In Praise of Paths by Torbjørn Ekelund

Buying books as presents for family tend to fall into two categories. The first are books that speak directly to that person’s interests, even if you think their interests are weird. After all it’s a present! The second category are books that they will like, but that you will like too.  Some may say this second category smacks of a little bit of enlightened self-interest, but I like to think of it as cutting down on our book-buying as one book can now be read and hopefully enjoyed by more than one person – the other person being me... I know that’s rationalizing but as John Lennon once said, “whatever gets you thru the night!”

Anyway, enough self-important quotage and on with the book talk. One of the books I bought my husband this Christmas was In Praise of Paths by Torbjørn Ekelund. I actually bought it for his birthday in September, then finished up buying something else and forgetting I had it at the bottom of a drawer. So that was a result come Christmas. I say it was a result because I will say up front that the husband loved it, and when I read it a couple of days after he’d finished, I loved it too. I should say that this is non-fiction in case that’s not clear.

Ekelund is a Norwegian writer based in Oslo, so my copy is a translation, but one that is beautifully done and doesn’t get in the way of the author’s intention which can happen so easily with a translation. I could really hear Ekelund’s voice throughout.

The book starts when Ekelund is diagnosed with epilepsy and is no longer allowed to drive. Already an ardent walker, he absorbs his new challenge with an astonishing degree of calmness and adopts walking as his new mode of transport where possible. By doing this, he comes to appreciate the act of walking – of putting one foot in front of the other, of being slow, of paying attention, of listening and most importantly of embracing the landscape in which he is walking.

All this brings me to the title of the books, ‘In Praise of Paths’, because this book really is a love letter to the concept of paths. He meditates on how paths bow to the demands of the landscape, that a journey takes as long as the landscape dictates, whereas a road often blasts through the landscape, its creation driven by our need to get from A to B as quickly as possible, little caring for what impact we have on the natural rhythms and cycles of nature. I should say that the book is not a diatribe against modern life, it is a thoughtful exploration of how we interact with our landscape in walking its most ancient byways.

One of the author’s earlies memories is walking on a path from his grandparents' cabin up to the field where grass was cut for animal feed for winter. He remembers every step, every overhanging rock that gave shade, the two bridges over streams and the trek uphill to reach the final destination where rest and chocolate awaited. I loved the way his child memory works, that the path on the way back down is a different path to the one on the way up and that the second bridge on the way up the path becomes the first bridge on the way down and therefore to his child’s eye, it is a completely different bridge. The walk on this path is an epic trip in his memory and one of the things that worked wonderfully in the structure of this book is that this memory told at the start becomes a reality at the end when he goes back to his grandparents’ cabin after many years and attempts to re-walk the path of his childhood. The intersection of childhood memory and current reality is fascinating.

Outside of these bookends, Ekelund talks about the concept of paths large and small  and tells tales of his pedestrian heroes such as 67-year-old Emma Gatewood’s solo trek on the Appalachian Trail in 1955, or Bjørn Amsrud who became the first person to walk the entire length of Norway in 1966. But as well as epic walks Ekelund also muses on how paths are made, from animal tracks, to solo walkers, to circular paths around the perimeter of islands, to the creation of urban paths because people cut corners instead of following the concrete byways laid down by the state.

The book is a lovely combination of practical advice such as never try to walk through a mangrove unless you’re following a path (I just know that will be useful) and walkers in dense forest without any navigation will usually finish up walking in a circle, to philosophical thoughts such as the meaning of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, which of course is all about paths.

For a small book, it covers a lot of ground, which is kind of appropriate given the subject matter. It’s charming, thoughtful, extremely well written and sympathetically translated. It doesn’t go in straight lines, it veers off up interesting tracks through the trees and down mountains and stops to peer in cold lakes and and meandering streams and as Geoff Nicholson says in the Forward, Ekelund “shows us that paths take us forward but they also take us back into the past and into ourselves.”

If I didn’t make it clear, I loved this book and I know I’ll read it again and just like the second bridge becoming the first bridge when you walk in a path in reverse, I know when I do that reread, I’ll find something new to discover.

In Praise of Paths by Torbjørn Ekelund was published in 2020 and my copy is published by Greystone Books.

As a footnote, I should say that Greystone Books is based in Vancouver and I was really impressed that in the copyright page, they acknowledge the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land their offices are located. Downtown Vancouver is built on the territory of these three First Nations and I think it’s brilliant that a book about travels through landscape acknowledges the lands of the First Peoples where the book was published.