My wife tried to kill me: [mis]adventures in the Carpathians
Though I don’t think it was intentional.
I hope.
It’s amazing, the number of words that exist in other languages that are untranslatable into English. German is especially rife with epic words that don’t seem to have a direct equivalent into English.
Take Vergangenheitsbewältigung, for example: ‘coming to terms with one’s past.’
Less dramatic in size, but perhaps heftier and more foreboding in scope is Waldsterben: ‘forest-death’ (though I think it actually means the death of forests themselves, not people in forests).
Either way, I very nearly succumbed to some form of Waldsterben on my recent trip into the Carpathian wilderness.
1. This is my final post about this trip.
2. This is post 7 (out of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge.
3. In my last, post-modernish post, there were no bears or boars threatening to eat us.
4. I really don’t think my wife wanted to kill me, truly, honestly, I promise.
This was our 4th trip out west. All four trips have featured some sort of adventure/misadventure, but as I often like to tell people when I have seemingly negative stories to share about my travels, it’s the crazy misadventures, the sometimes-at-the-moment miserable adventures that we remember the most. Who remembers a pleasant, leisurely hike up a modest hill, with barely a cloud in the sky and balmy 24C/74F weather?
We’re not finished with Robert Macfarlane and The Wild Places yet either:
‘I leapt streams, passed over sponge-bogs of sodden peat, soft cushions of haircap mosses. The pines, with their reptilian bark, gave off a spicy resinous smell, and their branches wore green and silver lichens of fantastical shapes. Between the trees grew heather and bracken.’
Ah, doesn’t that sound so magical, pure and evocative?
If only.
An obligatory disclaimer about me and technology and my hypocrisy
A couple of posts ago, The Joy of Getting Away From It All, I waxed lyrical about the pleasure I derive in switching off my devices and shutting myself off from the world of wi-fi and the internet.
But that doesn’t apply to my wife. She was happy to use her phone – or, at least I was happy to ask her to use her phone with satellite navigation to guide us in case we got lost. Which is what happened. Which is what tends to happen.
Which is fine. Getting lost is half the fun of exploring new places. But not if you’re about to get stranded and lost in the woods forever.
I like to use old-fashioned maps (surprise, surprise). On our last trip, three years ago, I had my map, my wife had her phone. She preferred the phone and laughed at me and my map, especially as I cursed it for being inaccurate and not folding up properly and generally being more of a hindrance than a help.
On one hike, we weren’t necessarily lost – yet – but we were unsure of which way to go. Olya’s wonderfully accurate satellite navigation on her Google maps told us to go in one direction. My map indicated another.
Google maps’ sage advice? To go, as the crow flies: down through a valley, up into some thick forests, and onto who-the-hell-knows where. Not on any trails, paths, just to walk down, through and up and over this:
Not that it looked like an arduous journey, but we couldn't just cut across private property (with dogs barking raucously) and through some dense forest without any trails.
My map, at least, indicated we needed to move on a particular trail, even though it seemed to lead us away from our destination.
The map was correct.
That time.
But not this time.
Drawing the line between reckless adventure and foolishness
As much as I like to rail against the inaccuracies of maps, especially the one I had which I’d bought cheaply from a kiosk in the centre of town, I still like to put my trust in them, especially when they feature well-marked hiking trails, which are supposed to be colour-coded.
I’ve done a fair amount of hiking in Europe, mainly Central and Eastern. In Slovakia, for example, in the Tatras, the trails are exceptionally well-marked and always clear. On one hand, that makes for a nice, challenge-free hike in terms of not getting lost. But if it’s a bit of reckless adventure you’re after?
In Western Ukraine, we’ve found that many trails are marked clearly, for the most part, but that some are not. Sometimes the colour-coding doesn’t match.
Okay, so in preparation for our hikes on this trip, I ‘cheated’ a bit. I wanted to keep things simple and so did a bit of research on hiking trails, borrowing Olya’s wi-fi for a few short minutes to map out some hiking trails.
But I could barely make head or sense of it. There was information that was all gobbledygook to me, and squiggly lines in red superimposed on a map image that hardly corresponded to my paper map. It only seemed to complicate things. Surely my paper map would suffice?
And then there was this, as we discovered a couple days later when we had a much more leisurely hike in another town, Tatariv. The website says the trail is colour-coded in green. My map has it down as black. We couldn’t even find the start of the trail. When we did, after half an hour of a steep climb, the trail was marked in red, and it looked freshly painted. But the old paint, underneath the red, still visible was yellow.
I mean, hell, what to do?
So on this particular day, we stayed local and went on what we thought would be an easy hike of barely 1000m in altitude on the far edge of town.
We couldn’t find the start of the trail at all. This has happened before and we’ve chanced it, eventually finding what we were looking for.
This time it never happened.
We stared up at a steep hill. The undergrowth wasn’t too dense at first, so we figured we’d try just to walk straight up.
