FOREWORD

This is nothing new.

This collection of writing will be nothing more than a bunch of old, used thoughts. Thoughts worn smooth by time, eroded and re-grown over generations, by people living in the world, dying in the world. There is no innovation here.

It can be read as a theory, or as a story. The story is about leaving, and coming back. The theory is about why we leave, and why – mostly – we want to come back. It’s about the world outside, and what it is outside of. It is a reflection on how we entwine our identities with the physical places we grow from and inhabit, and how we disengage from those identities through friluftsliv. It is about, above all, the wildness of being.

Each piece of writing will be different, but all will be connected. They will form a range, as mountains do; each peak and pass distinct at the skyline, while down at the roots they merge into one. All that will be needed for the reader to move from the pike of one to the summit of the next is a little unrushed time, and a willingness to navigate the occasional patch of rough ground through which the path may not always be clear. We may return to the same ground more than once, but by clambering about from place to place across the range, we will – I hope – be able to reflect on its colours and contours in new lights, from new angles, through changing weathers and seasons.

Some pieces have been growing for years. Others are only just beginning. Some will be simple, while others will perhaps seem long-winded. They will be published now and again, to no particular timetable, and come to an end when it seems as though there's not much more for me to say here.

__________

I was born in a house already full of other children in Snowdonia, North Wales, but our boisterous family moved from the Welsh uplands of Eryri to the English uplands of the Lakes when I was still young enough to regard the top of the stairs as a peak worth scaling. As soon as we were able to stand, me and my siblings were put out into the world to trot about, jump in squelchy things, grab hold of sticks, stones and leaves, and face the whole of the reality that surrounded us with open senses, and open minds. My youth was spent living, learning and playing in the woodland valley that we called home, and on the fells that surround it.

But then, for three years, my time was abruptly divided between the Cumbrian existence that I knew so well, and a separate, contradictory existence, navigating the concrete edifices of a vast city. I retreated from it, back to the old communities and small quietnesses I knew so well, and dug myself in deeper still. And yet, from those two fallow years, a second departure grew, this time for a place where the enmeshment of people and land was far weaker, and the wilderness far vaster. Those experiences are part of this collection. If some biographical complexity seems to have been overlooked in the process of sculpting them into essays, I make no apology. It is – in part – a story, after all.

__________

My dad fell from a crag and into his cardboard coffin when I was eight. Cardboard, so that we could paint the sides in murals of his life, and of our love for him. A crag, because he lived much of that life in the open air.

Both of my parents saw a lack of wildness in the way that modern society urges us to live. My father's response was to head out into the world, and to move through it with an ever-increasing mastery of the games that outdoor pursuits present; climbing, kayaking, walking, running. My mother’s remedy, by comparison, is to seek out a connection with what she feels are the spiritual, elemental forces of nature. He would pilot a brittle kayak frame down a fierce torrent of whitewater to find synchronicity with the wilderness. She will sit still in a bluebell wood and listen to its delicate sounds to find that same synchronicity.

We cannot tear ourselves up by our roots any more than we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. This work, as with all my writing, is partly an expression of the deep convictions nurtured in me by those two shepherds of my earliest thoughts: my father, who taught me how to look outside, and my mother, who showed me how to look inside. My concern with places and, more pressingly, with my place, is surely the confluence of these two strong veins. I could not tear myself away from them, and I would not. I was raised to express myself openly, and I did so as a young child by drawing and painting, until I began to learn how to write.

I am still writing. I’m still learning how to.

Bobby Gard-Storry
Cumbria, 2018, Kootenay, 2020