Life And The Pandemic Continue
Life and the pandemic continue. Two swimmers about to start their daily swim.
This walk takes you from the Port of Javea up to the lighthouse near San Antonio before continuing along the top towards Los Molinos. These are old grain mills. They used wind power to grind grain for several centuries before being taken out of action as modernisation arrived.
The walk takes you along the port before you start to climb. As you walk along the port you will see a number of cats, either being lazy, or playing. You will then start to climb. The first few metres require some bigger steps but after that you will find that it gets easier. There is a good view over the port at several moments. You also get a good view of the sea.
On this walk I could hear the bees and other insects buzzing. You can also see that many young trees are coming up. Many of them were destroyed by a fire a few years ago. In a few more years this will be a walk in the shade, once more.
A year or two ago, we did this walk. We came across the old kiln. Due to rain and nature recovering though, the kiln is hidden once again. I don’t remember if I have the GPS coordinates for the kiln. Nature will help keep it hidden and safe.
I tracked this walk with the CASIO GBD-200 and the Apple watch with the Steps app. The casio gave a good track although it did not track altitude and heart rate. The Steps app, with an outdoor walk, was crap. It didn’t track heart rate for some reason which makes it crap. The Apple Fitness app says that I didn’t burn my daily calorie goal today, as a result.
This walk is quite easy, for those used to walking over rough terrain but it does come with seasonal difficulty variability. As soon as the weather gets warmer walking with enough water is important. You are exposed for at least an hour or three, dependent on how fast you walk. In 35°c heat you will cook. In 19°c you will feel comfortable. Consider this, before trying the walk.
Last night I was reading and began seeing the pandemic as a journey. The pandemic has been a journey for everyone, but especially for those in solitude. For those of us in solitude, it has required that we completely change how we consume the media and how we interact with the world. We go for weeks without hugs, without kisses, without meals with other people. For weeks, we may exchange a few words at a shop or petrol station but without ever having in person conversations.
This changes us. I believe that this is why I walked two to three kilometres further, sometimes, to avoid being within meters of others. Solitude is painful when we are reminded that others are not solitary. Bizarrely, with time, the pain of pandemic solitude diminishes as we give up on some aspects of life.
Giving up on those aspects does mean avoiding most films, television series, current affairs podcasts. Instead of listening to the usual content, I ended up with podcasts about journeys, whether the American thru-hikes or other forms of journeys. I am currently reading “Le Camino Seule, enfin presque” and this is what made me think of the pandemic as a journey, where we work on ourselves, on our inner journey, while waiting impatiently for normality to return.
It isn’t easy to turn fourty in solitude during a pandemic. It wouldn’t be easy out of pandemic either, because we know that doors are closing. The energy to be lively around toddlers, of not going on road trips and sitting in cafés alone. Of never speaking about “we” because of the never-ending I of solitude.
I am fine with solitude. What bothers me is ageing and theoretically running out of time to experience certain chapters in the standard model life, as I like to call it.
The pandemic has forced us to accept two years of solitude, and to cope with it, to be fine with it. I refuse to accept the fatalism of married people, and people who have a home life. I want society to do what it can to end this pandemic. Teenagers, children and single people are forced to grow old without being able to enjoy a “normal” life because those who are not alone make excuses for not self-isolating.
I like solitude because I am not expected to feel sorry for people who have more than me, emotionally. I am not forced to hear things that make me miserable. Whether we are miserable or not, during this pandemic, depends on what we are subjected to. Solitude is pleasant. Fatalism about the pandemic being out of control is soul-destroying.
Pandemic life is absurd, so the sooner it ends, the sooner people who are not in solitude, do what they can to end the pandemic, the sooner people in solitude, can start experiencing social lives again.
I want the pandemic to end, and I want people in power to stop making excuses for why this evergreen pandemic can’t end. The pandemic could end within two or three months, if we had ambitious optimists in power, rather than corrupt individuals. For clarity, I mean corrupt in the sense that people are too afraid to lose their job, than to fight for human rights. The right to health, the right to live out of pandemic.
People think that you need to get in the car, drive for half an hour to two hours, hike, and then drive home for from half an hour to two hours but this idea is wrong. We can do a lot of walking in circles. In reality we don’t walk in circles. We walk in loops. We walk from home to home, but via a different variety of villages. Some days it is the villages that overlook the lake, and other days it is the villages that are under the Jura.
The walks are in almost the same place, but with different dynamics. One takes you along fields, trees, the camino de Santiago and the trail of the Hughenots and the next takes you along vines, orchards, woods and more. They also take you along different groups of people.
Most people seem to walk from village one to village two in a loop. They usually finish within an hour but I often walk from one and a half hours to two, and sometimes three, depending on whether it is summer or winter. There is more time to walk in summer. So much walking, 365 or so days a year, does mount up. Depending on the app it amounts to 2600 or more kilometres of walking. That is a considerable distance. 28,000 metres gained, despite not going up to the Jura, or doing sporty climbs this year. Simple walks, with the occasional bike ride thrown in.
In a normal year I might spend less time doing sports, but the carbbon footprint from driving to do those sports would be higher. I would also have more to write about, as I would have been exploring and discovering new places. At this rate my discoveries were books in lending libraries. I don’t mind walking. I show that I have the stamina to do a real hiking journey, rather than the loop walks. With the way the pandemic I could spend many more walks wearing out shoes going around in circles.