At the top I stopped and looked back. The curve I had written about an hour earlier was below me now, a single pale line laid between green fields, with no other car on it.

The same road, from above

From the seat the bend had felt sudden. From here it looked patient, as if the road had simply followed the edge of each field until it ran out of edges.

Every bend looks deliberate once you are above it.

Before the bend there are only fields and sky. Halfway round, the hills open out and the road shows itself ahead, grey and unhurried, under a sky that could not decide between cloud and blue.

I pulled over after the curve, not before, which is how I have done it ever since. The notes are always better when they are written just after something turns.

Going out, I watched the far side. Coming back, I watched the water just beside the hull, which barely moved. The lake was calm, and the boat barely rocked.

A return is the same line drawn in the other direction, and it never looks the same.

That moment is the stop. Mid-lake, the mountains stand back on every side and the water is so calm that the boat seems to be resting rather than moving.

What the middle is for

On land a journey is measured by what you pass. On the water there is nothing to pass, so you start measuring by other things: the colour of the lake, the shape of the far hillside, how long the flags stay still.

I spent most of this stretch trying to look at only one of the two. It cannot be done for long. The reflection comes back the moment the fields outside turn dark green.

The window keeps a copy of the room you are sitting in.

The first thing I wrote down was orange: a railway marker beside the track, bright against the green, gone before I could see it properly. After that the fields took over, flat and wide, with the reflection of the carriage laid over them like tracing paper.

Watching, not arriving

A train takes the work of moving away from you. What is left is watching, and a window that does not let you forget which side of the glass you are on.

I call this stop the far anchor because it held the whole route in place. Everything before it was on the way here; everything after would be on the way back.

Leaving things where they are

Someone built the cairns and someone else will find them. I sat a little way off, wrote for a while and did not touch them. They were not mine to add to.

The last stop is the one that tells you the others were a route.

From the lookout the bridge is a thin line between two slopes, lighter than it has any right to look. Up close it is all cable and plank and rhythm.

I wrote this at the bridge end rather than the middle. The middle is for walking.