Day twenty-five

 25^th May 2009    WALES

A day of muddled-up thoughts and memories

I wake up in the grand Park Hill Hotel to the sound of birdsong coming through the open window… fifteen minutes later, showered and packed, I’m sat at a table with a full cooked breakfast in front of me… Thank you Rev, Clive Hillmen… another half an hour and I’m back outside, bag over my shoulder, ready for a brand-new day. That four and a half billion-year-old sun I spoke of yesterday, is on my side of the river this morning, hiding behind low laying clouds… all is as it should be… I hear myself say ‘Good morning universe and how are you today’.

The first part of this morning’s walk will follow the main road (the same road the Romans had marched up to take out the Druids of Anglesey…). hmm… and I wonder at how many ‘Good Mornings’ this universe, this world, this island has had. Did ever a day go by, where we didn’t fight, a day where nobody died at the hands of another. I don’t believe this is how life was ever meant to be… and yet when sat behind the wheel of a truck, listening to the news on the radio that is exactly how the world is… and no doubt the radios the Romans and Druids were tuned into were pushing out the same kind of stories… are we really no better than this.

An hour goes by, maybe just over… the thoughts of our grim history are pushed aside…up ahead I see a tea caravan… not an easy thing to walk past. I step inside… after hearing my story, the lady running the place, Rachel, give me a cup of tea and a slice of cake… Thank you. I sit outside… the rays of our sun break through the clouds… just one star in a hundred thousand million that exist in our galaxy (a galaxy we call the Milky Way)… and how many galaxies are there in the observable universe… they estimate that there is around two trillion. Put those two things together… the how many stars in our galaxy… and the how many galaxies there are out there… I have read that that adds up to two billion trillion suns (stars) in the known universe. To help make sense of such a number, apparently it works out that there are ten thousand stars to every grain of sand that is on this Earth… your right, that doesn’t really help at all… the numbers are too big... too big for a truck driver walking… that’s for sure.

…so here I am, sat outside a tea shack… and spinning around in my head, a hundred different on-going and historical battles plus a billion different stars … it doesn’t help knowing that this caravan is also spinning around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour… no wonder we get a little dizzy sometimes… its funny how a slice of cake in one hand, a mug of tea in the other, can have the ability to bring all the fighting, all the stars and this intergalactic caravan to a stand-still, even if it is just for a moment … yeah, all is good again in the world.

I may have stopped the world for a moment, but I need to make a move… I take my mug back into the caravan… Rachel gives me some scones and biscuits to take with me… how good is that…Thank you.

The aim today is to get to a place called Bala. I take a look at the map… in another hour I take a right turn, which is good it’ll get me off the main road and back on to unbusy, smaller country lanes.

It is at Pentrefoelas that I turn of the main road… at the junction there is a small café and chocolate factory called the Riverside Chocolate House… yeah of course I step inside. The owner, Clive makes me a cup of tea and twenty minutes later sends me on my way with some really nice hand-crafted chocolate… Thank you Clive.

Walking along country lanes… in my bag, I have chocolate, two scones and a few biscuits … all I need now is Mr Blue Bird back on my shoulder… I’m guessing he will be bobbing about in amongst one of the hedgerows I see separating the different fields to the left of me or maybe in the hedge running alongside this road that I’m kicking a stone along. I think sometimes the importance of hedges are overlooked (yeah, I know, some hedges are a little too high to overlook … but you know what I mean). Sitting on the side of a hill looking across at a landscape we many times see a patchwork of fields, and stitching the patches together, more often than not a network of hedgerows… and they really do help to hold things together, both the roots and the hedge itself, act as anchor and windbreaks and in doing so, help to keep our soils in place. There are around 500,000 thousand miles of hedgerows in the United Kingdom, making them our biggest nature reserves… home to hedgehogs, field mice, sparrows and other songbirds, beetles and bugs and butterflies of every shape, size and colour… a whole different universe. Before the Second World war there were twice as many hedgerows. When out walking and you see a handful of trees stretching across several fields… and they seem to be standing in line… the chances are those trees were once a part of a hedgerow (a hedge long taken out to create bigger fields… with bigger fields you can farm with bigger machines) ... It’s not my place to make a judgement… how can I…I don’t understand, nor know enough about how it is we farm… but I do know we need to keep some kind of balance… take too many stitches away and like my boot, it starts to fall apart.

Yeah… I rattle on… thoughts jumping all over the place… one moment looking to see if the sun is on the right side of the river (hmm… I don’t remember seeing Running Bear on the banks of the river this morning, hope he didn’t jump in, the current looked pretty strong)… next I’m talking about an intergalactic caravan… modern day conflicts and yesterday’s battles… wondering what our ancient star gazing druids would have made of the Hubble telescope (I hadn’t written that thought down… I guess I have now) and from Hubble to worn out boots and in between the magical world of hedgerows. That’s kind of what happens when walking on your tod, hands in pockets, kicking stones and a head someplace up in the stars… (cannot help wondering what the reader makes of these muddled-up ramblings of a truck driver hobbling his way down this island to a church on the south coast of England… maybe I best not ask).

Today the walking is not so hard, the roads are quiet… and long … not much traffic at all… gently rising, dipping and twisting their way through the Berwyn hills. The clouds sit low, I don’t think their holding any rain… if I had a couple of wooden chairs in my bag, I could check the clouds out… stack the chairs on top of each other, climb up, stretch out my fingers… yeah, I reckon I could touch the sky. But I won’t… just in case a car drives past… I’d look pretty daft, standing on tiptoes balancing on two rickety chairs in the middle of the moors… and besides I don’t have any chairs in my bag… do I… no I don’t.

