About 15 minutes into my hike, I remembered that I am a sweaty sort of person. At the end of the first kilometre – which felt like a sharp, sheer ascent into heaven or hell, depending on how you see things – the fine mist that adorned my forehead had graduated to a far less dignified mild drench.
For this Santa Barbara trip, I’d brought along a book I’d been promising to read for several years – Fran Ross’s 1974 novel Oreo – but on the hike I was thinking only about the work of the American-British writer Bill Bryson. Bryson was perhaps the first travel writer I read and loved; as a teenager, I was on the reservation list at every library in Newham, waiting to check out everything he’d published. So I found myself thinking of Bryson’s rollicking account of his attempt to hike all 3,500 treacherous kilometres of the Appalachian Trail (A Walk In The Woods; highly recommended) and felt inordinately proud of my own 5km journey on rocky terrain.
“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere,” wrote Bryson, and how right he was. So I said, “Hey, buddy!” to all the curious dogs and their equally friendly humans, and was reminded of another of Bryson’s hilarious books, The Lost Continent, about small-town America (he is a master of the seemingly mundane observation).
Finally I got to Inspiration Point, with its cloudy but magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez mountains. I stood there, and wondered idly if I, an amateur hiker like Bryson, would ever write a book as funny as The Lost Continent. Well, they don’t call it Inspiration Point for nothing.
