The Eastern end of the Roman wall is, fittingly, at a town called Wallsend. It sits on a bluff above the Tyne River, about five miles inland from the open sea. But if you are the type of person who wants to walk the entirety of Hadrian’s Wall across England, you’re probably also the kind of person who needs to see both coasts.
It is you and the crag. You and the wind. You and the tiny Alpine flower that’s found a sheltered crack to grow in. No guidebook can prepare you for that. This is a series of lessons I learned walking across a small island.
We all do it — get really excited for a new book, make sure it’s preordered or on the library waitlist, count down the days until we can get it in our hands, hug it all the way home, then add it to pile and promptly begin to feel guilty about not reading it immediately.
The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is often presented as a signal-free quiet zone — no Wi-Fi, no cell phones, no radio. The 13,000 +/- square mile area was set aside as the United States National Radio Quiet Zone in 1958. It was chosen for its remote nature and relatively light signal traffic in order to have a clear patch to listen to the cosmos. But the reality of day-to-day life within the Quiet Zone is less clear-cut.
Read these wintry, dark tales to celebrate Krampusnacht, and hopefully avoid being tossed in a burlap sack and carried off into the German night.