(A sixteen minute read).
I wanted to drive about five hundred miles from Girona in the Northeast corner of Spain to Santander on the Northern coast of Spain. I wanted to do it in two parts with an overnight stop. I went online to the Airbandb website, a trusted platform that connects landlords with unique private accommodations for those, like me, that seek inexpensive and nice lodgings during their travels.
I typed in the name of a village that looked about half way to Santander and up popped the first suggested place to stay, a hut on a hill with no facilities, up in a forest well away from civilisation, cost, twenty pounds sterling.
If you remember, or if you care to read my post dated October 16th you will understand why I booked it straight away. (Photographs to look at in the gallery on this site with regards to this post are, a hut on a hill, a bed in a hut on a hill).
The accommodation had an indoor fireplace, free parking on premises and a front door without a lock on it. There was a pile of logs I could use and plenty of free wood out in the forest. The forest spread out in every direction from the hut on a hill. Perfect. And the no facilities claim was just that. No electric, no water, no toilet, no shower, no washing or cooking facilities at all. It was all bring your own. And I had everything I needed in my car.
So the scene was set. Within minutes of arrival I had the fire going. I had food, water and cooking utensils laid out on the very sturdy picnic table which was the only piece of furniture inside the hut. I ate. I drank coffee. I put cooking stuff aside and then got out my notebook to jot down the story that had been drifting around in my thoughts for the previous few days. Jim's story. It tells the fictional tale of a man who went missing, and the processes that can occur when real people disappear with no known trace.
Jim was forty four years old when these series of events happened. He was a very talented brain surgeon. He worked at one of the top hospitals in the Midlands in the UK. He was married to Marjorie and had two children, a boy, Max, of fourteen years of age, a girl, Mary, who was ten years of age. It was a happy family. Jim worked very hard. Marjory work very hard looking after the family and the house, and more recently the one year old puppy called Raven. All seemed well.
Jim love his job of twenty years. He was a top consultant and a very gifted surgeon. He saved lives, which gave him great satisfaction. But on rare occasions he was unable to save lives, and this affected him, not wholly consciously, because he was always busy with the next healing of a patient, but on some level in his conscience lived a tab, a list, a sort of engravement in stone of his failures, his perceived failures. And throughout Jim's twenty years of service these engravings managed to build up an unconscious weight on his spirit, on his soul, on his success as a fixer of lives.
From the very early years of his career Jim had made it a habit to visit the library. He'd visit the public library if opening hours allowed, and if closed he would look through the books in the hospital library or visit the university just down the road from his house which allowed him twenty four hour access. Jim used these library times, and they were often as short as half an hour, to try and relieve him of the daily stresses of his work. He would read a wide variety of books and had a near on photographic memory of all that he read and saw. He would read travel books, psychology books, people's memoires, spirituality books. He took a lot of comfort scouring maps and timetables and would always look at the noticeboards which promoted local events and talks. There seemed to be no conscious reason for these library visits, just an outlet for the mental and physical tensions that accompanied his working life.
When Jim turned forty, Marjorie started to notice Jim beginning to withdraw a little. It happened slowly, and he still seemed happy, but he stopped initiating conversations and only joined in when asked a question or asked his opinion. Marjorie was not overly worried, but she kept note of it.
Life went on, Jim worked, Marjorie was always busy, and the kids were growing up. And Jim continued his library visits, looking at his maps, reading survival stories, reading self help books, and always a glance at those noticeboards. You never know what you might see on a public noticeboard.
Jim never scoured the internet in the library. He never photocopied anything. The librarians knew his habits well but they had no idea what books he read. And the years went on. Jim had many healing successes and was a widely acclaimed expert is his field. But even so, failures in his terms still sometimes happened. He never talked to anybody about those failures, and that stone engraving somewhere in his conscious mind was starting to get heavier.
And it happened in one instant, on one day, in a very quick and seemingly innocent sequence of events.
It was a Sunday. The family had just finished lunch. Jim had helped with the washing up. And some sort of switch came on in Jim's mind. He had no conscious control of this switch. He walked up to his bedroom, pulled open the drawer in his bedside cabinet, took out the wad of cash he kept there for rainy days, put it in his pocket and went into the bathroom. He put his battery razor in his other pocket and went downstairs.
"Just going to the library love", he said to Marjorie. He kissed her on the cheek, squeezed each of the kids on the shoulder, like he so often did, and walked out of the house.
