I don’t like to be thought of as a wimp, a worrywart, an anxious Annie, a nervous Nelly, a scaredy cat, a coward, (I was trying to think of how I do want to be perceived, maybe like Desperate Dan with a tender side) but I can’t write about bumping into men on my walk and all the thoughts that go through my head without admitting that I am maybe all of those things.
Birdsong has not cured my anxiety. Nor has foraging or walking or paying attention to mycellial networks and creaking trees. All of the above have helped my depression immensely and made a big dent in my anxiety but they have not cured what years of therapy and medication have also failed to. The anxiety can also pervade my walks sometimes.
There are three things that can make me anxious when I go for a walk: cows, storms, and men. Not all cows, but the ones that sometimes reside in the fields that I walk through are particularly ornery. I don’t hold it against them, they’re beef cows and I’m a meat eater so I figure they’re well within their rights to chase me out of the field sometimes or to form a large crowd by the stile and refuse to let me over but I am well aware that they’re responsible for more deaths globally than sharks (not these particular cows, cows in general). When they crowd like that I will occasionally get my phone out and play music to them, trying to charm my way through but I never seem to pick the right track. Maybe I should try playing them music they wouldn’t like, blast some Baby Shark to disperse them instead of attempting to lull and woo them with Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby (why did I decide that cows would be into jazz harp specifically? I don’t recall). When it comes to storms I can usually tell by a certain kind of headache and bad mood that I get but I also check the weather forecast a bunch of times before I go out and look at the sky. I’m not scared of getting rained on, or the big bangs (a bit maybe), but I have always been terrified of getting struck by lightning. I hate getting electrocuted (you might think this is a universal feeling, it is not), but I am also fascinated by it and have read too much about electric chairs and lightning strikes (did you know it can change your whole personality?) and the more I learn about electricity the more I both fear and respect it.
I hardly ever see anybody when I walk my usual loop (lots of cow fields, a country lane, a bridleway, church, more cow fields and then home), man or woman but the further away I get from a road or a house the more anxious I get about bumping into a lone man with ill intentions (also way deadlier than sharks FYI). The only time I’ve been sexually assaulted in the countryside was when I was a teenager, it was the middle of a sunny spring day and I was walking on a very quiet country lane thinking about some of the horrifying things I’d just been reading in The World According To Garp. I was a champion screamer and he was an amateur sex offender (the police said they do these kind of attacks to practice and build their confidence up for the bigger ones) so after a few seconds/a lifetime of freeze response I howled and the power of the noise startled him into letting go for long enough for me to run until the lane met the dual carriageway and then to leg it across there too. While it was happening though, when I was frozen, I was thinking about the woods behind me and how easy it would be to drag me in there and kill me and wondering how long it would take anyone to find me.
I don’t have some of the skills I did as a teenager (champion screamer, A+ scrapper, mediocre runner) but luckily I also don’t have the appeal a teenager does to a predator. But when I’m walking if I see a man without a dog I think oh maybe he’s an opportunist prowling the fields/bridleway/country lane/woods for someone to attack and kill and I’m the only woman about and now I’ve got to think of where I would run and how fast I could run without getting a stitch if he does attack. Or maybe I would fight back. Would I stab him in the balls with my Opinel mushroom knife, does the thumb go inside or outside the fingers for a punch, could I beat him in a fight? I know that if a man is going to sexually assault me, physically attack or kill me it’s much more likely to be someone that I know than stranger danger, and I have put myself in far far more dangerous situations with men of my own volition but there is something about the unknown of it all that terrifies me.
A couple of weeks ago I was genuflecting in front of the Long-tailed tit’s nest (that I wrote about before) trying to look at it through my binoculars so that I could make out the individual lichens. I do sometimes kneel in reverence (there’s a Choisya bush on Crouch hill that I did this to and said a little prayer when I was coming back from work late at night during lockdown and no-one was around), but this was more a matter of convenience since the nest was at eye-level only if I was on my knees. I was oblivious to anything around me because I was hyper-focused on what was in front of me but after a while I felt the sensation of eyes on me. I looked up and there was a skinny man with a map around his neck, he was tall (I imagine he got called a beanpole when he was younger) and probably in his 70s. Next to him was a very ruddy faced man who I reckon was in his 50s. As soon as I turned to look at the younger man he tripped, seemingly over nothing, and fell into a ditch. Ol’ beanpole did nothing to help his friend, he just stared at me (on my knees in the mud in front of the rose bush) silently. When he spoke it was very slow, “seen anything good?”. I told him about the nest and the failure rate and gabbled away about predators of baby birds and oh look there’s a Kite, all while I assessed the two of them and their threat level.
Map around the neck in plastic, interest in birds, and old-age all factored into my assessment for the standing man. Lack of balance was the main factor for still-in-the-ditch-dude. It took me a while to get up from my kneeling position (I have creaky old knees, plus I think I was too busy working the men out) and when I did the younger guy was still in the ditch. He had tried getting up once and somehow fallen again and his old friend (or dad?) had done nothing to help him at all because he was frozen on the spot staring at me and talking incredibly slowly. I should have helped him up once I was standing. I love helping people, when I’m not busy imagining all the ways I might die I like to imagine myself getting big medals and half a page in the newspaper for helping people in a very brave and strong way. The whole situation seemed so bizarre and I was feeling weirded out by the interaction and by bumping into people on my walk (only the second time it’s happened on that route in two years) that I did nothing though, just like his weird old walking companion. Eventually he got up and they walked away and I imagine they said that was weird, that woman on her knees in front of the rose bush.
The worst sex-pest I’ve ever been on a date with is a massive birder (goes on birding holidays and writes about them beautifully) but somehow if a man had a pair of binoculars around his neck it would instantly allay any anxieties that I had. Basket of foraged flora or fungi is a very very close second, and then map in plastic around the neck is third.
It’s not the first time that looking at Long-tailed tits has coincided with a weird interaction with a dogless man (the ones with dogs just say hi and march past). I was up on the nature reserve a few years ago picking haws and had stopped to watch a flock of Long-tailed tits when I heard a man bellow at me as he walked past “I’m not following you”. It wasn’t as re-assuring as he might have thought it was, but it made me laugh and also realise the awkwardness on both sides when they have some awareness of how they might be perceived by a lone (dogless) woman in an isolated place. I yelled back “I’m just looking at the tits”, then rued not prefacing with long-tailed lest I sounded like a woodland pervert myself, but this was the same walk that two women had asked me what I was picking and I had simply shouted “HAWS” (pronounced the same as WHORES) at them, my mouth works so much faster than my stupid little brain.
I felt a little bad, I still feel a bit bad sometimes viewing men through this lens of threat or no threat when they are most likely just out enjoying all of the same things that I am on a countryside walk but I’d rather be prepared for the worst (Opinel in my pocket, shoelaces tied tightly, route to a populated place secured) than sorry.