Hiking Clothes

When I first visited Salzburg in 1990, I was so impressed to see elder women (though probably younger than I am now!) riding bicycles here, there and ever, dressed in skirts or drindls. Just out to the market for the groceries they put in the front basket and off to visit a friend. No one was counting miles or dressed in bike gear or even wearing a helmet. No one was part of a club of bike enthusiasts subscribed to the Biker’s Magazine, no one was comparing bikes and prices or debating about cleated shoes/ pedals. No one joined a bike coalition to pressure city hall for more bike-friendly roads. The bike paths were already in place and people used them as a matter of simple daily life. Biking was not a “thing”—it was simply a way to get from here to there and back again.

 

But in my country, everything has to be a “thing.” Special gear, special schedules, special vocabulary, clubs, magazines, the whole deal. Be it birdwatching or folk dancing or pickleball, biking or roller-blading or kayaking, downloading aps and upgrading phones, everything has a little industry built around it. Gone is the simple pleasure of just doing it, the simple conversations about the pleasure of doing it, the simple act of doing it all without elaborate and expensive gear. 

 

So although I enjoy biking, I’m not a “biker.” I never purchased a single item of biker’s clothing, from the corporate logo’ed shirts and shorts to the gloves and certainly not the cleats. Yes, I wear a helmet, but occasionally (sshh! don’t tell) ride without one (especially in Salzburg) and have lived to tell the tale. 

 

So on this walk (and on the bike trip soon to come), I’m wearing my normal clothes— my city shoes, jeans, shirt and blue raincoat and it has been just fine. I probably could have brought my seldom-used pair of rain-pants—they’re light and would have been useful these last three days of walking in the rain. Today, my jeans got quite wet and added weight and coldness to yet another walk through the lovely countryside. We stopped for lunch at Elaine’s Tea House in Feizer and sitting there in my cold, wet jeans, got the funny idea of taking them off in the bathroom and holding them under the hot-air hand dryer. Which I did! As my wife predicted, it didn’t make much of an impact, so just walked the final two miles to the town of Austwick with them cold and wet and that was just fine. Settle in our room, stuff newspaper in our shoes to dry them, hang the jeans on the bathroom heated towel rack and all is well.

 

So ends officially our four days of walking and a bit sad to see it end. I think I could keep up like this for a few weeks or a month. My legs are certainly getting stronger (we walked 9.5 miles yesterday), my connection with sheep and cows deepened, my acceptance of different weathers enlarged and my spirit fed by life in the open air. As the title of a movie I saw once on a plane says: 

 

Happy. Thank you. More please.

 

Odds and Ends

In the spirit of “What’s different here?”, a few little odds and ends from our time in the U.K.

 

• Dogs in Restaurants: Kind of charming until one yips loudly in your ear.

 

• Dog Ice Cream: Huh?

 

• Choices for tips— 10%/ 12% / 15%. Yeah! 

 

• Pickles:  A kind of chutney used in cheese-pickle sandwiches.

 

• Flapjacks: Not pancakes, but a cross between a granola bar and an oat bar.

 

• Beck, Scar, Dale, Moor: A stream, a rocky outcropping, a valley, an open hillside with few (if any) trees.

 

Today, our fourth day of hiking, we’ll be walking through them all. 

Bi-Pedal Bliss

 

I really have to thank my wife for envisioning and organizing this trip. There are few things in this life more pleasurable than walking from village to village in a relentless stunningly beautiful countryside, in company with sheep, cows and a few fenced bulls. Whether in heavy mist, light rain, streaming sunshine, no matter. It’s all good. It’s all very good. And in no small part because human beings were built to walk. Some anthropologists speculate that hunter-gatherers walked from 15 to 20 miles daily and since we essentially have the same bodies as our ancestors from so many thousands of years ago, it’s no surprise that we come more fully into our humanity when we attend to the body as it was meant to move.

 

Of course, many compensate with the gym, but I can testify that paying for a membership, driving to the site, changing in the locker room, walking or running on treadmills going nowhere at all, either to pounding music or a fake landscape on a screen, showering, getting dressed, getting back in the car to drive home is a far, far cry from walking out the door onto the path and through the fields. And yes, I recognize that there is some privilege to fly to this country, pay for this casually-organized experience that includes hotels and people taking your luggage to the next one, going out for too-expensive dinners. It's not a viable model for all of humanity. In-between the two are cultures that organize their daily lives around such walking outside and there are many.

 

Meanwhile. Our first day walking in Malham was in company with scores of other people— apparently, a very popular route to see the waterfall at Gordale Scar and the remarkable limestone. A nice mix of old and young, English and tourists, with the English including large Muslim families. It was a round-trip to and from our hotel and a thorough delight.

