Weekend Hauntings

2024 · 04 · 10

There was a period when I had little that could be called a normal schedule during the week but was leaving London as soon as the weekend began, driving voraciously across England in the cheapest cars I could find. I became well known at the rental offices outside Stansted and Luton. They were small stuffy buildings, cheaply carpeted and staffed by men capable of producing speech continuously from the moment I entered until the car door closed, often inspired by my accent or the vagueness of my plans to complicate my trip with free upgrades.

"That's a nice car that, beautiful, now what shall I put for your occupation then Henry? That's brilliant Henry, won't be a minute, ta, sorted a nice one just for you, mate, always do right by others when I can: a class car, that one, wherever you end up going, she'll get you there alright."

When I had the idea to drive to Wales, they put me in a Volvo Polestar II, the sequel to a car I'd never heard of. It was low and violent like a panther, leaping forward at the slightest touch of the pedal—then growing sullen and needy shortly after, demanding hours of expensive recharging at stations outside Slough.

I had sworn repeatedly that I'd avoid the M4, but the roundabouts always swung me back onto it, as if desperate to reveal something in the uniform deciduous rows ascending from the tarmac. Outside Cardiff it began to rain. Houses lay in neat heaps of cottage-cheese stucco, slumping in on themselves beside the road. By the time I parked in a small layby in the Brecon Beacons, there was less than an hour to sunset, and the open boot sent thick columns of water straight into the backseat as I packed.

Across the road, a brooding hostel marked the path up toward Pen y Fan, where a man at the Slough service station had assured me I'd find a small lake where backpackers were tolerated. Forty minutes later, I gained a broad plateau of bruised heather and quickly left it behind, following a muddy ridgeline that hooked to the left. On the occasions I struggled to look up, I could see only a few feet ahead.

At first it seemed a figure, slanting and stoic against the wind. As I stumbled toward it, the shape resolved into a lone flake of mossy stone only a few feet from the edge. Gripping it with both hands against the driving rain, I could just make out its inscription, which read:

"This Obelisk marks the spot where the body of Tommy Jones aged 5 was found. He lost his way between Cymllwch farm and the Lo--- on the night of August 4th 1900. After an anxious search of 29 days his remains were discovered Sept. 2nd."

I turned. Two steps farther, the path fell away, framing a narrow valley a hundred feet below: at its center, a pool of chrome gathered like the molten contents of a crucible. Across this surface each gust etched patterns that the next just as quickly erased: enormous inscriptions jagged like runes and delicate networks of arterial lines; between these, long moments like a deep breath when the water became completely still. It was as if in his long slumber, Tommy Jones had gained control of the wind, turning that pond into his etch-a-sketch.

I nearly turned back, but the sight of a sheltered hollow lured me down into the valley, promising hot oatmeal and soft grass. And twenty minutes later I nearly had it. I had slid down the curling path of freshly formed mud and gained the corrie floor. I had wrestled the tent into solidity on the eastern shore, and was lying inside, soaked through and exultant as the sun reached the frayed edge of the hills. From my chosen hollow, the pond was framed like an amphitheater, surrounded on three sides by the ridgeline above. Sure enough, high up and to the left, I could still see the monument.

I looked out over the water and was taken by the idea of naming him so that he might hear. Leaning out through the mouth of the tent, I called out "Tommy Jones!"—and just then a high gale shook the valley and the tent flattened on top of me. The delicate spine of my Big Agnes II vibrated so rapidly that the aluminum shook my thighs, but she remained miraculously intact, beautifully loyal creature that she was—the whole thing simply pinned to the earth, electric like a restrained animal. Around my feet, a narrow changing slit between the fabric and the grass offered snatched glimpses of the lake made tidal by the wind: glimpses briefer still of that narrow flake of inscribed stone standing out on the hill above. I say this without exaggeration: I was held down too. All I could do was stare up at the monument, just visible through the rain, and half laugh, half shudder at the last great game available to that little boy. Finally when a brief calm came, I dove out through the flap and crawled around, desperately gathering all of the stakes and poles into their Dyneema bags. Then the wind returned and I gave up, clipping the whole tangled assembly to my backpack with a carabiner and dragging it behind me—first around the pond, were the light finally failed, and then back up the ridge, where each gust inflated the tent behind me like a great translucent lung.

