Book of Travels: August

Hunting salmon, the human condition and disappearing acts.

Sep 07, 2024

A monthly feature giving you a glimpse into our nomadic family life.

Monday 5th August
East Grange Farm, Moray, Scotland

When I wake up in the middle of the night, Tara is not there. I don’t know why. It’s unexpected and I have no idea where she is.

Fear burns off the fog of sleep. What’s happened? I recall the day gone by: fraught and full of conflict with threats from me to dismantle the whole thing.

Thoughts churn. I imagine the worst-case-scenario and things start to look bleak. Two concerns push forward through the malaise: how do I explain to the children where mummy has gone and how do I proceed as a single parent.

Slow down. Too far too soon brain. Backtrack a little. Where is she?

I grab my head torch and go looking for my woman in the dark rainy night.

Between the trees I cast the beam through the gloom looking for strange fruit. Nothing. Check the toilets, showers and outbuildings. No sign. Down to the big shed. Slide open the wooden door on its iron rail. Sweep the light across the dusty floor. In the far corner there’s a body under some blankets on an old sofa. It rises up under the spotlight, eyes shielded from the glare.

‘Hello?’ she says, startled.

I straighten up and drop my head back, exhaling the dread.

Then I switch off the head torch and go back to the van.

It’s two o’clock in the morning. A car makes its way along the track, heading for the exit. Odd time to leave.

Five minutes later the van door opens. It’s Tara, hurrying and breathing fast. She’d heard the early departure and feared the worst.

I step out and stand with her in the rain. She leans into me.

‘Don’t give up,’ she says.

‘I haven’t given up. I wouldn’t be out looking for you if I had.’ I reply.

Tuesday 6th August
Spey Bey, Moray, Scotland

In the morning, the sunshine is merciful after a difficult night. We make coffee and sit together. Tara is affectionate. When I look at her there is a curious childlike openness to her face: her mouth is soft and her eyes are all the way open. A part that is usually kept back is available and I am captivated.

‘Let’s stay together,’ she says.

I’m already there in my own mind so I nod and agree, showing her my eyes.

We sit for a few minutes in companionable silence.

‘Sex once a month?’ I say.

She laughs.

‘Maybe more,’ she says, getting my hopes up.

For those of you reading for free, consider becoming a paid subscriber from £5 a month. Writing is my craft: direct, honest and authentic. Money expresses your appreciation.

Or become a spontaneous supporter with a one-off donation (any amount).

PayPal

When the River Spey rages, it gathers up vast numbers of stones and crashes downstream to Spey Bay where it hurls them into the sea in wave after wave of lithic fury.

The magnanimous Moray Firth, unimpressed, simply deflects the hail sideways, creating long shingle bars and banks that stretch for miles.

We sit and look out over the sea of stones, sharing a drink while the children explore. A flock of seagulls gathered on the riverbank alights all at once, drawing our attention.

‘There’s an osprey hanging up there,’ says a Scottish voice: a man nearby directs our focus with his outstretched arm.

There it is, high above the water, relaxed and resplendent. It flashes its white underwing as it glides upstream. There can't be many more remarkable sights in Scotland than an osprey hunting.

They don’t prey on other birds but, at the sight of a raptor over their heads, the precautious seagulls have taken to the wing. Reverently, respectfully, we all watch it follow the river inland.

Sitting in the cab after dinner, I gaze across the Moray Firth toward the hills between Helmsdale and Wick. They are a soft silhouetted undulation, like distant whales exposed on a watery gold horizon.

This vista is our bedtime backdrop.

Wednesday 7th August
Spey Bey, Moray, Scotland

I’m up early out on the sea of stones before the dog walkers, whale spotters and birdwatchers.

There’s a hot sun rising: a path of orange fire leads out across the flat sea to a pool of intense light.

The stones grind and crunch as I cross them. Startled by the sound, rabbit sprints away. Lonely crow waddles up the slope. Sandwich tern grates and grumbles. Pied wagtail bobs its black and white tail. My ten-pound charity shop binoculars magnify the river mouth, busy with birds.

The light changes frequently as the sun gets caught behind a stray cloud and then breaks free, throwing moving shadows over the sea.

The cool breeze is making my tea go cold: drink up.

I follow a wet-dry timeline on the stones, showing damp and green where the water crept up with the tide, serving a salad of salty seaweed on the side. Walking along this border heading north-west, the rising sun warms the back of my neck. The titanium tea mug, now empty, is carabiner’d to a belt loop, jangling on my hip.

There’s a curve of colour in the sea to the right of the river mouth: a current of water perhaps, or a stone bank beneath the surface.

Five swans scull on the river, facing upstream, working hard below the surface to stay stationary. Another sits alone on the bank, preening. Further down, muscovy ducks go with the flow.

