My little journey

I travelled from one place to the other. The plan was to go all the way from the top of the country to the bottom as if from Tierra del Fuego to some northern point in Nunavut. Where I started the forest was thick but not impenetrable. The grass was long and it held up in the wind; it was blown about by it and somehow you seemed to get the impression that the grass was happy, blessed by the elements, in its right place. There were tiny settlements all places I went. I could even see them from leaving the last town. These places ranged from the minute to self-standing cities.  But there seemed to be no limit at all to the number of dwelling places, no limit, always one just around the corner waiting to be happened upon. 

I had never taken a journey in this unusual country, although I had spent time observing it. In fact I had plenty of time looking at the lay of the land, sizing up its topography its subtle undulations – for it was mostly flat as far as I could see it – I had not come to this journey as an ingenu or as someone unprepared and in for a surprise.

But then again, the reality didn’t bear out what I had taken in just by looking. What I had seen from my look-out post was not what I was seeing or feeling when I went through the land as a walker. The two didn’t match up necessarily and it is all a matter of perspective. My look-out post is 200 feet up high and the trees look like mushrooms and you just see a canopy of forest covering everything within sight.

When I started my journey, I noticed that everything could be seen as a village as a settlement. It was difficult to say where one ended and the other one began. Once in a while there would be a lone house on the pathway, such that when you approached you were certain that this was just another hamlet, that it had the cast of being somewhere you were bound to find lots of people living, and it was only after you passed this one house and had seen that there were no more houses surrounding it that you could be certain that this was an anomaly, a house on its own, unsupported, and that to find the next one would have to wait until the next village.

Everything was in this way unpredictable and difficult to categorise. What seemed to be a constant was the forest but even this receded in places, somehow you would find yourself in a spot relatively clear and unencumbered and you might hardly have noticed until you did notice of course, it was a surprise, because in your mind’s eye you had got used to a level of tree cover and you supposed that that level would be reproduced in every place you set foot over.

There was a colour to this land, a uniform colour. Everything was made of this colour and although the exact shade changed in parts, it was always a subset of it. It was impossible for me to say what this colour was. It was neither green nor brown, it wasn’t the land or the trees, it wasn’t red, it wasn’t the blue of the sky, but it was its own colour impossible to discern. When I was moving, when I was travelling from place to place, usually of good spirits, usually well-rested, I took no notice of the colour. Perhaps it was so subtle and undifferentiated it would be difficult for me to notice. I do not know.  But it seems like a dishonour to say that the colour was beige or so unnoticeable because this colour was not boring, it was just very difficult to describe.

I knew, I think that I would be far away from the rivers, of which of course there are numerous tributaries. I knew roughly where they were from my times at my look-out post. These rivers broke up the landscape, vast emerald veins, very much differentiated by colour, so large and yet somehow at some points disappearing back into the land, back into the beige, but not back into the sea.

The one advantage of travelling in this land, I thought, was its flatness. There were no mountains. But then I came to a point where the land ends completely and rises up to a point where it does and here the gradient is mystifying and so unpredictable and you hardly know whether you’re going up or down, what you do know is the land is now bare and parched and desert-like and this land is rather different in character to the rest of the country I travelled in which is usually full of these grasslands and forests.

I sometimes wonder what is below the surface of the land. Has anyone seen it? Has anyone dug and inspected? It seems like the wrong thing to do, but what is below the surface where the grass emerges and the trees start to grow? I could not get under the land without causing harm, without hurting it, and I would be stupid to do that yet it seemed wasteful to just glide along the surface like a marble on glass from endless town to town, it seemed like I had not done my duty and that to widen my perspective I had to dig and go below the earth.