And As He Walked

And as he walked, the rain settling in a misty cover across a bed of stone-enclosed pastures, the Crab Man enjoyed the metaphor of disturbing and being disturbed by many fields rather than simply tramping a solitary line. He crossed an empty pasture and, looking back, the sign on the gate said: “Bull In Field”. He shrugged. There or not there, there is always, in some sense “Bull in Field”.

He passed a young man carrying a plastic lunch box and a pickaxe thrown over his shoulder, looking like a refugee fleeing history. “Off for a day’s work?” “Definitely.” It’s was a long walk that day and he’d started an hour early. J----, from the B&B, rang the

Crab Man’s office to say she was worried for him. His blisters were bad, but he walked through them, the skin bursting and hardening. The pain was hungry, it wanted to eat up his concentration. Today, he must actively “look” in order to see. Beside the Derwent, wreaths had been laid. A bucket improvised as a gate latch. Signs told of voles, brook lampreys and great crested newts. He had the names now, but he could not see the animals. He became lost in some fields and then emerged along a road where the backyards were like miniature memorial gardens and theme parks. “No Respect For Old Lane” says a headline in a discarded newspaper. He climbs Curbar Gap and onto the moors. “Good morning!” The Crab salutes a couple walking their dog, just out of their car. “Going far?” But their walk is a private affair and they don’t want to talk. Nor any walker or cyclist he meets this day. And so it becomes a day of private journeying. Listening to the monologue in his head. Forcing his

consciousness out of his blisters and into the fields and moors he’s passing through. The road stretching two miles ahead, vehicles shimmering in the distance like the demon’s truck in Jeepers Creepers. He enjoys the space of this place. On top of the Gap he’d looked back and seen the rusting shape of a barn he’d passed, like a monopoly hotel, a piece of geometry on a rucked carpet of green. Things spread out, thoughts disperse. …And all the time he was looking for a sign, a symbol on the skyline: the shape of three trees planted as a Trinity, spaced equal distances apart, and then four trees planted together to make a mutant atrocity of tangled trunks. Somewhere out there. On a hill with a view of C-----------. He stops for a plate of duck and two Franciskaner Hefeweissbiers at the newly refurbished Highwayman at E---moor. There had been a time when the taste of this beer had meant he had arrived, fully and completely, in Munich. It was the taste of that place. Now it is part of the flux, of the globalised flow.

The food and drink are good, but this is not a pub. The customers sit at separate tables, the smiling staff repeatedly check “Is everything OK?” but each time they are already walking away before the Crab can answer. It is a place that is not a place, a motorway for the transportation of imagery, a conduit for the flow of commodities. At I-- and J----’s this morning the Crab realised that the paintings in his rented room were for sale, a catalogue sat on the dressing table. He had been sleeping, partly, in a retail opportunity. A small party of elderly ladies, perhaps regulars under the previous regime, enter The Highwayman, gingerly. They look, shrink and leave. The Crab walks on and is inspired!! The road seems mythic now!

He sees something like a human brain in the verge. It puffs up dust when booted - an old wasps’ nest! A dead cat suns itself on a wall beside a strapped bottle of water, the crumbling edifice of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre farm matches the yellowed out light all around, it is as if he is being filmed on 1970s grindhouse movie stock. Fifty or more Special Brew cans are crashed out on a short verge. More than halfway through his 20 mile day and his knees are fine. “Iron Man!” he shouts and waves at the sky. He is bingeing on isolation. A discarded mattress reminds him of a dream. Each infrequent little tin of loneliness – neeeeow! – whizzing by, only heightens his happy exposure to sun and wind.