Neither of us slept much last night. I was plagued the whole night with terror dreams and thoughts that brought so much stress I was amazed the tent did not pulsate in rhythm with my heart. If we couldn’t find a campground last night what made me think today would be any different? Or tomorrow, or the day after? Would the rest of the trip be spent furtively setting our tent up after dark only to hurry away when people might be around?
Yesterdays events had shattered my morale and not only was I not eager to be biking, for the first time in the trip I was well and truly ready to go home. But having a ticket in hand is a powerful motivator and we had a ferry to catch the next day. So reluctantly we set out retracing our route back to Portsmouth.
The day loomed gray and cold ahead of us with chilly winds cutting at us. We stopped to break our fast at McDonalds
.While we ate, outside lest the unkempt appearance of unshowered bikers cause problems with the management, a great gray cloud blew over us, certain to bring rain and misery. But within seconds it had passed us by entirely and blown itself out to sea. One great thing that affects this region is weather that shifts so quickly you can watch the transformation with your own eyes. You can see a storm cloud build itself out of nothingness far out in the water. You can watch it blown in and buffet the shore and you can see the sunlight beyond. In Calgary we joke that “if you don’t like the weather wait five minutes” but compared to the rapid changes they experience here, our weather is tame.
After a breakfast made of bacon, buns, hash browns the size of my hand and, on Heather’s part, eggs, we set out once more. We had decided to head towards the second of our target campgrounds of the previous day. It was marked on Portsmouth’s eastern shore and by looking at the map I realized we had come nowhere close. So off we went, more cautiously this time and took a left turn I had dismissed the previous night because it seemed to lead into an industrial area. Fifteen minutes later, voila, we were on the eastern harbour. But the eastern road, on which the campsite was marked, was right against the water, no place on its eastern side for camping. So we set off south, very excited, as you can imagine, to find a sign announcing the south sea caravan park. Unfortunately the name proved to be accurate, it was at the far southern tip of Portsmouth, nowhere near where the campground we were heading to was marked.
After an extra hour or more following the elusive grail of a campsite, we found the south sea park, set up our ten and went to sleep.
We slept until noon, until the building heat in our tent forced us to go outside. The day was very windy, whipping the tent about dramatically but the wind died as the day advanced. Though tired we decided to go for a walk to see Portsmouth before we departed on the morrow. Portsmouth is a strange town, not sure if it is a tourist destination or a working harbour and not really able to reconcile the two. The innards of the town are the worst gray that England is famous for worldwide. Rows and rows of industrial housing stretch for miles, straight streets with high walled buildings and no breaks for greenery make parts of Portsmouth seem more like a prison than a city. Electrical wire and telephone wires tangle overhead like a net to keep even the birds from fleeing the monotony.
The first question the streets of Portsmouth raise is "how?" How can people choose to live stacked in cartons with no parks, no trees, nothing joyful at all? But then, very suddenly, you break out of the straightjacket streets and find yourself on the waterfront. Here are all the missing parks. Ponds with paddleboat, parks with trees, buildings with elaborately carved masonry, a sunken garden protected by a wall of hedge, a rose garden surrounded by ramparts and even now, in the chill of autumn’s beginnings still in bloom.
The people of Portsmouth must surge out of their homes and workplaces down to the waterfront, running to escape the cage that is the city.
We walked most of the waterfront, pushing our bikes beside us. We halted for a rest at the harbour castle where Henry VII is said to have watched his prize ship, the Mary Rose, founder before him. From here we has an easy view of the strange circular forts that Henry had sunk into the waves to protect the port. Each was a tiny self contained little isle, roofed over to keep from being washed away shore side to break waves and invaders that never came, at least not in Henry’s time or for many hundreds of years after. How foresighted of Henry that he provided England with perfect antiaircraft defenses for the Second World War, the only time his forts fired their guns in anger.
I would like to have gone to the maritime museum but we were both too tired and I had seen it on previous trips. With rigging looming before us we turned back and returned to our camp.
I could not help thinking of Edna and her dream to be a helmswoman, stuck in landlocked Calgary. She would not have been able to resist the lure of the rigging I’m sure and can see how it would have been a magnet to those wanting to escape the dreariness of city life. How shocked they must have been to discover that ship life was no better, only different and in most cases worse. I wonder, do recruits to the world militaries now discover the same thing?
We pedaled home slowly, painfully but delight to actually have a home to go to. Strange how hedge walls and a paid fee can make an empty pier of land seem so secure and strange too how the rules of society have been so ingrained in both Heather and I that to stop outside sanctioned boundaries should make us so uncomfortable. Why should that be the case? How we are sleeping tonight is really no different than the night before, we are ensconced in a tent and sleeping bags, people can still wander about us all night and despite our fears no one is likely to disturb us outside campsite boundaries, pounding on our tent and demanding that we leave. They are probably more scared of us than we are of them! Everyone we have spoken to here says the police too are unlikely to bother us, at least not for a single night and we were so hidden that they would scarcely have been able to find us. But a campground stands for a public sanction of our activities, a guarantee that society will enforce our security. Even if the guarantee is only thought and has no real force it builds mental walls that shelter us…or do they trap us as well.
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