 

The second day was walking from our hotel in Malham to our next in Settle and here we were virtually the only people on the path. Met two couples coming the other way and that was that. There was rain just about the whole walk, but not torrential and our simple raincoats and an umbrella I carried but never opened were enough to be comfortable. This was indeed the English walk we imagined—after all, that brilliant green of the fields does not come from a dry climate! We arrive in Settle at 2:30, the hotel not open until 3:30, looked for some shelter to eat the lunch we brought in our packs and had to settle for a doorstep in front of a theater not yet open for the night. Something nice about the two of us in our mid-70’s traveling as we did in our 20’s, eating simple sandwiches we carried wherever there was a place to sit down. 

 

We knew some friends of ours back home had independently planned a walk in the Yorkshire Dales, but they hadn’t seem too interested in coordinating when we found out we all were going to be there close to the same time. But Karen decided to write them an e-mail and imagine our surprise when our phone rang and there they were—Stephanie and David! They were staying in a town nearby and had planned to visit Settle, so we decided to meet them this morning and then go on part of our scheduled round-trip hike together. 

And that we did, spending a few fun hours together walking up to Victoria Cave and having lunch in the overhang. They then retraced their steps to take their train and we went forward on— but apparently, quite a bit too much forward as we missed some turn-off and went 2 miles in the wrong direction before finally figuring out our mistake. We backtracked to where the error was made and then, with the help of a friendly Yorkshire man who wondered why we had a President like we do,

found a short-cut that saved us from retracing our exact steps. With the extra reward of the sun emerging and illuminating the landscape so reminiscent of a David Hockney painting. Apparently, not accidentally so—he came here to paint!

Our final day tomorrow, from our hotel in Settle to the next in Clapham and I’m fine in any weather, but if the gods are listening, that sun sure felt good today. We shall see. 

 

Sharing the Wealth

One quality that feeds my faith in our humanity is how we are disposed to share good things that fall our way. Be it a spiritual insight, a falling in love or  an artistic expression, we rarely hoard it and keep it to ourselves. Buddha could have lived in a cave enjoying blissful samadhi but instead chose to teach. Two lovers could have locked the doors to their connubial bliss, but instead, hold a wedding and invite the friends and family to witness. And though not all succeed, every artist hopes to display in a gallery or museum, every writer to publish, every scientist to lecture, every musician, dancer or actor to perform. It is in the sharing that the happiness that comes our way is fully completed.

 

In this spirit, the traveler enjoying new sights, new sounds, new tastes, new ideas, new sense of release from their business-as-usual habitual life, wants to share it with those back home. How to capture a bit of the joys that fly? At the highest level, some might sketch a scene, write a poem, compose a song, keep a journal. But the usual impulse is to send a few postcards or in the old days (ie, my early adulthood), take pictures to be put in a book or slides to be shown at a slide-show gathering at your house, complete with all the travel stories. At the most mundane, the postcards simply said “Having a great time—wish you were here,” the photos taken were often “Here we are in front of the _______. And here we are at the _______” and the stories might have been about how hard it was to find a decent hamburger and a Coke.  But still the impulse to share was a good one, even as the dinner guests were eying the clock.

 

My strategy is both to write daily in my journal and take photos without me in them, try to give a sense of what I’m noticing as I’m passing through a place, from the quirky sign to the street scene to the scenic overview. So here are a few shots to give a little feeling of our first two days of our Yorkshire Dale walking tour. The first day of walking in 75 degree mostly sunny weather and the second in REAL English weather—60 degrees and rainy.

Enjoy and Happy June!

 

An Extraordinary Tale: Part III

Last year, my daughter Talia and her boyfriend Matt invited my wife and I to an event in San Francisco called The Moth. It’s a venue for storytelling open to anyone with a good six-minute story to tell that is true, uses no disparaging language and is somewhat related to that particular event’s chosen theme. Those who want to sign-up simply put their name in a hat and 10 are randomly chosen. There are also two sets of chosen judges who score the story from 1 to 10 (most are generous and land between 8 and 10) and the winner gets to go on to a larger Moth event down the line. Matt had done well before and had a story ready to go. 

 

While waiting for Talia and Matt to come, the host re-affirmed the theme: “I didn’t see that coming!” Sitting there I thought, “Hey, I have a good story for that theme!” So when Talia and Matt came and I told her I wanted to sign-up, she looked at me with her forever-adolescent-“Dad!”-eye-roll and said:

“First of all, the story has to be six minutes long! I repeat: SIX MINUTES!” And you don’t just spontaneously get up, people really work on theirs!” 

