Where the Trail Ends

The trail ends at a cairn someone built from flat stones stacked seven high. There's no summit marker, no sign, no explanation for why the path stops here and not fifty meters further where the view is better. Someone decided this was the place and built a small pile of rocks and everybody since has agreed by not going further. I walk this ridge most weekends. It's forty minutes from my door if I take the direct route, which I never do because the direct route goes through a bog that has swallowed one of my boots and most of my patience. The long way adds twenty minutes and follows a sheep track along the hillside where the ground is firm and the views open up gradually, which is how I prefer my views — earned, not given. The ridge is not famous. It doesn't appear in guidebooks. It's seven hundred meters, which in the Highlands barely counts as a hill — the Munro baggers walk past it on their way to things with proper names and triangulation pillars. I don't bag Munros. I'm not against it. I just can't be bothered with the record-keeping. Walking should not involve a spreadsheet. From the cairn you can see the loch, which is black and long and has a name in Gaelic that I can't pronounce. Beyond it, the hills stack up toward the north in layers of grey and blue, each one slightly fainter than the last, like a watercolor someone forgot to finish. On clear days you can see the sea. On most days you can see rain coming from the west with twenty minutes' warning, which is enough time to put on a jacket but not enough to get off the hill, so you put on the jacket and get wet anyway. I moved here from Edinburgh four years ago. This fact still surprises people who ask what I do for work and I say I teach online and they say but what do you do here and I say I walk, and they look at me with a particular expression that means they think I'm either brave or unwell. I'm neither. I'm a person who discovered at forty-six that he'd rather be cold and wet on a hill than warm and dry in an office, and who had enough savings and few enough obligations to act on this discovery. My ex-wife said I was running away from something. I don't think that's true, but even if it is, I'm running toward something too, and the something has a cairn on it and a view of the loch and a wind that comes from the Atlantic and has nothing to say except itself. The cairn needs a stone. I've brought one from the streambed — flat, grey, roughly the size of my hand. I put it on top. Eight high now. Someone after me will make it nine, or the wind will knock it down and someone will start again. This is how things work up here. You build. The weather has opinions. You build again.