The Salt Path
— at last!
The monster drone hovered overhead, only to lower a cable with a lone paperback attached. Bezos was smiling from the heavens on his creation like Jehovah. The Salt Path had arrived — weeks later than scheduled, and by no means a tome. Still, thanks to Scot Butwell for organizing the book club.
Reynor Winn found her story in amongst the dross that normal folk work hard to avoid speaking about — the tough sledding kind. After reading the first few pages, what registered was it was obviously yet another book I didn’t think encouraged bedtime bliss. After Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, I was going to read another one?
If it comes across like I’m super sensitive to rough plots about rough camping. I’ll just say I endorse the concept of regular showers in the morning, and a well-prepared cup of coffee, milk and sugar before beginning work.
I googled the name, Raynor, to discover a) it isn’t Welsh, it’s Germanic by way of Scandinavia, and b) it’s a boy’s name. Huh. It was unique to me even before discovering the derivation. Was her father betting on a male heir? She makes nothing of her name and no mention of siblings, though perhaps they exist. Moth has a brother who is mentioned. She and Moth have two children, both grown and off at college. They’ve had a full life before even starting to find a new one.
Moth and Raynor? This is all about the two of them, but mostly about her, and you’re living her life on the way. Not as though Moth doesn’t exist to her — he’s constantly in her mind, and after thirty odd years of marriage and two children. If married life has faded of late, these two didn’t hear about it.
The book begins with a flash forward prologue followed by some explanatory paragraphs, nicely enough written, though the impression was these pages had been added later, dutifully after the main story had been completed, perhaps to set the tone, though it gave the wrong idea, that the whole story would be a slog. It rapidly improves from there. Background —we need to ground this tale — or so the editor insisted.
The Conservatives in power in Britain at the time had done what conservatives the world over like best — cutting social services so they could claim they were managing the country like a business for profit. And here I thought it was to help your country’s people thrive. Lincoln must have had it wrong, with that ‘for and of the people’ stuff.
Raynor and Moth lost the right to legal representation in the court proceedings regarding a debt they tried to argue wasn’t theirs to pay, only they were missing the key document to prove it until it was too late and the judge said ‘tough cookies, cookie; you lose.”
It’s said the Brits live under a socialist government, but it seems to be hit or miss socialism. If you’re the plaintiffs, i.e. being sued, and are broke so you can’t afford a defense, that’s British justice?
They looked into council (public) housing, knowing the days of living on the farm were numbered — about to see it seized and needing a place to live:
“A girl with dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail sat behind a desk in the council offices, speaking to us in a strong Welsh accent, ‘Well, if you’re not going to die soon, like in the next year, then you’re not that ill, are you, so I can’t call you a priority, can I?’ That was the moment when we knew we’d rather be in a tent.” from The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
The Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah says that once Jehovah destroyed the cities, he salted the ground to kill any possibility of making a life there again. That’s some vindictive shit, that is. So, is the ‘salt path’ a euphemism for traveling away from destitution caused by a higher order?
Back around 1993, a few years after we’d begun the architectural firm, we were sued by a Connecticut school system’s attorney for the construction delays and mistakes of a dubious contractor. Our plans and specs were solid — not like this was our first rodeo — but the general contractor had low-balled the bid and was trying to make his profit from bogus change orders.
Signing an out of state contract was admittedly our mistake. Signing one in Connecticut came close to fatal. Let’s just say Connecticut has a reputation, being too close to Rhode Island and New York. We were a Virginia firm. It was a hard-learned lesson in how to defend against mobbed-up contractors. Not all, but too many, contractors lowball their bids and work the change orders for profit, because public agency staffs are always underpaid, and the politicians only want results.
The best scene from that episode was the puffed up mechanical contractor insisting, “I need a million dollars. I don’t know why, but I need it.” Well, sure, there you go, buddy. His firm was going bankrupt.
Three of us were sued personally in addition to the corporation. For millions. We’d built the firm from scratch, pledging our houses for the loan to start the business. Right up there with the health insurance premiums for our twelve person firm, was the $1 M liability policy we had to carry so public agencies would contract with us.
At the first meeting with our quizzical, silver haired Connecticut attorney, he counseled us to “never confuse justice with the law.” And he didn’t mean it as a joke.
Long story short, after several years of struggle, we were advised it would be a crap shoot to take it to trial. We agreed to a settlement, giving our entire insurance policy to the school board — even after their attorney had been thrown off the case and reported to the Connecticut bar for hiding documents during the discovery process. We didn’t lose our houses, but the insurance premiums went through the roof for years after. The profits in those years were lean.
