Appleby to Cliburn, 11 miles, 614 feet of ascent

“Appleby… shit. I’m still only in Appleby. Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the cow pastures. When I was home after my first ramble, it was worse. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing… Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute the cows stand in the fields, they get stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter.”

Okay, enough Apocalypse Now parody. But waking up in the same bed for a second night, something that has only happened twice in the last 19 days, was oddly disorienting.

At breakfast, my chatty hostess, who had no other guests to attend to, told me about the Helm Wind, the only named wind in the United Kingdom, which blows from east to west on the southwest slopes of Cross Fell, the hills just to the north of Appleby. Technically, the Helm only blows in late winter and spring. It’s serious wind. She recalled walking in the hills earlier this year, and though it was pleasant in the valley where Appleby sits, up near the top, the wind was blowing freezing rain at them.

I did not get the Helm Wind, but on a day with temperatures rising into the upper 60s, I was grateful to find my day starting with a steady wind at my back. On a long sweaty walk, a cooling breeze carrying you forward can make a huge difference.

One thing I have learned especially over the last few days, when the route is not well-marked and I need to consult my resources, is that sources don’t always agree. Apple Maps, which I pull up for confirmation when I am feeling lost, has some parts of Lady Anne’s Way marked as such. Which is great. But it isn’t the whole way, so what you get are little fragments. Not super helpful if you are between them, and sometimes they don’t agree with the maps in the trail guide. And today I ran into a section where the map in my guide book doesn’t seem to match the trail. Add to this the fact that the maps in the guidebook are not to scale, representing roads with double lines that would make the road fifty feet wide, distorting and exaggerating certain features for emphasis. This is why you carry Ordnance Survey maps, which are meticulously to scale. But they are unwieldy things to deal with, so I have almost never gotten the OS map out of my backpack where it is stored, prefolded to the relevant pages for the day.

This led me to a lot of wandering around a field that made Long Marton into Longer Marton for me.

Let me gripe a bit. Here’s another thing that can be frustrating: when you have a taxi pickup at the end of the day because the trail segments are broken up at places with no accommodations. I get it. Contours wants to give you good walking distances, and so for instance, it makes sense to end today at Cliburn (pronounced to rhyme with crib -burn, not the way we pronounce Clybourn in Chicago, as I learned when I stopped at the tiny village shop in Kirkby Thore for refreshment and got chatting with the woman who sold me my fizzy drink).

Anyway, the problem with taxi pickups is that they want you to schedule a time in the morning before you depart (partly this is a hangover from when cell phone service was spottier, but also, taxi drivers like it if they can schedule their day, especially in areas like this where part of their bread and butter is driving kids from remote places to school and back). So you have to estimate how long you think the walk will take. If you underestimate and give an early pickup time, you can feel rushed during the walk to get to the pickup. If you overestimate, you are stuck twiddling your thumbs. This can be fine when it is somewhere like Brough Castle, where I had an ice cream while waiting 90 minutes for my cab. But at places like Outhgill, where I huddled in both my fleece and my rain jacket under a tree in a churchyard for nearly two hours because there are no businesses at all in Outhgill, it’s a drag. Today had two hours at the end of the day to sit and lie in the parking lot of the Cliburn Village Hall, because I had walked up a hill past the usual plausible hanging out place (a churchyard if there isn’t a public park with a bench. Cliburn has no public space at all really), and got to the village hall tired enough to lie on concrete in the shade with my pack as pillow.

But I get ahead of myself.

As the day started, I thought to myself ‘It looks like today has a fair bit of road walking. That should be a good break from all these stiles and churned up fields that give my leg muscles and ankles a workout from the micro-adjustments of each step.’ Be careful what you wish for. Today I walked 11 miles, and maybe half of it was on paved roads. That would be fine in my sneakers, which are designed for hard surfaces. But my hiking boots have hard rubber soles, so road walking really wears on me after a while.

Though I am not consuming a ton of news (better for my mental health), I did see yesterday that Brian Wilson died. Last night I listened again to “God Only Knows,” which really is a gorgeous, tricky composition and an amazing piece of studio work (with instrumentation including sleigh bells, harpsichord, accordion, and plastic orange juice cups). So that was in my head this morning as I walked. And it led to some weird lines of thought.

