“Time for to spend his days on the land and for me to watch and hope.” Here, they once again discover the “sound of connection”, but it’s fleeting: 50 pages later they’re off again, to Iceland, to walk its southern highlands, “in the hope that could kick all the fear and pain aside and push his body as he had before”. Curiously, it’s here, in her element, where she overreaches: everything Winn sees in nature carries an immutable wonder, wisdom, or elemental power, until occasionally her breathlessness clouds the window: “Moments of blinding lightning lit sheets of water as they were lifted from the ground by the wind and thrown upward to meet the deluge from above in rolling balls of water that reflected the terrifying black monster of a mountain a thousand times, until we became the mountain.”Īnd… what about the farm? The first half of the book revisits trips to the Lake District, the Peak District, Skye… Not until page 145 do Winn and Moth receive Sam’s invitation to take on his rewilding project.
Slipping out of the hospital, she retreats to the nearby woods of her childhood, and to her memories of camping trips, to connect with “the land, the earth, the deep humming background to my very being”. Their relocation here, once again in search of natural healing but also a sense of home, is the premise of The Wild Silence. Sam offered Winn and Moth a free tenancy in return for reviving the wildlife on the farm. And it caught the eye of Sam, a City trader with a farm beside a creek in Cornwall that is said to have partly inspired The Wind in the Willows.
Written as a gift for Moth, a record of their endurance, The Salt Path was shortlisted for the Costa book award and translated into 14 languages. The fog in his brain had cleared, his movements had become surer, easier to control. And yet, as Winn recalls in the opening of this, her second book, as they walked the clifftop paths from Minehead to Polruan, “he’d grown stronger. Worse, Moth had been diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, a brain disease for which there was neither cure nor treatment. I n her bestselling debut, The Salt Path, Raynor Winn walked several hundred miles round England’s South West Coast Path with her husband, Moth, sleeping wild and virtually penniless after their home was lost to bailiffs.
0 kommentar(er)
