The C2C Trail, Part 6: The “End”

The cliff I was slowly traversing was spectacular – the North Sea spread out to the east in tumultuous grey waves, and a clear view of the rain that was crawling towards me. I tried to quicken my pace, but my legs let me know, in no uncertain terms, that I had reached top speed. Small children in flip flops and old people with walking sticks strode past me with seeming effortlessness.

It was difficult to rest; there were no benches and only muddy grass on the side of the trail, so I paused every so often, dumped my bag on the saturated ground, and braced my hands on my knees, willing myself onwards. With every undulation in the cliffs and every turn that promised a new view, I hoped to see a town, but there was just another cliff, another hill, more grass.

When the rain reached me, it was all at once. And all at once, I was soaked to the bone. There were more people in this area, and we were all slipping in the mud, cowering under our hoods, our heads bent against the wind. I stopped looking up and decided to keep my eyes on my feet.

Finally, a few buildings emerged in my peripheral vision.

Cobbled pavement appeared, uneven and slippery under my tripping feet, and a bench at last – except of course, rest is difficult when rain is pouring down on you like the end of days. 

I fumbled my phone out of my shirt where I had tucked it away from the deluge. I swore under my breath as I struggled to unlock it; raindrops hammered onto the screen and my fingers, rendering it nearly unusable. I finally got in and opened the map, and that’s when I realized my fatal mistake.

I had booked an affordable night at a lovely hostel called YHA Boggle Hole, which appeared to be a series of buildings crammed into a narrow valley near the sea. And now, as I shivered and struggled to wrap my mind around the blurry map, I realized that the hostel was a mile outside of town.

For those who haven’t walked many, many miles, I can’t underline enough how excruciating it is (physically, emotionally, and spiritually) to walk even a couple of minutes off the trail to an inn, especially in the wrong direction. So the prospect of a twenty minute jaunt through the downpour, up and down more cliffs, to reach a place with shelter, food, a shower, and a room to deposit all of my belongings was almost too much to bear.

The conundrum was real – I was so thoroughly drenched that wandering into a pub and ordering something to eat was not ideal. But if I made the final march to Boggle Hole now, I certainly wouldn’t return to town until the morning, and I was hoping to meet Chris and Julie at the Grosvenor Hotel where they said they would be staying. Once again, I had no inkling what Brian, my vegan Californian friend, was up to.

Lacking the bandwidth to make a decision, I simply sat there, in the rain, my mind increasingly blank and distraught. People walked by me, heading to the nearby shelter and warmth of their cars, or their hotel rooms, damn them.

“Brittany?”

The voice came from somewhere above me, outside the protection of my hood. I looked up, and to my surprise (but also not) it was Brian who was gazing down at me. Of course he happened to be walking by.

Brian was uncharacteristically unladen, striding back from the ocean in his raincoat. “Where are you staying?” he asked, and I told him my sad tale about Boggle Hole. It turned out he was staying at The Grosvenor like Chris and Julie, and suggested that we grab a drink and some food and wait for them. He even offered me the privacy of his bathroom to towel off my hair and change into dry clothes.

We made our way up the street where The Grosvenor beckoned. I borrowed his key, changed, and met him by the crackling fire in the pub. We ordered some ciders and chicken tikka (his with tofu), and stared out at the rivulets of rain running down the window, waiting for our drinks to arrive and swapping stories from earlier that day in the moor. 

It turned out that Brian had packed some new-fangled plastic gators he thought would out-perform regular gators, keeping the mud and wet out of his boots, but it turned out they were as leaky as his single-walled tent. After a couple of miles squelching along in the bog that was now trapped inside his boots, he had a solo tantrum in the middle of nowhere and threw them out the first chance he got. He shook his head in self-deprecating remorse.

Then our drinks arrived, and Brian raised his glass in a toast. I raised mine too, and we shared a strange moment of silent realization.

“To finishing,” said Brian, with a small uptick at the end, an almost-question.

“To finishing,” I echoed distantly.

Because yes, we had finished the Coast to Coast. We were done.

The past informs the present, and I recall now that my high school graduation happened a couple weeks before final exams began. I remember a feeling of anticipation – I yearned to walk across the stage, embrace my friends and family, and most importantly, experience the incandescent feeling that I had arrived. Gotten there. Crossed the barrier between childhood and adulthood.

