Eshtine

Walking to Stonehenge

When I was twenty-one, I walked to Stonehenge.
Not from here.
I was in England at the time. A train got me to the town of Salisbury, but then I walked across the Salisbury Plain to where the bunch of big rocks are. I'll talk about how big in a minute.
I won't get into why I was in England; it'd take too long. Let's just say I'd never been so far from home. I had already been gone weeks and weeks.
Perhaps that's why the letter I got from home that morning stung me. It was from a friend telling me how much fun she was having with another of my friends in my absence. My friends! Having fun! And I wasn't there!
So, yeah, I'm the jealous type. And jealousy's a funny emotion; it fills you with an incredible amount of energy, you feel like you could just shoot lightning bolts off the tips of your fingers. We jealous types all have to come up with ways to cope, to use that energy constructively. Me, I walked to Stonehenge.

Not on purpose. It was the cathedral's fault. I'd gotten off the train in Salisbury town. It was a bright day and the sun glinting off Salisbury Cathedral drew me to it. I'm always drawn to shiny things. "Ooh, pretty," I think. So I didn't get the bus I wanted, the one that would have taken me straight to Stonehenge. I missed it 'cause I was hanging around the church--as if there weren't churches in every other town I visited, as if there were megaliths around every corner. The next bus wouldn't come for quite a while.
I knew by the schedule the trip to Stonehenge by bus would take half an hour. Well, I'd gone places by bus in St. Louis, and then a half-hour bus trip would take me someplace four or five miles away. I figured I could walk it. So I didn't wait around. I just went--out of the town, onto the Plain. Maybe I could catch the bus along the way.
Now it's a pretty romantic place name, the Salisbury Plain. I don't know what sort of image it may conjure for you as you sit reading this, but when you're walking it--first of all, it's not designed to be walked. It's military property, that's what protects it from becoming Salisbury Suburbia, the fact that men in uniform practice killing each other on it. So there's no hiking trail. There's just the road, a two-lane highway with a weedy ditch on either side. And then past the ditch is a barbed-wire fence and then a wide expance like never-ending farmland. That's the Salisbury Plain. It's flat, it's dull, and I walked it on the road when I could and in the ditch, among the weeds and the thorns, when I couldn't. There was an occasional tree.
I probably walked four miles before it started to dawn on me that maybe this Stonehenge thing was farther away than I thought. This wasn't so much like a city bus ride with all the starts and stops, red lights and traffic. This was like a highway trip--what if the bus would be going 60 miles an hour?
The worst was not knowing how much farther I had to go. I couldn't turn around and head back without worrying I was already more than halfway there. It could be just around the next bend. But something else was sinking in--the fact that I wasn't carrying any ID, no driver's license, no credit card. I'd already bought the roundtrip bus and train tickets, so I did have a way of going back--other than that, I had 65 pence on me and I was alone in this world. On this trip I had done a few foolhardy things--I went to a punk club in Milan called the Anarchist's Laboratory and I hung out with bums in a seedy part of London--but this felt like I was really pushing it. Like this whole trip I was on a tightrope, daring myself to fall off, continually surprised when I wouldn't, trying something riskier next time.
Besides the train tickets and the 65 pence, I carried a notebook (useless because I'd left my pen on the train), a juice box and some cheese and crackers. As I walked on and on, no end in sight, my pilgrimage started taking on the character of a death march. I sang songs to keep up my spirits--folk songs with endless verses, my favorite songs by my favorite bands. I rationed the juice and crackers--one sip of juice after rounding this next bend, one cracker after five cars pass.
Tourbuses nearly ran me over (that's why I kept jumping into the ditch), several cars honked, but no one offered me a ride and I never flagged anyone down. I was going to be tough if I had to be. My only worry really--other than wondering I was on the right road--was that by the time I got to Stonehenge, it might be after 6 o'clock. Six o'clock was when the last bus would leave going back to town.
The walking, the singing and the worrying went on far longer than I can give you any sense of. Then the road I was on ended where it met another road, forming a T. A sign with a stick-figure megalith pointed toward the right, so that's where I went. Up ahead I saw a parking lot, a line of trees in the distance, and a grey something-or-other. I couldn't tell how far away the grey something was. Its proportions were confusing. It looked to be as tall as the trees in the distance, but seemed closer, but if it was closer it had to be huge, and my mind couldn't conjure anything that could possibly be that size...
And that's when I stopped in the middle of the road and my jaw dropped open. I spoke out loud. "Oh my God."
I had walked about ten miles; it had taken me three and a half hours.
And I couldn't even get close to the megaliths because I didn't have enough money on me for the tour ticket. Not that I could have touched them, anyhow--these days they are a barrier away from human contact. I stayed on the other side of a chain link fence, in the free seats as it were, with other poor pilgrims. I walked back and forth and watched the stones change configuration depending on my angle. Sometimes they were all bunched together, sometimes they were all in a line, they were always perfect.
Eventually it occurred to me I owed Stonehenge something, some measure of gratitude, so I tossed a 5 pence piece inside the fence when no one was looking. This left me, as you might have figured already, with 60p. I caught the last bus back to Salisbury and then the train back to the town of Lewes, where I was living. There was a soda machine in the first train station, and sodas were 65p. Just another of my life's little quirks.