The path had taught us that foot miles were different; we knew the distance, the stretch of space from one stop to the next, from one sip of water to the next, knew it in our bones, knew it like the kestrel in the wind and the mouse in his sight. Road miles weren’t about distance; they were just about time. [loc. 1991]
At the start of the book, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lose their house: all their money's gone towards legal costs. Days later, Moth is diagnosed with an incurable, terminal, degenerative disease. Ray feels she can't go out and get a job if it means spending less time with her dying husband. So instead they decide to walk the South-West Coast Path, 630 miles from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset, via Devon and Lands End. (They initially hope to walk it in the other direction, with the easier parts first, but all the maps and guidebooks are geared towards the Minehead-to-Poole route.)
Quite an ambitious project for anyone, let alone a couple in their fifties, one of them dealing with terminal illness, both of them reeling from the loss of their home. Understandably, there are moments at which Ray becomes quite resentful of the perceived privilege of other walkers they encounter. There are also some scenes where human kindness is decidedly lacking: cafes charging for water, people shrinking away when Ray admits to being homeless. ('We could be homeless, having sold our home and put money in the bank, and be inspirational. Or we could be homeless, having lost our home and become penniless, and be social pariahs.' [loc. 1438]) There are occasions, too, where Ray and Moth are desperate enough to steal: confectionary from a shop, an overnight campsite where they sneak out without paying. Balancing the grimmer moments, there is joy: watching a peregrine falcon, being mistaken for poet Simon Armitage (who was doing a well-publicised coastal walk at the same time), a nighttime swim. "...showers of white and silver dancing through the water, each swell sparkling with shattered, iridescent crystals of light. The moon, the source of it all, moving, swaying, refracted through the water to the sand and rock of the seabed... at eye level the water fizzed with the same light."
The walk is restorative both physically and mentally: the repetitive physical motion restores some of Moth's strength and muscle control, and Ray finds walking a meditative experience, helping her to accept rather than to rage at what she can't change. "Only one thing was real, more real to me now than the past that we’d lost or the future we didn’t have: if I put one foot in front of another, the path would move me forward." [loc. 2557]
I'd been wary of The Salt Path for two reaons: firstly because of its 'instant bestseller' status, which doesn't always reflect quality of prose or subject; and secondly, because my father wanted to walk the whole of the same coastal path (in sections), but degenerated too quickly to manage more than a couple of stretches. I was concerned that reading this would bring back the helpless sorrow I felt during his illness. It didn't: instead it made me miss long country walks, by the sea or otherwise. I doubt I would physically be able to do the coast path (breathing issues, especially on even the slightest incline) but I can certainly attempt some shorter routes on the flat. And I'll have a home to go back to -- which, I'm happy to say, Ray and Moth have too, by the end of the book. Their experience of homelessness showed how easily it can happen to anybody, and how little there is in the way of safety nets. And this was 2013, when things were not quite as bad ...
Fulfills the ‘read in November’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.
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