The keys were in the car. He knew that. He drove ten miles away to a secluded lay bye, turned the car engine off, left the keys in the ignition, closed the car door and walked down a country pathway which he knew was there from the many maps that he had scoured through in the past. He walked for about two miles, took the razor from his pocket and shaved his beard off. He then shaved his head clear of hair, careful to feel all around his scalp and jaw for a smooth and decent cut. He pocketed the razor and carried on walking. Jim was on automatic pilot. His every act was determined by a feeling inside that said cycle, walk...and sleep, cycle, walk and sleep, cycle, walk and sleep. It was his only coping mechanism for the way he was feeling. The stone engravement of his perceived failures had become alive in his thoughts. His apparent failures had tipped the balance. Jim was no longer a happy successful brain surgeon. Jim's life had suddenly become one long list of failures.
And he walked. And he walked to a large car boot sale that he knew was in the area because he had seen it advertised on a noticeboard somewhere. The car boot sale was four miles away from where he had parked his car. He had passed no one on the footpath, passed no cctv spots, and he had nearly two thousand pounds in his right hand pocket. And he was no longer a black bearded, shoulder length haired man. He was now a bald haired, beard free man.
Jim arrived at the car boot sale. He bought a high visibility jacket from the first stall and walked on. He then bought a decent touring bicycle with panniers for fifty quid. He moved on. It was a very big car boot sale, maybe five hundred separate selling stalls. He bought some training shoes, moved on, put them on, and slipped his old shoes into a nearby recycling bin. He bought a tent and a sleeping bag and sleeping mat and put them in his bike panniers. He bought a few tools for the bike, some extra clothes, some bottles of water, some snack bars and a few other bits and pieces he thought would be useful for his trip. What trip? What was he doing? Where was he going? What about his family? But Jim had no time for these thoughts. It was just cycle, walk and sleep. These three words were the only thing that made sense to him, and he had to follow sense, and to survive the way he was feeling.
Within less than three hours of leaving his happy Midlands home and family, Jim was cycling North along back roads that he had seen marked on old Ordnance Survey maps in the local library. He also remembered the many cycling adventures he had read about so was pretty familiar with some of the tricks used to survive on such ventures.
He headed North, North and West actually. He cycled, camped wild, and got food and water from out-of-the-way local shops. He barely spoke to the shop keepers. He was keen on following his mantra, cycle, walk and sleep. Two hundred miles from his car, and five days since leaving it in that secluded lay bye, Jim locked his bike to a lamp post in a small fishing village along the coast just above Wales. Jim packed all his gear into a rucksack that was strapped to his bike and that he had bought at that same first car boot sale, and started walking. There were three main walking paths from hereon. He took the coastal path and headed North. He knew the path well. You know where he got his knowledge from.
So by this time Jim had been missing for five days. Marjorie was frantic with worry. The kids were confused and unhappy and couldn't concentrate in school. Marjorie brought them home to be with her. The police were scouring the area where Jim's car had been found and posters with pictures of Jim on were printed and were put up in as many places by as many people who would offer to help. Social media starting going crazy with yet another missing person story to try and solve. Local and national television stations put out appeals for any information with regards to Jim's whereabouts and a special hotline was set up by the police force, and in Jim's case was named Chancer33.
Had Jim had an accident? Had Jim disappeared because he wanted to? Had he been involved in an altercation with somebody? Had a crime been committed? Had Jim sadly taken his own life? So many questions. No answers. No leads. And one distraught and confused family, and many distraught and helpless friends, desperate to find Jim and to bring the family back together as soon as possible and with all the answers to the so many questions.
And Jim kept walking.
Marjorie and a small army of friends printed poster after poster. They laminated them, punched holes in them, bought cable ties and put them up wherever they could. They sent packages of posters to friends in Scotland. They sent packages of posters to friends in London, in Wales, in Cornwall, and to friends ten miles away, twenty miles away, and to anyone who said they could do it in their home towns. Jim had left his passport and mobile phone at home, but that didn't mean he couldn't have gone abroad, somehow. So posters went to America, to Greece, to Egypt, and closer and further away around the Planet. It was all Marjorie and her friends could think of doing. Get Jim's story out there. Tell the world he is missing. "Where is our Jim?" they would say.