Nevertheless, I persisted and decided to put my name in the hat. My only hesitation was it was one less chance that Matt might be chosen, but still, I did it. After the first storyteller spoke, part of me thought, “Hm. I see what Talia means about working on it!” So I began to think a bit more about my story, even as I was convinced it was likely I wouldn’t get chosen. The second one wasn’t as good as the first, but fine. And then—they chose me for the third!! Up I went and felt I did a pretty good job and the judges seemed to agree, scoring me between 8.8 and 9.2. As I turned to walk off the stage, they reminded me to pick the next name out of the hat. I did and — it was Matt!!! His story was great and in fact, he won that night. I think I came in 3^rd or 4^th. 

 

And the “I didn’t see that one coming” story I told? You guessed it— the one about Jim and Karen Bold. But there was more to the story that I managed to fit into the six minutes. After two lovely days at his house, Jim had to drive south on a business trip and offered to give us a ride to the intersection we needed for our next stop. Here’s my journal excerpt:

 

10/13— Good fortune nipping at our heels. Long ride down with Jim through relatively flat Midlands, a warm goodbye at the road to Cambridge intersection and five minutes later, picked up by a grey-haired professor with a handlebar mustache. After two minutes of talk, he invited us to his home for “tea.” We looked at each in amazed disbelief. 

 

He took us to his quaint cottage in the village of Tofts, past thatched-roofed houses and neighbors waving hello. He introduced us to his wife, they gave us a tour around the hobbit-like cottage with low ceilings and small windows, charm oozing out of every room. The table was set with sweet cakes, homemade bread, salad, cheese, red china, all prepared for the husband’s return to home and quickly shifted to accommodate us as guests. After “tea,” a twilight visit to the garden looking out to a field of sheep. Two young daughters came home from Brownies and listened politely while we talked about children’s literature. It seems that The Wind in the Willows (one of my favorite childhood books) was inspired by this region of East Anglia and he introduced us to The Little Grey Rabbit series. I played some Schumann and Mendelssohn on their piano next to a blazing fire and it felt like I was in a storybook.

 

Then upstairs to a lovely room with an inviting bed and woke up the next morning to a knock on the door. The hostess came in with a tray of tea and biscuits—breakfast in bed! One could get spoiled by this level of hospitality! 

 

 I ended my Moth re-telling of the whole tale something like this: 

 

And there you have it. Back-to-back drive-by acts of random kindness that I couldn’t have seen coming. And the lesson I’ve carried with me from that time?  That there’s every reason in the world to be distrustful, to be cynical, to think you have to pass through this life watching out for number 1. But what does it get you? Fear, misery, anger, a life that infects others with your own fear, misery and anger. Everybody loses.

 

If you flip it around and treat the world as if it’s a benevolent place and treat people as if they’re innately good-hearted, lo and behold, the Jim and Karen Bolds will find you and treat you to tea. We fulfill our own prophecies, so be careful what you choose.

 

PS When I told Matt and Talia I was going to look for the Bolds on this trip, I imagined that if I found them, it would be a fabulous Moth Story, Part 2!! So now I'm ready to sign up. Let’s see if the opportunity present itself.

An Extraordinary Tale: Part II

Fast forward now 48 years and here we are again in York. It’s a short ride on the Number 10 bus to Nether Poppleton and so we get ready to set off. I looked online for a Chamber of Commerce (didn’t find one) and then notice a Poppleton Parish Council. Remembering the stories of histories recorded in churches, I thought this could be a possibility. Here I wished I’d had Sue Grafton’s detective, Kinsey Milhone, by my side. She seemed really good at finding people! We waited for the bus, due in 14 minutes according to the electronic sign, then 6 and finally 1 and it never appeared! Then it disappeared from the board and said, “Next one: 10 minutes.” Not a promising beginning. 

 

• The Man on the No. 10 Bus: Finally, it did come and we went to the second floor of the double-decker and started chatting with a white-haired man. I ended up giving him a short version of our mission and my hope that the parish council might help. He assured me that this had nothing to do with church records. When I told him the part of the story about visiting the school, he told us where the school was and it occurred to me that they might have some record of Rachel and Jane who went there. The man also mentioned that the library was right next to the school and they might have some records. 

 

So that became step one of our mission. Before getting off the bus in Nether Poppleton, I turned and asked, “By any chance, are you Jim Bold?” Wouldn’t that have been an amazing end to the story! But of course, he wasn’t and had never heard of him.

