The Hill at the End of the Valley
There is a hill at the end of the valley I walk to. Forty minutes from my door along the river, then twenty minutes up. It is not a serious hill. It does not reward you with a view you can name; it rewards you with a bit further than you thought, a wire fence, and a badger path worn into the grass.
I have walked it in every kind of weather the year can produce here. In April the whole thing is mud and I arrive making a heavy sound, and the hill is nothing but a long brown slog that takes an hour and ten minutes instead of sixty. In July the grass goes to straw and the wasps find the path and I walk faster than I came to. In autumn the light comes down the slope at four o'clock and everything on the far side is gold for about twenty minutes, which is not long enough and is the best part of the year. In winter the ground is hard, the mud becomes a gift, and the hill is a piece of arithmetic: you know exactly how long it is and it still hurts.
Two questions come up there, and they come up every single time, whatever the season.
The first is whether the walk is for the body or for the head. This is a real question, not a rhetorical one, because the two are not compatible. Walking for the body is brisk, purposeful, and stops at the top. Walking for the head is slow, meandering, and often does not reach the top at all. I have gone up on a Thursday with a head full of a problem and come down without it, and I have gone up with nothing and come down with three things I did not know I was carrying.
The second is what you are carrying. Everyone arrives at the top of something with a load. The hill is good at showing you the shape of it, because it removes every excuse. There is no errand, no message, no shop to stop at. You can hear yourself think, and what you hear is usually much smaller and much more specific than what you feared.
I have been going since March. The hill is not going anywhere and neither, at present, am I.