Yuka

I think my holiday travels this year were an exceptional experience. As such, I found it hard to summarize and describe in any kinds of usual blog entries. Instead, I decided to write a short piece that, I think, captures one aspect of the journey in a fictional form (though based on real events). This is in many ways an experiment for me, as I have only really written a story once before in my life (an unfinished one, at that!). This story is a very clear combination of fact and fiction and I especially feel strange about describing Gustave and me in the third person as well as the way we act. Hence constructive criticism is appreciated. So much for the introduction, here goes...

Yuka loved running. Especially after things thrown by humans. Especially after the yellow rubber ball that was covered in pimples and squealed if squeezed. She loved the thrill of chasing down that ball (or a twig or a stone or a cone, anything, really), snatching it up from the ground or out of the air and then triumphantly trotting back to the human with the catch in her mouth. She loved the sound of the wind in her ears and the pebbles under her feet as she ran down her prey in the yard of the orange plantation she lived in.

The plantation consisted of several orange-tree fields tucked in between two rocky hills and a walled compound consisting of a house, yard and a pool. Apart from Yuka, this compound was inhabited by her Owner, his wife and their two children, though one never knows if Yuka thought of them that way. There was also a cat, but it was fairly boring: it either wailed to be let in the house and fed or was gone God knows where. It was just a little smaller than Yuka and she liked to chase after it occasionally or wrestle with it.

Other humans were constantly in the compound, coming and going. Yuka tried to make all of them throw her something at least once. She would follow them around with whatever object she wanted to chase (usually it was the yellow ball), set it on the ground as soon as they would stop or sit down. Sometimes she even nudged it in their direction with her nose with a facial expression, that showed utter longing and anticipation. If it so happened that one of the humans gave into her pleas and picked up the object to throw it, Yuka would focus on the human's hand while trying simultaneously to predict in which direction the object will be thrown. As soon as the object left the human's hand, the dog would take off after it as if upon its successful retrieval depended the fate of the free (and maybe even the not so free) world.

Yuka's obsession with retrieving things was so strong that she could follow humans around for a very long time no matter where they were going, because she never abandoned the hope that someone might throw her something.

When two new strangers arrived at the compound late one night in the Owner's van, Yuka was asleep. The next morning, however, she submitted them to the same treatment as all the inhabitants of the compound, permanent and temporary. She noticed right away, that these strangers were unusually tall, taller than most of the other humans she saw in the compound. One had long black hair, walked around barefoot and seldom spoke. The other had reddish hair and wore glasses.

Both strangers, to Yuka's delight, seemed to enjoy playing with her from the start. Even though their enthusiasm waned slightly after she had retrieved various objects several dozen times in a row, they still were considerably more eager to oblige her with a throw or two than the local humans, those being a bit jaded in this respect.

Of the two, the stranger with the long hair tended to spend more time with Yuka. He would pick up her yellow ball, get a few huge steps head start, and then hurl it as far as he could, which tended to be limited by the bushes and the walls of the compound. Yuka for her part would race to where the ball fell and bring it back to the stranger, then the procedure would repeat. During one of these throwing and retrieval sessions, he tried to pet her. She dropped on her stomach and squirmed a bit. She did not like being touched. It reminded her of her previous owners, the ones she had before she was taken in by the Owner of the Plantation.

As for the red-haired stranger, Yuka saw him walk out through the main gate one moonlight night and, as was usual for her, followed him. He started walking up one of the hills around the plantation, stopped for a second to exchange some phrases with the other stranger and the Owner, then continued walking down the path that led westwards from the farm. Yuka followed.

To be continued...

The 100-Acre Wood or My First Hitchhike

I will start with an explanation of why this trip happened in the first place. One of my favorite books in childhood was Winnie the Pooh, the Russian version of it especially, since my dad read that to us regularly before we went to bed. I was never really attached to the movies or the English version because both of these I encountered later in life and by then I had a very set image of what the 100-Acre Wood and all of its inhabitants looked like (and as a result was not fully satisfied by the traditional illustrations or the imagery of the cartoons). I am, however, digressing from my main point which is that for me Winnie the Pooh is a great bright part of childhood.

