Notes from the Road: Walking into the World, Albania

By Nick Hunt

Always this sense when travelling: will I find it here? Will the great secret reveal itself? Is it around this next corner? The ferry rolls between the mountains and with each bend of the lake the sliding angles of walls and cliffs perform the same kaleidoscope trick. And the secret is never revealed. That's why the boat keeps moving.

Do I move around the world in the expectation of finding something, or to continue the sense of looking for it? The planes of the world slide back and forth, rearranging their perspectives around me, and I am always in the middle trying to get to the end. And in the most wonderful places of the world, it isn't enough just to pause and see – it isn't enough to look. I want to be inside that rock, that mountain, that green sea – I want to be it. But the wonder won't let me in, it only lets me stand at the side and observe. And the beautiful moment slides by, and I'll never remember those shadows and scales, I'll never remember the awe of that peak in the moment of truly watching it, and photos are just the skin of the world, and words are only something.

What, then, am I taking back? Perhaps a ripple in the brain, perhaps a small shift in the architecture. The rock is not changed by my watching it. But watching the rock changes me.

And walking is a way in. Walking takes you from seeing something to being inside it, entering into it – at least, this is the closest that I have learned to get. Walking takes the mind inside with the rhythms of the body. Walking is a way of watching without using the conscious eye – the roll of loose rocks underfoot, the changing light on the trees, the very far white noise of rivers distantly below: all of this is a part of watching, of knowing the world without the egotistical need to understand.

Taking off my clothes just now and climbing into an ice-cold stream, crouching under the waterfall, covering my head with it, was less about getting cool than wanting to get inside what I was seeing, pulling the world over myself like a blanket – trying to be a part of it.Perhaps the secret is in here – but it never is, not entirely. That's why I have to leave, get dressed and walk on.

And then, on the far side of the mountain, having come to a place that approximates paradise, after having climbed and descended paradise, my body and mind are tired enough not to have to think. There are no adequate words for the beauty of those mountains, for their presence or enormous mood, but because I have walked inside them I don't have to try to describe. I feel that the mountains are in my body – in my happy exhaustion I can feel them swelling and subsiding, full of their own special scale and light – I feel full of mountains, and this, I think, is the closest I can get to being them.

But the hardship of the climb, the exertion and the muscle burn, the respect I had to show in placing each foot on each loose rock, of minding the path, of observing the weather, the huge movements of the clouds, the loss of breath, the thirst and sweat – all of that was necessary to reaching the place I've reached. You can't attempt to enter the world without giving something of yourself away – I've given away, fleetingly, the surface part of my thinking brain, with all its anxious needs to understand, all its comparisons and descriptions, and now my mind is small enough to crawl inside what I see and stay there for a while.

That's what feels like paradise – more than the deep green valley, more than the cowbells, more than the river, more than the granite mountains with their nations of dark trees, more than the snow in the ravines – the fact that I have stepped inside, even if it cannot last, the fact that I have glimpsed what is there, even if I won't remember.

Halfway up this stony path I feel an overwhelming need to lie down, flat on my back against the rocks, trusting them to hold me. The rocks are a deep and easy bed, fitting me like a mattress. I wake up to the sheer blue sky, the crows talking loudly in the pines, an eagle very far away announcing its intentions to the world. The mountains have not been changed by my sleeping here.

Thunder over the mountains now. Pigs, horses, cows, sheep, chickens, trees and bending flowers, together under the rain.

Lake Koman ferry -- Valbone -- Theth -- Accursed Mountains, Albania

This piece first appeared on Nick’s blog and we are extremely pleased to have been given permission to republish it here. We are also huge fans of Nick’s book Walking the Woods and the Water and urge you to buy it from an independent bookshop near you.

Elsewhere No. 01 - The Launch Party in Berlin

Last Wednesday we held a launch party for Elsewhere No.01 at Cafe Tasso on Frankfurter Allee. This is the extension of Karl-Marx-Allee, the grandiose socialist boulevard that was originally named for Stalin and which was supposed to be the showcase of the new (East) Berlin emerging from the rubble of the Second World War. Cafe Tasso is a lovely cafe with a second hand bookshop attached, both upstairs and in the basement, and they were wonderful hosts.

