Guess.What.Day.It.Is?

Posted on by Live & Learn

Robyn Davidson, who didn’t exactly set out to write about walking at all, but did so brilliantly in the course of her Tracks, a book recounting her 1,700-mile trek across the Australian outback to the sea with three camels (sponsored, like Jenkins’s odyssey, by the National Geographic Society). Midway in her journey, she explains its effect on her mind: “But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become totally conscious of in retrospect. For one thing I had remembered in minute and Technicolor detail everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there. I had remembered every word of conversation I had had or overheard way, way back in my childhood and in this way I had been able to review these events with a kind of emotional detachment as if they had happened to somebody else. I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. . . . And I was happy, there is simply no other word for it.”

— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking 

Notes:

33 thoughts on “Guess.What.Day.It.Is?”

  4. I was just going to say what Dale said: Life is SO fascinating and we never knew nor will we know just how many amazing, fascinating, interesting, funny, clever, (majestically idiot) people are roaming this earth.
    Thank you for always finding another interesting aspect to mostly anything and everything AND then for sharing with us. We are deeply greatful.

  5. Sounds like a compelling read. It can be so difficult to ‘tune out the noise’, particularly in today’s world. I am sure that the repetitive nature of the walking, day after day, was cathartic in ways never anticipated. Into the queue this goes! As others have said, pal. So many intriguing souls out there…thank you for bringing some of them to our attention. 😊

  6. She’d walk a mile for a camel, and pick up two more for spares… then walk 1700 miles across Australia! What a story she wrote! I recall reading about it in National Geographic.

          1. I’ll be watching tracks tonight on prime.

            Movie on a TV is my preference.

  9. Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
    Simply amazing … “Robyn Davidson, who didn’t exactly set out to write about walking at all, but did so brilliantly in the course of her Tracks, a book recounting her 1,700-mile trek across the Australian outback to the sea with three camels (sponsored, like Jenkins’s odyssey, by the National Geographic Society).”

  10. I am always in awe of how the power of a journey can reveal discoveries outside and inside our world!

    And it’s not only HD it’s Canada Day! Happy Canada Day expat!

  13. … that water though.
    ….Caleb in THAT water.

    Had to go back a few times to read the words b/c I was transfixed by THAT water…….. ahh

    MJ

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