tramping
tramping
CHAPTER SIX
THE COMPANION
GIVE me a companion of my way, be it only to mention how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines,” wrote Hazlitt. An ideal companion is ideal. However, we all know that companionship prolonged may be trying even to good friends. If you live for some time in the same room with any one you discover that fact. Indeed, you discover a good deal about your companion that you had not suspected before you were intimate, and he about you. Eventually a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand becomes a storm, andyou quarrel over what seems afterwards to have been nothing at all. Even man and wife of ideal choice find that out.
But there is perhaps no greater test of friendship than going on a long tramp. You discover to one another all the egoisms and selfishnesses you possess. You may not see your own: you see your companion’s faults. In truth, if you want to find out about a man, go for a long tramp with him.
Still there are rewards. If you do not quarrel irreparably and part on the road you will probably find your friendship greatly increased by the experience of the wilds together. I like tramping alone, but a companion is well worth finding. He will add to the experience; perhaps double it.
You have naturally long conversations. You comment on Nature around you, and on tramping experiences. You talk of books and pictures, of poems, of people, but above all, almost inevitably, of yourself. Tramping makes you self-revelatory. And this is an enormous boon. If you have patience you will get to see your friend in a new light; you willfill in the picture which up to then you have but vaguely sketched. The richest people in life are the good listeners. If, however, you also must talk, must reveal your life, your heart, your prejudices and passions, it will often happen that you will express yourself to yourself, as much as to your friend. Self-confession is growth of the mind, an enriching of the consciousness. In talk which seems idle enough you may be reaching out toward the infinite.
The early morning tramp is a striving time, one of reaching out, of vigorous assertions. The afternoon may mock the morning with jesting, with ribald songs,
“Songs that make you cough and blow your nose,”
“Songs that make you cough and blow your nose,”
“Songs that make you cough and blow your nose,”
“Songs that make you cough and blow your nose,”
as Kipling says. But the evening will make amends. There is a great poetic time after the camp fire has been lit, the coffee brewed, the sleeping place laid out. You sit by the embers as the twilight deepens and talk till the stars shine brightly upon you. That is the time of confidences, of tenderness, of melancholy, of the “might-have-been” and the “ifonly.” You are full of the songs of the birds to which you have listened all day. Music will come out again.
But there are many types of companionship: the two undergraduatesen vacance, the two cronies of the same town, the middle-aged man and his young disciple, sweethearts, bachelor girls, father and son, man and wife, friend and friend.
Young athletes will go to the furthest distance; lovers the shortest. But the lovers may be out the longest time. I am inclined to measure a tramp by the time taken rather than by the miles. If a hundred miles is covered in a week it is a longer tramp than if it is rushed in three days. There is great happiness in taking a month over it. However, it is hardly possible to walk less than seven miles a day if one sleeps out of doors.
A point to make sure about in companionship is distribution of kit. You do not need two coffeepots, two sugar bags—a number of duplicates can be avoided. See your companion has the right boots. The slower walker should set the pace. It is absurd for one towalk the other off his feet just to show what a walker he is. There is great difference in walking capacity. Some can do forty miles a day without turning a hair; many can hardly keep up fifteen. If your companion breaks his feet or turns an ankle you may have to wait some days with him while he recovers. The first days of tramping are in this respect the most dangerous. It is so easy to blister the feet if one marches too far in hot weather. One or two blisters may be remedied, but there comes a morning when you cannot get your boots on.
The best companions are those who make you freest. They teach you the art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves. After freedom, I enjoy in a companion a well stocked mind, or observant eyes, or wood lore of any kind. It is nice sometimes to tramp with a living book.
Of course, one should carry a notebook or diary or some broad-margined volume of poems. You can annotate Keats from your life on the road. But whether you do that or merely record the daily life in a page-a-dayjournal, you are enriching yourself enormously by what you can write about.
Lovers, I imagine, will carry no diary. Their impressionable hearts are the tablets on which they write. Every one has a tendency to write down the unforgettable: it is obviously unnecessary. Loving pairs, however, seldom take their staffs and their packs and make for the wild. Even in our free days they are somewhat afraid of it. But it is to be recommended as an admirable preparation for married life. It is a romantic adventure, but it leads to reality. If you have to carry your beloved, you will probably have to carry her for the rest of your life. You cannot tell till you’ve spent a night in the rain, or lost the way in the mountains, and eaten all the food, whether you have both stout hearts and a readiness for every fate. If not a tramp before marriage, then a tramp directly after comes not amiss, a honeymoon spent tramping. It is an ideal way to begin life. For tramping is the grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar—but it is worth while.
There are few more felicitous proposals ofmarriage set down in literature than the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table’s, “Will you take the long road with me?”
Lifeà deuxis much more of an adventure than lifeseul, much more of a tramping expedition, less of a “carriage forward,” “fragile,” “lift with care,” and “use no hooks” affair. One, be it the man, be it the woman, pulls the other from security. It is a more difficult way of life; it needs learning.
On the road the weak and strong points of character are revealed. There are those who complain, making each mile seem like three; there are those who have untapped reserves of cheerfulness, who sing their companions through the tired hours. But in drawing-rooms, trains, tennis parties, theater, and dance hall, they would never show either quality. The road shows sturdiness, resourcefulness, pluck, patience, energy, vitality, or per contra, the lack of these things. It is something to face the first night together under the stars, the fears of lurking robbers or wild animals, fears of the unnamed.
The first night out together of a man andhis wife is a memorable occasion. You go back to the primitive, but there is something very cosy and comfortable about it—the only man in the world with the only woman. Darkness settles down upon you in a stranger way than it does upon man and man. There is more poetry in the air and in your mind. More tenderness is enkindled than ceiling and walls of house ever saw, tenderness of a certain sheltering care which it is luxurious to give.
Night is dark and still and intense, and you can hear two hearts beating while you look outward and upward, and dimly discern the passage of bats’ wings in the air.
The first night, however, is seldom without alarm; the cold wet nose of a hedgehog touching your beloved’s cheek may cause her to rend the air with a shriek, a field mouse at her toes cause her scarcely less alarm. It is good to pack her in a really capacious sleeping bag; it excludes rodents. And if you are not too big you can snuggle into it yourself, if the lady proves to be nervous and you are on such terms of fellowship as to make it possible.
A night of murmurings and deepening shadows and freshness, and then, perhaps, of a gentle rain before dawn, and of glimmerings of new day and sweetness of wild flowers and birds’ songs before sunrise. You watch the boles of the great trees grow into stateliness in the twilight, and the night is over. With an arm round your fair one you go to the point where in orange and scarlet the great friend of all the living is lifting himself once more out of the east to show us the way of life.