Peter's Owl

One morning last month while on vacation near the Finger Lakes, I walked. I decided against taking my sister’s dog and to walk unencumbered. The property I’d rented with my brood (sister, mother, daughter) sat on 60 acres crossed by dozens of trails. After days of walking with a dog and an 86-year-old and a 9-year-old, striding at my own pace was a pleasure. I headed east on a trailhead we’d passed the previous day, which turned out to be marked with a “1” on dozens of thin squares of yellow-painted tin nailed to tree trunks about 8 feet above a path muddied by summer rains through a thin tree canopy. I turned briefly south on a trail marked Yellow 6 (yellow trails could be used by mountain bikes), then west on Blue Trail 1 (more thickly forested, more tree roots, no bikes, less mud). I saw no one. 

As my body found a rhythm my brain traveled to Scotland, to last summer, to the Borders Abbeys Way, where over six days I walked 90-odd miles near the northern English border in a loop between towns featuring abbey ruins from the 11th-14th centuries. A travel company took my suitcase each day from town to town, leaving me with a daypack, a thin trail guide, and detailed topographical maps. Trails were marked with a symbol (a capital A smashed atop a capital W), with what proved to be long stretches between signs. I was alone and encountered almost no one on the hilly trails, which ran mostly across rocky fields dotted with sheep (who enjoy expansive areas to roam) and an occasional farmhouse and patches of second- or third-growth trees; I crossed paved roads only when nearing a town. The travel company’s suggested gear included one item I had neglected to purchase: a whistle. If I broke an ankle I could have been overnight in a field, where farmers (on the evidence) seldom walk. I wore excellent boots, for which I was grateful at least hourly. My week-long circuit ran roughly clockwise (southwest, northwest, northeast, southeast). Each day’s trek ended in a new town and a new hotel or B&B. I carried rain gear, though it rained significantly but once. I lost the trail every day. I had no one to blame but myself: no spouse, no child, no sibling, no parent, no friend, no place but inward to take my excoriating anger. The experience felt fresh. 

The first day, scheduled for 18 miles, I misread an ambiguous trail marker, failed to cross a stile, and walked more than two miles off course. Borders Abbeys Way was crisscrossed with a half-dozen and more trails maintained by various groups, some national, some regional, some local. Junctions came marked by a mishmash of signs, or no signs at all; mistaking a trail was easier than falling down. After a fruitless half-hour seeking my conjoined A/W, with my ears detecting what I decided was a highway, I turned around and walked back two minutes before deciding I’d been right originally, turning back until hearing again what was most certainly a highway, at which point, in a moment that felt absurdly like defeat, Self-Preservation triumphed over Foolish Stolidity and I broke out the day’s topographical map. The sizable hill to my right should, I realized, have been on my left. Shit.

The wrong path had led mostly downhill through a rough trail along the fenced edge of a sheep field. I realized I could triangulate and cut off a sizable chunk of path by taking a route at a traverse angle. If I kept in sight a cell tower two hills over, I calculated, I’d return to my A/W trail. This required hopping the fence and walking through a field of what looked like high grass. I set out with renewed energy. (Map skills!) My vigor lasted two minutes, as the field proved to be hip-high gorse, untilled for years, studded with viciously-thorned vines, and pocked with stones and pits and slick mud that harbored, it turned out, black flies. The day was warm; I had already sweated through two cotton shirts. Head bent to the next step, dodging thorns, swatting a ceaseless buzzing menace, I launched a stream of ever-more-imaginative curses. The cell tower seemed to get no closer. My knees and shoulders throbbed. It was nearly noon; once I regained my path I still had nine or 10 miles to walk. My body hadn’t worked this strenuously in a decade. What the hell was I doing? Who was I kidding, thinking I could enjoy a carefree stroll in a foreign land over the course of days by myself? I had no whistle. My phone had no bars. My body could lie in this field for days. Death by twisted knee. Death by starvation. Death by stupidity. Forty-five minutes later, sweat drenched, joints aching, bloody handed, light headed, I stumbled to the field’s edge, climbed a fence, and rejoined a smooth track, where two minutes later I saw an A/W sign and surged with unalloyed rage. Fucking arrow at the last stile had pointed almost perpendicular instead of up. Who the fuck had marked these trails? Ten minutes later, pounding downhill alongside a tree stand, it started to sprinkle. Jesus H. Jehoshaphat. Then I heard a bird call. Could it be? No. Could it be Peter’s owl? 

My friend Peter and I had spent the previous week in Edinburgh and points north enjoying plays and parks and good restaurants and other urban pleasures. At our last meal, discussing the separate journeys upon which we were to embark the next morning, Peter, who knows me better than anyone, wondered how I’d fare walking solo. I confessed to fear. “At your lowest moment,” he said, “when you’re tired and broken and filled with self-loathing, I’ll send you a message.” I knew where this was headed. Peter knew that in middle-school I, the youngest of four, had rebelled against my siblings, had demanded they stop calling me “baby,” an insult that had rankled for years. My 12-year-old self had spent a weekend family therapy session sobbing over my plight; at weekend’s end, I swore that no one would ever call me “baby” again. (When my sister did the following month I smacked her across the face; when my brother did a couple of weeks later, I jumped off a ladder and flailed at him until my dad pulled me off.) For years now Peter, when he sees my self-pitying worst, has gently mocked me in falsetto singsong: “Baby! Baaaay-bee!” Drunk at our final Scotland dinner I said, “You’ll send a message through a bird or something.” Peter laughed. “Exactly. I’ll send an owl. And you know what my owl will say.” We said it together, in an accent approximating falsetto owl: “Bay-beee! Baay-beeeeeee!” We laughed so long a waiter came to ask if we needed anything or just the check. 

Now, trudging downhill along a stand of trees, miles from my destination, wet, aching, bitten, Peter’s call arrived. It couldn’t be. Was it a mourning dove? I stopped. “Bay-bee!” Surely I hallucinated. Again, clearer: “Bay-beeeee!” Unbelievable. Peter’s owl! I breathed in, then laughed out loud. I shucked my pack, drank water, donned my rain jacket. I listened: no bird. I read my guidebook. Only three miles until a tiny town with a pub that promised a late lunch. Then six miles after that. I was not roughing it, not trekking the Outback or Andean peaks or the Alaskan wilderness. I was walking between tumblers of Scotch. New rule: Pride wastes time. Seeking help signals no defeat. Go too long without a trail sign, break out the fucking map. 

Fucking Peter.