The Salt Path

During their journey on the South West Coast Path, Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path (Penguin Books, 2019), and her husband Moth, encounter a Tarot card reader who offers them a free reading.  “Give time for what you know you must do and you will have what you desire most,” the woman tells them.  She then turns to Moth and says, “And you will be well.  She has a long lifeline, and you’re in it.”

This is remarkable because Winn is not giving the time to walk the 630 mile trail from Somerset to Dorset.  She has no choice.  They can be homeless in the English town where the couple’s lost farm was seized by the bailiffs to pay an unfair, court-enforced debt, or they can become like the homeless transients the couple later encounters on the trail itself.  Either way, they are homeless.  So, short on options, they set off walking in the hope that the next step in their lives will become apparent on the journey.  And Moth, well he has a terminal disease which would seem to preclude a long life as well as a long arduous journey on foot through southwestern England.

This beautiful, poetic memoir contains almost unbearable lyrical sadness ending in quiet triumph.  At its heart, the book is about the way life bends and pulls us, and how if we are not flexible and resilient, we will snap and fall off the cliff to the rocks and tides below.  It is also about rebirth, rejuvenation, and enlightenment of a secular Zen nature.  We see these two come back to life and rise from the ashes of what was to embrace the reality of what is and the uncertainty of what will be.  They become “salted” on this salt path, as one of the many curious characters they meet tells them.  She also says they have “the look,” as she passes them “wild camping” along the trail.  “It’s touched you,” she continues, “it’s written all over you:  you’ve felt the hand of nature.  It won’t ever leave you now; you’re salted…but when it’s touched you, when you let it be, you’re never the same again.”

These nuggets of wisdom and metaphysical knowing come from a variety of interesting characters.  A man practicing yoga trailside seems to know all the burden and strife the middle-aged couple carries.  They tell him they are just walking the path because there is nothing more to do after one loses everything.  The man replies, “you’ll travel many miles…You’ll see many things, amazing things, and suffer many setbacks, problems you’ll think you can’t overcome…but you will overcome them, you’ll survive, and it will make you strong.”  Then he offers the strangest of observations:  “And you’ll walk with a tortoise.”  After he is gone, the couple remark on the near total absence of tortoises running wild in the English countryside.  It is a moment of humor in all the extreme challenges facing the two on their journey.  Yet, the prophecy does come true, but how and in what manner is up to the reader to discover.  It is a good story.  The wording of the prophet’s message reminded me of The Odyssey and C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Ithaka,” and it is not the only allusion to that epic.

This journey-as-healing memoir is popular now:  Cheryl Strayed’s wonderful Wild, (Vintage, 2012) and on a darker note, Jon Krakauer’s tale of Christopher McCandless’ disappearance into the Alaskan wilderness in Into the Wild (Anchor Books, 1997).  However, Winn’s book adds a layer of richness with the infamous stoicism of the English.  There is something about these tales that transcends culture and becomes universal.  We can relate to financial catastrophe after living through the recession.  We can understand sorrow and despair in the face of pain and suffering.  We feel the sting of reprobation when we fail our families and friends.  “How could this happen,” they ask.  “Did you squander your money?”  In the rational thought of most people, we are the architects of our own demise.  However, tragedy strikes erratically in a random universe.  There is no right or wrong path; there is only the path, the one we are on and the one we are trying to navigate to the best of our ability.  And sometimes, we must simply get out and walk away to find where we belong.

In Winn’s story, there is a resurrection of sorts.  Moth seems healed, or at least very much stronger than when he starts the journey.  And he appears to grow stronger as the journey progresses, although he does have moments where he feels unwell.  “He’d changed,” Winn writes, “there was no question, he’d changed and according to the doctors that wasn’t possible.”  This is similar to what John Muir experienced and wrote about in his books.  People pronounced ill by doctors go to nature and find themselves healed.  It is extraordinary, and maybe the result of exercise and reduced calories.  The couple finds themselves starving, subsisting on noodles, pasties and berries, the last disastrous to their gastro-intestinal systems.

Winn crosses into philosophy, as a journey such as this might inspire.  “On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same,” she writes.  “Perhaps we were all looking for something that was missing.  Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was.”  She goes on to say that they are “Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death.  At the edge of existence.”  These philosophical musings go hand in hand with such physical and soulful journeys.  And of course, the real subject of such debate is death.  How do we live in a world where we are destined to die?  Winn finds herself shifting into the autumn season, the gradual denouement into the winter years.  She tells us, “I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth.  A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.”

Is that not the point of all journeys?  We must find the place to stand; we must make peace with the raging emotions and angry emptiness inside.  We desire, whatever it takes, to find home.  All journeys, of course, end, and that ending can be, metaphorically or literally, death.  That is the ultimate end of us all.  This is alluded to when the couple comes upon a bench on which a quote is carved:  “Meet me there, where the sea meets the sky, lost but finally free.”

Winn comes to a clearer, more direct conclusion.  “Living with a death sentence, having no idea when it will be enacted, is to straddle a void.  Every word or gesture, every breath of wind or drop of rain matters to a painful degree.”  They thought they would be buried on their farm, now lost.  It has become someone else’s place, another family’s home.  They decide to have their ashes commingled and scattered into the sea, to be together always.  They discover, in short, they are each other’s home.

This is a moving and poetic book, sad yet also life affirming.  Raynor and Moth Winn face heavy blows that nearly take them out of the daily ebb and flow of their shared lives.  But in the face of this adversity, this loss and living on, they find themselves.  That journey is the gift of The Salt Path.