As soon as I reached the plateau I was lost. I entered a separate track of my life, a montage cut together from all of the times on various continents when I have staggered forward through a strong headwind, staring at my feet, testing each step in the weak light of a headlamp as the front of my jeans soaked through. A black maze of stones gave the horrific impression that the monument had duplicated itself across the night. Once for a miraculous instant the wind died and the clouds slid apart like curtains. I found myself groping around the jagged footing of the Corn Du trig point, having evidently doubled back to the ridge. Then the curtains closed and it was back to darkness.

I followed the light off a distant town, gemlike on the horizon, down into a canyon, across a stream, and up the other side, where I finally caught sight of the road. Coming up that first slope was a man equipped very much like I was: an hour past sunset but committed, he said as we met on the trail and paused briefly to shout through the storm, to trying his luck at sleeping beside the very same pond. I took his shoulder, a gesture likely less brotherly than I had intended in the wet depths of night, and said: "I can't emphasize strongly enough how bad an idea that is." But he only shrugged my hand away and smiled slyly as he replied, "I'll see how I go"—as if my teeing up this line for him had added the final atmospheric touch to his quest. It was exactly how I would have reacted to a similar warning three hours earlier.

The Polestar II sensed my presence from across the road and purred to life, which seemed in my compromised state a gesture of astounding loyalty. The display in the dashboard showed a cheerful little animation of the car sliced down the middle, the heater swirling industriously to restore me. I didn't unpack anything or untangle the tent, just pulled up a local map on the touchscreen and limped the car slowly down the road, so wet that I could feel the lack of friction through the power steering.

I parked in one of those enormous central car parks lined with a low drystone wall that all British villages seem to have invested in. Rain battered the cobblestones under long pale arcs of bunting. Whenever I paused to look up, a vast grid of drops hung suspended in that same pale light. In the only pub still open in Breacon, a group of charismatic young locals looked at me with elaborate pity and brought out an extraordinary steak and ale pie.

When I left hours later, the rain had stopped. After dark, the silence of a village draws soft, comfortable speech out of its households, causing the narrow roads to echo like one labyrinthine living room. The knowledge that you're going to sleep in the car park confers a certain intimacy, a freedom to walk around and listen to these unguarded conversations blowing out and mingling in the wind. You can follow one voice for blocks without discovering its source, misled by echoes. At other moments they begin right next to your year, snapping your attention toward a window left wide-open: a figure inches away, framed in profile as he addresses his wife—completely unaware that you could reach in and touch his cheek. Without any particular malevolence, you find yourself becoming the sort of rustling presence that dogs bark at through the night.

Despite England's misgivings about wild camping, I feel a great loyalty to its village car parks. I love waiting for these lots to empty and then taking my time to find the perfect spot, a place deep in a corner, shaded from the all-night lamps. As I prepared the cramped nest inside, the usual crowd began to arrive - not many, but true bohemians one and all, men over 40 in large SUVs and old jeeps, each claiming their own dark corner or isolated island, carefully positioning their cars at a diagonal across three or four spots such that no light fell through any of the windows.

Even after countless nights, you never sleep well in a car. You start in the driver seat, convinced that this time the angle of the recline will be enough, and then around 1am you open everything up, put down all the seats, and begin trying every possible tessellation of your body into the shallow space of the back, sometimes noisily starting the car again to drive up onto a curb and remedy the angle that was sending the blood to your head. When you open the door to empty or refill a bottle, you often catch one of the others doing the same - never a nod or smile, but a sense still of silent camaraderie shared by the grim evening citizens of the lot. Finally near dawn you remember (how easily forgotten, this principle) that it's best to tuck your torso back through the small hatch in the rear seats and into the cave of the boot, where you awake looking a decade older, unsure where you are but certain that you have been paralyzed.

Days later I was on Beachy Head, contending with the ghosts of the other side of the island. I'd limped my bike across the South Downs: past astounding windmills steadied by outriggers and down slick hills of grass, untouched like powder. Cramping out on a hilltop, I paused to compare gear with retired solicitors: their sleek gravel bikes sitting beside what I'd achieved on the dawn train to Hassocks, a collection of objects tied to the steel frame of my single speed with ragged bits of paracord. The final climb traced the border of Friston Forest, a sea of ancient beech barely contained behind a low sandstone wall, its canopy rolling in one skeletal mound, touched by the faintest pink.