Where the stones meet the river I watch the surface of the water dance, and wonder what’s beneath. There could be salmon swimming up this river right now.1

The story of the wild salmon is an heroic epic. After swimming hundreds of miles, it throws itself up impossible waterfalls to spawn in its home stream, using its sense of smell to find the exact gravel bank where it was born. Spent and exhausted, it usually dies soon after.

The young parr live in freshwater rivers and pools until they’re between two and four years old when they undergo a physiological transformation which allows them to survive at sea. Now known as smolts, they continue to change and develop their distinctive silvery colour before heading out in late spring. A few years later they return as adult salmon to spawn and this is when you’re most likely to see them.

A man in waders is standing in the river, midstream, about a quarter of a mile away, his fishing line going away from him with the current.

Heron stands sentinel by the water’s edge. Its neck extends and the head pulls back to preen the chest feathers.

Up above, unnoticed by both, osprey is back, looking down into the water with sight beyond sight.

Three hunters coveting the pink flesh: the orange-red carotenoid hue the salmon get from the krill and other tiny shellfish they eat out at sea.

Down by the riverside, with the sea behind me, I go gently, blissfully, out of my mind. The sound of the water mesmerises me. I relax into my legs and let my body hold me up for a moment, swaying like tall grass in the breeze.

Later we stop by the exposed and windy harbour in Hopeman. Light is rushing across the water with the gusting winds. An older resident warns us off sleeping there, in the nicest possible way:

‘You’re very welcome here and in the village but please, no overnight parking.’

He’s so polite we decide to heed his words and drive back down the coast.

On the way we pick up a denim jacket for Thor, the eldest. He has been pushing for one for some time. Puberty is driving a burgeoning self consciousness. He comes back from the shop with the jacket and a classic handmade Kent comb. He looks like a 1950s teenager.

Thursday 8th August
The Park Ecovillage, Findhorn, Scotland

One might do one’s best to carve out a few minutes on a sunny morning to read great literature while drinking fine coffee, but when the youngest child digs up cat shit in the sandpit and smears it on his trousers, the book will remain unopened on the bench, the coffee will go cold, and the sun will go in.

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,2

My brow thickens; a full grump descends. I am but a mouse and my plans oft’ go awry.

Around me the hips and the haws are showing. North finds an early autumn leaf. The heather is blooming with soft purple flowers.

Summer is coming to an end together with our season of work on the campsite. Where might the wind blow us when the work is done and the autumn gales come?

We talk about it over afternoon chai. Wherever we go we need food and fuel, and to buy food and fuel we need money, and to earn money we need work.

Work, money, food and fuel are essential for survival but getting them requires more time spent in the system, and the more time I spend in the system the more my will to survive is crushed.

As Paul Kingsnorth notes:

We were all really born for an age of walnut trees and shaded pools, but instead we find ourselves in the Machine’s maw with the jaws closing, and it is hard to know whether to fight or run, or whether either is possible…3

This makes for a tricky dilemma: it is essential to play the conventional game to some degree in order to survive but in order to thrive, rather than merely survive, I must turn away from the system and move toward the wilds.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's
lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the
great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still
water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.4

Truth, I have discovered, resides in nature’s wild places, here on Earth, while in towns and cities, in the system-made World, damned lies proliferate.

Rather than being imprisoned in the world, I want to spend as much time as possible on earth. Although they are inseparable, it is possible to move between them and there is a vast experiential difference between the two.

When I am in one of the few remaining remote sanctuaries on earth, I might get lucky and go out of my mind. In such a state, I tend not to pay much attention to the bureaucratic, financial and time demands of the system. This has the potential to create problems, such as temporary debt.

If I abdicate responsibility for engaging with the system and someone else feels they need to take the throne, this also causes problems. Temporary freedom is no fun if someone has smuggled the system in through the back door.

Freedom is terrifying and many people don’t know what to do with it: the uncertainty, the unknown, the wide-open horizon, the timelessness, the absence of doing, the empty page and the encounter with self.

I notice this can catalyse fear in others, leading to a focus on lack, which often results in anxiety, stress and a constant sense of existential dread.

Someone has to take responsibility for finding work, money, food and fuel. Don’t they?

Yes, but responsibility can be taken up when I decide, at my own discretion, in controlled bursts, with a clear end point and exit plan.

I am resigned to the inevitability of spending time in the system. I am dependent on it because I cannot generate my own food and fuel for survival, therefore it is unavoidable.

Under duress, I will walk through the gates beneath the sign with its treacherous promise: Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free).

I know from experience a small part of me will wither and die while I am slaving away doing pointless tasks for other people or contributing to the profits of corporations, but that is the deal.

Because of an inherited legacy agreement I made with society, I must move between temporary freedom and periods of indentured work-slavery.5 I exchange part of myself for just enough food and fuel to keep the wolf from the door.

