THE SALT PATH

A Few Books You Shouldn’t Read Just Before You Go To Sleep

I’m not talking about Stephen King type horror stories, I mean memoirs.

True stories by writers who have set out on a quest despite numerous obstacles stacked against them. These books — all by women deciding, for various reasons, to go it alone have kept me awake, worrying about the writer, wondering how the hell she’ll get through her misadventures.

Before I get into them, a thank you to Scot Butwell for including me in his virtual book club. I’ve been in a few actual book clubs, often as much for the great food and wine as for the selected books. No such distractions this time, I bought the The Salt Path and started reading.

And stayed awake worrying about the fate of Raynor Winn and her husband (unlike the others, Raynor didn’t exactly go it alone, but the prospect of losing Moth hovers like a cloud over the story.) In their mid-fifties, after losing their family home and farm, they set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path from Somerset to Land’s End. A walk described as equivalent to climbing Mount Everest four times.

This after Moth has been diagnosed with a terminal illness that would leave him progressively weak.

Difficult odds for sure.

But I worried too as I read Under the Ripening Sun, by Patricia Atkinson, — one of the first books I read when I first came to France.

Atkinson and her husband left England to buy a vineyard in France. Their first attempt at winemaking was a disaster. Then her husband left her. And then things got really bad. One obstacle after another. Her French wasn’t that good either. I could definitely relate to that.

At times, I couldn’t believe that she didn’t just pack it in, but she didn’t and eventually because a very successful winemaker.

Laura Galloway’s book Dalvi, Six Years in the Arctic Tundra also raised my anxiety level. It’s the story of her life in a remote reindeer-herding village in the Arctic, mostly alone, and struggling to learn the language with no guidebooks or manuals for how to fit in.

She’d gone there to live with a boyfriend who left her shortly after she arrived.

She writes:

I have no control over my anxiety here because I have no control in general; this place is utterly unknown to me and I am reliant on others — Áilu, primarily — to show me and teach me and guide me. There is nothing to worry about because I simply do not know what to worry about; my anxiety has no frame or anchor and so it wanders elsewhere for the moment.

Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s incredibly successful memoir about hiking the Pacific Trail — again alone and with very limited resources — gave me many nights of troubled sleep.

The difference between these three powerful memoirs and The Salt Path involves choice. Seeking a different way of life, Atkinson and initially her husband, chose to move to France and make wine. Galloway chose to discover her ancestry and, perhaps, find a new perspective on lfe. Strayed, also seeking perspective and grieving her mother’s death,chose to hike the Pacific Trail.

By contrast, Winn and her husband were perfectly content with their lives — a happy marriage, adult children, a much loved home and family farm. Their choice would have been to continue on with their lives.

Unfortunately, that choice was not available to them.

A bad investment and prolonged legal battle had left them homeless. Then, still reeling from that blow, Moth was diagnosed with an incurable and dengenerative disease. Winn wrote:

‘God just grabbed the roots of my life and ripped them from the ground, turning my very existence upside down . . . now we were cast adrift, with no safe haven to return to, floating through fog on a raft of despair with no notion of where we would come ashore, or if there would be a shore at all.

Their choice of what to do came down to signing up for a council flat . . . or living in a second-hand tent while hiking an almost 700 mile trail.

I’m on the fourth chapter. At the moment, the hike is proving more arduous than either of them anticipated. There are money issues and on-going fears about Moth’s health.

I may need to put the book aside for some lighter reading and less troublesome sleep, but it’s proving quite engrossive.

I will post updates and thoughts on the book as I continue the journey. Meanwhile, here’s a link to Scott’s page and more information on The Salt Path.