To be a dot
The joy and terror of getting lost in a surveilled world
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It is a nice irony that I am working on a book about fishing that requires me in my brain every day and sometimes in person to be at sea. And that I wrote a book about container shipping in which I spent five weeks at sea, then another 10 days on a pirate monitoring vessel. I love being at sea, though my very weak stomach does not love it, so I have learned that actually I love being on large container ships in calm weather and not so much on under-ten-metre trawlers in a force 5. There is a lot of sea in my life and I’m glad of it.
Yet almost every weekend, and sometimes during the weekend, I do not head for the sea but for high land. My chosen hobby is fell running, which I have written about at [too much] length on my running blog, here and about which one day I will write a book.
Fell, from the Norse for “hill.” The Scots call it hill running. The North Americans call it mountain running, which it isn’t, or trail running, which it also isn’t. It’s different. We run in the wild, sometimes on trails, sometimes on footpaths, sometimes on sheep trods*. Races can be waymarked or not. Sometimes you have to navigate. In fell running you will often find your fell running friends busy on a “recce” at the weekend, as I was this weekend. This meant driving to Mytholmroyd in the Calder Valley (better known as Happy Valley these days), parking at the wonderful Mytholmroyd community centre, where you can pay for a warm shower for the huge sum of £1, then setting off with printed route instructions in hand, and a map. To do a recce is to run a race route and try very hard to learn it.
*sheep trod: an informal but relatively clear path named for the fact that maybe sheep made it. It is a favourite word of mine. I also like “desire path,” a path made by humans usually as a short-cut.
I have a very poor spatial and visual memory so recces are essential. My partner, a Scotsman known variously as Braveshorts or FRB (Fell Running Boyfriend) has an excellent spatial and visual memory. He can run a race and remember how many stiles there were, whether they were wooden or stone, and what order they came in. I can run past a giant conifer forest and not even notice it, let alone remember it. I can remember parts of routes but not necessarily in the right order. If I have trouble sleeping, as I do at the moment, I go through race routes in my head, trying to visualise them. Sometimes I can do a few miles before STOP. There is a total blank in my visual memory. I just cannot see it in my head. It has taken me many years to realise that my brain just works differently to his, and that he is lucky that his works the way it does, but I can read countless very dull articles on things and pull out the interesting facts and then even write books about them so it’s not all bad. That skill though is not much use when you are standing at a junction of four footpaths, and the clag* is down, and all you have is a map and a compass.
*clag: Yorkshire for thick fog. Related to haar and fret, but not necessarily coming from the sea.
There are four types of lost.
You know where you are but you don’t know which way to go.
You don’t know where you are but you know which way to go.
You don’t know where you are and you don’t know which way to go.
You know where you are and where you should be but you can’t get there.
I am not great at navigation, but I try. I once got thoroughly lost on an out-and-back fell race up Ingleborough, because I had veered slightly off-route, there was thick clag, which muffled noise as well as the sun, and I couldn’t find my way back. For a while I was panicking: the land around Ingleborough is known for its caves and pot-holes and I couldn’t see much beyond me. Eventually I got a phone signal and phoned FRB, who was spectating, and then also came out of the clag. His instructions were simple but useful: Follow the sun. It was a short sharp episode of fear and it taught me never to make assumptions. You can always get lost. You can always fall. You should always be prepared.
A couple of years ago I reviewed Clare Nelson’s book “Things I learned from falling.” In 2018 she went on a hike alone in the California desert and fell off a small cliff. Her pelvis was shattered, she had only five litres of water with her and had drunk most of it, and there was no phone signal. She wasn’t found for five days. It is an extraordinary account of endurance, and I was particularly fascinated becuase when I was researching what it was like to be torpedoed off a ship and spend many days in open boats during the Second World War, that is what I was desperate to understand: how do you endure?
The answer is, you just do.
I finished my review by saying that someone else had just gone missing. And now today as I write this Julian Sands is still missing after going for a hike near Los Angeles, and Darren Kay, a very well-known fell runner in West Yorkshire is still missing in Madeira after several weeks. Fell runners all know about the fatalities. Sometimes these are due to falls but sometimes they are due to straying off-course. To being lost. In 2021, another experienced fell runner, Chris Smith, went for a late afternoon run in winter in the Scottish highlands, and died of exposure in wind chill of -11. He had a jacket, hat and gloves, but took them off because of what is called “paradoxical undressing,” which is a feature of hypothermia. If it can happen to experienced runners it can happen to anyone.
