A lot of writers drink, a lot of writers walk. Are there many people who walk and write and
drink? Some obviously: Guy Debord, Edgar
Allan Poe, Harry Crews, Malcolm Lowry and Jack Kerouac maybe: but I’m not
sure how many, and it’s an awfully boyish crowd to be sure. And
what about the druggy walker/writers?
Once you’ve said De Quincey and Will Self, who else is there? And is sensory derangement good for
walking? I dunno, but I’m working on it.
In the meantime, a small story about walking and drinking, and of course
writing, from the great Sebastian Snow, author of The Rucksack Man, a book which describes his walk from the bottom
to the top of South America: Tierra Del Fuego to Panama. It didn’t kill him, but it’s hard to say (per
Nietzsche) that it made him much stronger.
He experiences a fair amount of derangement in the book, but most of it
isn’t of the alcoholic kind.
“Well, I had made it, I’d traversed the continent of South America on
foot and crossed the Darien Gap. The end
was hazardous, ghastly, a grueling nightmare where Death stalked. Only willpower kept me going. Under weight by about five stone, two
sprained ankles, both swollen and discoloured, my feet and ankles covered with
gore, blood and bites, a mass of suppurating sores, stung by a hornet on the
neck, bitten by a scorpion, nipped by a vampire bat, ticks under the skin. I looked in the mirror and saw what days in
the jungle could do.”
Somewhere outside of Pasto, in the south of Columbia, he writes, “I encountered
three young Colombian men who told me that they had not a peso between them and
had been walking for five days without food.
I was very sympathetic.” He gives
them money for food, and buys them new shoes.
“Although I felt quite quixotic towards their evident plight I could not
believe they had been tramping for five long days without a bit to eat. It was just not feasible, I thought,
especially as all three looked in very good shape.”
They start walking
together but they young men aren’t very good walkers, certainly not by Sebastian
Snow’s standard. The youngest of them
starts complaining about his feet almost immediately, although of course if you
believed his story he’d already been walking for 5 days. Snow puts him on a bus and pays for his
ticket to Cali. A day later the second
Columbian starts “hobbling badly, in spite of or despite the new shoes I had so
stupidly bought him.” I wonder if it’s “because of,” but in any case, he too
gets put on a bus.
“The last, Sancho Panza, however, bravely soldiered on
but it was not very long before he took to taking buses and meeting me in the
evenings at the places I had appointed.
In the end I reluctantly had to sack him for taking to the bottle in a
big way; all, of course, at my expense.”
Some of us might think
the whole episode was something other than quixotic.
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And once we start talking about “quixotic”
travellers we’re right there with William Wordsworth in The Prelude Book 5, and the dream (had by Wordsworth or by a
friend, depending on which the draft of the poem you read) in which the dreamer
encounters a man crossing the desert on a dromedary. Was Sebastian Snow familiar with this? I think there’s a reasonable chance.
Some of the relevant lines run as
follows:
Full often, taking from the world
of sleep
This Arab phantom, which I thus
beheld,
This semi-Quixote, I to him have
given
A substance, fancied him a living
man,
A gentle dweller in the desert,
crazed
By love and feeling, and internal
thought
Protracted among endless solitudes;
But now hold on there. You and I might think this fellow is just
some imaginary Romantic Bedouin, but according to recent scholarship – Kelly
Grovier is the scholar in question - this poetic image was a “coded tribute” to
a real person, a man named John “Walking” Stewart, an Englishman who in 1765
started walking home back from Madras, where he was working with the East India
Company. Supposedly he walked all across
Persia, Arabia, Africa and through every European country. It took him the best part of 30 years. He met Wordsworth in Paris, and was
befriended by Thomas De Quincey in London, where he eventually settled.
Now,
“Walking” Stewart was clearly one helluva guy, and Kelly Grovier is more of a
scholar than I am, but all I can say is that if I were writing a poem
containing a coded tribute to a great walker I’d have him walking, not riding a
camel.
Anyway,
Stewart became quite the man about London, and was often seen walking the
street. He lived to the age of 75, and
right now I have no information about his attitudes toward sensory derangement,
but on 20 February 1822, the morning
after his 75th birthday, he was found dead in his room with an empty
laudanum bottle beside him.
De
Quincey wrote an actual, as opposed to a coded, tribute to him in the London
Magazine, which I think is very fine. It
starts like this:
“There are several
kinds of pedestrians, all celebrated and
and interesting in their way. …
The Walkers, indeed, like the lichens, are
a vast genus, with an endless variety of
species; but alas! the best and most singular
of the tribe is gone! … “
Walkers
as varied as lichens: there are some 17,000 recognized lichen species: I like
that a lot.