We were so excited by the number of people who turned out to welcome Elsewhere to the world on a Wednesday evening. It was standing room only for the short readings from editors Paul Scraton and Tim Woods (who read from Julian Hoffman’s essay in the first edition), and Eve Richens, contributor to the first edition who also spoke a little on the subject of memory, writing, and where the truth lies in writing about place. Elsewhere Creative Director Julia Stone was also there, as was contributor Nicky Gardner and many, many people who supported us via the crowdfunding campaign. It was a great evening, and we hope to do it again sometime.

All photos are by the extremely talented Patricia Haas (post@patpat-studio.com)

Buy Elsewhere No.01 via our online shop here

Postcard from... Schöneweide

From the train station where the tiles crumble to dust and the abandoned shopping trolleys wait at the bottom of fenced-off stairs, we follow the main road parallel to the tracks. This is an anonymous neighbourhood of pre-war residential blocks and offices housing job centres and training academies for bus drivers. The students and the under-employed smoke their cigarettes on the steps as we pass, a light drizzle falling from grey skies.

The streets around here all speak to a romantic past of daring air travel. Sportfliegerstraße. Landfliegerstraße. Pilotenstraße. Segelfliegerstraße. Not far from here was once the Johannisthal airfield. Once graced by the early aviation pioneers the airfield is now a nature park. To the north, where we walk, we have reached an edgeland zone of new construction sites and old red brick industrial buildings, open, grassy wastelands, and large corrugated sheds.

This is our destination. A whirring, cranking, echoing hall. In this industrial zone sandwiched between the railway lines and the main road south, we have come to look at our words and our pictures, laid out in giant sheets as the machines spin and howl around us. Inspect and nod. Press the button and go. Soon we will hold it in our hands, but for now, Elsewhere is printworks in Schöneweide.

Elsewhere No.01 was released this week - buy your copy via our online shop here

Five Questions for... Gary Budden

As part of our series of interviews with the editors and contributors to Elsewhere, we speak to Gary Budden – whose essay on the Romney Marsh appears in Elsewhere No. 01 – about what place means to him. Image above: Stodmarsh

What does home mean to you?

I’m torn on this one as to whether home is London, where I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life, or Kent where I grew up and still visit frequently, and where most of my family (most of them ex-Londoners) still live.

The landscapes of the Kent coast, as hopefully evident in a lot of my writing, are very vivid in my mind. Growing up on the Thames estuary in Whitstable, going to school in a city steeped in Roman, Norman and medieval history (Canterbury), being frequently taken to places like Stodmarsh, Reculver, Dungeness etc. by my birdwatching father, all left a strong mark on me. It was a place that I couldn’t wait to get away from when I was a teenager, but now parts of me still definitely consider parts of Kent home.  Only as I got older did I begin to appreciate some of the weirdness of the saltmarshes, start digging out the stories from Blean Forest, to begin revisiting Reculver with a different perspective – turning a place I couldn’t wait to get away from where ‘nothing happened’ into a living, breathing place in its own right.

However, London itself is also very much my home. I’ve been lucky enough to work all over the city, in almost every borough, and I think I know the place pretty well. I built a life here and I doubt I’d be able to be running Influx press, working for Ambit, or doing a lot of the things I do had I not moved here.

It can be an exhausting, baffling and frustrating place to live. But sometimes, when I see the Thames at night from the Hungerford Bridge, all can be forgiven.

Where is your favourite place?

Almost impossible to answer. I feel I should say somewhere more grand or exotic, and I’ve seen a few amazing places around the world, but one of my very favourite places that I find myself always willing to go back to, however, is the Stodmarsh nature reserve near Canterbury. It’s beautiful, and one of the few places in the UK that is home to breeding marsh harriers – birds that are, simply, an awesome sight.

What is beyond your front door?

