Speyside Way - Day 2 of 6 - part 1

April 21, Saturday. From Aviemore to Grantown-on-Spey. Estimate was 17. IPhone said 20. I suspect some of the discrepancy was my losing my way a couple of times and having to back track to get back on the trail - I also suspect the official one was an underestimate. 

I am relaxing in a private room with a private bath, which feels like a great luxury after staying in a hostel dorm with a shared bath down the hall last night. 

The shared room was especially challenging because I had already gotten dressed and packed up (and no doubt repeatedly disturbed my dorm mate’s sleep) when I realized it was 12:30am not 6:00 am. If I had a room to myself I would probably have felt free to unpack. As it was I left my packed backpack in the hall and crawled into bed in my clothes - and never really got back to sleep. 

So this morning at 5am (having had maybe a couple of 20minute naps since the midnight fiasco), I decided I might as well get up. I didn’t actually start walking until 6 so who knows what I did? Brushed my teeth and drank a cup of tea and dawdled. 

The walk was pleasant, the weather on the cold side but nothing like what is coming later this week (two days the lows will be in the 20s, and tomorrow, rain). Today the paths were mostly level with easy footing. I was struck though that I lost my way both yesterday and today so I have decided that it is related to this trail being so connected with whisky. Even though I don’t plan to taste whisky because I have found I am quite allergic to it and feel bad afterwards in a way that it completely separate from alcohol content. But losing my way seems related to the role of whisky in my life. 

Do you really want to hear about this and do I really want to write about it? I had long and very meaningful conversations with my imaginary Jesus - I told him he didn’t seem very real to me. He said I refused to believe in him because I was unwilling to receive his love. We argued a bit but it came down to him saying I could not accept God’s fallibility as a creator, or his, or that of anyone who had loved me, or my own. I wanted love to be perfect. Never doing harm, never abandoning, never betraying. It was my stepfather’s scotch whisky that was at the heart of my experience of abandonment and betrayal. My mother’s unwillingness or inability to confront his bullying and humiliating and hurting me and the other children when he drank. 

I don’t want to write about this. I don’t want to write when the words don’t sing. I also expect my own love  of writing to be perfect, to flow beautifully, to be fun, filled with delight. This is onerous - as walking sometimes is. So let’s not talk about whisky or Jesus and the way for a short time in my life I felt loved by some priests and nuns and laypeople in the Catholic Church. The way the Christian myth and the ritual wove together a web of story and practice that made me feel loved and belonging and able to be in the presence of something sacred I called God. And how betrayed and abandoned I felt when one priest let me down - loved me, as my imaginary Jesus would say, imperfectly and fallibly. Jesus keeps telling me his whole story is about how it’s worth it - the miracle of being alive, being able to walk and see and hear and taste and smell - and experience beauty and love. That’s a bigger miracle he tells me than curing a disease or bringing someone back from the dead. Creation is the miracle - and it is not perfect. It is full of ugliness and horror and cruelty and his message is that it is worth it. That we can’t make it perfect but we can love it. And that is why his story involves his becoming human and experiencing torture and humiliation and abandonment by God. Because that’s part of the miracle. It’s horrible it’s morally unacceptable but it’s part of what is. The creator was fallible. The universe is not perfect. But it is worth it. 

So jesus and I go on and on arguing about this. I walk along what was once a railroad track, seldom seeing the Spey River I thought I would be walking beside. I meet a man whose little dog seems to be in love with the cows and they with him.  They all follow the little dog to the very edge of the field and look eagerly and expectantly at him. The man says he doesn’t know why. The cows just seem to like his dog. 

When the river does appear I take photos looking both ways from the bridge. This is supposed to be the Speyside Way but I’ve had only a few glimpses of the river Spey these first two days. 

I wonder how a photo can convey the movement that is so essential to a river’s presence. It’s a lot the same problem as how a 2-dimensional image can convey the curves and roundness of the landscape. I thought these stripes of color on the newly mowed grass might do it (but of course they do not) because when you are walking through it you can almost feel yourself rolling down those curves or running your hand over them. There is a tactile kinesthetic experience thst I can’t get the photo to suggest. 

It was fun to see all the bundles of hay stacked up beside this newly mowed pasture. Speaking of which, I walked by stacks and stacks of timber while Jesus and I were arguing and I realized that my dislike of the slaughter of innocents (in this case trees) was related to my refusal to accept a flawed universe and my inability to protect trees, which I love, from destruction. 

Interestingly, I came upon an educational sign explaining the value of thinning trees to the forest ecology. It was well done I thought. 

To be continued in

Speyside Way - Day 2 of 6 - part 2