What gives me succour is the knowledge that sooner or later the wolf will wander off in search of other prey and I can walk back out through the gates and return to earth.

Not only can I walk out, my van-home is a purpose-built escape-ship which can transport me and my family away from the safe, secure, soul-crushing machine-world and into a direct experience of the life-giving, life-affirming, life-threatening wilds.

Tara loves, and fears, the wild places. Her barefoot spirit is at home in these places. In the wilderness, her true soul comes home. But another part of her, the self, worries about the loss of safety and security. Existential angst soon follows, which torments her in the loneliness of the night.

This means she is more motivated to lead us back into connection with the conventional comfortable world to harvest as much money (security) and normality (safety) as possible.

In some ways this is useful, as it addresses the work-money-food-fuel demand, but it is also miserable.

Advice-givers and other well-intentioned bores might counsel that the best thing to do is meet somewhere in the middle.

Compromise: the received wisdom of the age. In my experience the middle-ground is awash with mediocrity: miserable and mundane, inferior and indifferent, a second-rate featureless hell.

Whichever way I turn, I am confronted with a choice between misery and hardship.6

Choose the system and I get some stability. The system is safe, secure and comfortable7 but it comes at a price: deep-fathom misery and the slow but steady dissolution of my soul.

Break free and run for the hills instead and my heart will brim over, but I will also have to deal with a number of hardships, some benign, others onerous: living in a very small space with six people, not knowing where we’re going to sleep, searching for and rationing water, cutting expenditure and outgoings to the bone, no postal address, no shower, no hot water, going out in all weathers to dig holes, doing without many (not all) luxuries, finding, foraging and processing firewood, meagre earnings, bearing the burden of debt and so on. You pays your money, and you takes your choice.8

It’s true that I don’t have much ambition as far as conventional goals and aspirations go, but ‘there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved.’9

Charles Bukowski’s poem, Laughing Heart, captures the struggle:

your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.10

Friday 9th August
East Grange Farm, Moray, Scotland

Back on the campsite for work: the slow meaningless grind.

Saturday 10th August
East Grange Farm, Moray, Scotland

Sinking further and further into the sludge of myself.

Sunday 11th August
East Grange Farm, Moray, Scotland

The qualities of misery: detachment, depression, despair, tears locked away; weary, aching body, bone-tired, jaw set; tense back, tight hips; cut off, can’t focus, can’t do anything right, clumsy; avoiding eye contact, the thousand yard stare; shallow breath, slumped posture, shame, failure, vulnerability, give-up, suicidal; pain pushing, rage lurking; can’t get going, don’t want to get going, nowhere to be, nowhere to go; a self-imposed prison.

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) characterised the human condition as frustration-filled and fundamentally painful.

Our lives are a pendulum between boredom and suffering, an emotional to and fro: happy today, unhappy tomorrow, happy today, unhappy tomorrow, ad infinitum.

This is immediately recognisable to me in my suffocating emotional swamp.

In my diary there are no references to the sun, or the sky, or the wind in the trees, or the visiting butterfly and beetle; no mention of birdsong or the smell of rain or the delight and wonder in my children’s eyes; no details about my chance encounter with a sincere and open-hearted fellow-father at the washing-up sink.

I know those things happened but they did not penetrate my miasma, or more accurately, I did not allow them to, or more precisely still, I allowed them in, experienced them momentarily, and then pushed them away, choosing misery instead: the human condition is frustration-filled and fundamentally painful.

Monday 12th August
East Grange Farm, Moray, Scotland

The emotional fog smothers everything, all day. In the evening Tara forces a walk and talk.

Out along the far paths the trees bear witness to a lot of shouting and swearing (me), denial and pretence (Tara), the ramming of inconvenient truths down throats (me), existential fear (Tara), and cowardliness and hypocrisy (me).

The fire-breathing dragon chases its tail until it threatens to devour itself: the exchange becomes circular and repetitive.

We have stopped at a place where the grassy track forms a crossroads. The monkey babble continues, fitful and broken now.

Then the light changes.

A blinding sunset burns through the cloud: penetrating, intense, and irresistible.

In their mercy the gods, shaking their heads and taking pity, have guided us here and are exposing us to overwhelming wonder.

The fearful, squabbling chimps are awestruck. They stop pacing, stand still, and quieten down.

Momentarily freed from the human condition, they experience ‘a sensational wonderland. A hyper-vivid experience of every moment being pristinely itself and yet connected to every other moment in a mesmerising whole.’ 11

Truth and understanding break through.

Even in the belly of the beast there is a disco ball.12

If you’ve got something to say, write a comment. I will read and respond (eventually) and I like to engage with different ideas, criticism and questions.

The Rover

4 Comments