English Countryside
August 23, 1983

Dear Folks,

Beautiful, lush, and grassy hill country. Towns are smaller and very,very old. Many rich stone-walled farms and occasional massive mansions. Quite pastoral and sparsely populated. Like it very much. Perfect for walking.

Ventured off A6 at one point near Bakewell to walk through the countryside on one of the many public footpaths I've seen. A pure treat--crystal clear stream with deep pools and many trout. I took off my clothes and somehow found the nerve to take a plunge into the icy water. Thick, grassy cow and sheep meadows, wooden step-ways in the fences, waterfalls and a lake with dozens of wild ducks. Many more of the beautiful trout beneath the stream's falls, thick forests on the nearby hills and on the other side of the lake. No other people. Eventually there was no path as such, just the steps in the fences. With the heavenly scenery and the quietness and the soft, gray mist, it was (for at least two kilometers)the best I'd seen of England since near Shap. Such an incredibly deep sense of mysticalness, as I passed through those short parcels of natural beauty that England puts forth every so often. There was still magic there, even with all the traffic and the row houses and the construction.

That evening, at dusk, I became all the more certain that the same spirits who had once inspired writers to use this land for so many tales of magic and heroism still dwelt there. It was dusk, right before the sky gave up the last vistages of sunlight, when I had gazed at a tall hill over Matlock to see what looked to be the ruin of a large castle. The castle walls looked as black as the soul of the devil himself, and the gray sky seemed to swirl angrily above it, as if part of a large flag of defiance.

Beneath the dark and almost featureless structure there still remained the walled hillside plots that had surely once been worked by many, many serfs. As I watched the castle, and it watched Matlock, the sky went from gray-black to all black, and from the valley below the castle there rose a a ghostly mist. It crept slowly up the hillside, plot by plot. How many nights had the mist and the castle and the night sky rendezvoused like that? How many more of those silent meetings on the hill were yet to come?

Yes, the castle was but a decaying relic of man's past, but what of the souls its sight had mesmerized and stirred to contemplation? What of all the souls clothed in mail and silk that had dwelt within that stone edifice? What of all the souls of those who had toiled to keep the castle's masters satisfied? What of all the souls of those--like me--who had only watched from afar? Had they all dissipated as completely as the mist did with the return of the morning light? I did not know. All I did know was that I was not far from them, wherever they are.

Steven

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Shap to Milnthorpe, England
August 16, 1983

Dear Folks,

Such unexpected and incredible beauty today. From the gray and gloomy little factory village of Shap--where I stopped for half an hour in a steady, cold rain on the steps of a school to eat lunch (a can of baked beans, a pint bottle of milk and some tea bisuits--to the town of Kendal, I was to walk through some of the most hauntingly scenic countryside I've ever seen. It was like something out of a National Geographic magazine.

What I found today was exactly the British Isles I'd been expecting all along: miles upon miles of meticulously-constructed stone walls neatly griding grassy and treeless meadows that were pimpled with large, fat sheep and the occasional brown Jersey cow with a brass bell about its neck.

The farms I passed were old and massive, while the buildings were long and tall and made of thick brown stone and dark slate roofs. Many of the people who lived in this stretch (and there were very few)looked to be wealthy farmers whose families had resided here for many hundreds of years.

The land continued to rise all day and at times looked so much like that I'd seeen in Wales on the bus ride from London to Holyhead. Although the rain and the gray skies never ceased, I actually enjoyed it all the more. It lent a moodiness and a mysteriousness to the land that made it feel all the more ancient.

The land itself, as it streched away for endless miles upon miles of grassy round mountains, was enough to make me walk very slowly and with awe. The curvy road I was on wound tightly up the sides of the open mountains, and I was pleased at how few vehicles passed me with each hour. At the top of the highest pass the sky's heavy clouds rolled overhead at what seemed to be but an arm's length away, and the wind blew furiously and unhindered. So desolate and empty was the setting that even the stone walls ceased to border the road. It was all to easy to think of myself as being on the western American plains, or perhaps on a treeless island like those to be found in the Falklands where England and Argentina had recently fought a war. Other than some clumps of weeds and a forlorn-looking red telephone booth, there was nothing at the highest point in the road to indicate any other life on this world.

As I wound my way down the other side of the Cumbrian hills, I saw even less people--only bigger sheep farms and so many of the stone walls that I couldn't help but be amazed. The walls were around five feet high, with more than a few as high as eight or nine feet. All were at least eighteen inches thick and built entirely of unmortared, rough-shaped gray flat stone. They looked to have been built hundreds of years ago, and yet they were in such perfect order. Hardly a stone was out of place, even though each farm must have had dozens of miles of the walls boxing in the meadows that made up the steep sides of the hills and mountains.

At one sheep farm right beside the narrow road I stopped and asked for a glass of water. A young, brown-haired farm wife answered the door, and in her arms she held a naked boy of about two whom she seemed so proud of. His name was Steven, too.

She gave me some tea, and then she surprised me with a box of cookies and biscuits. I helped myself to a couple, and she had me take a handful more. It was so nice there, I thought, and from the way she smiled and talked, and from the sparkle in her eyes each time she looked at Steven, she looked as if she couldn't be any happier with life.

After drinking my tea I crossed the road and sat on a stone wall. I watched a muscular sheep farmer and what was obviously his son herd sheep into a dipping pen, where the sheep were dragged through a reddish-brown fluid that filled a 10-foot-long cement trough. Off to the side two small black-and white border collies lay nervously watching the loudly complaining sheep. The work looked to be hard and tedious, for the son would grab a sheep by one of its horns and by its rear quarters and dump it into the trough at the deep end. Then the father, straddling the two-foot-wide trough, would hook a metal hook onto the sheep's horns and push its body and head completely beneath the dip several times. Whereupon the sheep would swim to the other end and leap out to join its equally miserable peers.

The father looked like a true country gent, even in the midst of such a messy chore. He was dressed in a white shirt, neatly-pleated trousers, and a gray gentlemen's driving cap. With the exception of the high rubber boots and all those sheep passing beneath his legs, the rest of the farmer's attire made it look as if he belonged in an office in a city.

When the farmer and son had dipped perhaps a hundred of the complaining animals, the father slipped on a spotless wool tweed jacket and called to the dogs. The collies were so eager to obey they hurdled three walls to be with the sheep and their master.

I watched the man, the sheep, and the ever-circling darting dogs move slowly and steadily up the side of an adjoining mountain meadow. Their fluid movements made it seem as if the land had no slope at all. The man had to be at least 55-years old, and yet he never looked to be slowed by the sharp steepness of the earth. He and the animals moved ever upwards, ever higher.

I thought to myself that the farmer will undoubtedly live to be very old and will work to the day he dies. This was the sort of land that only a tough people with a lot of patience could ever comfortably call home.

Steven

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