pieces of cardboard upon which we would slide back down the meadow grasses. When my father’s career took us away from Texas and to other interesting venues, Colorado was the place we always returned to, my mother’s spiritual center. Despite her peripatetic life, she had a profound love of the Roaring Fork River valley, its smells and flowers, its imperious weather changes, the varieties of its wildness. These never ceased to sustain her, and she in turn worked to sustain them through her involvement with various environmental causes, particularly land conservation.

When she was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer in 2007, my parents began spending more time at their San Antonio home to be near the doctors she most trusted. Since she had long since given her heart and energy to Colorado, I was worried that she would feel unmoored during her time in San Antonio, adding to the discomforts of treatment. As we talked about ways in which she could stay connected to the conservation world she loved, especially in a state like Texas that so dearly values its private property rights, the idea of creating a gathering place for people passionate about nurturing the natural world was born.

I know I will eventually move out of the strange timelessness that hovers around times of death, but never completely. Despite her preference for the mountains, she saw the beauties of the Texas Hill Country and bought the original piece of what has become Madroño Ranch more than fifteen years ago. The blessings she bestowed on me—awareness of human limits, love of place, the place itself—are with me as long as I am here to receive them.

What we’re reading
Heather: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Martin: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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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