A synagogue, the Cambodian embassy, a Buddhist temple, Irish boozers and lots of green parakeets. I had the misfortune of watching the local library at the end of my road get demolished over the past year and get replaced with Lego-style ‘luxury flats’. This is the way London is going, and I don’t like it.

What place would you most like to visit?

There’s a place called Deadman’s Island in the Thames Estuary, only accessible by boat and fairly close to the Isle of Sheppey. During the Napoleonic Wars, French prisoners were interred on the prison hulks (like the ones in Dickens’ Great Expectations) that floated in the estuary. Disease was rife on these ships and many of these men died. Their bodies were buried on what became known as Deadman’s Island – now due to coastal erosion, these bones are coming to the surface.

Ghoulish, but fascinating.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve been reading a lot of Alan Garner lately. His novel Strandloper is one of the very best ‘place’ novels I’ve ever read. I also recently finished Charlotte Higgins’ Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, which brings what can be a rather dry subject to life. It’s more a history of the history of our understanding of Roman Britain than anything else; how our perceptions of what it all meant shift over generations. I also found out from reading this book that Syrian troops had been present at Hadrian’s Wall and Roman York was quite a multicultural place, much to the chagrin of Daily Mail readers.

I also have to mention Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure, which had been reprinted by Three Impostors press (it sold out but I fortunately found a copy in Housmans Bookstore). It’s a must for anyone interested in place writing, or London writing in particular. It’s Machen, in a rambling shaggy-dog story way, finding magic in the suburbs, weird backstreets and unloved parts of the metropolis – London incognita as he calls it. As someone who has spent a great deal of time walking around strange residential parts of the city trying to find the address of a new tutoring client, I knew what Machen was on about. Great stuff.

Gary Budden is the co-founder of independent publisher, Influx Press and fiction editor at Ambit magazine. His work has appeared in Structo, Unthology, Galley Beggar Press, Brittle Star, The Lonely Crowd and many more. He writes regularly for Unofficial Britain.

Gary’s essay ‘The Fifth Continent’ on the Romney Marsh appears in Elsewhere No. 01 – Order here

Lo Sound Desert - The origin of Desert Rock

A project close to our heart here at Elsewhere, Lo Sound Desert tells the story of a music scene born in the early 1980s by revolting punk rock kids in the middle of the Californian desert, where - hidden from the narrow-minded authority of suburbia - it gave birth to bands such as Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age.

Sometimes place shapes a music scene, and there is no question that ‘Desert Rock’ was a specific vibe of pure analogue rock music, fostered by the beauty of surroundings that by its very nature provided a lot of space. And although Desert Rock never reached the level of popularity of its contemporaries in the Grunge Rock scene, it is still around, whether via endless jams in rehearsal garages, wasteland venues and smokey European backstage rooms, and continues to inspire a new generation of rock bands to make music.

Lo Sound Desert is a film that provides a deep, intimate insight into the Low Desert music scene’s history and the punk rock vibe of the 1980s and 1990s. Ten years in the making, it is narrated by the main protagonists – the musicians: Mario Lalli, Alfredo Hernandez, Scott Reeder, Josh Homme, Brant Bjork, Nick Oliveri, Sean Wheeler and many more from bands like Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, Yawning Man, Fatso Jetson, Mondo Generator, Dali’s Llama, Hornss, Slo Burn, Unida, Fu Manchu etc.

The two-part feature documentary brings together two generations of musicians and their achievements in underground rock music, and in the spirit of the music itself, the film has been a labour of love for filmmaker Joerg Steineck who has basically funded the project entirely by himself. But to get the film out there, Joerg needs a little help and is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to raise the last funds needed for music rights and DVD production. The campaign is going well, but still needs a little more over the last two weeks to get the project over the line.

We can’t wait to see the film… Elsewhere was born out of a desire not only to feature writing that explores a certain place in the many ways that can mean, but also those artists, musicians and filmmakers for whom place is central to their work or has shaped the creative process in some way. Lo Sound Desert is such a project, and we hope you will help support it.

Lo Sound Desert Crowdfunding Campaign