21.05.12
Confessions Of A Recovering Nature-lover
By Paul Kingsnorth
29 December, 2011
Orion magazine
Scenes from a younger subsistence # 1:
I am twelve years old. I am alone, I am scared, I am cold, and I am crying my eyes out. I can’t see more than six feet in either route. I am on some godforsaken moor high up on the dark, ancient, poisonous prickle of England. The black bog juice I have been trudging through for hours has long since crept over the tops of my boots and down into my socks. My rucksack is too impenetrable, I am unloved and lost and I will never find my way home. It is raining and the cloud is punishing me; clinging to me, laughing at me. Twenty-five years later, I still have a felt honour of that experience and its emotions: a real despair and a terrible loneliness.
I do find my way snug harbor a comfortable; I manage to keep to the path and eventually catch up with my father, who has the map and the compass and the mini Mars bars. He was always there, somewhere up before, but he had decided it would be good for me to “learn to keep up” with him. All of this, he tells me, will frame me into a man. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
Source: CounterCurrents.org