A Nice Walk

He was just sat there by the side of the road. His little arm reaching out between the weeds and the litter, pointing across the fields.

It had been a long drive and I still had a couple of hours to go. I’d pulled into a layby for a comfort break and I spotted him on my way back to the van. Poor little fella must have been lost, knocked out of a car door by an impatient child, I thought at first. As I bent to take a closer look though, moving some weeds to one side, I could see he was sitting quite neatly on a smooth, round stone. He couldn’t have been dropped and just landed like that by chance, he must have been placed there deliberately and then forgotten about.

I was about to pick him up when I glanced in the direction he was pointing; I’d stopped here before but never really taken in the view. Through a row of trees, just beyond a low hedge, a grassy field gently dropped away from the road. There was a small stone cottage at the foot of the hill, smoke rising from its single chimney despite it being a warm, late spring day. Beyond the cottage was a wood, a line of hills in the distance sloped gradually from left to right before being obscured by the tree tops.

I’ve always been a city man, never had much time or inclination to visit the countryside, but the panorama held my eye. On a whim, I climbed over the hedge, spotted a fence post that seemed to be more or less in line with where he was pointing and headed across the field in that direction.

Before we go any further, let me tell you about him. He was an action doll, about 30 centimetres tall. He was dressed in army fatigues, had a stubbly shaved head and his gaze was fixed on the middle distance. He was the type of toy most young boys have owned, played with, argued in his defence that ‘he is not a doll, he’s an action figure’, and been upset about when they found their sister had co-opted him into a hastily arranged wedding with her favourite, unrealistically proportioned and usually blond, female doll. You know the type I mean.

I soon reached the fence post for which I had been aiming. I hadn’t formed any particular thoughts about what I would do when I got there, I’d just enjoyed the walk through the knee-length grass and the wildflowers, so I was standing idly looking down a footpath through the woods when an elderly gentleman came out through the front gate of the cottage.

He gave a wave when he spotted me, calling out, “It’s a nice walk that one, down through the woods,” nodding in the direction I had been looking. He climbed into his battered old four by four, it started in a coughing cloud of blue-grey exhaust fumes and he drove past me up a dirt track. The track disappeared around the end of the woods, but it must have led back to the road I had pulled off.

He seemed such a cheerful old chap that to not take up his freely offered recommendation would have felt rude, so I hopped over the stile in the wood’s boundary fence and started along the path.

The afternoon sun intermittently cut through gaps in the trees to my right, giving the impression it was flashing as I moved from full sunlight to shadow and back again. I paused for a while by a small clearing that was filled with bluebells and bright sunshine, where some unidentifiable, presumably once useful but now rusting machinery poked out from underneath a bush.

Away from the noise of the road I started to notice other sounds - birdsong, the rustle of the undergrowth as a rabbit hopped by; the sounds of a peaceful place. A dog barked in the distance; a deep, happy sound. I imagined a Labrador enjoying being outdoors, enjoying being himself. I could empathise.

The path started to level out and we (the path and I) rounded a corner, arriving at a small lake; its waters clear, its surface smooth.

I found a few pebbles and checked their weight, shape and size against some unknown, innate criteria, discarding those I felt were not quite up to scratch. I crouched slightly and with a flick of the wrist I sent the first pebble skidding and dancing across the surface of the lake, rings of water splashing from its surface, spreading and then dissipating until the lake was flat and still again.

I repeated the routine, adjusting my grip and stance a little each time until I heard the satisfying ping of a stone clattering onto the shingle beach on the far side of the lake. My unconsciously determined goal now achieved, I threw a celebratory handful of tiny stones high over the lake. The resulting brief, frenzied fizzing and popping as they broke the surface of the water brought to mind the sparkle of foam from a shaken champagne bottle.

I headed back through the woods now, bending to pick up a stick and idly occupying myself by picking the bark from it as I walked. Soon I saw the cottage again, I climbed back over the stile and chose the dirt track this time to take me back up to the road.

I was conscious of slowing a little. Perhaps tiring a little, perhaps reluctant to get back to my van and the rest of the drive. A footpath branched off the track, saving me from having to walk along the now noticeably busier road. Rush hour was approaching, my drive would take me maybe half as long again as I had originally planned. But that was ok, after my drop off I didn’t have anywhere I particularly needed to be, anybody I needed to see.

I rounded a bend and there was my van. As I got closer, yes, there was the action figure too, still pointing across the field. I left him where he was, he looked clean and well looked after; maybe somebody would come back for him, or a different somebody would give him a new home. Or perhaps another different somebody would follow his gaze, check where he was pointing and find their own little walk in the countryside.

I took in the view a final time, climbed back into the van and drove on.

Had anything changed? Not really, no. In my experience things rarely do, not on the back of chance encounters with toy dolls anyway.

But it was a nice walk, just what I needed.