34 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
I looked like a newborn. They gave me
bread, a tin of sardines, and a glass of
the tea, which was as sweet as a candy
cane. I happily devoured all of it.
A couple of the men spoke French.
As far as I could understand them, they
were indeed from an itinerant local group,
but a French hiking tour had employed
them as porters, to carry luggage in ad-
vance and to establish camps. I never
saw the hikers—who, unlike me, had a
guide—but one of the men gestured to-
ward a pile of heavy bags. I wanted to
ask the men more questions about their
lives, but they had questions of their
own. What had I brought to eat? Where
had I slept the night before? Why didn’t
I have a tent? And they were astonished
that I was alone. “Vous êtes seulement ...
un?” one of them asked.
“Oui,” I replied.
A silence ensued.
“Je suis anglais,” I said, as if that ex-
plained everything.
It was time to go. I needed to ar-
rive at my camp with enough time to
set up for the night. Before I left, one
of the men insisted on checking my
maps. I pointed to the spot where I
planned to sleep, which was perhaps
three miles away. I said, “Pas trop loin”—
“Not too far.”
I was impersonating a brave solitary
explorer, but I would have been elated
to stay in their camp until the next
morning. This mountain range was their
home turf: they weren’t on some ersatz
vision quest. They also
seemed to have plenty of
food, and would probably
cook some for me. Their
tent looked comfortable and
watertight. They already
had a fire going.
I made myself leave. The
rules of my expedition de-
manded that I reach a cer-
tain point on the map by a
certain time. It wasn’t lost
on me how perverse it was to break off
an authentic and unusual experience—a
chance exchange between mutually in-
terested parties—in order to hew to an
arbitrary timetable, on a trip suppos-
edly designed to reconnect me to au-
thentic modes of living. Nevertheless,
after snapping a selfie with two of the
men, I put on my backpack, consulted
the G.P.S., and began to walk down
from the clearing. I didn’t turn around.
I wasn’t sure that I could stand to see
their doubtful looks.A
s the elevation decreased, I saw
more signs of human activity: the
occasional mud-walled farmhouse, an
enclosed and irrigated field that seemed
like a marvel of engineering in this dusty
landscape. My ignorance gnawed at me.
I wondered what crops these people
grew, and how they survived the win-
ters here. A couple waved at me from
the door of their home. A farmer’s dog
chased me for a few hundred yards,
barking, and then got bored. It was early
afternoon, and hot. I was still an hour
from camp. My legs were beginning to
quiver with the effort of the day. I de-
cided that I needed some sugar.
I removed my pack, and hunted for
a bar of Kendal Mint Cake, which I
had bought in Manchester specifically
for such a moment. Kendal Mint Cake,
a chewy and calorific peppermint bar,
is made in the Lake District town that
bears its name, and has been beloved of
British mountaineers and explorers for
a century. Ernest Shackleton took Ken-
dal Mint Cake on his Antarctic expe-
ditions. I had last eaten it twenty-eight
years ago, when I was thirteen, on the
island of Ru’a Fiola, off the west coast
of Scotland.
Between the ages of ten and thir-
teen, I visited Ru’a Fiola three times, to
attend a summer camp run by an exu-
berant, posh man named
Torquil Johnson-Ferguson,
who had children about
my age. Everything about
the trip was an adventure.
At least twice, I travelled to
the camp on my own. My
mother put me on a train
from London to Glasgow
Central, a journey of five
hours. I had coins in my
bag to call home from a pay
phone when I arrived in Glasgow. I
walked half a mile from Glasgow Cen-
tral to Glasgow Queen Street station
to catch another train, to Oban, on the
Scottish west coast. I called home again
from Oban. I also had a ten-pound note
to spend on a meal. I went both times
to a chip shop in Oban, and ordered a
“sausage supper”: battered sausage, chips,
salt, vinegar. After dinner, I’d meet upwith an employee of the camp, who
took me and other children out to Ru’a
Fiola. It seems impossible now to imag-
ine that my mother sent a preteen alone
on this journey. But she was a widow
working two jobs, and there didn’t seem
another way for me to get there.
My memories of the camp itself are
golden. The kids bunked in the main
house on the island. The days were full
of abseiling, rock climbing, sea fishing,
and expeditions to other parts of the
Hebrides, where we’d stay in caves. I re-
member lying f lat on my belly with
some other children at the edge of a
cliff, watching an eagle slalom through
the air below us. At night, we’d tell ghost
stories by a fire. Johnson-Ferguson told
a terrifying one about a local “mad-
woman” who, long after her suicide, still
lit a candle in the window for her hus-
band, who had abandoned her.
At the end of the camp, the children
were divided into pairs for an exercise
called Survival. You spent a night or
two in a deserted patch of a nearby is-
land. You weren’t allowed to take food,
but you were given instructions on what
you might be able to find to eat—say,
rock-pool cockles to boil over a fire.
Every few hours, an instructor motored
past you on a boat to check that you
were all right. There was a distress sig-
nal for emergencies, although I can’t re-
member what it entailed. In any event,
Survival didn’t feel dangerous; it felt lib-
erating. In my final year at Ru’a Fiola,
I completed the challenge alone. It struck
me, while I was muddling my way
through the Atlas range, that Get Lost
had attracted me because it echoed those
early, happy experiences, in which I first
felt independence—or a convincing il-
lusion of it.
Time had both burnished and tar-
nished these memories. I looked online
recently to see if there was still a sum-
mer camp at Ru’a Fiola. There was not.
In 2015, Johnson-Ferguson was jailed for
sexually abusing three boys who had at-
tended the island camp in the eighties.
The victims, now men, had come for-
ward after some thirty years; they had
wept in court while recounting their sto-
ries. Two of the incidents of abuse had
taken place in caves, presumably during
one of the expeditions I had so loved.
I was chilled to learn that I had been
exposed to a predator, and felt terrible