We in the States adopted our legal practices from the Brits, after all. Never confuse justice with the law.
You read about older people doing extreme things like changing careers rather than retire and taking long hikes when they lose their houses. Raynor and Moth (I can’t very well call him by a first name and she by her last name, can I?) fall into that that category.
I had sympathy for Raynor and Moth. My 50s weren’t too much a thrill either, but for different reasons than theirs. I wasn’t rolling in cash, but choking on grief. The worst of it I wrote about in Cheryl Strayed’s Gone Wild.
It would be boring as hell if you scribble all the mundane details, but likewise, if you avoid the big fractures. That’s also not truthful. Finding a balance takes work they don’t teach you in writing seminars, though Raynor seems to handle it fine.
Losing one’s entire way of life in a lawsuit, one’s house and farm to an erstwhile friend since childhood, has to be right at the top of all the ways to slip sideways at any time of life —and in your fifties?
“He’d been close friends with the man who was making the claim against us… How had it come to this?… They’d stayed close even when others had fallen away… Cooper moved into financial circles that few of us understood. But Moth kept in touch regardless, remaining friends. Trusting enough that when an opportunity arose to make an investment in one of his [Cooper’s] companies we took it, putting in a substantial sum.” from The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
It’s hard to believe we live in the same world as these villains. Breathe the same air. I didn’t lose my career until I’d reached 69 — it, too, by the grudge of a man I had helped promote from intern to partner in our firm. Et tu, Brute? Hadn’t planned on retiring just yet. Design still fascinated me, but there it was. We had sold ourselves to a larger corporate entity who believed in improving the balance sheet by lopping off the ones with the most experience. He’d become the office manager — congrats to him — oh shit. They even insisted I turn over the laptop inherited from our small firm — not a great loss, but it was the meanness that got me.
It didn’t seem Reynor and Moth had been living the high life as farmers. Farmers in general, unless you’re the corporate head of Monsanto or Archer-Daniels-Midland, aren’t eating ‘high on the hog.’ And the corporate suits aren’t so much farmers as commodity dealers. You get the impression Raynor and Moth weren’t financial wizards leading up to the demise of their farm. Just two more of the working class.
So sleeping ‘rough,’ as the understated English expression has it, wasn’t a step down for them? In fact, it terrified her, as well it might. She doesn’t play down the awkward launch of their hiking adventure. As it’s been pointed out by others, they still had each other to lean on, which indeed they did lean. Married thirty-two years with their children in college — how college was afforded not explained. It’s also not clear how much of their financial straits they hid from their children, though it seems quite a bit.
When shame tags along with homelessness, is it fair? Like a dog with a lame leg, we don’t go there because we fear it for ourselves.
Not far into their hike along the coast, Raynor begins explaining to any who ask that they’d ‘sold the farm’ for the freedom to hike the coast rather than ‘lost it in a lawsuit.’ She and Moth agree the change of verb from the passive ‘lost’ to the active ‘sold,’ made it easier on both inquirer and the hapless subjects. Though, given that a good part of this public coast path lies hard against private property, it’s trespassing to sleep ‘rough.’
The story goes, the Salt Path, officially the South West Coast Path, originated as the trail used by the coast guard keeping an eye out for smugglers employing the various coves and estuaries for their import work. With the southern coast facing the English Channel, it remains an issue, now with refugees coming in small boats from Calais.
“The South West Coast Path is England’s longest waymarked long-distance footpath and a National Trail. It stretches for 630 miles… running from Minehead in Somerset, along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, to Poole Harbour in Dorset. Because it rises and falls with every river mouth, it is also one of the more challenging trails.” From Wikipedia article on South West Coast Path
The shape of the peninsula looks something like an 18th century cartoon lady in Punch magazine dipping her misshapen toe into the Atlantic. To the north across the narrowing Bristol Channel, lies Cardiff in the south of Wales.
South Wales is where their farm lay, where they’d raised their kids, near to where Moth had grown up. All clues to why Raynor and Moth would choose the Salt Path, being a short public bus ride from where they lived across the Bristol Channel.
It’s not explained how she acquired it, but it’s quite evident Raynor knows a fair amount of the natural world. Wrestling stubborn sheep on a farm isn’t always the bucolic life, though teaches one to appreciate the moments in between changes in the weather.
Birds by species become characters. A peregrine falcon makes several scenes by itself— and always the gorse is noted as they pass. She observes and writes what she sees along the way. They carried their homes on their backs, so if she took more than mental notes, she doesn’t say.
