Walking Man: The Secret Life of Colin Fletcher

By Robert Wehrman

Walking Man is the only biography of Colin Fletcher, the man who walked through time.
He was an iconic American folk hero best known as the first person to force a passage through the length of Grand Canyon National Park in one arduous solo journey. He was the world’s most famous long-distance walker.

He was the first thru-hiker.

Called the father of modern backpacking by Backpacker Magazine and others, Fletcher was the one who showed us the way—more than a million people followed his shadow into the green world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483572291

Robert Wehrman

World reknowned composer, Robert Wehrman, Ph.D., is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran. He served as a member of an army band in The Nam where he risked his life daily by flying into hostile jungles to play horrible music for American GIs. After reading An Unnatural Act, a retired Marine Colonel thought that the author probably ended up as another homeless Vietnam Vet. Instead, Dr. Wehrman is a professor of music at a major university. He hosts a popular radio show in Hawaii where he lives with his family

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PART ONE

1922–1939

EMERGING

Oh, I’m one of these guys that’s just like everybody else—I’m absolutely unique.

-COLIN FLETCHER.¹

In the beginning there was nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. Niente ... Not even a speck! Well, actually there was a bit of radiation mucking about. Radiation, in the form of light, comes in packets called photons, and it is from these photons that matter was first generated. Remember E = mc2? It is the most famous formula in the world. Albert Einstein developed it to prove energy, matter, and light are just different forms of the same thing— like steam, water, and ice.

We’ve been turning matter into energy for quite a while, but we didn’t realize that’s what’s going on when steam—which is matter—is converted into enough energy to power an engine. Einstein’s formula proves with the right equipment,* you can change sunlight into, say, a giant redwood tree, or a replica of a 1950 Plymouth station wagon with wood paneling.

It was a monumental discovery that changed, in part, the way we understand our place in the universe. Einstein began contemplating this idea in 1895 after wondering what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. It is commonly presumed he worked out his formula using a blackboard on which he scribbled different formulae until he got it right. That’s not how it happened. He simply thought about it for a decade. Then, one sleepless night, as he lay awake worrying about the things we all worry about, it popped into his mind, seemingly out of nowhere. He published the formula in a three-page paper in1905.

Back then most people weren’t ready to ride on light beams. The vast majority hadn’t even taken a ride in a car and even fewer had been in airplanes. Einstein waited 17 years to receive formal recognition from his fellow scientists for this work.

On the evening of March 14, 1922, Einstein was celebrating his 43rd birthday. It was a big party because he’d recently learned about his Nobel Prize nomination in physics for his work on the behavior of photons. He was jubilant as he walked around the party greeting his guests.

The earth’s population was 1.9 billion in 1922. This was the year Reader’s Digest published its first edition; James Joyce’s Ulysses was released xin Paris (only 1,000 copies printed); insulin was first administered successfully to diabetics; Howard Carter opened the tomb of the boy-pharaoh Tutankhamen; the first radio was installed in the White House; Al Jolson had a smash hit with Toot, Toot, Tootsie!; water skis were invented; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees for $52,000 per year; a first-class postage stamp was two cents; Claude Monet was 82 years old; Amelia Earhart was 25; Duke Ellington was 23; Frida Kahlo was 15; Edward Abbey was minus five—and John Lennon?—minus 18.

Herbert and Margaret Fletcher were also celebrating a birthday on March 14. Their son, Colin Evan Boulton Fletcher, was born that evening in their home at number 10 Mayfield Street in Cardiff, Wales. It was—and still is—one in a line of small, identical, two story red-brick and white-stone row houses at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. This was the starting point—his first trailhead. Colin was two weeks overdue, weighed nine pounds, and arrived feet first. Years later, when Fletcher was the world’s most famous walker, he told a friend about being born breach saying, In the beginning were the feet.²

Colin’s father, Herbert Reginald Fletcher was born in Blackpool, England in 1888. He was the son of Charles Boulton Fletcher and Annie Powell Fletcher. Herbert went by his middle name, Reggie, and was a yacht salesman when he proposed to a pretty Welsh girl named Margaret Williams. They were married on September 9, 1920. He was 32, she, 24.

The hard times of the depression struck Wales six years before it hit the United States. Reggie lost his prestigious job selling yachts to the wealthy and was forced to work for his father-in-law, Evan Williams. As soon as he could talk, Little Colin christened him Grampy. The two men sold coal and firewood for a living,³ but finances worsened and their business failed. The lack of money forced the Fletcher’s to move into 9 Bangor Street in Roath Park—a poor suburb of Cardiff—and Evan moved in with them. Reggie tried selling bacon slicers, but this business failed too because, as it had been with yachts, bacon was a luxury most people could not afford.

It was a rough time for the Fletchers. The place was cramped, and there was a young boy who often ran through the little house screaming for attention or needing to have his diaper changed. The level of stress in their home increased as Reggie searched for work every day. But he could find nothing. Often he returned home depressed and frustrated. He tried hard to provide for them and was forced to take work as a rag seller. As the dark mood around the house descended into bleak hopelessness, their marriage unraveled and eventually collapsed. By 1927, when Colin was five, Reggie could stand it no longer. He thought the grass would be greener across the Atlantic in Canada, so he booked space on the steamer, Alaunia. In August he sailed out of Cardiff and out of his son’s life.

