I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a bookstore and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub and, all being well, back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordnance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in its terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in inappropriate weather.
For years, I watched these walker types toiling off up cloudhidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheerfaced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble that was the word he used up Haystacks one weekend. I think it was the combination of those two untaxingsounding words, 'amble' and 'Haystacks', and the promise of lots of drink afterwards, that lulled me from my natural caution.
'Are you sure it's not too hard?' I asked.
'Nah, just an amble,' John insisted.
Well, of course it was anything but an amble. We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us. Beyond it lay even greater and remoter summits that had been quite invisible from the ribbon of black highway thousands of feet below. John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruellest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, Smoking and charting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at their feet, they would bound up refreshed and, with a few encouraging words, set off anew with large, manly strides, so that I had to stumble after and never got a rest. I gasped and ached and sputtered, and realized that I had never done anything remotely this unnatural before and vowed never to attempt such folly again.
And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. 'Fuck me,' I said in a moment of special eloquence and realized I was hooked. Ever since then I had come back whenever they would have me, and never complained and even started tucking my trousers in my socks. I couldn't wait for the morrow.
The ferry docked and I shuffled on board with the others. Windermere looked serene and exceedingly fetching in the gentle sunshine. Unusually there wasn't a single pleasure boat disturbing its glassy calmness. To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement. Some 14,000 powerboats let me repeat that number: 14,000 ate registered to use the lake. On a busy summer's day, as many as 1,600 powerboats may be outon the water at any one time, a good many of them zipping along at up to 40 mph with waterskiers in tow. This is in addition to all the thousands of other types of floating objects that may be out on the water and don't need to register dinghies, sailboats, sailboards, canoes, inflatables, lilos, various excursion steamers and the old chugging ferry I was on now all of them searching for a boatsized piece of water. It is all but impossible to stand on a lakeside bank on an August Sunday watching waterskiers slicing through packed shoals of dinghies and other floating detritus and not end up with your mouth open and your hands on your head.
I had spent some weeks in the Lakes a year or so before working on an article for National Geographic and one of the passing thrills of the experience was being taken out for a morning on the lake on a national park launch. To show me just how dangerous it could be to let highpowered craft race around in this kind of crowded environment, the park warden pootled the launch out into the middle of the lake, told me to hang on 1 smiled at this: listen, I do 90 on the motorways then opened the throttle. Well, let me say this: 40 mph in a boat is nothing like 40 mph on a road. We took off with a velocity that snapped me back in the seat and had me clutching on for dear life with both hands, and bounced across the water like a flat stone fired from a gun. I have seldom been so petrified. Even on a quiet morning out of season, Windermere was clogged with impediments. We shot between little islands and skittered sideways past headlands that loomed up with alarming suddenness, like frights on a funfair ride. Imagine sharing this space with 1,600 other similarly dashing craft, most of them in the control of some potbellied urban halfwit with next to no experience of powered craft, plus all the floating jetsam of rowboats, kayaks, pedalos and the like and it is a wonder that there aren't bodies all over the water.
The experience taught me two things first, that vomit vaporizes at 40 mph in an open boat and second that Windermere is an exceedingly compact body of water. And here we come to the point of all this. Britain is, for all its topographical diversity and timeless majesty, an exceedingly smallscale place. There isn't a single natural feature in the country that ranks anywhere in world terms no Alplike mountains, no stunning gorges, not even a single great river. You may think of the Thames as a substantial artery, but in world terms it is little more than an ambitious stream.
Put it down in North America and it wouldn't even make the top one hundred. It would come in at number 108, to be precise, outclassed by such relative obscurities as the Skunk, the Kuskokwim and even the little Milk. Windermere may have pride of place among English lakes, but for each twelve square inches of Windermere's surface, Lake Superior offers 268 square feet of water. There is in Iowa a body of water called Dan Green Slough, which even most lowans have never heard of, and it is bigger than Windermere. The Lake District itself takes up less space than the Twin Cities.
I think that's just wonderful not that these features are modest in their dimensions but that they are modest, in the middle of a densely crowded island and still wonderful. What an achievement that is. Do you have any idea, other than in a vague theoretical sense, just how desperately crowded Britain is? Did you know, for instance, that to achieve the same density of population in America you would have to uproot the entire populations of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan, Colorado and Texas and pack them all into Iowa? Twenty million people live within a daytrip of the Lake District and 12 million, roughly a quarter of England's population, come to the Lakes each year. No wonder on some summer weekends it can take two hours to get through Ambleside and that you could almost walk across Windermere by stepping from boat to boat.
And yet even at its worst, the Lake District remains more charming and less rapaciously commercialized than many famed beauty spots in more spacious countries. And away from the crowds away from Bowness, Hawkshead and Keswick, with their tea towels, tearooms, teapots and endless Beatrix Potter shit it retains pockets of sheer perfection, as I found now when the ferry nosed into its landing and we tumbled off. For a minute the landing area was a hive of activity as one group of cars got off, another got on and the eight or ten foot passengers departed in various directions. And then all was blissful silence. I followed a pretty, wooded road around the lake's edge before turning inland and heading for Near Sawrey.