The Spine Race was going on all last week. It started on both Saturday and Sunday – there are various races of various distances which set off at various times – and then went on a very very long time for the men and women who had to make their way up the 268 miles of the Pennine Way from Edale to Kirk Yetholm, the full Spine. I don’t usually have much interest for macho ultra racing, and wish the Fell Running Association’s magazine Fellrunner would also feature the achievements of ordinaries like me, but the Spine Race is different. It’s in January. It’s a ridiculous amount to travel. And in 2019 Jasmin Paris won it by many country miles, by being a brilliant runner but also a new-ish mother who had had excellent training in operating while sleepless. What that means is that now when men get a course record but not Jasmin’s record, they have to say “the men’s record has been broken,” which makes a nice change. Usually when “record” is mentioned, it is default male, like, well, pretty much everything. See Caroline Criado-Perez’ excellent Invisible Women for more.
The Spine Race publishes video updates, where competitors are interviewed. Several of them said the same thing. “I’d been dot-watching for years and I wanted to be a dot.” I have been dot-watching too: my new friend Dougie Zinis, who I met when he was one of two sweepers (runners who stay at the back of the race field who are the safety measure because they check everyone is back OK) on the long and ridiculously up and down Castle Carr fell race, and my friend Louise and I having lost time by getting lost in the clag, were the last in the race field, at least until another couple of people turned up. So we got chatting to the sweepers, Paul and Dougie of Calder Valley Fell Runners. You can spot them by the red and white vest with a ram on it. Dougie is a very talented ultra runner. He has done the Wainwrights Round, an easy endeavour involving running the 214 Lakeland fells listed by Alfred Wainwright, and other epics. And he is a very nice man. So I watched his dot, which was in third place for most of the Spine, and I watched the two dots in front of him, Damian Hall in first place and 28-year-old Jack Scott behind him.
Slowly, Jack Scott caught up Damian by eating up the miles like a Pacman. One of the videos — which I recommend if only for the music that almost makes you want to go and spend several days mostly in darkness in below freezing temperatures in high and forbidding lands — interviews him en route and unlike most people interviewed en route, Jack is running. “I’m going to run until summat snaps,” he says, then, “racing, innit…”. From 0.35.
In the end, he caught Damian but had a 41-minute time penalty added to his time for having gone wrong in a forest and taken an accidental short-cut. But Damian and Jack arrived together, and they made sure, pausing at the wall in Kirk Yetholm that serves as the finish, that they touched the wall together. The next day they were interviewed on BBC Breakfast. Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty in the studio; Damian and Jack sitting close together in Kirk Yetholm as if they are holding each other up, the morning after they had arrived at 9pm or so after three days on two hours’ sleep. I’m amazed they were upright. The interviewers did what I expected them to do, because it is what many people do, when you tell them you do fell running for fun, in winter, and you like running 20 miles over moorlands in cold and snow. They say, “you’re insane,” or “you must be mad.” I never understand this. I think it is entirely sane to test yourself by putting yourself in the wild, as safely as you can.
So Naga said to Damian, with a mixture of wonder and horror in her voice, “but why do you do it?” And Damian answered beautifully, as he sat there having travelled 268 miles by foot in three days, sleepless, and said “because it makes you feel alive.”
An article about Julian Sands today talked of his love of mountaineering and mountains, and Sands said this:
“A lot of time people who don’t climb mountains assume it is about this great heroic sprint for the summit. And somehow this great ego-driven ambition. But actually it’s the reverse. It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains.”
You are small, and you are in danger but in control, and the walls have gone and you are freer. That is why I do fell running, and that is why I won’t stop doing it until I have to. Because I want to be a dot.
Animal hero of the week: Sergeant Stubby
A dog this time, and what a dog. Stubby suited his name, because he looked stubby and not particularly handsome. He was a brindle and white bull terrier, and his heart and courage were enormous. After wandering into a US military encampment in 1917, he was smuggled on a ship to France wrapped in an overcoat and then started his astonishing military career. At first, he was a general purpose mascot, roaming up and down the trenches as a feel-better therapy dog. He was under fire for a month, day and night. The writer of his obituary in the New York Times was a fan:
When he deserted the front lines it was to keep a wounded soldier company in the corner of a dugout or in the deserted section of a trench. If the suffering doughboy* fell asleep, Stubby stayed awake to watch.