First, I was singing snatches of it, and somehow slid into a Kermit the Frog voice. Then that got stuck in my head, and over the course of an hour (not continuously thinking of this, of course, but coming back to it) I convinced myself that Jim Henson had in fact done a cover of “God Only Knows” as Kermit, singing to Miss Piggy. It would be such an interesting twist on the fact that she is always the desiring engine in that relationship. Just imagine Kermit singing this:

I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I’ll make you so sure about it

God only knows what I’d be without you

I really got to imagining what the video would look like, very simple and sincere, with Kermit and perhaps a portrait of Miss Piggy. At first, I was playing around to amuse myself, but by the end of the hour, I had convinced myself that I must be drawing on a memory. Had Brian Wilson been a guest on The Muppet Show, back when a lot of ’70s music acts turned up there? I was pretty confident this was real.

Reader, it was not. Later research debunks this terrific idea.

But then I got to thinking that Sly Stone and Brian Wilson have both passed away while I was on one of my rambles. And I flashed back to my walk on the Coast to Coast Path with my sister in 2009. On the morning of June 30, at a B&B breakfast, another walker, a rough-around-the-edges guy with a northern English accent, said “Did you hear? Michael Jackson snuffed it.”

Today seems to have been my day for weird trains of thought. Huh, major musician deaths on two walks. Suddenly, I was imagining a scene from a thriller (I’d like it to be a high class thing, say David Fincher), with the younger detective who’s good with computers sitting at her desk while she and her older, jaded partner talk about this odd fact that she’s noticed in researching Wilson’s death (why? haven’t quite worked it out yet): there’s this walking blogger who was on walks when Michael Jackson, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson died. “Ha,” snorts the older detective, “that’s just a coincidence. Three deaths like that doesn’t mean anything.” Cut to her looking thoughtful. Cut to her fingers on the keyboard of her computer. Cut to the screen as she reviews RamblingHank.com. Cut back to her face, lit by the glow of the computer screen. Cut to her typing “famous musicians death dates” into a search engine. Cut to the computer screen as she finds a correlation, then another, then another (this section should be in a series of fast cuts to her face, her fingers on the keyboard, the screen with images of musicians and what are clearly obits with the date easy to see).

“Mike, I think I’ve got something. We need to talk to this Rambling Hank. And have the chief ask for a wellness check on Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan.”

And scene.

God, I amuse myself.

Later in the day, along the river, I was passing more cows. No sign of them wanting to mob me; they seemed aware of me but actively indifferent, tamed by the heat. But the path hugs the river, and the cows like the river, so sometimes I had to pass within ten feet or so of a cow. At one point, there was a cow standing facing down toward the river on a little dirt area that led into the water, with the path behind her. I veered off a bit to the right to give her the usual ten feet of distance. She looked over her shoulder (as it were) at me, lifted her tail, and set forth with an absolute gusher of urine. Let me just say that if you have never seen a cow urinate, I highly recommend you keep it that way.

All of this verbal rambling is to say that the physical rambling was fine today, but not filled with dramatic moments to record. I walked through fields. I saw more cows and sheep. I walked past farms. I saw an actual food crop growing. I passed through two towns before reaching Cliburn, one with a tiny village shop and a nice lady who corrected my pronunciation of Cliburn.

The taxi, scheduled for 3:30, arrived at 3:00. “You’re early!” I exclaimed. “I like to build in time to myself when I can sit for half an hour,” he replied. I am not sure if he was kidding a little bit or genuinely disappointed that he didn’t get to sit and listen to music in the Cliburn Village Hall parking lot. He brought me to Penrith.

Penrith is a confusing small city/big town. It’s big enough to have a cinema with three screens and whole streets that have been turned into pedestrian areas, and the restaurant pickings are better. I had a nice Italian meal and two glasses of wine before staggering to my B&B to collapse in bed.

Tomorrow is my last day, with nine miles culminating in Brougham Castle, another ruin of another castle Lady Anne restored in the 1650s, her big restoration phase. But more on that tomorrow. Until then, readers, God only knows what I’d be without you.