 

He did illuminate the difference between Nether Poppleton and Poppleton, “nether” being the old English world for “lower.” Hence, the Netherlands or the nether world in poetry and mythology. Of course!

 

Note that had the first Number 10 bus come on time, I wouldn’t have met this man and wouldn’t have thought about going to the school. The first of many, “if not this, then not that.”

 

• The Schoolteacher: We arrived at the library first, but it was closed for lunch for an hour or so. Next door was the school and walking to a gated entrance, I did have a clear memory of the sidewalk where the Mums waited for their kids. But now it was empty, the school gates were locked with many warnings about no trespassing —the end of innocence even in this remote charming English village. We walked around to another gate and rang a bell and an intercom voice told us to push on the gate, but it didn’t work. Over the fence, a teacher noticed us and asked if she could help us. We explained we were trying to find some people and wanted to check in with the office if they might have a record of them. She told us that the school was closed for some vacation, minus a small day care group she was with. When we explained a bit more about the nature of our quest, she suggested we check out the Poppleton Community Center close by. 

 

• The Poppleton Social Center: So that we did and decided to have a little coffee with the unique Flapjack bar we first tried last year in the Cotswolds. (A kind of cross between a granola bar and an oatcake.) We talked to the cashier about our mission and he told us to hold on and came back with a little newsletter with various Poppleton activities and groups listed and pointed us to Julian Crabbe, the head of the Poppleton Historic Society. There was a phone number, though he warned us that Mr. Crabbe was extremely hard-of-hearing. Noticing my hearing aids, he quipped, “Much more than you! Good luck!” One step closer. Sort of.

 

• White-Hair: While enjoying our snack, the thought struck that any white-haired person in the café might possibly know Jim and Karen. So I unabashedly approached many and asked, “Excuse me. Have you lived in Nether Poppleton a long time?” The first three said they were tourists from out of town. Another said she lived elsewhere, but had taught in the school, though she didn’t remember Rachel and Jane. A younger woman at the table next door said they had a babysitter who would have been Rachel or Jane’s age and she called her to ask. Of course, the person called didn’t pick up. 

 

• The Poppleton Facebook Group: She then suggested I join a Poppleton Facebook Group. I logged on and joined one and put out my inquiry. Then she suggested I try a second one, which I did. No response from either yet.

 

• The Library: By now the library had opened and the helpful librarian affirmed they really didn’t have records of the residents. But she graciously complied with my request that she call Julian Crabbe, since my phone didn’t have service. She did and of course, no answer. She did uncover an e-mail for him, so I hadn’t wholly given up hope yet. 

 

• “Where Is Main Street?” So we called it a day and tried to figure out how to walk the 5 miles back to York instead of take the bus. I had some minimal directions on my GPS which told me to turn left at Main Street. When we got to a crossroads, we veered left and there were five white-haired people chatting. I asked if this was Main Street and then explained we were trying to find the walking route to York and they were so helpful and amiable in explaining the directions to us. We thanked them and then turned to set off. Then I paused and asked, “By any chance………?”

 

(Here is where the music in the movie-to-be starts to crescendo and all cameras point to this extraordinary moment.)

 

“ … do you know either Jim or Karen Bold?”

 

One of the women’s eyes lit up and she burst out, “Yess!!!!! Karen Bold! We were in a child-minding group together!! We would watch each other’s children when needed!” Then the man chimed in, “Yes, I believe they got divorced about 30 years ago and each of them moved away. Why do you ask?”

 

When I said, “It’s quite a story,” without hesitation he said, “Come on into my house and you can tell us all about it!”

 

Now note that detail. The same generous impulse when Jim Bold invited us to his house. Still alive and well. “Would you like some coffee?” he said. We politely declined and when I told them the story, joked, “I thought you were going to invite us for ‘tea.’” (see yesterday’s story)

 

They all said they had lost touch with Jim, but Karen still sent a Christmas card every year, so he came back with her address. They noted she hadn’t sent a card this year and that had me worried. But I will write her a letter and see what the Fates have in store. 

 

So there you have it. Short of meeting the Bolds themselves, this was an extraordinary quest wholly dependent on serendipity and the kindness of strangers—alongside how much I care about it and my determination and willingness to talk to strangers— and it all came together beyond my wildest dreams. 

 

And the reader might wonder at the end of it all: So what? Why do you care so much about this? Three things:

 

1)    My musical obsession with tracing a theme through a symphony or jazz improvisation and coming to a cadence that completes it. The simple satisfaction of coming full cycle through a piece of art or life.