*“Doughboys” was the nickname of the American Expeditionary Forces in WWI
Sergeant Stubby, not yet a sergeant, endured trench warfare in his own doggy way, usually racing up and down raging and barking when battle was ongoing. You would, wouldn’t you? He once was too enthusiastic and leaped to the top of the trench when a grenade exploded and wounded him in the foreleg.
My favourite Stubby story is this: when his human soldiers were in the Argonne in Belgium
Stubby ferreted out a German Spy in hiding and holding on to the seat of his pants kept the stunned German pinned until the soldiers arrived to complete the capture.
By now, kindly and grateful Frenchwomen had made him a chamois blanket, and the captured German was relieved of his Iron Cross, which was affixed to Stubby’s blanket. The rest of the war saw him gassed several times and eventually smuggled back to the United States along with his human, Sgt. John Conroy (who wasn’t smuggled). There, he became a celebrity, marching in every American legion march he could, always wearing his chamois blanket now covered in medals. I’ve got much of his story from this Connecticut site, which lists his decorations:
3 Service Stripes
Yankee Division YD Patch
French Medal Battle of Verdun
1st Annual American Legion Convention Medal Minneapolis, Minnesota Nov 1919
New Haven WW1 Veterans Medal
Republic of France Grande War Medal
St Mihiel Campaign Medal
Purple Heart
Chateau Thierry Campaign Medal
6th Annual American Legion Convention
The year before he died in 1926, his portrait was painted by Charles Ayer Whipple.
His obituary in the New York Times covered half a page. For his final honour, he was stuffed and now resides in the Smithsonian.
“He was a nothing dog,” wrote the Hartford Courant, when Sergeant Stubby (stuffed) was taken from storage and put on display again. “[He] became a hero and was honoured by three presidents.” A military official called him “the unofficial grandfather of the war dog.” What he definitely was was a hugely brave and big-hearted dog whose humans probably didn’t deserve him, just as we probably don’t deserve the affection of many animals and one day they will rise against us and I wouldn’t blame them. Oh sorry, this was meant to be the uplifting section.
Stubby, I salute you. (I recommend that you don’t look at this picture before sleep.)
SSS: Sgt Stubby, Stuffed.
Currently reading*
*unlike every end-of-year “best books I have read” list, I really am reading these
For work:
Distant Water by William M. Warner. Because Skipper Tom McClure, who hosted me on his trawler Guardian, insists I should read this and I trust him because he’s a thoughtful man.
For because:
The Race Against Time by Richard Askwith. Richard was my editor at the Independent on Sunday magazine for many years, and I was always in awe of him. A brain the size of a planet, and kindness in spades. His book Feet in the Clouds is considered the best book about fell running by most fell runners I know, and this book, about running into your older age, is right up my alley.
Anything by Jane Casey
I’m a big crime fiction fan but I have standards. Pointlessly gruesome deaths especially of women are not my thing. Thoughtful characters and clever plots are. Jane Casey’s series about Maeve Kerrigan is great, and I know that because I’ve read it before but luckily having a crap memory means I can read them again. I’ve just finished book 2, The Reckoning. While I’m at it, I’m also a fan of Susie Steiner and William Shaw and Julia Chapman, who writes a delightful crime series set in a disguised Settle, and no I’m not just a fan because her two main characters are fell runners. OK, it might be that. But also because she has created the character of George Capstick who calms himself by reciting facts about tractors.
The dangers of smoking in bed by Maria Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell
One of the many blessings of being a writer is that my publishers sometimes send me books if I ask nicely. My editor at Granta, Laura Barber, recently sent me a care package of Granta books, and I started with Maria Enriquez. Goodness. Maria would definitely like to get close and personal with Stuffed Stubby. I’ve only read two short stories so far but the image of a rotting ghost baby on bony stumps will probably stay with me.
p.s. My friend Simon phoned last week to say he had enjoyed Able Seacat Same Name, especially as he had written a book on the Yangtze and knew about the Amethyst. He also said, your some rambling definitely is rambling. He’s probably right. But where else would you find pictures of military heroes, stuffed?