If you need to reconnect with something wild, head to the Scottish Highlands, where the landscape has no concern for your golf handicap, your bank balance or how many friends you have on Facebook.
There is one fixed point in my year. Actually there are dozens of fixed points: Christmas, birthdays, Easter, school terms, anniversaries, the office party, deadlines. My whole life turns out to be fixed points and deadlines, a slalom of imperatives. What I mean is there is one week that isn’t fixed by other people, or the kids, or bosses, or God. What I mean is there is one week without noise. It’s more a hole in the year, a blank in the diary, unsullied by asterisks and exclamations, scribbled phone numbers and restaurant names, an escape hatch in the space-time continuum. It’s the week I spend in the Highlands of Scotland where I stagger and slip up and down the hills, gasping like a spilt carp, cold, wet, grazed, twisted, strained, agued and palsied. Every day of it, there is a moment where I swear, swear on my shuddering aorta, my turned ankle and my barbied lungs, that I will never, ever do this again. And then the minute I leave, I am yearning to get back, to dig this hole into next year’s diary.
The purpose of being here is ostensibly to kill things. We go out accoutred for murder in camouflage with binoculars and guns and knives and sandwiches. But the pursuit of death is really only a ruse, a cover. As often as not the deer elude us. The point is really not death but the pursuit of life by life. To get out and discover quite how alive I still am. And the hills grow taller and my feet heavier, but still I’m bound to the wild pursuit in this quite literally breathtaking place. It is a validation that I still have a place in the landscape.
In this rough world there is a pleasure that is difficult to explain. This isn’t about aesthetics or health or achievement or any of the urban unwinding, de-stressing, getting your head together stuff. It’s something more basic, colder and ancient. It’s being part of it, part of something bigger. The belonging not to a list of accrued things – the urban civilised litany of stuff that our credit companies and our censuses know about us – but to a species, to be Darwinian. To fit into a world that isn’t already man-ordained or man-ordered.
There is a growing trend, particularly among middle-aged blokes, to choose holidays for their primordial discomfort. I’m noticing that a lot of chaps are packing rucksacks and heading out into the high country – up a river, over tundra. I know that holiday companies have noticed this too. There’s a new market of sedentary men with families and white-collar jobs who don’t want to exchange the vanilla comfort and safety of their homes for the fuchsia comfort and safety of some packaged and predictable resort. One tour operator who makes bespoke adventures for groups of men told me, ‘These are people who want to come back with a story, not a tan.’ Who want to have memories more than they want to have a set of photographs just like the photographs they had last year and the year before. How boring are most holiday snaps, how passive.
Women tend to dismiss this as a midlife crisis thing – possibly preferable to a Harley, a ponytail and a mail-order mistress, but still essentially risible, a foolish-man fantasy game, an attempt to ignore the truth and put off the responsibilities of life. But in fairness that’s not it. ‘Midlife crisis’ is such a dismissive, glib little put-down. It’s more complicated and more poignant than that, than just wanting to feel 18 again.
Most of us reach a point where we’ve already hacked the big stuff. We’ve had kids and wives, we’ve had careers or had them thrust upon us, we’ve taken on mortgages and debt. And we’ve handled it. We’ve been okay at the grown-up stuff. We really don’t want to be teenagers again, or wear leather, or go to nightclubs. We know what’s ridiculous. And if we’re not actually proud of our lives, then we’re pleased with them; what we’ve made, the things we’ve achieved. But there is also a nagging sense that we’ve become janitors in our own lives. We turn up and maintain stuff – paint a wall, unblock a drain, shout at the kids, put out the rubbish – and with care and luck we can go on doing this forever.
But we didn’t set out to be curators to our own families and offices. There is a disconnect with something wild, something out there. So we get on a horse, or into a canoe, or onto skis; we pack a sleeping bag, a wet-suit, goggles and a mosquito net and take a week to face the weather. It’s not escapism, or fantasy, or role play, or showing off; it’s being a bloke who hasn’t hyphenated himself with father, or husband, or neighbour, investor, accountant, teacher, plumber, journalist. Because out here in the Highlands, with the heather and the gorse, the ravens and the stags, they don’t care. The landscape has no concern for your golf handicap, your bank balance, how many friends you have on Facebook.
I’m from Scotland and this is also a week of home-coming. Like most of us I have contradictory feelings about all that root stuff, but I do have an emotional commitment to this place that has grown fond through absence. I only went 500 miles away down the road, but still this is the Other Country, and I suspect the adventures men take on are often bound up in the business of their childhoods. We think it’s serendipity or an empirical choice, but to walk or cycle or run in deserts, or hack through jungle will have had its origin in a bedtime book, a moment with your dad, the first time you realised the world went on beyond the bottom of the garden. It belongs to a bit of your brain and memory that is not rational or explainable. This week in the hills chasing the deer isn’t really a hole in the diary; it’s not an escape. It’s the ridge pole of the rest of the year. It takes a load for all of the other stuff.
I don’t want to live up there. I have no intention of chucking the solid bit of my life away. I come back to it with greater gusto and gratitude knowing that I’m not just the sum of my achievements, my habits and my acquisitions. When I’m stuck in traffic or a tedious meeting, when the computer crashes and the deadlines pile up, I can close my eyes and be back on the hill, saw-breathed, sodden with the wind, wiping the curses from my mouth.