 

2)   Curiosity as to whether Jim or Karen remembered us. And still a chance to find out if Karen writes back. Did that tiny blip in the long scroll of life’s brush painting mean anything to them? Whether or not, no matter, just curious. 

 

3)   But most importantly, just to thank them for the simple act of generosity that meant enough to me—and still does— that I remembered it for so long. It’s all part of the philosophy/ values/ ethics and such that I’ve been cultivating my whole life and believe in more and more.

 

And, dear reader, stay tuned. A short epilogue to come!

 

An Extraordinary Tale

I often have felt like I am living out a remarkable story written by unseen hands, with an intricately woven plot masterfully penned in ways that would make Dickens envious. Yesterday was one of the most magnificent and miraculous example of those hands at work, a tying together of threads left dangling for almost 50 years. 

The story begins on October 11^th, 1978, with my soon-to-be wife Karen and I at the beginning of a one-year trip around the world. At the end of August, we drove across the country in her old Pinto car, from San Francisco to my parents’ home in New Jersey. After a visit there, we boarded a Laker flight to London for some $150 each, hitchhiked north up to Scotland and then back South to the city of York. As recorded in my journal: 

 

10/11/ 1978 – Peanut butter lunch under a slight drizzle in a park in Newcastle, a quite friendly tire salesman who let us use his bathroom and gave us directions to a bus out of town. We found it, and rode to the outskirts and the driver gave us the ride for free, as if he never expected us to have to pay. Then a woman walked with us five minutes to show us a good spot and the right road for hitchhiking and within 5 minutes, we climbed up into another lorry carrying frozen sausage pies, the driver telling us what were probably delightful stories, but unintelligible in his thick Scottish accent. We just nodded our heads and smiled. 

 

He dropped us at the cut-off to York and 10 minutes later, we were riding with a talkative, friendly man on his way home from work who asked us if we’d like to stop at his hour for tea before going on to the York Youth Hostel. He lived just outside in a charming village called Nether Poppleton. 

 

We happily agreed and as we entered his house, he told his wife and two daughters, 3 and 4 years old, that he brought some guests for tea. They greeted us warmly and when we finally sat down at the table, we realized the “tea” was “dinner” in England! A most pleasant meal followed and when we suggested we better get going to the Youth Hostel, he said he would be driving to Cambridge in two days and we were welcome to stay with them. His name was Jim Bold, his wife was Karen and the two daughters were Rachel and Jane.

 

An evening of lively talk about English politics, history and geography punctuated by crackers and cheese and all of it thoroughly delightful. The next day off to be tourists in York with its charming car-less narrow streets, open-air market, bright cathedral, delightful museums and famous wall, then back to our hosts, Jim and Karen Bold, for an evening of cribbage, canasta, watching a bit of rugby and British sit-com on TV.

 

The next day we visited the kids’ school, beautiful building and grounds, good materials, pleasant teachers and focused kids. I did some singing with the preschoolers. In the teacher’s room, the teachers were talking in hushed tones and let us know that they were discussing a child whose parents were (gasp!— divorced. They seemed aghast when we shared that that described some 40% of the families in our school! But here in Nether Poppleton, life seemed like the British version of Leave It To Beaver, the husbands off to work, the mums walking their kids to school, back yards with swings, pet rabbits, bicycles. And it worked. 

 

When we finally reluctantly parted, I gave my kazoo to 4-year old Rachel and Karen made a drawing for 3-year old Jane. Off we rode with Jim to be dropped at the cut-off to Cambridge.

 

In 2020, I decided to fill some of the pandemic time writing a book about this extraordinary trip, alternating between those journal entries and my comments so many years later. (A book I’m now determined to publish!) Here is what I wrote about that story: 

 

The kindness of strangers. The tire salesman, bus driver, the woman from the bus, the sausage lorry driver all willing and eager to help. And then the extraordinary generosity of the Bold family, inviting two complete strangers into their home for two days within ten minutes of meeting us. Visiting my folks in New Jersey a few weeks earlier, I had noticed them locking the doors during the day while they were in the house! Nothing had happened in the neighborhood to warrant that beyond the rising epidemic of fear as the basis of the lives we lived. 

 

This was the first example of how trust fulfilled its own possibility to make people kinder, more generous, more happy. And it was far from the last. I don’t remember the names of people who refused help or ignored us or insulted us (and here I’m talking about our life in the U.S.. On this trip, there were perhaps two mild incidents in a year of travel!). But I will never forget Jim and Karen Bold. 

 

And indeed, I never did. So knowing we were going back to York 48 years later on the way to our walking trip in the Yorkshire Dales, I decided we should return to Nether Poppleton to see if we could find them. Read on to discover what happened.