The Road to Little Dribbling (5 page)

Everest was born in 1790 in either Greenwich or Wales (depending on which sources you credit), the son of a lawyer, and educated at military schools in Marlow and Woolwich before being packed off to the Far East, where he became a surveyor. In 1817, he was sent to Hyderabad, in India, to serve as chief assistant on an enterprise known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey. The aim of the project was to survey an arc of longitude across India as a way of determining the circumference of the Earth. It was the life’s work of an interestingly obscure fellow named William Lambton. Nearly everything about Lambton is uncertain. The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
says he was born sometime in the period 1753 to 1769—an arrestingly broad range of possibility. Where he grew up is quite unknown, as are all the other details of his early life and education. All that can be said is that in 1781 he joined the army, went to Canada to survey its boundary with the new United States, and then was dispatched to India. There he got the idea of surveying his arc. He worked on it exhaustively for some twenty years before dying abruptly in northern India in 1823—though exactly where, when, and what of are not known. George Everest merely completed the project. It was important work, but it went nowhere near the Himalayas.

Photos of Everest from late in life show a cheerless face almost perfectly encircled by white hair and beard. Life in India didn’t much agree with him. He spent twenty years there more or less constantly unwell, suffering from typhus and chronic bouts of Yellapurum fever and diarrhea. He spent extended periods at home on sick leave. He returned permanently to England in 1843, long before the mountain was named. It is almost the only mountain in Asia to have an English name. British cartographers were generally fairly scrupulous about preserving native designations, but Mount Everest was known locally by a range of names—Deodhunga, Devadhunga, Bairavathan, Bhairavlangur, Gnalthamthangla, Chomolungma, and several more—so there wasn’t one to fix on. The British most commonly called it Peak XV. No one at the time had any idea that it was the tallest mountain in the world, and therefore deserving of special attention, so when someone put Everest’s name on the map it wasn’t intended as a momentous gesture. In the end the trigonometrical survey was found to be largely inaccurate anyway, so Lambton and Everest died having achieved very little.

George Everest, incidentally, didn’t pronounce his name Ev-er-rest, as everyone says it today, but as
Eve
-rest—just two syllables—so that the mountain is not only misnamed but mispronounced. Everest died aged seventy-six in Hyde Park Gardens, London, but was carted off to Hove for burial. No one knows why. He had no known connection to the town or to any part of Sussex. I was greatly taken with the idea of the most famous mountain in the world being named for a man who had no connection to it and whose name we don’t even pronounce correctly. I think that’s rather splendid.

St. Andrews is a striking church, large and gray, with a dark, square tower. By the gate stood a large sign saying
The Church of St. Andrew Welcomes You,
but the spaces for the vicar’s name, the times of services, and the phone number for the churchwarden were blank. Three groups of vagrants occupied the churchyard, drinking and enjoying the sunshine. Two guys in the nearest group were arguing heatedly over something, but I couldn’t tell what. I hunted around among the gravestones, but most inscriptions were weathered to the point of illegibility. Everest’s grave has been exposed to the salty air of Hove for almost 150 years, so it seemed unlikely it would survive in identifiable form. One of the two arguing fellows stood up and had a pee against the boundary wall. As he did so, he took a simultaneous interest in me, and shouted questions at me over his shoulder in a vaguely hostile manner, asking me what I was looking for.

I told him I was looking for the grave of a man named George Everest. He astounded me by saying, in quite a cultivated voice, “Oh, just over there,” and nodded at some gravestones a few feet from me. “They named Mount Everest after him, but he never actually saw it, you know.”

“So I’ve read.”

“Stupid fucker,” he said, a touch ambiguously, and hefted his organ back into his pants with an air of satisfaction.

And so ended my first day as a tourist in Britain. I presumed that at least some of the following ones would be better.

Chapter 2

Seven Sisters

S
OME WOMAN
I
HAVE
never met regularly sends me e-mail alerts telling me how to recognize if I am having a stroke.

“If you feel a tingling in your fingers,” one will say, “you could be having
A STROKE
. Seek medical attention
AT ONCE
.” (The alerts come with lots of italics and abrupt capitalizations, presumably to underline how serious a matter this is.) Another will say: “If you sometimes can’t remember where you parked your car in a big parking lot, you are probably
HAVING A STROKE
. Go to an emergency room
IMMEDIATELY
.
”

The uncanny thing about these messages is how accurately they apply to me. I have every one of the symptoms, and there are hundreds of them. Every couple of days I learn of a new one.

“If you think you might be producing more ear wax than usual…”

“If you sometimes sneeze unexpectedly…”

“If you have had toast at any time in the last six months…”

“If you celebrate your birthday on the same date every year…”

“If you feel anxious about strokes after reading stroke warnings…”

“If you have any of these symptoms—or
ANY OTHER
symptoms—find a doctor at once. An embolism
THE SIZE OF A DUCK EGG
is heading straight for your
CEREBRAL CORTEX
!!”

Taken together, the alerts make clear that the best indicator of a stroke is whatever you were doing just before you had a stroke. Lately the warnings have been accompanied by alarming accounts of people who failed to heed the signals. “When Doreen’s husband, Harold, noticed that his ears were red after he got out of the shower,” one might begin, “they didn’t think anything of it. How they wish they had. Soon afterward, Doreen found Harold, her husband of forty-seven years, slumped face-first in a bowl of Rice Krispies.
H
E WAS HAVING A STROKE!
Harold was rushed to the hospital but critical minutes had been lost, and now he is a
VEGETABLE
who spends his afternoons watching Judge Judy. Don’t let this happen to you!!”

