A Homecoming of Sorts
Five days healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
Part ten: Why the need for healing?
As a child I was a talented artist. I was born with an aptitude for pencil drawing, but a mis-spent adolescence followed by a traumatic twenties filled with false hope and false starts meant it was not until I was 32 that I arrived in Bath as a student artist. By this point I had grown tired of drawing, and was eager to gain recognition for the work of my mind, rather than my hands. On graduation I entered a world of art exhibitions and residencies, and having been awarded a professional development opportunity with an art writer, the beginnings of a career hunched at my laptop. Five years and two children later, I embarked upon a three-year master’s degree during which I spent most of my time trying to shoe-horn walking into my artistic practice. After my MA I was commissioned to produce a one-off publication, limited to 100 copies, by independent publisher Fifth Syllable (Scott Robertson). I used the opportunity to document my route to becoming a hiking artist. In a nod to the seemingly never-ending run of new experiences that had befallen me since embarking upon my degree back in 2012, I titled my book ‘Horizons Are Important’.
In the summer of 2021 a text came from Scott, ‘Holy shit, mate. I think you’ve just been invited to Turkey!’ His exclamation was correct. An arts organisation over there had taken a copy of my book and posted about it on Instagram, suggesting that we walk the Lycian Way together.
A year of emails and zoom meetings passed in a flash. A year of route-planning and scheduling, budgeting, kit-checking, and endless training culminated in flights booked to the hiking and art opportunity of a lifetime along the beautiful and rugged coastlands of Antalya aong 200 miles of the Lycian Way. The plan was to collaborate on a project encapsulating both individual and collective works, twin exhibitions in the UK and Turkey, and an accompanying publication. By far the biggest project I’d been involved in since graduating ten years earlier. I wondered to myself whether this could be the break I’d been working towards and hoping for.
I knew within hours of arriving in Turkey and watching him put on his rucksack for what looked like the very first time, that the plan I had worked on tirelessly and tweaked repeatedly over the course of a year – and each time with his express agreement – would not be adhered to.
Over the next few days it became apparent that my hiking partner had not walked so much as a single yard in training. Indeed, he had packed his kit as though it were to be carried by mule train rather than on his own back. A lack of preparation, coupled with lifestyle choices that promote tiredness, inattention to detail, and dehydration do not make happy bedfellows, let alone provide a basis on which one should set out on a 24-day early summer hike through remote and often precipitous coastal and mountainous terrain. At the end of day three he went off to swim in the sea with a trailmate he had met the night before. This was followed by radio silence for what felt like an eternity, and on the phone to my wife on my daughter’s eighth birthday I quietly wept at how desperately shitty this incredible opportunity had turned out to be.
In hindsight, some of those tears were almost certainly shed in self-pity. I had repeatedly ignored my instincts. Without indulging in too much detail, almost nothing about this experience / opportuntiy turned out as it appeared or was promised to be.
A week into the trip the whole project felt under threat. We had set a pace of one mile per hour (normal hiking pace with a full pack being 2-3mph), and every day withdrawn from the trail miles before the scheduled end. A lack of intellectual engagement had my trailmate frustrated and feeling unfulfilled – he was pushing himself physically and felt strongly about the lack of artistic input into a project he had imagined playing out quite differently, despite my constant and detailed communications about the difficulut terrain and long miles our hike would involve in the run-up to our departure.
On day eight we set down in Kas for what turned into three long rest days in a tiny room together, and it dawned on me that we would not be making it to the end of this trail. Stretched out on my bed, two feet from his, in that matchbox of a room, I replanned our trip three times over. We were due to meet up with another artist so I worked around that, then when it rained and he declared his complete lack of waterproof equipment, I worked around that. He refused to countenance anything away from the shore, for that would include climbing, so all the promised remote mountain phases with their spectacular sunsets and hundred-mile views into the Turkish interior were slashed and burned in the name of keeping him on the trail. I so desperately wanted to make this work.
On day eleven – our eighth day hiking – we stepped out of our tents just yards away from the turquoise sea. Surrounded by such tranquil beauty I foolishly allowed hope to trickle in. Perhaps if we just cling to the coastline from now on, perhaps if we swim every day, perhaps if we dedicate rest-days to philosophical discussion, perhaps if we stick to our new plan to walk no more than five miles per day, using buses and taxis to jump the more challenging sections, perhaps if I make sacrifice and compromise my watchwords – P E R H A P S – we will make it to the end of this incredible trail.
