The loneliest wolf in Brighton

When in doubt, just keep walking...

The walk to the River Findhorn, by Rebecca Whitney

Autumn in Scotland is a golden bloom of wonder, verging on the ridiculous, when the Brighton I left behind was still tepid and green. Cauliflower fungus sprouts in the grass and a circle of turkeytail traces the rings of a logged tree, consuming the wood from the outside in, and we wonder why in a vague way, but neither of us breaks the spell by opening our phones to the rush of the world with its Wikipedias and the headlines I’ll need to check because it’s become a compulsion. Only ten minutes from town, and already the landscape is magnificent, wild and rugged, possibly one of most beautiful places on earth, and there’s not another soul around to notice apart from us.

Me and my brother make our way towards the River Findhorn. My hair is frizzy with drizzle and my duffed-up Nike’s are clogged with mud. We stop and point at a dry stone wall consumed by moss and a steaming mound of manure, lovingly piled up by the ghost of a farmer who passed this way sometime before, and all the while the sound of water amplifies. We descend at Sluie where the river cruises through a canyon of sandstone. Scots Pines cling to the rock face, roots winding into crevices, and a sandy strip of exposed riverbed makes a beach. On the opposite bank, a few isolated fishing spots are rented out by the estate for mega bucks, and I imagine the million better ways I could spend my money. Legend has it, the last wild wolf in Scotland lived along this river before it was hunted down and beheaded by MacQueen of Polloc-haugh, and my heart bends towards that creature whose family was slaughtered before she too died for having been born a wolf.

River Findorn at Sluie, by Rebecca Whitney

My children are at university – one in deepest Cornwall, the other in the North-West – and my husband, Sunshine, is away for a month in Vancouver. We have never all been so separate and far from each other. Even though I’m with beloved family in Scotland, I ache for my other essential connections. When the kids were little and I travelled abroad without them, I would look out the plane at all the land and sea, the endless expanse of fields and cities rushing underneath my little metal tube in the sky, and think, What if everything stopped, if there was a natural disaster or civil unrest, how would I get home to my children? How long would it take to walk the difficult distance I had flown with such ease? Across mountains ranges, rivers with blown up bridges, roadblocks manned by blokes with weapons made out of tools from their garden sheds… and on and on I spiralled (Jesus!) so I hardly ever went further than a few hours in the car, and all the while, I’d have this urgency to get home and gather my kids’ warm little bodies towards me. They don’t need me in that way anymore, nor I them, but there is a hole, and I haven’t yet worked out what any of this missing means.

For the week I’m in Scotland, I do school runs and after-school clubs for my niece and nephew. I’m transported back to manic parking and standing in windy playgrounds sizing up the other parents, and my relief is beyond that I’m only here temporarily so don’t have to navigate the complicated world of Alpha-mums and playdates. When the kids are at school, I explore the smallish town on foot. My default, whenever I go somewhere new, is to work out where I am in relation to everything else, how the roads link up and where the cut throughs are. On holiday it’s the same, and I study maps, preferably paper ones, to orientate myself and feel satisfied and safe. I joke I’ve got the same navigational system in my brain as a migrating bird, some kind of magnetic protein that sorts north from south, so I rarely get lost, and if I do, it’s my pleasure to find my way out of the puzzle of roads. One Xmas, I asked for a giant road atlas, the kind everyone used to have in their car before Sat Nav. The present I received was a picture book of scenic places in the British Isles because the gift giver thought it was a nicer present, and I didn’t have the heart to say I actually wanted a road atlas.

My two brothers are the same about routes, my dad was too, the mapping gene originating in him, all of us obsessed with ways and orientation, not in that pub bore way (at least we don’t think so, lol) where blokes spend the duration of their pint talking about traffic on the A283, but in a way that finds deep connective pleasure in discovering a secret backroad carved by centuries of footsteps through fields, which then erupts into a town from the edge of a housing estate while everyone else drives the straight line past Tesco’s and the Esso garage. Once, when we were kids on holiday, my older brother spied a white speck on top of a mountain, and my dad happily obliged by hiring a miniature Fiat with no seatbelts and, with the treat of a warming bottle of orange Fanta, we wound our way up precipitous Italian roads until we arrived at the partially derelict, rarely visited church, all of us more excited to have found this far-away dot up a hill, than the actual church. I don’t think we even went inside.

Back in the Scottish town, I walk through estates of the most miserable looking, small-windowed, pebbledash bungalows, and wonder what beef the architects of the 50’s had with the good people who live here. I happen upon the noise of water and cross the Burn of Mosset, the water russet brown, trailing down from the peaty hills to form a river that runs into Findhorn Bay and eventually become the sea. I think to drink the water would be to fill up with primeval goodness, but I don’t because there are also shopping trolleys, dog shit and pasty wrappers thrown in. As I walk, I’m surprised again and again by this hearty little stream burbling up in odd places through the town, a little nod to nature and beauty, and a reminder among these tight grey streets of what the earth here used to be. 

I thought I was going to have this grand month to myself without my nearest and dearest around, where I’d drop into a creative meditative flow, but this geopolitical shit-show runs on and on, deepening and worsening. I am more than a little wrecked by it all and can’t find a way to recover, apart from, on some level, an unwinding on these streets and through the woods, mapping my way out of the madness.

I fly home to an empty house and the funeral of a friend. The service is beautiful and devastating, a family now incomplete. I have little truck with the formal faith of this cold and splendid church, but I do absorb the yearning and endeavour that centuries of folk have poured into this building and personified in its artefacts. This is where God really exists, I think, in the essential goodness of most people. 

I visit my neighbour whose husband is trapped in a war zone. She watches livestreams of the aftermaths of bombings in marketplaces and hospitals. The screen is split into multiple boxes, the disaster looping on infinite fronts, and I’m traumatised after only an hour and a half as I have mostly chosen to see and read only what is essential, what I can act on and that doesn’t propel me into a stasis of fear. I don’t know if her husband – a good man who’s lived on our street for longer than me, whose children I’ve watched grow up – will make it home. I leave her with nothing useful, only a hug and chocolate, plus a TV she can’t choose to turn away from.

At night, I’m so out of sync with being alone, I hallucinate banging noises when I’m drifting off to sleep and have nightmares of waking to a presence standing over my bed. These old fairy-tales of the big bad wolf coming to get me are so deeply embedded in my psyche, when really, I’m the lucky one percent. And we humans are the pack that did for the wolves.

The South Downs near Brighton, by Rebecca Whitney

I walk myself silly over The Downs, inhale the curvaceous beauty of the hills in low winter light. I’m stoked by my new trail app which shows me routes I never knew about, up and over then down through the valleys, and what I’d like more than anything is to keep walking to the end of forever as moving forward one step at a time seems to be unlocking something inside. I am shedding, turning, recalibrating. I still don’t understand how to navigate the many bald and terrible facts of this world, but I do know my family isn’t the same as it used to be, and some of my work is to find my place without them. Once upon a time, before all this, I had just been me, bowling around in my pixie boots and batwing jumpers, worrying about who did and didn’t fancy me. Then for a good while, it had been me and Sunshine, our little unit of two, hoovering up experiences in pubs and clubs and work and on walks. So, there’s good stuff to return to, and a new pattern of living to unfold from the accumulation of all that’s been and all I hope for – let’s call it my fourth stage. But big life moments in the past have been filled with people and urgency, decisions and busyness. This one is filled with space.

The sun sets and a transparent moon rises in an indigo sky. A child moon, it’s called, because it's early enough for kids younger than mine to see before they go to bed. I howl.

(My neighbour makes it home :))