Читать книгу The Book of the Bivvy - Ronald Turnbull - Страница 10

Chapter 3 THE BREATHABLE BAG

FIVE NIGHTS IN GREEN PLASTIC

1 Overnight Ochils

You can’t find more suitable hills to walk in moonlight than the grassy Ochils. No need to use torches on these easy slopes, and the views are even better in the dark because of the lights. The Ochil valleys are deep holes of darkness, and a great orange sea of sodium light stretches away to the south.

We unrolled bivvybags in a grassy canyon between two hills, with a small stream trickling somewhere. Here we lay in a floating bowl, looking out and down at the cities of the plain.

The thistles were so comfortable we overslept till 5am. The water bottles froze in the night and so did we – but it didn’t matter about the water bottles as mine had been left lying downhill, so the ice was all at the end where the little lid wasn’t. Dawn crept up from behind, warming the fingers and sculpting the hills with rounded light. The Forth valley was all mist, with oil refineries sticking up like island castles; their chimneys poured wide white stripes across the morning. Vapours ebbed and flowed like slow thoughts in the mind of a giant whose alarm clock hasn’t gone off yet.

There’s a certain incentive not to get up – it’s literally freezing out there. On the other hand, it’s also very cold here in the bag, and the only way to get warm will be to get moving. We’ll eat once our fingers thaw.

Weak sunlight gleamed on the distant Firth of Forth and on us. Four hours into the walk, we met our first fellow-walkers. And down in civilised Stirling at lunchtime, it was quite a surprise to find overnight ice still knocking about in the water bottle.

2 Wet Wooler in November

The green undulations stretching dully to the horizon; the solitude; the wet bedclothes – I’d be a single-handed yachtsman if I could pay for the boat. As it is, I must make do with the not terribly dry land of the Southern Uplands. A crossing of the bottom of Scotland in November offers every important feature of the solo transatlantic except seasickness.

Walking in the dark does strange things to the mind. After an hour of stumbling through mud, 7pm felt like the middle of the night. I was, on my eventual return to houses and electric light, to suffer from jetlag. The map ahead said, ‘stream, plantation; high valley walls’ – in other words, bedroom – and the map didn’t lie. I unrolled the bivvybag on a voluptuous bed of pine needles below the branches.

In November, if nights are clear they’re unbearably cold; otherwise it rains. This was one of the warm wet ones, so I slept for quite a bit of the time. In the expensive sort of bag, you zip yourself into a featureless green slug-shape the same at both ends, and alarm innocent householders when they wake to find you on their lawn. My bag is what it says: a simple bag. So it was necessary to wake up every hour to drink the water in the entrance before it flowed over the doorstep.

Untroubled even by thirst, then, I lay listening to the drips till six in the morning before setting off through the drips to look for the Cheviots.

3 Hoover Bag

On a May evening in 1994, I lay between two tufts of heather, 450m/1500ft above the town of Callander, immediately below a vivid sunset in green and orange stripes. A lump of hill blocked off the cold wind out of the north – it also blocked off the leaping skyline of Stuc a’ Chroin and Ben Vorlich.

Those Munros didn’t matter. My eyes and thoughts were fixed on two peaty lumps to the south. Uamh Bheag (pronounced, very roughly, hoover bag) lies south of the geological Highland Line and is therefore a Donald, though in those days not listed in the tables as such. And I was about to attempt a record-breaking 10-day run over all 148 of those small southern Scottish hills.

Before a long run, it’s important to get a good night’s sleep. The heather was scented and dry to lie on, the sunset was soothing. Wind whispered through miles of surrounding grassland. I pulled the sleeping bag tight around my face and closed my eyes.

My morning preparations were simple. Two of Mr Kipling’s apple pies, eaten in bed with gloves on. Shoes on, roll up the bag, and away. First hilltop 10 minutes later, at 5.07am; start the stopwatch and start running. Only another 147 to go…

4 Man Management

An island is simply a ridgewalk with the sea at each end and also on both sides.

A motorbike can get right round the Isle of Man in 18 minutes. On foot there’s more to it than several very sharp bends and some cattle-grids painted gorsebush orange (not just to match the actual gorsebushes, but to make it slightly easier not to crash). I had a day in hand for the spine of the island, and the spine of the island is 33 miles with several hills in.

