Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing - a newsletter about science and wonder.
Please join me as I cower in these bushes.
Cronch, cronch.
I lift my head cautiously, squinting into the pale morning light, and freezing-cold air pours into my bivvy bag, forcing me to stifle a curse…
It’s a jogger, using the gravel shoreline to get a morning sweat on, and she hasn’t seen me yet. I duck my head again and flatten myself against the ground, hoping the bushes will hide me.
Cronch cronch cronch - skiddd.
Oh dammit.
Please. Please keep going. Please don’t come over to check if I’m dead, or ring the police. Look, I know I look a bit dodgy. What person in his right mind would be sleeping in the bushes on the ice-rimed shore of the Humber on a bitterly cold February morning like this? I promise I’m not up to no good. I’m not a terrorist or lunatic. I’m a wild-camping enthusiast (admittedly this may not sound much of an improvement). Trust me, I’m doing this for fun! I’m functionally harmless - I haven’t slept all night, my knees don’t bend properly and I’m way too cold to be a threat. Please keep going.
Another cautious peek.
She’s tying her shoelace. One, two, a nice little bow - and then she’s off again. Not a glance in my direction.
YASSS thank you thank you thank you.
It’s been a horrible night, but this makes up for it - and a quarter of an hour later, so does the view when I stagger out onto the beach.
The Humber Bridge, which connects East Yorkshire with North Lincolnshire, is absolutely astonishing. Maybe not so much when you regularly race over it, or when it’s viewed from afar, but get underneath and look upwards through icy early-morning fog, and what you can see of it reveals its true nature.
When it first opened on 21st June 1981, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, a title it held for the next 17 years. It’s over 2 kilometres long, and each of those main cables holding it up weighs around 5,500 tons - about half the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
Honestly, when you tot up the numbers, it’s hard to believe human beings made it. Each upper cable is made of 14,948 parallel galvanised drawn wires, and adding in the length of the horizontal cables attaching it to the car deck (the flat bridgey bit), the combined length of all its cables & wires is 71,000 kilometres (44,117 miles).
In a straight line, that’d get you nearly twice round the world - and it’s also the total length of all the mid-ocean mountain ridges that form the world’s longest mountain chain.
I’m gawping.
This is why I’m here, to gawp. To look upwards at this colossal fog-streaked edifice, the product of so many people knowing things I’ll never learn, and doing things I’ll never be capable of doing, and working together in a way that surely would fix everything if only everyone round the world agreed to try it for a change.
As I look upwards, everything else shrinks away to nothing. I forget my aching feet and bruised-feeling shoulders from yesterday’s 26-mile walk to get here, carrying an overladen rucksack. I forget the cold, and my mild headache from forgetting that bitter cold can dehydrate you just as much as scorching heat. I even forget my ever-present anxiety about whether I’ll ever find a way to make a living as a writer (a worry I’ll wrestle with for another decade, until I begin writing an odd little newsletter called Everything Is Amazing.)
For a few astonishing minutes, this is all there is.
It’s truly awesome.
The scientific study of awe suggests that a steady diet of going “wow!” at stuff could be astoundingly good for your mental and physical health.
This paper from Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner summarises a lot of the research:
“The physiological profile of awe documented thus far—elevated vagal tone, reduced sympathetic activation, increased oxytocin, and reduced inflammation—is associated with enhanced mental health. This is evident in studies of increased optimism, sense of connection, and well-being…an openness to others and prosocial tendencies…reduced anxiety, depression, social rejection…and cardiovascular problems and autoimmune disease. Through awe-related shifts in inflammation, for example, or vagal tone, or reduced DMN activation, experiences of awe will likely benefit mental and physical health.”
If awe was a green prescription, and it had the same marketing budget as Ozempic, we’d all be striding angrily into our local doctor’s surgeries, demanding that we be dispensed our fair share. It’s sort of ridiculous that we don’t actually have anything like that - that it’s up to us to go engineer a steady diet of awe for ourselves for our own good, and how it’s still seen as a wholly recreational activity, a throwaway thing, a pleasant frippery.
(If you want further convincing about the power of awe, have a listen to Professor Keltner chatting to
here: How We Live Now: Dacher Keltner on awe, humility and purpose - or read his book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder.)Buried within the shopping-list of minor medical miracles resulting from awe is reduced focus on the self - where you feel your awareness expand and your consciousness become absorbed into something greater, rendering you a tiny, insignificant speck of a thing with laughably trivial concerns.
Again, this is healthy: dwelling too much on self is associated with depression, anxiety, and the kinds of body-image and self-worth problems that lead to self-harm, eating disorders and drug abuse, and it can trap you within a spin-cycle of worry where every potential disaster feels like unavoidable crushing certainty…
In contrast, awe whispers LOL just get over yourself, because bloody hell check out THIS mate!!!
But even awe has its limits, and soon I notice my stomach is grumbling.
Yet again I’ve forgotten how enjoyable simple breakfast is when you’re camping outside. It’s not like normal, home-based breakfast, where you’ve got half an eye on the telly or your phone, and you have so much choice it makes you cranky because you can’t decide about anything until you’ve woken up, and surely breakfast is what’s supposed to wake you up, right?
It’s much easier when you made those decisions a day or so earlier while packing your rucksack. Now it’s simple: you can either eat the thing you have, or you’re an idiot who deserves everything coming for him. You can either faff around with your aged gas burner as it farts out sheets of flame high enough to blacken your eyebrows, and try to brew up a coffee to jolt life back into you, or you can stay the kind of cold and uncaffeinated that dramatically hastens along your next self-inflicted disaster. Those are your options. Get on with it.