But of course, finality was denied to us that day. We hadn’t yet sat our final exams. Even though I was confident I wouldn’t fail, there was no feeling of release for me at graduation. In fact, the true last day of school slipped through my fingers like silk. I left my last exam paper in the gymnasium, got on the bus, and went home just like every other day. The only difference was that when September eventually rolled around, I wouldn’t be coming back.

By contrast, my university graduation ceremony happened four months after I finished my final classes. Despite being done in late December, I had to wait until April to walk the stage with everyone else. By then I was working at the bank in the job I’d had before I started my degree, leaving me with the dire conclusion that life is indeed a flat circle.

I used one of my ten precious vacation days to graduate university, and encountered the opposite realization that I’d had in high school: this day – this famous marker of finishing – had not come too early this time, but too late. By the time I showed up and donned my gown, I hadn’t been on campus in months, and in a real sense, I had already experienced the abrupt change in lifestyle, worked through a period of mourning that I would never again enjoy the academic rigour of the past four and a half years, and had settled into a new, more pragmatic, routine.

But every once in a while, you get the rare chance to actually finish something on your terms.

Like Alice in Wonderland, I had eaten mushrooms that were too much of something – the mushroom that made me arrive too early, and the mushroom that made me too late. 

But this big walk, I promised myself, was the mushroom that would allow me to arrive right on time. This time, I told myself, I would revel in it. I would celebrate it. I would congratulate myself and feel whole and accomplished. I thought about finishing a lot in the days leading up to it, as I wandered across the landscape. I’m old and wise enough to be here for the journey, but I also anticipated the pleasure of completing something I didn’t know was possible for me.

And yet I found myself here, toasting my cider into the void and realizing that, well, I had kind of missed it.

Does finishing mean to walk across a stage? Does it mean to quit the job, move across the country, accept the award, get the promotion, complete the race, receive validation, or sit on a bench in the rain in Robin Hoods Bay after 300km of walking?

Perhaps “finishing” is more of a feeling we chase than a thing we do. We anticipate the pride, the celebration, the success, the release, the calm, the conclusion. The deep breath out. I’ve made it. And this is all I’ve ever wanted.

In other words, we still seek happily ever after.

But happily ever afters live in fairy tales, and fairy tale endings are always tied up in a neat little bow for us. There goes the prince and princess, riding into the sunset… aaaaand that’s a wrap, folks.

In real life, the sunset ride eventually ends. We disembark from the carriage, our limbs stiff. And tomorrow is another day, something new to anticipate. 

In real life, every finish line immediately gives way to a starting line. Perhaps we aren’t wired to feel like we’ve received all we’ve ever wanted, because we’re geared to continue striving, seeking, enjoying. And maybe, just maybe, thank goodness for that. 

Maybe contentment means to accept that our goals don’t just materialize like a road hitting a dead end. Our aspirations don’t just become fulfilled and leave us satiated, never to want anything ever again. Instead, life seems to roll out in a spiral, always changing, always expanding and growing. And our ambitions, anticipations, and priorities change in harmony with it.

I find my finish line in the clarity of hindsight.

I sit here now in early October, thinking back on that walk, and I feel a greater sense of finishing than I did in the moment, and even in the days, weeks, and months that followed. The gravity of it took a while to catch up with me.

I asked myself just now: Did I have a real moment of finishing? Did I give myself that? 

And I did. It just wasn’t what I was expecting. I didn’t feel like I finished when I walked into Robin Hoods Bay in the rain. Nor when I toasted Brian. Not even when I collapsed in my tiny bed in the tiny room called “The Brig” at Boggle Hole.

Finishing actually occurred earlier that day. It happened when, after miles of foggy skies, limited vision, and tall hedges, I turned a corner and there was the ocean, no more than a hundred feet ahead of me. I gasped, I laughed, I cried – I was listening to the perfect music to accompany the moment. I stood at the fence for a few minutes and watched a sailboat float by, disbelieving and shaky and elated.

I still had two hours of cliff-walking ahead of me, but that was the moment I realized I had finally, impossibly, run out of land.

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