"Freedom" by Sebastian Junger

This book is framed by a travelogue. The author, with three friends and a dog, walked for a year (although not all in one go) along the railroad lines in the American east, sleeping rough. It is in many ways a classic American journey: the men are emulating the pioneers, they are practising the cherished American ideals of self-sufficiency and freedom from authority.

They are a macho bunch. Four men, all experienced in warfare (Junger is a journalist and war reporter, and the friends are a conflict photographer and two veterans from the Afghan campaign), who anticipate trouble: “We were always worried about the locals and on a weekend night it seemed like a good idea to sleep at a place that was hard to find and easy to leave. If they came up one side, we’d go down the other. If that didn’t work, we’d stay on top and see how badly they wanted this.” (Book Two: Fight) Indeed, they are shot at more than once.

As they walk, Junger muses over that classic American ideal: Freedom. He and his friends feel free (“most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” ; Book One: Run) but this is a mirage because their existence is marginal and precarious. Freedom is "first and foremost ... the absence of threat. A person who can be killed without any consequences for the killers is not free in the most important sense of the word” (Book One: Run) There must be a trade-off between autonomy and security. Junger and his friends may have no obligations to outsiders but to stay safe they have to become tightly interdependent, ceding personal freedom to the needs of the group. In the same way, the American pioneers as a group were tightly bound by a code of obligation to one another because each might need the other to help when the Indians (Native Americans) attacked. This is the same bargain as that made when joining a street gang: "The inside joke about freedom ... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.” (Book One: Run) 

But surely hunter-gatherer societies are freer than others. Movement from place to place is, he suggests “subversive for the development of authority ... Adults of either sex can readily, if they choose, obtain enough food to feed themselves and are potentially autonomous.” (Book One: Run). His group of friends are like nomads but although they feel free he realises that “everything we needed—food, clothes, gear—came from the very thing we thought we were outwitting. ... Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one—literally no one—refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.” (Book One: Run) 

Most people live as citizens of a nation state and have surrendered a part of their own freedom in return for prosperity within that state. Junger realises that, counter to the opinion that freedom means the freedom to make money, a society with a great discrepancy between the poor and the rich must have limited freedom for the poor (a wage slave is still a slave). “An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don’t have to make sacrifices for you.” (Book Three: Think)

 Similarly, nations are prepared to bargain away some of their sovereignty in exchange for prosperity (as brought by mutual trading alliances) or security (achieved through common defence systems). Junger believes that in human societies the powerful cannot always prevail against the powerless, citing examples (eg Afghanistan) in which insurgencies have defeated powerful armies. He sees this as key to the development of international human rights which may curtail freedom but are essential to ensuring the freedom of citizens within societies. 

The book is also a meditation on walking. I have done some long-distance walks (though much shorter than this one - up to 100 miles - and not sleeping rough but deliberately seeking out towns, hotels and restaurants as part of the experience) and I enjoyed this aspect of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “The ancient Celtic measurement of a “league” was defined as the distance a man could walk in an hour—roughly three or four miles.” (Book One: Run)
• “The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.” (Book One: Run)
• “One of God’s great oversights is that dogs don’t live as long as men” (Book Three: Think)
• “Rightly or wrongly, society tends to value women’s survival more than men’s, and that makes machine-gunning them problematic.” (Book Three: Think)
• “History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived—especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power.” (Book Three: Think)

Freedom is an interesting, if very personal, exploration of an important philosophical concept. It's also a fun read!

August 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Salt Path" by Raynor Winn

 Within the same week, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lost their farmhouse home, after losing a court case, and Moth was diagnosed with an incurable terminal disease. So they decided to walk the South-West Coast path which is 630 miles along the north coast of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall from Minehead to Land's End and then along the south coast of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset from Land's End to Poole. They are incredibly short of money, trying to survive on £48 per week, so that they are having to camp wild. They often go hungry, they are almost always wet, they are often cold. Moth is frequently in pain from his disease. They walk half as fast as they expected. Being homeless they are often shunned. In every way, their decision to do this walk is crazy. And yet, being so close to nature enables them to appreciate life and thus come to terms with Moth's imminent death.