Forty-six… forty-seven… forty-eight… on kick forty-nine the stone bounces off the road and is lost… I’m thinking to look for it… a good stone for kicking down a road is not always easy to come by. As I walk towards where the stone bounced of the road… my phone pings (twice in two days…wha) there’s a text message ‘WHERE ARE YOU’… blunt and to the point… made me smile… it felt like I was a kid again, still outside playing when I should have been home half an hour ago… my dinner on the table going cold. The text was from Gary, another pal from my Air Force days. Steve (the guy I had met yesterday) had been up to see Gary and had told him I was in the area. I text back to let Gary know the road that I was walking on and an idea of where I would be in half an hour.

Half an hour later, Gary and Barbara pull up on the side of the road. “You alright mate”… “yeah I’m good, and you two… it’s good to see you both”. he climbs out of the car, gives me a bag full of biscuits, sweets and cans of coke. “This is from Steve and me”. “Thanks”… I take my bag off and jam my knew supplies into the top of it… Gary picks the bag up, throws it over his shoulder and we begin to walk… hey the bag ain’t heavy, he’s my brother… I have known Gary since I was seventeen…

Never really looked into my family tree, I know through my grandparents that I am connected to Scotland, England and Ireland… but Wales… hmm not sure, like I say I have never really looked into such things… but that’s ok… it is knowing Gary and his wider family that I have a connection to Wales… and the head of my adopted family, Iris, Eric and Beryl (the sister of a Dunkirk veteran and his bride).

I’ve done a lot of walking with Gary… from the valleys, mountains and coast lines of Wales, the back streets of Memphis, we have stood on the corner of 53rd and 3rd in New York… When we came out the Royal Air Force we took our mountain bikes down to Dartmoor, with the plan do climb every hill in England and Wales that was over two thousand feet (there are over four hundred of them)… we never completed it… a little under three weeks in, we had all our stuff stolen, bikes, hill bags, everything other than what we were wearing… that was the end of that adventure. There is one day of that adventure that comes to mind… we had been going full out for a solid two weeks… peddling bikes, climbing hills, sleeping in a tent, waking up, peddling bikes, climbing hills, sleeping in tent, waking up, peddling bikes, climbing hills…… We both hit exhaustion (the wall) at the same time… I remember staggering of the hill, climbing onto our bikes, and peddling into Bala (I think it was Bala I could be wrong… the diary I was keeping of the adventure was in one of the bags that had been stolen). Once in town, we each brought a pint of milk and slumped onto the pavement… the people that had to walk around us, must have thought we looked pretty vacant… no fun to be around that’s for sure… I can understand that… we must have looked both scruffy and worn out… milk spilling out the corners of our mouth as we gulped it down… we didn’t have a job, nor were we claiming anything from the government… we were living one day at a time… and yet the sense of freedom we felt sat on that pavement leaning up against a wall is akin to what it is I feel today (thirty years on) and again heading into Bala... this time from the north.

It was good to see Gary and Barbara plus Steve, Gillian and Matthew from yesterday. The last part of the walk into Bala passes me by… my head to full of memories of days gone by. Once in the small town, I look for a church… but instead stumble across an independent hostel. Stella the owner of the hostel allows me to stay the night. Thank you. My dinner tonight is scones, biscuits and a can of coke and after I grab a shower.

It is still early, I head out of the hostel… a fresh set of clothes and trainers on, it feels good not to have a bag on my back. I walk through the streets of this little town… a little town that sits on the northern shores of Llyn Tegid (also known as Lake Bala … the largest freshwater glacial lake in Wales). I pick up a path that runs alongside the River Dee, it is from this river the town gets its name… the name Bala in Welsh means ‘the outflow of a lake’. Like many settlements on these islands, the town holds countless stories… it is said Julius Caesar passed through Bala and obtained horses for his army… Welsh Princes have fought over this place… the Normans built a castle here… the wool industry became important to the area… but it is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl back in 1800 that captures my imagination. Her name was Mary Jones… she was from a poor family, the daughter of a weaver who lived in a small village south-west of Dolgellau, surrounded by the mountains of Cadair Idris. At an early age she was captivated by the Christian faith… and began to save up her pennies in order to buy a Welsh Bible, eventually after six years of saving she found out there was a Minister by the name of Thomas Charles selling such Bibles in the town of Bala (twenty-six miles from her home). The next morning, she got up early, took her saving and walked to Bala… cross country and unlike me she didn’t grumble about her boots falling apart… she didn’t have any… the fifteen-year-old Mary walked the twenty-six miles in bare feet. The walk (and the reason for the walk) inspired the Minister Thomas Charles to establish the ‘British and Foreign Bible Society’ (an organisation that would get Bibles to all the four corners of the world in the language of whatever that corner spoke… work that still continues today).

If I’m not kicking stones, I am more than happy to spend time throwing them into the sea, a river or a Loch and watching the ripples move out in all directions… as I follow the track upstream to Lake Bala, I cannot help but wonder what ripples I will leave behind when I’m gone. Did that young girl when setting off to buy a Bible imagine that she would inspire the establishment of the ‘British and Foreign Bible Society’ or that her story would still be being told two hundred years later. It is all too easy to think that it is others… people that are far greater than we… that will change this world for the better. Not at all… they were no difference to us, not really… maybe they had a better understanding of what makes this world tick… they could see beyond the physical world in front of them… if we stop a moment and take a look around our communities, can we not also see beyond the physical, we just need to act upon what it is we see… that is how a ‘Good morning universe’ happens.

After throwing a few stones into the lake, I head back up to the hostel… a strange day today… a day of muddled up thoughts and memories… a day of feeling a little lost… I think what is needed to clear the head is a cup of tea a few more biscuits and an early night.