But the aeroplane doesn’t leave till 11am. A bivvybag dawn would give not just a sunrise over the sea but five hours of morning to walk through. And a bivvybag rucksack makes 33 miles not at all too much for a day and a dawn and a morning.

So with a shop’s worth of pork pies and bananas in the bag, six or seven hills behind, and a pale mauve sort of sunset on the right, I walked southwards towards the toe of the Man. The waves were too far down to hear, even though there was no wind; but the low sunbeams bouncing off the ocean showed the shoals and cross-currents in swirls of alternating shiny and black. A twiggy scent rose off the heather on one side, a cool draught off the sea on the other. Black choughs wheeled in the fading air. I stopped on Bradda Hill to watch the end of the day. Would the last sunbeams flash through the seawater horizon in the mystic phenomenon of the Green Flash?

No, silly. The Mountains of Mourne are over there; and two inches above the sea, the sun slipped away behind a jagged horizon. I wandered up the still visible path, heather brushing bare legs, and found a fallen wall with a view of the last daylight and also eastwards towards the dawn of following morning.

The heather was deeper than blankets, and scratchy against the green nylon of the bivvybag, like two-day stubble. Ears cooled in the night air below the woolly hat, but everywhere else was warm as I ate the bananas and the pork pies and watched the sea go purple. Then I leant back and went to sleep.

Bike and bivvybag: heading onto Cross Fell

5 Saddle Bag

The day had not been easy. Silly you feel, sitting behind a bicycle on a station platform for two hours waiting for a train that’s late. And on the cyclepath from Whitehaven, strong wind in the face, then strong wind and rain, then strong wind and snow. I came down into Keswick cold and slow, the brake blocks screaming as if in severe pain.

And then came the Old Coach Road – considered as the challenging option, but what hadn’t been considered was ice in the puddles and snow over the top. March sun shone on the high face of Blencathra, sky was blue as lark’s eggs, and cycling was exciting through puddles well over the pedals.

Whereupon, at five in the evening, it all suddenly stopped being difficult. A downhill swoop, and a short climb to warm up with, and another downhill swoop. Air like iced vodka, and a sort of drunken vigour that just wanted to keep pedalling rather quickly on and on into the night. Which I could, as I hadn’t booked. And I didn’t have to book, as I had a bag to fall back into.

Just as well I did have the bag. The first wayside inn was sorry but it had no spaces left tonight. Maybe if I’d had a respectable VW Passat purring in the car park, maybe if I’d had mud-free legs and something on those legs that wasn’t pale blue Lycra… The second wayside inn had no spaces left tonight, sorry.

But in the little pinewood near Penrith there was plenty of space. I leant the bike against a fallen tree, and shone the front lamp around to find if there was anything in the wood I wouldn’t want to lie down on. The pine branches shut out the glimmer of the stars, but even so there was a suspicious crispness about the pine-needles. The motorway sounded a lullaby rumble and beamed night-lights between the tree-trunks. I wriggled under the fallen tree to save some of my night heat from the emptiness of the night sky.

It may have helped a little. My trainers, well wetted along the Coach Road, froze stiff during the night. I had to wear them on my hands for 10 shivering minutes before they would yield and let my feet in. Four miles downhill into the town was a bitter bit of riding, but 120m/400ft of climb let me re-establish communication with my toes. Next night, halfway down the long downhill to Sunderland, I swung off early to a bed and breakfast.

They gave me some sheets of newspaper to undress on.

A bivvybag in some modern breathable fabric keeps away the rain but lets out most, or even all, of the condensation. It costs between £50 and £300 – later I’ll discuss whether you want to spend the smaller or the greater sum. Fifty pounds is the price of two nights in a hillwalker’s hotel, or five in a bunkhouse. For £200 you could join the Hostelling Scotland for about 50 years.

Alternatively, your £300 could get you a little tent. In your little tent you could cook suppers, undress indoors, and lie till 9am reading this book.

A bivvybag may not be all that expensive, but it’s not a way of saving money. It is, rather, a new way of having fun. A bivvybag isn’t simply an extra bit of kit that has the backwards effect of making the rucksack lighter. It’s a new attitude, a new way of being in the hills. It rearranges the co-ordinates of space and time and allows us to wriggle through the wormholes into a different universe.

