It never rains but it pours? The only time a browse shelves in a library nowadays is if I get to the Wexford Science Café early enough to have a pee [it's 50 mins from home and just after tea time] andif there remains still 5 minutes before The Off. For example, I snagged Tamed : ten species that changed our world (2017) by Alice Roberts from the 590.9 shelf just before the Wex Sci Caffeine meeting in September. Usually, I hear about something, discover that it is on a library shelf somewhere in Ireland, then 'place a reservation'.
In a parallel universe, I restless swipe through borrowbox looking for something anything for an earbook. 10s of thousands of books published in English each year - and so many of them cookbooks or path$-to-million$ or brutal descriptions of murder in the guise of detective novels. But I try to keep both media bubbling along: it's illegal to read deadtree books while driving but they are nice to get under the duvet with.
Then last week I finally landed both
Rough Sleepers (2023) by Tracy Kidder about a month after asking for it
AND
Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter (2024) by Kat Hill bobbed to the surface on borrowbox.
They both deal with minorities [homeless people in Boston vs hikers on a shoe-string in Scotland] whose mission, every day, is to find somewhere safe to sleep that night which offers minimal services and redefines what is meant by comfortable.
Coincidence? I think not!
Rough Sleepers is another fly-on-the-wall reportage by Tracy Kidder. I first came across his The Soul of the New Machine (1981) which won him a Pulitzer (and whc Bloboprev). The next two books follow the fortunes for a year-in-the-life-of a) a construction crew House (1986) and b) an elementary school teacher her pupils Among Schoolchildren (1989). That was the 80s, Kidder wrote a number of books after that, but I didn't have /make much time for reading books after / because I got busy and productive at work in the 90s.
I nearly stopped [as in fling across the room] reading Rough Sleepers a couple of times as the central theme of the book gelled around a supposedly charismatic homeless fellow called Tony Columbo who becomes an accretive sinkhole for [dozens of] other folks' care and attention. I try not to indulge in victim-blaming; and I know it's a journalistic trope to give structure to the book by concentrating on one story. Because homelessness is the shame of our times and can seem insurmountable from any other perspective. But some people are really high-maintenance.
Bothy also concentrates on a single person - the author - and their travails. Ignoring Sisyphus, Bothy might be the antidote to RLS's "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." Because, for some people [getting to the] Bothy is destination driven more than the journey. Bothies offer rudimentary shelter in remote areas, there is no warden to take bookings, so getting there first secures a roost. In this sense it is like the unbookable refugios of the Camino de Santiago. When I was on the walk, anxiety about the next bed [starting as soon as you turned out of the current one!] fuelled a lot of crazy behaviour - getting up before dawn, not caring about waking everyone else, not pausing for beer or chat, walking too fast. But Kat Hill expands on the charity [kindness of strangers] of bothies: leaving more fuel than you consume; trekking out trash; leaving a bit of pasta. But as with Tony Columbo in Boston, we get perhaps a little TMI about abusive past relationships. ymmv maybe its my blunted affect again. Then again, Bothy's message is that embracing some rural simplicity can be transformative. If you're already perfect, why bother getting your feet wet in a peat hag?
Before her Bothy years Dr Hill was an academic historian: poring over old, scraggy hand-written mss in to ferret out the truth about old religious feuds. One evocative aspect of Bothy is the research into bothy guest-books, some of which go back 100 years and have been archived off-site. Entries in these records are optional and give great insight into the minds (and artistic talent) of these ghosts of the past. One entry at Corrour on the Lairig Ghru was made by Charles Drinkwater in the Summer of 1939 full of post-Appeasement hope for the future and promising to return next year. In 1940 he is back - on leave from the army but still hoping to return. Thereafter silence. Kat Hill is not the only trained researcher in this affair and I popped off to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission CWGC to see if therein lay an answer. Seemingly yes. Pte Leonard Charles Drinkwater #14721196 of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry was killed 17th February 1945 and is buried in Germany never to ramble no more. The pity war distilled.
We've been in the wilds of Scotland before with John "Last Hillwalker" Burns. Burns and Hill got together for a podcast last year: which I found . . . rambling? Hill also cites with approval David Gange and his Frayed Atlantic Edge. Outposts by Dan Richards [blob] is also adjacent to the theme of sleeping off-grid. And my trip to Cape Wrath with The Boy was wild and wonderful.
Footnote: In discovering the sorry end of Charles Drinkwater, I noticed they had an option for Civilian Dead and found the record for Pat the Salt's mother who died in the Cardiff blitz in March 1941 - aged 46. She left a dozen children, who all survived WWII although their home was 'beyond economic repair'. There is no CWGC record for Pat's father PJ because he died in 1945 from wear&tear and/or pneumonia and that doesn't count. When Pat returned from WWII he and his two older brothers had a string of orphan siblings to keep fed and clean&tidy and ready for school.
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