The distance between Raynor’s written story and the lived facts of their current circumstance is hardly a distance at all. Without the grace of her language, who would read such a thorn of a story?
Another of The Salt Path articles, Who is Simon Armitage? by Angie Mangino is a great aside, starting slow and delivering like it should. I’d go on about this subplot, but Mangino saved me the work, and thankee much, as they say somewhere, ex-Brits and sidekicks spread about the globe.
Which gets to the humor of The Salt Path. It’s drenched in that dry-to-touch humor the Brits have so deftly brought into the world, such that one must believe Britain is a hard, hard place to live, their little rock off the coast of greater Europe.
Late in the book, after a blissfully beautiful day with spectacular views overlooking the British Channel, while boiling water for tea on their small camping stove, Raynor and Moth are joined by a dumb Dalmatian (which has to be the world’s clearest tautology) followed by a Liverpudlian (native of Liverpool), who on his own invites several more of his friends to join them for tea. Says the Liverpudlian to the newest arrivals:
‘We’re having a cup of tea. Want some? You’ll have to wait till we finish with the cups, though. This couple is walking the coastal path.’
‘From where, Falmouth?’ [a few miles ahead of where they were]
“No, Minehead.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Somerset.’ [where they’d began — some 300+ miles away on the far side of the peninsula.]
‘No, you haven’t. That’s too far.’
I handed them two mugs of tea; they drank it.
‘We have.’
‘How come you’ve got enough time to do that then?’
I heard Moth sigh and raise his eyebrows.
‘Because we have no job and we’re homeless.’
There was a lot of shuffling; the dogs recoiled; the women took a step back.
‘Well, we need to be off, thanks for the tea.’
‘Yeah, us too. Thanks for that.’
Don’t mess with a writer, no matter how ratty her hair, or you’ll end up in her book, and it may not be pretty.
Journalists are perennially interviewing the homeless in the States, mostly in the cities where they congregate, writers and homeless folks both. Some more than others of these stories are worth reading. There’s always the question — are the urban institutions helping, or injuring these folks? Is the government? Sleeping ‘rough’ in LA or Miami, New Orleans can help with the problem of freezing, but what about 100 degree days in August, and where do you go for a shower?
We saw poverty in Bimini. The forty foot fishing yachts tied off at the docks were as far from the lifestyle of the Black majority who lived there as could be described. When Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, they had nowhere to go — and Bimini wasn’t the worst hit.
In Istanbul, we walked past Syrian refugees, whole families sitting on sidewalks within strolling distance of Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque. Made beggars by stint of a civil war provoked by Assad and aided by Putin. In Athens, boys and girls said to be gypsies worked the tourist trade, street children all when they should have been in school.
‘What happened to your life?’ Hard to believe it’s but for a good stock portfolio?
It’s just easier to disappear in a big city. Provided you can tolerate the glares, and the others who step around you like a contagion. Like homeless dogs who’ll hang at the edges of places, hoping for better.
The journalists will attribute homelessness to mental health issues and drug habits. Is it beyond the possible to think homelessness is at the cause rather than the result? Raynor isn’t crazy — even for a writer — oh, I kid. She doesn’t write like she is. But being homeless is crushing her and Moth both. That, and her husband has been told his disease will shortly make him mentally unstable before it kills him.
Globally, a small but growing minority evince outrage at how we humans squander our environment. But we squander our populations just as convincingly. Consistent behavior, but it comes with consequences. The more babies who come to those least able to provide for them, the greater the destruction of the natural world.
Neither can explain why, but their life of daily hiking eases his painful joints.
“We shouldn’t let all those — choose a favorite slander — come into the country.”
Even if they’re piling up at the borders because we have better. They are moving from exhausted farmland drug smugglers and despots to something perceived as better than where they’ve been. If their countries were better managed, if they weren’t already broken, it would help. But large parts of the world, the land cannot sustain the swelling numbers.
Worldwide, we are at that tipping point. It’s been on a short list of catastrophes for decades, but with insufficient attention being paid.
Raynor and Moth have been punished through no fault other than the bad luck and misfortune of being friends with the wrong person. A not too uncommon tragedy. You want to believe they’ll do better turning the corner, but will they? Read the book.
The warmth Raynor expresses in the closing pages doesn’t come from a fairytale fireside. Heaven is very grounded for her, still very real. If she puts Moth on a pedestal, you come to understand why he loves her in return.