TIME, THINGS AND MIGUEL

Time

Time is a tyrant. How often in a day do you look at your watch or the clock on the wall or the clock on the town hall? Ten minutes to catch the bus, two hours to knocking-off time…

Even on the hill, there’s the four hours until it gets dark and the three hills we want to get over before. There’s the bed and breakfast that expects us at seven, and the train we’re wanting to get at Achnashellach next Tuesday. A timepiece is as essential to safety as – say – the mobile phone and the GPS gadget (however much we may have managed without them in the days before they were invented).

Time may be a benevolent despot – as when you’ve started at six instead of nine, walked into the evening, and got yourself half a day ahead. Pleasant and lazy are the days that are half a day ahead, but then you spoil it all by deciding you could actually catch that train on Monday rather than Tuesday. And there you are again, half a day behind, pressing forward up every hill, irritable at every shut shop or unnecessary cup of tea, cross because the sun has come out on the summit you left 10 minutes ago but you’re certainly not going to go back for that photo…

A bivvybag is the thing that lets you do without things, and one of the things that you could do without is a watch. Dispense with the timepiece and get – paradoxically – more time.

Wander watchless until the sun sets, find another sleepy hollow and go to sleep in it. Will tonight be the one that rains and sends you back down into the real world where they wear watches? You can cross the whole of Wales this way if the sun shines. For me the wet night came on the Fforest Fawr; next morning I dropped off the ridge to the roadside wondering what day of the week it was.

On ordinary hill days you need to know when you’re going to get benighted. With bag that doesn’t matter. Walking watchless is one of those simple pleasures whose appeal is – obviously – timeless. It’s also one of those pleasures (like bivvybagging itself) that’s not altogether pleasant. For the first day you keep glancing at your wrist and worrying. Not knowing what time it is is a new level of insecurity and freedom. There’s no day’s target to achieve or fall behind when you don’t know when you are at the moment. There are more interesting things to think about than whether you can grab back five minutes on the ascent of Waun Fach.

But time doesn’t give in so easily. Can you keep right on to St David’s without ever knowing how late it is? Or will you fall back into the valleys and have to stop at a clock?

Things

You can spend many interesting hours deciding what items to buy, and many slightly less interesting ones earning the money. But, disappointingly, your fellow walkers aren’t going to go Gore-tex green with envy at your cool new bivvybag.

This is because the bivvybag is the item that encourages you to get rid of other items. You’ve saved 2kg/4½lb on the tent; why not save a bit more by not taking the cooker? The bivvybag attitude tends to disobey the Consumer Imperative. It doesn’t bother to shave, and keeps warm under many thin layers of worn-out stuff it should have thrown away four years ago. As you get further and further from the car park, the breathable jackets get shabbier, the hats are bobble instead of fleece, the boots are scratched and old. Four hours out you meet the breeches. Eight hours out it’s the rucksack fixed with string. And on the furthest, loneliest hilltop, as the stars come out, is the chap or lassie in the bag.

For this is the thingless thing, the genuinely money-saving purchase. By its aid you climb the Hill Difficulty into the Cloud of Unknowing.

Also, by the time you unroll the nice new bag, everyone who could have admired it has cleared off down to the pub.

Diogenes the Dog

A bivouac is defined as any form of shelter less than a tent. It could be breathable Sympatex, it could be sheepskin, or it could be a woollen plaid. The only timber bivvybag on record was inhabited by Diogenes the Cynic in the third century BC. He had to, as he was 2400 years before Gore-tex.

The timber bivvybag hasn’t ever caught on, but Diogenes is still the founder of bivvybag philosophy. The treasures of this world – flashy jackets, walking poles, the satellite GPS navigator – cause only grief and envy. The absence of a marble palace or a flexible-pole domeline tent may be more enjoyable than the proud possession of it. Sadly only two lines of dialogue from this original master have come down through the ages. Alexander the Great came to visit the barrel. ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘I’m Alexander the Great.’

‘And I am Diogenes the Cynic.’

A nasty smell came from inside the barrel. The bed appeared to be a pile of old rope. ‘Ah – ahem. As the greatest emperor in the world so far, is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Yes there is,’ said our hero. ‘Could you shift yourself a little bit to the side? You’re standing in my light.’

While on a sea voyage Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold as a slave in Corinth. He was purchased by a rich man who found him amusing. But you don’t have to be rich to buy a basic Milair bivvybag.

You just have to find it amusing.

Miguel