Where my wife takes charge
On our travels I do almost all the planning and leading. I’m usually the one leading the way on hikes, reading the map. Olya is happy to try to use her phone, but she has her struggles with orientating herself.
But on this hike, she took the initiative. And I was happy to follow. I was feeling lethargic after the previous day’s exertions. My legs were wobbly and felt like lead.
We went up, up, up. And quickly realised that getting down, down, down was going to be tricky, if not downright impossible (very clever, eh?). I chose my wrong shoes for this hike, the ones with less traction. I don’t know why. Oh yes, I do: this was meant to be a ‘leisurely’ hike up a hill.
Something like this, I was hoping for:
But instead, we got this, the look of pain already on my face:
We turn to The Wild Places, for the final time:
‘So close was the latticework of leaves and branches, and so tall the sides…that light penetrated its depths only in thin lances.’ We ‘moved slowly up the bed of the roadway, forcing a way through the undergrowth, through clumps of chest-high nettles, past big strongholds of bramble, and over hawthorns that had grown together, enmeshing across the roadbed. Occasionally we came to small clearings…where light fell and grass grew.’
But only very occasionally, as it turned out.
As we got higher, the undergrowth got thicker. The nettles were only knee-high, thankfully, but plenty else was chest-high, including the bramble. At one point, as Olya clambered way up ahead, I couldn’t even see the ground beneath my feet. I was walking on a slippery log when I fell hard into raspberry bushes. It softened the blow, but my legs were a mess of scratches and cuts from the thorns.
We never found a path. We passed the point of no return. Up and up, through the dense growth we climbed.
Trees blocked our path. Slopes led down to gulleys. We weren’t even sure of the way back at this point.
The map was useless now too. It was just a big green blob of forest and we were nowhere near any type of trail. No colour-coding, nothing.
So, onto satellite navigation and Google maps, right?
We started following that, which told us to go to the left (as the crow flies) to get to our destination, the Chornogoria ridge. Clearly not a good idea, plowing through the murky thickness, stepping on saplings and who know what other creatures hidden in the depths.
The afternoon was ticking by and we started to get antsy. Olya wanted to keep going. I followed, reluctantly. I started envisaging never making it out of this morass.
My legs were a bleeding mess – a fine day to wear shorts – and the mosquitoes were relentless. My shirt was torn, I’m not even sure how or when it happened.
Eventually, eventually, at long last we had to call it quits. We were at the right elevation, but way off course and right thick in the middle of the map’s green blob. There was no way to get any further to the left (was it East? West? North? South? At this point, we had no idea). To our right, the descent didn’t look too forbidding and steep, but again, there was no discernible trail.
Down we went.
Our three previous trips to the Carpathians were in May, and so the weather was cooler. We even had snow on the top of Mt Khomiak (‘Mt Hamster’, in English) and we could only see the very tips of tall trees on the way up and we slid down like penguins on the descent, soaking our trousers and getting all sorts of bumps and bruises and welts.
We followed a dry river bed (Olya: ‘why is it called a river bed? it doesn’t look very comfortable’).
Good thing it wasn’t spring. At least now, we had a way down.
There were trickles of water but otherwise, just steep inclines, plenty of ‘sponge-bogs of sodden peat [and] soft cushions of haircap mosses’ and an inordinate amount of slippery stones and rocks of all shapes and sizes, along with the odd fallen tree blocking the route.
It was perilous, steep and foolhardy.
But it was the only way down.
This time we didn’t face getting our legs cut to shreds.
Instead we faced broken limbs and tumbling down the river bed.
I was slipping and sliding all over the place.
Olya plunged down:
…laughing at me every time I fell.
At one point I really took a tumble and slid down some hard, slippery rocks, and I was thankful that a fallen log saved me from almost certain death.
Here’s me, resting on the log that saved my life, ready to call it quits, agony on my face:
I thought Olya was trying to kill me. It was her revenge for when she accused me of trying to kill her three years ago. On our descent then, from Mt Hamster, I stepped on a twig or branch or something and it snapped and flew behind me right into her ankle, hitting her at a nasty angle and right in the sweet spot, felling her to the forest floor. She was in excruciating pain and struggled to get down the mountain.
She thought I wanted to leave her on the mountain.
Three years later, last week, it was time for her to get back at me, leading me up and into the wilderness, through the barely penetrable jungle, waiting for me to plunge to my demise.
But I was not to be deterred. There would be no Waldsterben for me. She was not going to have the last laugh.
We made it. Battered, bruised, scarred, scraped, bleeding, bitten…but intact. Fairly. More or less.
We were lucky this time.
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My literary take on the so-called ‘beauty’ of mountains, from Kochkor, Kyrygzstan, April 2009:
Behind a ruin’d mountain does appear
Swelling into two parts, which turgent are
As when we bend our bodies to the ground,
The buttocks amply sticking out are found.
Thomas Hobbes
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