Читать книгу Rough Magic - Lara Prior-Palmer - Страница 10

II

Why do humans put so much thought into some decisions yet plunge into others like penguins into freezing ocean? Are we met with a sudden urge to avoid the direct path to middle age and subsequent visions of growing old in a lonely world of cats? I certainly have a fear of falling into the routines of my elders—their eggshell worlds of dangers and do-nots. But maybe I had a simpler desire to settle something unsaid, away from home. Or a longing to be wild and snort about like a horse.

No single reason seems satisfactory. I want to hand myself over to something, but I can’t tell what creates that need to leap nor what decides its timing.

In fact, maybe this was me at age eighteen: a bundle of urges, a series of plunges. I was loud and quick. I thrived on being the loser in the anecdotes I recounted—caught without a ticket on the Underground, shouted at unjustly by an anxious teacher. I bent the world this way and that—schlepping barefoot through London, to school in my pajamas, where I threw pens in class and blurted my frankest thoughts. What, besides a diagnosis of attention seeking, did any of this point to? I couldn’t yet tell.

If the fashion in which I applied to and signed on for the Mongol Derby was characteristically thoughtless, the event itself would, perversely, leave me deep in thought. Grasses and a blue-domed sky. Bodies and wind and rain and pain. Wide, open prairies, and twenty-five ponies saying, Who are you? and Who are we?

By the time I took the return planes to London, words were tumbling out of me. In the writing I could mull the matter over, as a cow ruminates her grass. We had been given ten days to ride twenty-five semiwild ponies a long way around Mongolia. Why the need to go all that way and do such a thing?

I am telling a story about myself. There’s a British disease called modesty, which nearly stops me from sharing what I’ve written. After all, this is about an event that seemed to go well. Somehow, implausibly, against the odds, I won a race labeled the longest and toughest in the world—a race I’d entered on a whim—and became the youngest person and first female ever to have done so. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.