It is not surprising then, that I was very pleased to find out from Caity, whose dorm I was staying at, that Ashdown Forest, the place that inspired the 100 Acre Wood, was within a two-hour bus ride from us. We decided to visit it during my stay.

On the day that we were planning to set out, Caity had class until 11 am, so we decided to take a bus that left around noon. Then we were going to change buses in a town called Hayward's Heath and ride to somewhere called Wych Cross.

Our troubles started when the first bus was 12 minutes late, making us miss our connection by 5 minutes. At that point we were not too worried about the matter and waited for a little under an hour on the soft lawn of a nearby hospital. We ate the provisions prepared for the day and talked about storytelling.

Our next problem arose on the second bus. As it turned out, Wych Cross was not a bus stop name, but the name of an intersection or a town. We realized this too late and had to get off one stop further away from our destination. We tried hiking our way back, but ended up on some golf course and some private property. It was my first time walking around an actual golf course and I have to say I now understand the appeal of the sport: one gets to wander through neat slightly wooded grasslands without dedicating too much energy or concentration to the sport at hand. This is indeed perfect for business meetings. Caity and I were not there, however, to discuss the faltering economy or a competitor's sudden rise in sales or whether it was worth buying a Ferrari online. We needed Pooh's wood, so we trudged past the golfers onto some seemingly less used path.

Caity Standing in front of
the boyscout camp sign.

This took us to a campsite, where we asked for some directions and Caity posed for a picture with the boyscout signs. The people in the camp office said we were some 6 km or so away from our goal, that we needed to head a bit south-east in order to hit the road that led to Pooh's wood and that we could use their grounds to cut a corner. We thanked them for everything and proceeded to walk, wondering how it happened that we were so far away from our destination.

On the way I noticed that the landscape around us was indeed very similar to what I had imagined of the 100 Acre Wood. The ground we were walking through was mostly sand and as a result the forest consisted primarily of pine trees. Aside from the fact that pine trees are mentioned in several places in Winnie the Pooh, I must mention that pine forests are my favorite kind in general. They usually feature little undergrowth and so one can see further. The pine trees themselves with their long bare trunks and rooflike tops, form a natural collonade and leave one the impression of being in a cathedral.

Another detail that I picked up on was the abundance of ferns. In Winnie the Pooh they (and the fog) were the scenery for the chapter in which Tigger got unbounced. I felt a bit like Rabbit, walking through them and being slightly lost. I mentioned ferns to Caity, who remarked that for her the word was a bit bothersome from a philological standpoint. She pointed out that it can be used as both a countable and an uncountable noun.

After about half an hour we arrived at the Ashdown Forest visitor center (or at least one of them) that was fortunately still open (by then we had been wandering for almost two hours and it was 4 pm). There we confirmed that we were indeed considerably far away from the Pooh Walks (as they were called in the park) and it would take at least an hour to get there. The last bus from Wych Cross left shortly before 7 pm, which meant that we actually had about 15 minutes to spend  on site before we had to head back. We decided, however, that it would be silly to turn back now, after we had spent so much time shaking in buses and trespassing on golf courts and boyscout camps.

The long winding road...

We thanked the lady at the visitors center and set out to Pooh's wood. The road we walked on was a narrow cement country road with cars speeding by at 40 mph all the time. We saw some fields and forests and hills and even a mansion or two in the distance. The sun was getting lower and lower as we walked on and on. Caity was nervous, not without reason, about us getting hit by a passing car. I was getting nervous, also not without reason, about missing the bus.


Finally, after more than an hour and after scaling a considerable hill, we found ourselves at the start of the trail. At this point Caity had the idea that we could walk the trail quickly, then attempt to hitchhike back to the bus stop. This way we would get what we came here for as well as avoid yet another hour of walking.