We stepped out of our tents at sea level, and no sooner had I bade him good morning than he ventured the question, ‘do you think there will be any uphill today?’
On day three, as I was ditched in favour of sea-swimming with a stranger, my heart had been broken, now my spirit followed. Here we were at sea level, and still I had to contend with these unrealistic expectations, managing them with sensitivity and care, which were met with complaint, despair, and more.
At the end of mile two of the day’s scheduled four we sat for a while before he declared he could walk no more. We hiked a mile to the nearest bus stop and in a single moment all of his frustrations came to fruition.
There were two factors that contributed to the failure of our project and breakdown in our relationship. The gulf in preparation for the physical aspect of the trip (I had trained for a year, he had done no training at all), and the gulf in expectation for delivery of the project’s intellectual element. As a walking artist I hike to get out of my mind. On the trail I am a body moving through space with a very specific set of requirements – fuel and rest. Hiking frees me of the overthinking that often stymies my creativity. If there is to be an intellectual outcome from the experience it almost always occurs after the event. My hiking partner for this project had his heart set on hiking to get out of his body and into his mind. He imagined a more romantic escapade, reading philosophy and reciting poetry under shade of the olive tree. Long nights by the tent discussing the many texts he had selected for us to read as part of the project. I cannot fault his prep for this aspect of our collaboration, but he fell woefully short of the preparation required to build the framework around which these intellectual musings would hang.
I had sacrificed my time, effort, emotional energy, and a lot of money to be here, and on our long journey home, was told, ‘I hope it’s not too disappointing for you.’ When I began to say yes, his look of surprise nearly knocked me off my seat.
The hike ended that day.
A few days later I was home, and I received the news that my brother-in-law – a dear friend whom I had come to call ‘brother’ – had reached the end of viable cancer treatment, and that he had been given mere weeks to live.
Having already left my heart, all thoughts of The Lycian Expedition left my head as I focused completely on giving my sister and her family whatever support I could muster. In the summer of 2022, aged just 39, Thom died and what little joy I still had inside me at that point upped and left with him. In my devastation, I communicated to my collaborator that I was unable to produce creative work at this time, and that I did not know when I would return. The reply came quickly, and it read, ‘I don’t see why this would affect your artistic output.’
And with that, I was done. I later withdrew from the project altogether, to yet more gaslighting.
By January we had been through what would have been Thom’s 40th birthday and our first Christmas without him, and I was starting to turn a corner. Out of nowhere I wrote ‘Musings on Disappointment.’
Musings on disappointment
By Trevor H. Smith
How long now has it been?
Eight months. Two since the break-up, and well over a year since all those promises,
and hope.For a while you really had me going there.
But there was something in the eyes – your hubris – that set a doubt in my mind. Was this ever really going be? You showed me your CV, but there was never any delivery.
You took away the right of that landscape to call itself unspoilt.
And as you bluffed, lied, and gaslighted your way across ancient history, you trampled my kindness into the dry, red earth.
When I was at my lowest ebb, inside a sadness incomparable, you abandoned me, saying ‘I am following a different story now.’
There was no way back after that, and although you returned, I readied myself for your imminent and permanent withdrawal.
When it came you showed your anger in all its foot-stomping glory, and I entered survival mode. And though your strange generosity continued, I noted the end of a partnership as I drifted in timeless slow motion, surrounded by mementos of the trauma you had so recently visited upon me. That pain turned to numbness and hardened into a manic smile that stuck around for weeks.
Months later, I began to understand what you and your retinue of enablers had put me through.
My first adult break-up went as expected; my feelings ignored, my emotions, invalidated, and I was left with only one recourse.
‘I thank you for your support and understanding at this difficult time.’
You are free to follow a different story now, but not mine.
Two years have passed since the failed Lycian Expedition, and I bear no ill-will towards my Turkish would-be collaborator. Although our aspirations were similar, our methods of achieving them differed too much for our project to handle and our personalities were utterly incompatible. We are no longer in communication with one another, but I wish him well in his pursuits. He is, as I am, just another creative person striving to make something meaningful.