I don’t actually need memos to know that things are not going well with my body. All I have to do is stand before a mirror, tilt my head back, and look up my nostrils. This isn’t something I do a great deal, you’ll understand, but what I used to find was two small, dark caves. Now I am confronted with a kind of private rainforest. My nostrils are packed with fibrous material—you can’t even really call it hair—of the sort you would find in a thick coir doormat. Indeed if you were to carefully pick apart a coir doormat until all you had was a pile of undifferentiated fibers, and shoved 40 percent of the pile up one nostril and 40 percent up the other, and took the rest and put that in your ears so that a little was tumbling out of each, then you would be me.

Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It’s like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, “Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils.”

The other thing you can do incredibly well when you are old is grow toenails. I have no idea why. Mine are harder than iron now. When I cut my toenails, I see sparks. I could use them as body armor if I could just get my enemies to shoot at my feet.

The worst part about aging is the realization that all your future is downhill. Bad as I am today, I am pretty much tiptop compared with what I am going to be next week or the week after. I recently realized with dismay that I am even too old now for early onset dementia. Any dementia I get will be right on time. The outlook generally is for infirmity, liver spots, baldness, senility, bladder dribble, purple blotches on the hands and head as if my wife has been beating me with a wooden spoon (always a possibility), and the conviction that no one in the world speaks loud enough. And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s if everything goes absolutely swimmingly. There are other scenarios that involve catheters, beds with side railings, plastic tubing with my blood in it, nursing homes, being lifted on and off toilets, and having to guess what season it is outside—and those are all still near the best-case end of the spectrum.

Unnerved by my dossier of stroke warnings, I did some research and it appears that there are two fundamental ways to avoid having a stroke. One is to die of something else first. The other is to get some exercise. I decided, in the interests of survival, to introduce a little walking into my life. And so it was, the day after my trip from Bognor to Hove, that I was to be found fifteen or so miles to the east wheezing my way up a steep hill to a breezy top called Haven Brow, the first in a series of celebrated eminences gracing the Sussex coast and known as the Seven Sisters.

The Seven Sisters is one of the great walks of England. From the top of Haven Brow the view is just sensational. Ahead of you stretches a hazy infinity of rolling hills, each ending at the seaward side in a sudden plunge of limestone cliffs. On a sunny day like this one, it is a world of simple, bright elements: green land, brilliant white cliffs, deep blue sea, matching sky.

Nothing—and I mean really, absolutely nothing—is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized—more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks—and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time, and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily-spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply-hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 50,318 square miles the world has ever known—almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics in mind, but all of it adding up to something that is, quite often, perfect. What an achievement that is.

And what a joy it is to walk in it. England and Wales have 130,000 miles of public footpaths, about 2.2 miles of path for every square mile of area. People in Britain don’t realize how extraordinary that is. If you told someone in the Midwest of America, where I come from, that you intended to spend the weekend walking across farmland, they would look at you as if you were out of your mind. You couldn’t do it anyway. Every field you crossed would end in a barrier of barbed wire. You would find no helpful stiles, no kissing gates, no beckoning wooden footpath posts to guide you on your way. All you would get would be a farmer with a shotgun (or in Iowa a glass of lemonade and a slice of pie) wondering what the hell you were doing blundering around in his alfalfa.

So if there is one thing I enjoy and admire in Britain, it is the pleasure of being on foot and at large in the open air. I was on the South Downs Way, which runs for a hundred miles from Winchester to Eastbourne along the rolling chalk downs of the south coast. I have done most of the trail in chunks over the years, but this is my favorite stretch. To my left were bosomy hills of green and gold, to the right a spangled plane of bright blue sea. Dividing the two were cliffs of brilliant white. You can, if you dare, creep right up to the cliff edge and look over. Generally you find a straight drop down two hundred feet to a rocky beach. But almost no one ever does this. It’s too unnerving and way too dangerous. These cliff edges are crumbly, so everyone keeps well back. Even frolicking dogs brake and retreat when they see the fall. All along this stretch of coast the path is a grassy lawn, cropped by sheep, sometimes hundreds of yards wide, so even the most absentminded walker—the sort of person who can’t be trusted around automated parking barriers, say—can amble along in a state of blissful unawareness and remain safe.

The South Downs Way is not only lovely but getting better. At Birling Gap, roughly halfway between the start of the Seven Sisters and Eastbourne, there used to be a fairly horrible café, but the National Trust has absorbed it into its tasteful care and converted it into a paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Patagonia catalog. Now there is a smart cafeteria full of scrubbed wooden tables and lovely sea views, clean restrooms, a gift shop for people who think that £10 is not too much to pay for six ginger cookies so long as they come in a nice tin, and a small but interesting museum. I went to the museum first and appreciated its intelligence and thoughtfulness. It tells you a great deal about the geology of the Sussex coast, including that it is eroding by a foot or so a year on average, though Birling Gap itself is tumbling into the sea at nearly twice that rate. Across the way from the National Trust café there used to stand a row of cliff-top houses. Now just four houses remain, and house number four looked like it might soon be called Beach Cottage.