We started out on the trail but soon disovered that the hilltop where it started, was covered in little paths leading here and there. Because nothing on the spot was marked and we only had a map from the visitor's center as a guide, we soon found ourselves walking on a horse path seemingly leading in the right direction, but in no way resembling a trail. This path led us to the "Enchanted Place", where we saw the Milne Memorial and confirmed that we had not been on the trail till that point and as a result had missed the Heffalump Trap and the Lone Pine. We retraced our steps towards these attractions and came across a very cozy and unique place. The Lone Pine was a shorter-than-usual tree, whose branches for some unknown reason all split at the very top of the tree and formed a wide cover, very much like a roof. This canopy stretched over a small sand pit in the side of the hill, creating a protected look-out point over the valley below. "This was worth it" - I thought to myself at the time.

The horse path that we mistook for the Pooh Trail

Lone Pine and Heffalump Trap at last!

This we thought were Roo's Sandpits.
They were not marked, so I guess we will never know for sure...

We then tried to find the Sand Pits, and seemed to have succeeded in this, though, because nothing was marked, we could never be sure. At that moment I noted that the environment we were in had significantly changed compared to that of our starting point. The sky was now cloudier, the sun much lower and the wind much stronger than over by the golf course. There were still pine trees around, but now they grew scarce and the ground was primarily covered in thistle bushes. This was the first time that I saw Eeyore's food up close and I must confirm that it is as pringly and inedible as described by Milne.

From the hilltop we looked over the hillside that was the inspiration for Eeyore's Sad and Lonely Place. It didn't look that cheerful: lone pine trees here and there with grass and thistles as undergrowth. Especially in the occasional light of the setting sun this did indeed seem quite depressing. It is also possible that our impressions of the place reflected our own worries about the journey home. In any case, we didn't linger there long and headed to the road that would take us back to Wych Cross.

One final glance at the setting sun from the 100-Acre Wood.

This was the first attempt at hitchhiking for both of us, so we were slightly on edge as we strode down the steep hill and waved down cars. The first 6 vehicles passes us by: a woman with a polite smile in a van, an old lady in an old car, a man driving a Smart car that would not have fit us all, a volvo driver who even signaled with his blinker that he didn't want to stop, and a couple of others who I have forgotten now.

Just as I had given up hope and Caity started describing the type of driver that would in fact pick up two young people on an evening road, a white ford pulled over and a round-faced glasses-wearing gentleman said he would give us a lift. This was an unexpected turn of events for me (I had given up hope) and I struggled to find a suitable topic for conversation as we whizzed along the streets past hedges and oncoming traffic at what I thought were impressive speeds. I told the man about our bad luck that day, he asked where I was from. He was incredulous when I named the USA.

-  You don't sound it - he responded.
 - What do I sound like? - I asked.
 - I would place you somewhere in Mid-Germany - he said.
 -  Really?
-  Yes. I work at a school, you see. We have German exchange students teaching there every year and you sound exactly like them.

We continued to talk about this and that. Caity put in a couple of words and our driver said she definitely sounded American. He himself, as it turned out, worked in a school several towns over managing their budget and was staying at a hotel in Wych Cross, hence could give us the ride. We were at our bus stop in no time (as was mentioned earlier, he drove fast), thus ended our first hitchhike. Not a bad experience overall: we saved lots of time and energy, I was told to my face that I have an accent, we "drove" a car through Britain (as opposed to a bus or train). I have to say that I'm a fan of this style of driving, where only commited people actually get a license and a car (both harder to attain in Europe than in the US) and these commited people speed like maniacs down small streets in small maneuverable vehicles. I have yet to see an accident during my stay and at the same time this kind of driving seems way more fun to me.

The rest of the journey home was uneventfiul: all the busses were on time and empty (on time because they were empty), we got home around 10, consumed some frozen pizza (it's surprising how unfilling it is on both sides of the ocean) and went to bed.

By jove, what a day!

P.S.
All pictures in this (and all other posts about the UK) are courtesy of Caity Gebhard. I am very grateful for her having a camera around and not being shy to use it.