RANDOM THOUGHTS AND ACHING BONES

This is how it used to work. For many years I operated walking tours in Central Australia. I would start walking again after resting during the off season, and I mean resting. I did almost nothing for six months apart from daily walks with Tommie, some serious lounge surfing and a little reluctant pottering around the garden. 

The first day back on the track was as close to hell as you can get without suffering third degree burns. The second was worse. The third usually started with my body feeling not like it had been on a torturer's racks, but was currently on the rack, just before the ligaments snap like a busted violin string.

Then on Day Four, abracadabra, I was ok and rejoicing in the weight of the pack and the exercion of the climb up desert mountains. I was reborn. I was home, not just in the desert but in my body. 

I fear it won't be that like this time. After just a few days of pulling my rickswag I can safely say it will be weeks/months before I reach that beautiful, exquisite place of physical well-being. For a start I had a heart attack 11 months ago. Where I used to find my old body within days, I have to trust that this new version, post heart attack, can adjust to the task of walking, to be effortless in movement, without a chorus of groans. It is not fitness for fitness sake, but physical capacity to engage easily with the wilderness, to connect to the natural world. 

We have been sold a pup I think, that old age is about 'comfort'. I sense my older years will be happier for the absence of it, for the reliance on my body to take me places that cars can't, deep into the experience. This Big Walk is as much about finding that physical sense again as collecting stories of this country.

I am reading a book at the moment ― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking - and this struck me:  

“Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors...disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.”

Physical strength, endurance and health are carriageways to that external space, a way of feeling at home with and in it. 

Young Ralph has taken to the walk well. I believe he sees pulling the rickswag as his job. For the first hour or so he pulls and strains like a husky before adopting a perfect heel beside me as he tires. I think he's a little beauty. Yep, I think little Ralph will be a gorgeous friend, especially when he starts to return to me on command. That's a concern for me because there are lots of dangers out there. I don't want him to have to live on the end of a restraining lead.

My sense is that we will become great mates, Ralph and me. I met a farmer the other day with a face like crumpled sin. Until he spoke at least. Then he said ... that dog will be as good as the love you give him ... and he smiled a transforming smile to accompany his Buddhist aphorism.

It's early days, this Big Walk, but I am on the journey and just for a moment, on that first day, and briefly on the second, I felt happier than I have for an age. 

and remember you can

WALK WITH US.

R & r

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