And Jim kept walking. It was late summer, so yes, there were others on the walking trail, but it was usually pretty easy to stay alone if you wanted too. Jim had found a pair of sunglasses on the path so he had put these on and when people came walking from the other direction he either just stared straight ahead and ignored his fellow walkers, or just gave a slight nod in recognition of another human being. To them, Jim was just another walker, another soul following his meditative route from one place to the other. Jim was alone. All memory of his family and friends, for the time had disappeared. Jim was grappling with an inner turmoil that had no interpretation for him. It was just a foul gutter of self loathing and massive failure. He had to keep walking. He had to keep eating. He had to keep drinking water, and he had to end each day with a long sleep, in his tent, in his sleeping bag, on his sleeping mat. He was surviving. That was what mattered to Jim.
The five days of torture for Marjorie, the kids, the family and Jim's friends turned into five very long weeks. The police had undertaken extensive searches and had interviewed many local people who might have seen something or heard something, but nothing. The television appeals had stopped, but would start up again if any new information came to light. The police liaison officer assigned to Jim's family and to hotline Chancer33 was available to the family twenty four/seven but slowly the contact between them was no longer quite twenty four/seven as other events in police life took over or interfered with that original one hundred percent efficient contact line.
Marjorie started to become frustrated as police time became less frequent. Lack of resources meant it was difficult for the police to keep focusing on missing persons cases as they had so many other things to do in the normal running of a busy police force.
And time went on. Marjorie couldn't sleep. The kids cried a lot. The puppy dog still had to be looked after, meals had to be cooked to keep them all healthy, and slowly a few of her friends had to cut down the hours they there were willingly giving to her, as they had to look after their own families too.
It was hard. It was very hard. It was mental torture for all those that knew there should be an answer-but couldn't find that answer. An event had happened. Jim had vanished, and no one could piece back the events that led to that vanishing act. Did they just have to wait for answers to come, or should they keep digging, and digging, and digging, at a pit that just seemed to get deeper and deeper as the days and weeks and months carried on?
Marjorie couldn't give up on Jim. She loved him. He was her soul mate. Jim was her children's dad. He was family to many, friends to many. She had to keep going. So she just kept on sending out posters to anyone who would put them up. And they did keep putting them up, all over the place, in shopping malls, on noticeboards, on gate posts, in church halls, on lamp posts, in car windows, on the side of lorries, and even in one case, on both sides of a baby's pram. Jim's poster went with the pram to and from school, in a sleep village, somewhere in the Welsh countryside.
Four months after the day Jim disappeared, and with no clues still to his whereabouts, one of Marjorie's friends suggested a break from the months of daily and hourly torture Marjorie was experiencing. Billy Joel was in concert just down the road from the family home and Jim and Marjorie had been life long fans. They had walked down the aisle to one of his top hits when they got married in their local church. Marjorie's initial reaction was that it just wasn't appropriate. How could she attend such an event when her life at that moment was just so full of grief and sadness? But her friend insisted. "Just come Marjorie. Don't try and be happy. Just do something different. Take some pressure off yourself. Don't feel guilty. Just go to the concert in prayer. Go with Jim in mind. Go asking for answers. Just take some time for yourself. I'll be with you. We're not going for fun, smiles or laughter, or to forget Jim. We'll go because we have nothing else to give, no answers, little energy, and we're running out of hope".
And Marjorie agreed. What did she have to lose? She had already lost the love of her life, and she wanted him back. The music of Billy Joel had brought them together. Maybe Billy can work his magic again, because that's all that she believed would help her situation now, magic, a miracle bit of help from somewhere that she could neither find nor reach.
So Marjorie and her friend went to the concert.......as Jim came to the end of a very long day of walking. It had been a particularly hard day of walking, harder than normal, in fact the hardest day on this bewildering trek of his. But something inside himself had said "Keep going. There is something ahead of you".
And as he walked the final steps to a gate that he saw led to a town in the distance, he saw a poster on a fence. "Jim Daley", it said, "Where are you? Please call home if you see this poster. Please walk to the nearest police station and tell them who you are. They will help you. We want you home Jim. We all love you. Please come home".
And he saw his face on the poster. And in that instant he remembered who he was and why he was walking, and that he needed to wipe off the engravings in the stone if he was to survive and live again. He took the poster down and took it with him to the police station in town.
"This...", as he held up the poster to the police officer, "...is me. Could you please help me get home"?
(I will upload the two photographs I spoke about when I get off the Santander/Plymouth ferry. Not enough bandwidth on the boat's wifi to do it now to accompany this post).
(Apologies to you dear reader for any spelling or grammar mistakes. Please do point them out to me. Thank you).