Don Miller

Day 4—Grasmere to Patterdale


The Group of Ten and the Parting Stone


     I wandered lonely as a cloud
     That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
                                    
     When all at once I saw a crowd,          
                                    
     A host, of golden daffodils;                  
                                    	
        —William Wordsworth, 1807       

if only they were

a crowd of golden daffodils

we encounter again

on the trail today

the group of ten, and three dogs

We have shared the trail with them repeatedly since our first day, when they gradually overtook us; their dogs running free even though we were in the uplands and there were many sheep.  


the parting of two trails
 
at the gate

one to the left

the other to the right

only to cross another day


Early on the ascent today we are on a wide path of loose stone, hedgerows on either side, when we encounter two of the ten descending, escorting an injured dog back to town with hopes of getting a transfer to this evening’s lodgings.  Looking at the dog, we express our concern and wish them best of travels, and we watch them disappear down the trail, the dog limping.



Approaching Hause Gap on the rocky track that has been narrowing, trench-like in places, the remainder of the ten are stretched out and broken into smaller groups of threes and two on the path.  They are ahead of us, and they are behind us, and the dogs race from the last of them to the front of them and back again, brushing by us each time. 

stone-filled

the track is treacherous

in single file

making way

for dogs to pass

Reaching the Gap there is a brisk wind, and it is a cool wind, and the group of ten with three dogs break for lunch.  We choose to press on and follow the trail overlooking Grisedale Tarn, then gradually descend to the water’s edge where the path crosses over at the outflow and becomes a steeper track alongside the tumbling headwaters of Grisedale Beck.



Just below the crossover stones, we find a grassy edge off the track and out of the wind to break for lunch, not knowing at the time that we are sitting near the “Parting Stone.”


we part again

where the trail divides

the group of ten

to the left

our path to the right

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From the Author:

The Parting Stone, or Brothers Parting Stone, is where William, John, and Dorothy Wordsworth stood for a final time, in 1800, before John continued south toward Patterdale. This was the last time William and Dorothy saw their brother John, who perished in a shipwreck in 1805.

This tanka tale is an excerpt from my manuscript, It is a Long Trek . . . and the Rain Is Steady, a travelogue of the trek my wife and I made along Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast Trail in northern England in celebration of our 40th wedding anniversary. 

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About the Author

Don Miller lives in southern New Mexico splitting his time between a house in the Chihuahuan Desert, and a mountain cabin at ~9,000 feet. He has been writing tanka since the early 1980s, and has his short-form poetry published on a somewhat regular basis in various print and online journals since the early 2000s.

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