19 February: reading 500 Mile Walkies

Allan took a quick look at some beauties of Cape Disappointment while delivering books to the Lewis and Clark gift shop there.

Cape Disappointment lighthouse

alders with lichen

Meanwhile, I was reading a book I had learned about from Raynor Winn’s memoir, The Salt Path.

This is a glorious tale of a different sort of walk around the coast of Devon and Cornwall from the one decades later in The Salt Path. Mark Wallington camped in some rough weather but stayed in inexpensive B&Bs when the wind and rain were too dire and had the money to have a Cornish pasty in a pub or teatime in a cafe.

His tale is mostly hilarious with some poignant, heartfelt moments. From a night at a B&B, he learned of a lifeboat disaster that reminded me of tragic tales around Cape Disappointment, near me, where the Columbia River bar is known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.:

His walk must have taken him along the cliff in front of Dorminack Cottage, home of Derek and Jeannie Tangye of the 19 volume memoir series, The Minack Chronicles, which was just about to consume my life for almost a month and put a stopper in any desire to blog instead of read. (That’s where I’ve been, in my imagination.) Derek Tangye wrote of the same tragedy when it happened and several times afterward.

From 500 Mile Walkies, some scenes very near to Dorminack:

Below, I always love to read stories about what the locals think of tourists. I was a tourist in this same part of Cornwall in 1975. Now that I’ve been a local in seaside towns for a quarter of a century, I think I would be uncomfortable returning to the tourist role.

500 Mile Walkies is now one of my favourite books of all time, and up in the top ten of the funniest, and I intend to read all of Wallington’s books. I think it’s been out of print. I hope it being mentioned in The Salt Path will give it a huge boost. Two of the sequels feature Boogie, an adorable scamp of a dog (who in real life is bigger than I imagined from Mark’s description; I googled up some photos of the two of them).