February 11, 2017
The English countryside, with its consistently grey skies and quiet solitude, sprawled out in every direction. I’d packed for a weekend, and I listened as the other two–Ashton and Kody–scurried across the dorms on base, our current residence, as they both brought their own luggage around. We decided not long after our arrival in England to explore the island and mainland as much as we could over the weekends we spent during our internship, methodically naming off places we always wanted to visit. We were ambitious. Young–and I would have never described myself as wild, but it felt like something new would burst out of me at any moment.
Edinburgh was next on our list, and we had no car to travel in (and definitely no international permit), so instead we took a train that snaked up to the northside of the UK. Our usual routine of cab-luggage-train came into play, and when we stepped onto the platform in the only slightly larger village of Brandon, Norfolk, we knew the trip would be long and arduous.
“How long is the trip, again?” Ashton asked, her blond hair braided and set to one side of her shoulders.
“About seven hours,” I answered dutifully. I didn’t have phone service; I just knew because I had looked before we had left, the map, crisscrossing the countryside, loaded on my phone’s GPS.
“Gosh.”
We thought we had travel deducted down to a science, but instead we found ourselves, several hours later
Lost in the Wilderness
We arrived in the early evening after the embarrassing realization that we hadn’t bought the proper train ticket, the conductor having stared us down as he scrutinized the improperly bought stubs. We hastily counted out the pounds we needed to pay the fare from Peterborough to Edinburgh, apologizing for the mishap and feeling very American tourist in a train full of Europeans.
I watched the countryside pass us by with a fascination I harbor for the stark beauty of the world. I had only taken a train once before in my life–the line from Oklahoma City down to a station stopping off in Southern Oklahoma as a novelty, and not at all for the ease of transportation. But in Europe, trains were such a commonality that the cars were constantly full, the lines connecting cities to towns to rural communities, and I longed for a piece of that back home, though I knew my homeland was too vast and too diverse in geography to handle such infrastructure.
So, I watched the fields and towns and villages fly past the windows, the greenery of the land still such a pleasant novelty in comparison to the yellowing fields of wheat and corn in the rural countryside of my home state. I listened to downloaded podcasts, playing cards with my friends, read, and traded jokes over the snacks we brought along with us for the trip since it was such an undertaking. The train pulled into the station in the heart of Edinburgh, rolling to a stop after snaking through some of the land adjacent to the North Sea.
We ventured over to our place of residence for the weekend, a small room for the three of us in someone’s home, a sweet woman taking in expats from around the world who wanted to share in Scotland’s beauty. Starving, we decided to venture into town to get some food at one of the various pubs in the middle of the city, but as we approached the road leading into town, we approached what I later realized was Holyrood Park, a small nature reserve in the middle of the city. We thought we could take a shortcut through the park to reach some of the shops near Edinburgh Castle and the downtown area of Edinburgh.
We thought should be emphasized here, because we became inexplicably lost on the hillside of what we soon realized was a massive park rather than the shortcut we thought it was at first glance.
What Americans we were.
“Are we lost?”
“On a hill? In the middle of Edinburgh? In the wind and rain? It looks like it.” Kody laughed, but our fingers and toes were definitely numb. The pure joy of just letting ourselves be taken by the landscape overwhelmed us.
“It looked like it led into town!” Ashton defended, her hat bobbing as she looked out into the distance, where the town lay below us.
We stood at the edge of one of the plateaus of this so-called hill, watching as cars wound around the road snaking through the landscape. The rocky crags bordering the plateau would make the trek down from the other side impossible, so we were stuck, essentially. The town’s true center was absolutely, not in any way, close to where we stood, and we could see it from our vantage point on this small mountain. Edinburgh, much hillier and stacked in layers, spread out before us like a cornucopia, buildings and shops piled on top over on another. We laughed more heartily at the circumstances much later, when our noses weren’t pink from the cold, but in that moment, I felt wildly content.
We settled into a small pub an hour later, the last stop on the first day we spent in Scotland, once we realized we had to backtrack to leave the park and safely return to the road from the hiking trail. Our first evening was wasted, but not in any substantial way–we were cold and rained out and our boots were soaking wet, but they would be several times over by the time we left the continent to return home at the end of the Spring. We ordered pub pizza and onion rings (which went as well as you would think) and a few drinks, though we felt out of place more in Scotland than we did in England as expats.
I reveled in the company of my friends even though we all, exhausted and cold, slumped against the back of the pub booth in defeat. Mistakes are always made, I realized then. Detours and failures will happen even when we try to take the quickest route, and sometimes walking blind will give us a proper perspective. I knew before then that life’s detours could bring me to unexpected places, but it didn’t quite sink in until that night, where I ate crappy pizza with two people I was closer to than I ever thought I would be to anyone so quickly. It was an anomaly I was just beginning to scratch the surface of. The previous year I had been in such a dark place that the thought of being halfway across the world in a tiny pub in Edinburgh, Scotland was laughable at best. I always refer to 2016 as the year I really came into myself, because at that point I snapped so cleanly that I had nearly no connection to the young woman I had been before.
I changed.
Morphed.
That breaking point brought me to the culmination of that change halfway across the world in a darkened pub after getting lost (and not the last time) in the middle of the countryside far from home. I still had a long way to go until I felt I was the person I was meant to be–assured and confident most days (though I do still have my bad ones). I don’t think, now, that any of my time is wasted. I’ve come too far to think that these moments, tiny snapshots that can very quickly fall through my hands, are worth so little. I want to believe that every misstep, every mistake, is a lesson learned, a step forward into the future, even if I didn’t quite warm up completely that night when we returned to sleep at the inn.
Sam