A book that is full of humour and compassion, with some brilliant descriptions of nature.

It starts with a life-and-death moment in the middle of a night as their beach-pitched tent is in danger of being overwhelmed by the incoming tide: "The man, who only two months earlier had struggled to put on his coat without help, was standing on a beach in his underpants holding an erected tent above his head with a rucksack on his back saying, run." (Prologue)

Perhaps the thing that keeps it going all the way is the audacity of their daring and the endurance in the face of so much suffering.

Selected quotes:

• "We're not as ninja as we used to be." (Ch 3)
• "We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show." (Ch 13)
• "Between morning and early evening, camping spots abound. After six, they're nowhere to be seen." (Ch 13)
• "Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? ... If the homeless of our own country were gathered in a refugee camp, or rode the seas in boats of desperation, would we open our arms to them?" (Ch 21)
• "Our hair was fried and falling out, our nails broken, clothes worn to a thread, but we were alive. Not just breathing through the thirty thousand or so days between life and death, but knowing each minute as it passed, swirling around in an exploration of time." (Ch 21)
• "The thought of a room in a house full of teenagers made me shrivel a little inside. I'd already done that and thankfully they grew up." (Ch 21)

Did it make me want to go for a long distance walk? Yes! The memories of my long distance walks are among my most vivid. But I wouldn't want to do it the way they did: broke, filthy, homeless, cold and hungry. Call me soft but, while there is pleasure in wind and sun and rain and fatigue, there is also pleasure in the hot shower or (even better) wallowing in a hot bath at the end of the day, in the beers because you've earned it at the end of the day, in the soft bed for the sleep of the just, and in the full English breakfast to set you up at the start of the next day. Call me soft ... or call me someone who seeks to experience all of the pleasures of life.

I've now seen the film of the trek. Wonderful scenery and great acting but somehow it misses the drama and the issues of the book.

There have recently been newspaper reports which cast doubts over the truth of this story.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

January 2022; 274 pages

Other great books about long distance walking that are reviewed in this blog:

• The Sea on our left by Shally Hunt who walks around the entire coastline of Great Britain
• A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor who walks from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople

"A Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor

This book is an account of a walk the author made when he was only 18, across Europe, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. I too enjoy walking alone: I have walked the Thames from Greenwich to Windsor, from St Paul's to Canterbury Cathedral, from Oxford to Cambridge, the Avon from source to Severn, Shrewsbury to Gloucester, Brighton to Folkestone, and the River Lea. What I love about walking is the emptiness of countryside and the evening arrival at an interesting town where I can see a church or a castle and end up in an inn with wonderful food, fabulous beer and a comfortable bed (and a full English breakfast the next morning!) Solitary walking has provided some of the most memorable holiday experiences I have ever had. But I would never have dared when still so young to have attempted the walk this man did. Shorn of the comfort that I enjoy, he often slept rough and he went weeks without a bath. Nevertheless, as I read the book I have a great fellow feeling for another walker and I feel the wanderlust rise up in me again.

But what makes this book special is his wonderful gift with words. Here he describes the way Germanic painters treat martyrdom:

