by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

Eight years ago, I walked the Cumbria Way in England—or rather, I walked most of it. The whole walk is 70 miles and goes from Ulverston in the southernmost part of the Lake District to Carlisle in Scotland, crossing several fells, or mountains, and a lot of glacier-carved lake valleys in between. I skipped the first and last few miles, the ones that took walkers out of and into the cities where the path begins and ends and walked for 45 miles over three days through the heart of the national park.

One of the lovely things about long distance walking (in America we call it hiking) in England is that the paths are usually designed so that each day’s leg ends at a bed and breakfast, and there are baggage services that will pick up your luggage in the morning and drop it off at your next stop so that it will be waiting for you when you arrive. You can set out in the morning with just your daypack and your lunch, although often, there will be a handily-placed pub or cafe where you can stop halfway for lunch and a cup of tea.

And then there’s the landscape—the valleys of hundreds of shades of green, the dry-stone walls, the rocky paths and waterfalls, the glacial lakes, the dark fells, the purple Scottish thistle, the brilliance of the sun when it finally emerges from the clouds and pours its golden light across the hills. The Lake District is still the most beautiful part of the world I have ever visited.

As I said, I skipped the beginning and the end of the trail. Part of the reason I decided to do so was that I wasn’t sure I could walk the entire 70 miles. I had spent my twenties dealing with an autoimmune disease that required two major surgeries. My health issues had felt like a long wandering away from the path that I had imagined my life taking when I graduated from college. Even those 45 miles felt daunting. But I hoped that the three-day hike would be a kind of pilgrimage, walking into the wild of nature in order to hear a word from the Lord and to say to myself that the rest of my life would tell a different story.

I discovered once I began walking that the Cumbria Way is known by locals simply as “the Way,” which, I knew, was also the name that the first believers in Jesus used to refer to Christianity in the book of Acts, before they had acquired the name of Christians. Instantly I felt like I was inside a metaphor for the Christian life, or even inside a psalm. Soon I encountered “living water” up in the fells—the little mountain streams that run noisily everywhere in the Lake District on their way down to the tarns, or lakes. The Lake District is the rainiest part of England, and I had accidentally booked my trip for the rainiest week of the year, so there were these little living streams everywhere, their babble the constant soundtrack of my walk.

I had expected to find a lot of other walkers on the path with me, but I was told at my first bed and breakfast that it was the off season; most other walkers knew that the week I was there, it would pour down rain every morning, and the fell paths would be especially slippery. So I found myself walking almost completely on my own, encased in a waterproof jacket, waterproof pants, and mostly waterproof shoes, spending a lot of time meditating on Psalm 121 (“He will not let your foot slip”) and Psalm 94 (“When I said, ‘My foot is slipping,’ your unfailing love, LORD, supported me”).

And then there were sheep. So many sheep. The Lake District is known for its native Herdwick sheep, which are raised on the fells, and they were everywhere. I discovered that no matter how high you climb, there is no place where you can get away from the sheep. I remember crossing a high pass in the Langdale Pikes and thinking that I had at last climbed so high that I had surely left the last sheep behind, when of course I found one more lost, or at least wandering, sheep waiting for me.

The sheep made me laugh a lot during those three days. Their habit of getting themselves into the most unexpected places. Their soft white faces peeping at me from around a corner. The—there is no other word for it—sheepishness with which they encountered me on a narrow trail, backing up anxiously as they tried to decide how to get around this unwelcome stranger on their fell.

So of course I began to meditate on myself as a sheep. Now, I love having an itinerary and a map. When I go hiking with friends, I’m the one with the compass and the state park map, but that can often bleed into wanting to be in control, to know where I’m going, or to choose for myself where I’m going, rather than trusting the Lord. But I often felt myself to be wandering, like a sheep, not knowing where the map was that would keep me on the path of God’s plan for my life.

On the first day walking in the Lake District, I had left Coniston Water, the home of the critic John Ruskin, and walked past Beatrix Potter’s estate and on for about thirty minutes when I realized I was lost. I had been in a wood, but now I was in a field with a bull, and I was pretty sure that I was not supposed to be in a field with a bull. I gave him a wide berth and retraced my steps to the other side of the wood, where I found the problem. In the middle of a field, the path had been hard to see. I had taken what seemed like the obvious direction toward a path heading into the wood, but it hadn’t been the right path. After some searching and carefully checking and re-checking my compass and the map, I found the place where another, harder-to-see footpath split off from the one I had been on and led in another direction. I would find out a few times on that trip that it was easy to stay on the path when I was climbing up and over a fell: there was usually only one way up and one way down the difficult portions of the Way. It was in the valleys, in the easy places, where it was easy to wander accidentally astray.

I took a long time to walk each day’s section of the path. I stopped a lot, trying to pace myself, wondering if my strength would be enough for that day’s portion of the Way, but also sometimes just to enjoy the view. It would usually be sunset by the time I walked into the little town where my next bed and breakfast waited for me. I came to expect each B&B owner to greet me with a little anxiety, saying they had been wondering if I was OK, because I had arrived so late. At the end of the second day, I was walking slowly because I was stiff, and I had the beginnings of a blister because all my socks were wet from the constant rain. As soon as I reached Keswick that night and quit walking, all the muscles in my legs seized up so that I could barely walk to a restaurant for dinner. I stood under the shower for a long time that night, willing the hot water to loosen my muscles so that I could continue for the final day. I wasn’t sure I could.

The last day was the longest. I had to walk all the way around Skiddaw, the fourth-highest mountain in England, in other to avoid the hazardous weather at the peak. Even so, for a lot of the 17 miles that day I walked in cold rain, and at one point had to stop and try to shelter beside a boulder from a hailstorm. By the time I could see the final town in the distance, I knew if I stopped I would not be able to keep going. I passed a woman just as I walked into town, and she thought I had just come through a rain shower, because my face was wet. I hadn’t been rained on; I was crying. I had come to the end of my pilgrimage, and I almost couldn’t believe it I’d made it.

Earlier that day I had been walking about halfway up the fell when I heard a man calling out in the valley below me, a sing-song repeated call. I was too far away to hear what words he was saying, but I could soon see sheep dogs running up from the valley to help guide the sheep down to the shepherd. Suddenly sheep were bounding down the mountain all around me, their anxiety about getting close to me less powerful than their urge to obey their shepherd’s call. The sheep did not just know his voice; they knew the call he sang out that told them it was time to come home. And none of them, it turned out, had wandered too far away to hear the call when he came.

By J.R.R Tolkien

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