The wind tugs and moves the tent in intermittent waves, mixing with the repetitive transient sinusoidal sound of the oceans waves. No matter what time is it, it's time to restart. Slipping out of the comfortable cloth earthworm is tough, when waiting for you are only wet clothes soaked with even more humidity than the day before. There is no need to cover up more, it's useless, just one layer to go out where nature - robust, rough, wild and unforgiven - awaits you.
The coffee ritual gives you time to reaccustom your mind to focus on the next 30 km, which everyday are there in front of you. What you achieved yesterday doesn't count, if not for the Achilles tendon, cold sore and brutally aching, to remind you of it.
Listen to your step in nature.
During the weeks of walking, the pace is improved, as well as the packaging and the priority of objects in the backpack, the balance on the body and on the soul for the over 40,000 steps to put together. In the long and endless roads one can even close one's eyes - a real luxury in a world contaminated by cars. Often one alienates oneself by walking, repeating the movement, focusing on the muscles. Trance.
A Hill, a fucking upwind hill, with the rain on the side leaving you half dry and half soaked. Gravity is an infamous force, which you fight by raising your knees, raising the point of support of the trolley, pushing on your forefeet up to the tip of your big toe, a titanic and unbalanced battle that you know how it will end.
Resilient. It's the only adjective that matters. You are here for this. There is no breaking point, there are no shortcuts and you know it from the moment you get up, so you walk. Resilient. You are here for this.
It's not a battle against nature and it's not a trip of loathing humanity. It's not a challenge-against. It is a path of reappropriation of one's spiritual self, which is built with effort. Hard work. Gong-fu, for the Chinese.
The animals stare at you, certainly more accustomed to cars than to this human on foot, they observe this slow and lost alien in this nature far from home.
Memories of the geographical antipode resurface strongly, Tasmania. Bizarre encounter made only 7 months ago. The most distant point on earth but tremendously close, in conformation, in its wildness, in the cliffs and the ocean wind. I walked both poles of the world in the same solar year.
What do one think about as during walking? About everything. And then, magically, finally, about nothing. To anecdotes, sometimes smiling thinking of them, while the goats observe you with their super wide view. Without losing sight of you, the lambs are constantly hiding behind their mothers.
To the people one cares about, what went wrong, to dwell on the details and in a game of divide et impera, to untie accumulated skeins of feelings and frustrations, of misunderstandings and joys. The more this tetris fills up, the more one erases the lines that make it up and only isolated pieces remain floating in an amniotic liquid, with no connections with feelings. There are no conversations that one postpones, because as the only interlocutor, time doesn't dictate priorities, the time for all possible thoughts is almost infinite in this walk.
As if thoughts, kilometers and time merged. Walking of foot is marking time in kilometers. it's your personal pace, the clock of your gait, the ability to predict where one will be, based on a personal natural speed.
Breaks. From walking it means stopping, quickly covering up, as if the moment one stops the body suddenly discovers itself in the cold, as if it weren't the same temperature, as if it weren't the same feeling. It doesn't take much to freeze. Breaks don't last long, physical tiredness isn't measured in breathlessness like when you climb a mountain. There is no mountain here, there is no peak, there is no finish line - even if for convenience you have given yourself one. But once one reaches that, immediately the next one is at the horizon of events, be it a house, a rock, a hairpin bend or just the thought of the next day.
Details. The plane flies over, the train hurtles, the bike runs. And then there's you, naked in the territory of infinite detail, just walking, at the speed of your stride. Each object has a time of sighting, magnification, distant and then close observation, meticulous photography of its faces as you approach it and then magically disappears once it is passed. The value that each of these elements has is impressive until one physically crosses them, and then they have no more value than that of perennial memory. An imprint that ends at the time of overtaking, which leaves room for the next one.
Distant horses. I don't know if it's their curiosity that brings them closer or my raw dreamy illusion of empathy, both towards these marvelous beasts, but above all for my rediscovered emotional balance. But now that I'm there, I unhook my house on wheels and run to pet them. Docile they allow me the luxury of important physical contact in these days of solitude.