I hadn't seen a photo of Beachy Head, so its scale was shocking: a lonesome upland region of cliffs that fell 500 feet to a black shore, where the sea climbed half again as high to loom from the horizon. Basking on the chalky edge, I first noticed a drone hovering overhead—then two priests in high-viz vests sat down beside me. We chatted for a while, but the conversation kept returning to questions that sounded like a risk screening. I told them repeatedly, laughing, that I wasn't there to jump, but that word had the opposite effect. I became their main focus. Wincing as they tested their words, they negotiated my retreat from the section beyond their low rope line. And so began the game of evading the industrialized pastoral infrastructure of what was, unknown to me then, Britain's number one suicide spot. I would shake my priests' hands and try to look as optimistic as possible as I biked off across the ribbon of wet grass. But as soon as I found a new perch, the drone would appear, followed by two pinpricks of neon cresting the horizon; then they'd be back beside me, cooing ecumenically as the drone bobbed out in the open air. Feigning some revelation, I finally lost them in the tall grass fifty feet from the edge, where I set up my tent under the cover of a thick and luminous fog.

I've come to distrust those who sleep easily when alone in a tent. The thru-hiker's absolute calm as they put in headphones for a podcast strikes me as a deadness or insensitivity. My nights outdoors are still marked by hours of painful spatial awareness and full-body fear. From inside a tent, individual sounds can rarely be identified over the wind, but this only hastens the arrival of incredibly specific hallucinations: the invention of ornate systems to track the movements of the dark manifestation you sense lurking fifty feet behind your left shoulder. It becomes important to arrange yourself such that you never present the back of your head to this presence.

There is always someone talking in England. Even at 3am on a rural cliffside, every mournful gust from the sea carried high laughter and stray volleys of conversation. Just as I was nearly asleep, and from a direction I had thought completely safe, these voices resolved suddenly into a pack of local women roaming the cliffs. I lay frozen in their flashlights as they surrounded my tent, pausing a discussion of village politics to ask if I was alright. Certain of an apparition, I was unable to bear young mothers—and eventually let out some groan of acknowledgement that sent them on their way.

The next morning, I lashed everything to the bike, pinned myself to the frame, and soared down the stone switch-backs into Eastbourne. In one climactic moment, I plunged into the upper surface of the fog layer—shocked to discover that it was a discrete physical entity, a bounded world of wet grey light with a few-second duration—and shot out the other side. I touched neither the breaks nor pedals for a full 20 minutes, riding the momentum in a long loop past the great silent houses along the shore and into a town that felt stranded in time. I swam beside the white iron behemoth of the pier, a Victorian spaceship scaffolded into the sea, and was elated the whole journey home, tricked somehow by the past week's events into feeling that I had cheated death.

These trips took days, sometimes nearly a week, to recover from. They amused everyone in my life, who seemed curious at how little I had to show for them. Common to them all was a moment, often in the early evening, when I encountered again the basic fact that the countryside is not a true wilderness in any sense, not even a bounded and managed one like the Cairngorms. I remembered that in Britain, while you are often alone, you are rarely out of sight of large groups of people, clumps of cheap housing, cars moving across the valley floor—but that when you do evade all of these, however briefly, you find a landscape suffused with dark and unresolved intensities. This tension is somehow key to the effect of the country; the constantly shifting gradient between these modes produces a sort of magnetic field, a source of potential energy; you slide ineluctably from Ballard's England to Wordsworth's and are pushed on again to the next. All of this manifests after sunset as a sudden sorrow or terror, so you find the nearest pub that is still open, very conscious as your meal arrives that you are using it as a sedative to hasten the arrival of fitful sleep. Then it's back to your tent that’s not as far outside of town as you remembered, or rather not as far from any of the three towns it seems to lie between, where you watch the passage of the cars across the valley, darker now, the hills painted a brief fierce gold by the headlamps—and you take a sort of domestic solace in imagining where they’re driving, or as you near sleep, that they might even be coming to pick you up.