Forgive us our trespasses
I was raised Catholic and as a kid, I was always confused by the “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” part of the Lord’s Prayer. To my kid brain, it seemed oddly specific and not very applicable — confusing because I was a child and didn’t even own any property to forgive anybody for trespassing on.
The true meaning of this line was illuminated for me during classes for First Communion, but yesterday I was taken back to my original interpretation of the language. I literally trespassed on someone’s property.
It all began with a walk to the beach behind our house. The birds were tweeting mightily and daffodils and gorse (which I’d battled in Anglesey) had started to bloom, their cheerful yellow providing a bold pop of color to the muted landscape. The tide was out a bit and there was a lot of seaweed onshore, including nature’s version of bubble wrap — seaweed with little pods on it that popped when you stepped on them. Very satisfying.
Andy turned back, but I kept going up the hill to a little cemetery nestled next to the water.
On my way back home, I ran into our neighbor and chatted. She has a lot of opinions, on everything from beavers (doesn’t know why they reintroduced them to the area as they destroy everything) to mattresses (get a new one every three years). She and her husband were doing some complicated tree removal on the steep hill behind our houses. Her husband had bought one of those tubes that they use on construction sites to get rid of debris from the higher stories of a building. They were chopping up some trees that had been felled at the top of the hill behind the house so that the wood would fit through the tube. But he hadn’t bought long enough tube, so they would send all the wood through the tube and then position the tube farther down the hill and then start the process over again. Very tedious.
While the process was annoying, according to my neighbor, the views from the top of the hill were incredible, and she told me that I should check it out for myself. “Just go down the road and around the bend and then through a farm gate and up the hill,” she told me. She said it would take 20 minutes. I was taking it easy after a lot of long walks this week, so the route sounded perfect. I went home and had a little snack and then set off.
I’m not sure if she gave bad directions or if I was bad at following them, but I must’ve gone down the wrong lane and through the wrong gate. I realized something might be off pretty early on, but knew roughly where I was and figured if I just kept climbing up, I would come across the path.
I followed some cowpaths through stubby forests and dense underbrush until I popped out onto an incredible view, with the harbor on one side and the sea on the other. It was both literally and figuratively breathtaking. I’d brought my phone and nothing else (not even water) and had just spent 45 minutes of a 20 minute walk slogging up a hill.
Luckily, I could see the road I needed to be on, so I set off down the mountain and across some fields. While passing through the first gate was easy, I then realized I was in some sort of barbed wire purgatory. Seeing another gate in the distance, I hopped over a creek to get to it. The gate was locked, but seeing no other break in the barbs, I decided to climb over it.
I walked through more fenced fields, seeing chicken coops and orchards and houses on the other side, and past them, the road I needed to be on. But I could not figure out how to get there. After crunching around in the grass for a while, I finally found a gate at the top of someone’s garden.
According to the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, the right to roam does not extend to people’s gardens. And so I hesitated for a while at the gate, trying to think if I’d seen any alternatives nearby. But all of the breaks in the barbed wire led into gardens - there didn’t seem to be any reasonable alternatives without substantial backtracking, possibly up and over the mountain again.
So I went through the gate and walked around the side of the house. An old woman immediately came out the front door to meet me. One of the few privileges of my gender (when combined with the many privileges of my race) is that I don’t seem particularly threatening to people. So she was more curious than anything else about why a strange lady was walking through her backyard.
After immediately and vociferously apologizing (my accent also softens people up - it’s clear that I’m some dumb American and they take pity on me), her husband, who was working on his boat in the front yard, called over to me.
He listened bemusedly to my rush of apologies and explanations before telling me it was alright and pointing out some more paths across the way. “They’ve put some paths over there - look for the blue and the red,” he told me, before waving me off, and I walked home rather sheepishly.
The next day, I was much better provisioned and prepared and, even though I was wary of following someone’s slightly vague directions again, decided to give the blue and red a go.
I walked from the village and up the road he’d pointed out until I found them - little wood stakes with paint on them. The blue path looked a bit flatter, so I decided to take that first.
Soon, I was in the woods, enjoying a million shades of green — dull, neon, green-yellow, dusty, purple-green, saturated, red-green, pale. Maybe I noticed all the green because it really stands out against the dull brown and grey of winter.
But I think the variety of green is mostly due to the unique ecology of this place - it’s a temperate rain forest. As the name suggests, it’s an area that receives a lot of rainfall and has mild temperatures year round, which make it a perfect habitat for over 500 species of moss, lichen, and liverwort. (Liverworts were new to me; they’re in the same family as mosses and have fun names like “deceptive featherwort”).
The Gulf Stream makes western Scotland mild and wet in the winter; it’s why while my mom in Minneapolis sends me screenshots of the weather there not getting above 0 degrees (F), I’ve barely experienced below freezing temperatures, even though I’m 800 or so miles north of her.
After the blue loop, I climbed a hill to follow the red one. I’m not sure who created these trails - they didn’t have the same signposts as the other trails I’d been walking on in the area. The stakes were stubby and hand-painted, making them hard to find sometimes. The walk was a bit of a treasure hunt.
Having completed both trails successfully, it was time to meet Andy at the village cafe and have some hot chocolate as a little reward for successfully navigating the countryside.
Love this and am so happy you get to have all these wonderful experiences. Thank you for sharing them!