Meaty, unshaven louts with breastplates crooked, hanging shirt-tails and codpieces half-undone have just reeled out of the Hofbrauhaus, as it were, reeking of beer and sauerkraut and bent on beating someone insensible. A victim is found and they fall on him. Leering and winking with bared teeth and lolling tongues, they are soon sweating with exertion. The ostlers, butchers, barrel-makers, and apprentices, and Landsknechts in moulting frippery are expert limb-twisters, lamers, stoners, floggers, unsocketers and beheaders to a man, deft with their bright tools and rejoicing at their task ... Four burly tormentors with their crossed staves bending under their weight, force an enormous crown of thorns on their victim's head and a fifth batters it home with a three-legged stool. When another prepares him for scourging, he places a boot for purchase in the small of the victim's back and hauls on the bound wrists till his veins project. The heavy birch-rods need both hands to wield them and broken twigs and smashed scourges soon little the floor. At first the victim's body looks flea-bitten. It is spotted later on, like an ocelot's. with hundreds of embedded thorns. At last, after a score of indignities, the moribund carcase is nailed in place and hoisted aloof between two pot-bellied felons whose legs are snapped askew like bleeding sticks. The last touch of squalor is the cross itself. Ragged-ended and roughly barked lengths of fir and silver-birch have been so clumsily botched together that they bend under the weight of the victim as though about to collapse, and the special law of gravity, tearing the nail-holes wider, dislocates the fingers and expands them like a spider's legs. Wounds fester, bones break through the flesh and the grey lips, wrinkling concentrically round a tooth-set hole, gape in a cringing spasm of pain.

Is that not wonderful writing?

Travelling through Holland he discovers that he is entitled to a night's sleep in the local jail. Then he enters Germany; Hitler has just come to power. In some towns he calls at the burgomaster and receives a chitty for a meal and a night's accommodation at the local inn; at other times he stays with the local von who then writes to other vons on the route for him; sometimes he dosses down in a barn and on one occasion he had to make do with a field in a snow storm. Food is tricky. He is having four pound notes left at British consulates along the way but when the cash runs out he is left penniless; in Vienna when his money fails to turn up he is reduced to a Salvation Army doss house and going door to door to sketch prosperous Viennese for 2 schillings each; this enterprise proves lucrative and he is able to bankroll another dosser's saccharine smuggling operations.

Later he takes a detour by train to Prague and his description of the city and the castle perched on its citadel reminded me so much of my holiday there. But he was also very good on how Bohemian history fitted with English history (and how Shakespeare got it so wrong in A Winter's Tale when he assigned a coastline to Bohemia). At then end of this volume he ends in Hungary.

A magical and entertaining travel book written by one of the most lyrical writers I have ever encountered.

February 2016; 284 pages

Brilliantly continued in Between the Woods and the Water

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.

"The sea on our left" by Shally Hunt

Shally and her husband John walked clockwise (ie in the opposite direction to most of the long-distance guides) around the coast of Britain. They weren't the first or the second although they are probably the only husband and wife pair to have completed this 4,300 mile trek. But they did occasionally cheat, taking the bus and once a lift.

I should love this book. I adore long distance walking although I have never attempted anything on this scale.  I have walked half the Thames path (Greenwich to Windsor) and Oxford to Cambridge, and St Paul's to Canterbury, and the Lea, and Brighton to Folkestone, each walking lasting about a week and travelling about eighty miles. Shally and John regularly walked twenty mile days. They lost a lot of weight. They each used three pairs of shoes. Whereas I insist on a B&B they did rough camping. So I admire them so much and I would love to do something epic like this. But...

I know how intense a walk can be. Even though your sore feet and your aching shoulders often distract you, because you are travelling so slowly, you have the opportunity to observe more. And she doesn't. I understand her problem. A three hundred day walk cannot be adequately described in three hundred pages. And this frustrated me immensely because I lost that feeling of intensity.

I learned a little about the places they passed through. She describes the Pocahontas statue in Gravesend but she doesn't explain why it is there. To be fair, I felt she would have liked to learn more about the places but their demanding itinerary meant they could rarely spare the time. (And I know how it can be when your flagging energy means that you can't be bothered to find out something that at any other time would be fascinating.) But I often felt that she actually didn't like the places she walked through or the people who lived there.

I learned more about the bird life of the coast. Her husband is a keen ornithologist and she describes birds very well.

I learned a great deal about the frustrations and near-disasters they experienced. I learned about the campsites that were poorly equipped, and the many times she felt ill, or exhausted. There was a lot about the rows they had as John walked ahead and she limped behind. A lot of the book seemed to be a long complaint.

April 2013; 312 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.