So I get on with it, tucking into a blackening, squishy banana, a packet of “breakfast biscuits” (ie. normal biscuits with the word “breakfast” embossed on them) and a few slices of cheese on my version of toast - two halves of a flame-scorched bread roll with an aftertaste of liquified gas. It sounds grim now but at the time it’s absolutely terrific, fine dining at its most basic - with the added bonus that I know it’ll make my rucksack slightly lighter.
I was too cold to sleep last night. I spent pretty much the whole night shivering - the really bad, can’t get warm, fingers-kept-going-numb variety. I wore everything I had, but it still wasn’t enough. I was warmer sleeping in the snow in sub-zero temperatures in the North York Moors. For some reason, this felt far worse.
Thing is, I’m using similar equipment to that North York Moors trip. So it’s probably me. Right now, I’m just not tough enough. I need a warmer sleeping bag, and more thermals, and more practice. It’s not that I can’t - it’s just that I haven’t.
But tonight is forecast to be a lot colder, with the added delight of sleet or maybe even snow. I’m an idiot, but I’m not stupid. That means I’m done for now. No need to add hypothermia to this particular story.
I wobble-stagger down the beach (my legs are doing very odd things right now, as if they’ve got twisted 180 degrees in their sockets during the night) and I pass under the partly-seen Humber Bridge, in search of Hessle railway station.
I’m feeling pretty good about things until I start reading a book on the bus home.
In 2011, Jennifer Pharr Davies set a new record for walking the 2,175 miles of the Appalachian Trail (for which she became a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year in 2012). She did it in just over 46 days. That’s an average pace of around 47 miles a day. I learned this because it was in the bio to her bestselling book Becoming Odyssa, currently top of my reading queue on my Kindle.
With perfectly awful timing, I now start reading about one of the world’s most accomplished walkers, someone capable of walking at least twice as far as me every day for a month and a half, through far worse environmental conditions.
26 miles, Mike? the book seemed to shriek: Hahahaha! That’s nothing. You’re PATHETIC.
Professional adventure writers must dread this reaction. They tell their story as honestly as possible, hoping to inspire others into chasing their own misery-soaked escapades, and instead they’re met with jealous resentment, as their readers are thrown into self-absorbed comparison anxiety:
“Are you saying my own adventuring isn’t proper adventuring? You pompous tw*t! Oh, sure, it must be nice to have your expensive outdoors gear / time / money / good health / class privilege / Armed Forces background / sponsorship / massively followed Instagram account enabling all of the above…”
That’s not the intended message, but it’s what some of us can choose to understand. We can see it as a competition we’ve already lost, and the winner already wrote a book to really rub our faces in it, the absolute bastards.
So, momentarily, I lapse into this way of thinking, sitting on the bus with aching feet, annoyed that I’m not allowed to feel heroic anymore.
(It’s not much of a defence, but I should add that I’d only had an hour’s sleep in 36 hours at this point. Even so - get a grip, man.)
Then I shake myself out of it, splashed some of my water-bottle onto my face (I immediately regret this, because it’s half-frozen) and carry on reading.
In fact, Becoming Odyssa seems to be about someone superhumanly bad at walking. She’s hopelessly ill-prepared. She undercooks inedible food, and forgets to bring a water filter. But - these are things I’d do, I think incredulously to myself. It turns out she’s a klutz, sustaining all sorts of avoidable injuries. It’d be easy for a judgemental outsider like me to read all this and say, Oh dear, look, you’re not cut out for this, mate. Why put yourself through it?
Reading all this makes me feel better, in a mean-spirited sort of way I currently lack the goodwill to all mankind to correct.
Pharr Davies, and all the other walkers and adventurers I admire, seem to have mastered one important trick: they spent most of their energy comparing themselves to themselves, improving on what they did last time until they eventually got somewhere that felt truly remarkable.
Awe is like that too. Comparisons try to rob it of its power - oh come on, it’s just a bridge, there are bigger ones. Oh, sleeping in a bivvy bag means you’re adventurous, does it, hah and pah, Mike, you’re clearly no , he literally wrote the book on it (and you’ll never write anything that good, will you?).
But everything also exists as itself, a personal discovery that’s a source of intimate wonder, independent of any joyless comparison if you can rewire your brain to see it that way. Every experience is its own unrepeatable thing. And for however long our lives are, we continually get the chance to try new things for the very first time and enjoy the homegrown, deeply personal, health-boosting awe that they create for us, all the way to the very end where there’s one final experience in wait that we’ll only get to try once. (Your religious beliefs depending, of course.)
So, you know what? 26 miles is plenty. That’ll do nicely for now. Well done, that man.
Now - what’s going to be next?
Images: Different Resonance; Mike Sowden.
Camping is one thing. CAMPING IN CHILLY WEATHER IS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT BASKET au CATS !
When I was a kid, sleeping in a tent was a big deal. It seems like EONS since the last time I tried " roughing it ". Which ain't saying that I wouldn't like to. FYI : I only use " ain't " to emphasize something. One of my English teachers is spinning in her grave. 🪦
That exact spot is well known to my family, though we never bivvi’d out underneath! For years once we’d all grown up, moved to different places and had kids, we’d meet up at the bridge for an afternoon, have lunch at the windmill or the truckers’ caff and enjoy a walk over.
We learned about it at school and then later that our extremely modest running coach at Brid RR had had a part in the engineering. He told us with great pride that he’d calculated the tops of the towers were further apart than the bases due to the curvature of the earth! We were never good enough at physics to work out if he was kidding!