Reggie told young Colin that he and Mummy would follow as soon as Daddy established himself. The move was really the official severing of their marriage and both parents knew it, so did Grampy, but no one had the heart to tell little Colin. So he hugged his father tightly and then kissed him goodbye. Reggie bravely shook his son’s hand and told him he’d be waiting for him in Canada. Seventeen years would pass before Fletcher next saw his father.

Colin’s first pivotal memory was of the day his father left. Almost eight decades later he could still call to mind the three of them saying goodbye beneath a large funnel, which the five-year-old thought was a huge gray owl hovering above him in the fog.⁴ The ship’s horn belted three short blasts. All ashore, came the distorted announcement over the squawk-box. They gave Reggie a round of final hugs and hurried down the gangway to the warm car where Grampy was waiting. This was the end of Colin’s traditional family life. The foundations of Fletcher’s infamous irascible personality were seeded the day his father sailed away.

When we think of Colin Fletcher, we often picture a crusty outdoorsman—sagacious, white-bearded, wizened, curmudgeonly, strong as an ox—the writer who showed us the way, taught us about the green world and how to reach it. But, like everyone else, he went to school, skinned his knees, was whipped by his masters—and by his mother.

As an only child, Colin was closely accompanied and protected before being abandoned by his father. He was accustomed to living with three loving family members. This was now reduced to two and all too soon it shrank to one: his mother, Margaret.

There is evidence this stress affected him later in life. With his natural male role model gone, the bond between Grampy and Colin brought him closer to his grandfather than anyone else in the constellation of his small household. His psychological identification with Grampy became so strong that, years later, he told his first wife, I think that I may have a stroke and die someday like my grandfather, whom I resemble.* Fletcher more than resembled Evan Williams—he was Grampy’s spitting image! His oval face and aquiline nose, the arching eyebrows, and above all, the look of the cat that ate the canary, bore an uncanny likeness to his grandfather.

Grampy enthralled the boy. He bounced him on his knee and told him stories he made up on the spot. Sometimes at night, sitting on the side of the boy’s bed he spun improvised, captivating yarns such as The Tales of Doug the Bug, Jake the Snake, and J.J. the Blue Jay.**

The center of Fletcher’s life was the house on Bangor Street. But beyond the front porch stretched the great unknown, and the six-year-old explorer wanted to discover what was out there. If you turned left outside our front door you arrived within less than a hundred yards at a bend in the road. Not a sharp bend, just an elbow, but from our part of the street you could not see down the far stretch. And in my mind the bend marked something. Beyond it lay alien territory. It’s been like that as far back as I can remember.⁵ Slowly, in tiny increments, Colin pushed back these boundaries and continued doing so throughout his life. Whenever he wandered around any new base, he was almost always aware of boundaries between unknown and known places, between alien and friendly territory. Along with this feeling came his desire to find out what lay on their far side.

It fell upon Margaret to teach young Fletcher everything a boy needed to learn, which in this case included the joys of walking. Throughout his early years they took long walks into the rainy Welsh countryside where they still have a saying: If you can see the castles on the hills, it’s going to rain. If you can’t see them it is already raining. Before he was eight, Fletcher knew the pleasures of sitting quietly, watching cloud shadows as they evolved along the gray faces of distant cliffs. He felt excited as he listened to the cutting wind howling through the crags and aeries of nearby windswept mountains. Sometimes he closed his eyes and attempted to sense which way the wind was blowing.

Colin and Margaret took lengthy walks along beaches and rambled through lush valleys thick with boggy peat. They ventured deep into dark woods that held the magic of the Welsh* and climbed through wraith-like mists to rocky crests crowned with the ruins of half-hidden medieval xcastles. Sitting up there on the heights, atop a large boulder perhaps, they drank tea and ate scones slathered with jelly. She told him about features in the valleys below. The mountaintops and seashores became Margaret’s classrooms. Out in the open air, with the wind blowing cold on their faces, she taught young Fletcher Welsh history.

See those mountains over there, son? she’d say, pointing. "That’s where we finally stopped the Romans’ 5th legion from turning us into slaves. Before that happened, they defiled our land for 400 years. But we’re a tough people. We’re Welsh, not English, and we are extremely proud of that fact. It took them 30 years to get a toehold and two-thirds of their army to hold us down.⁶

In the end, Colin, she went on, We learned in school that the Roman Empire was stretched to its limits, their legion could not get badly needed supplies. The strongest nation the world had seen was in her final years. Back in Rome, and later, Constantinoble, greed and corruption ate away her foundations. Our ancestors gave them a kick in the pants they would not soon forget.⁷ The Romans abandoned Wales in 410 C.E.

One day, while walking along the seashore, Margaret showed the boy where the Vikings landed but had failed to take Wales. This happened in approximately 900 C.E. The Vikings were quite the despoilers, she told him. They destroyed everything in their path and left a trail of destruction behind them that took centuries to repair.⁸

On another walk she pointed to the mountains and said, That line of castles up there was built by mighty kings of England to keep us under their thumbs. There are many tales about skirmishes between the Welsh and the Anglo-Saxons and these include legendary accounts of an invasion by King Arthur himself, aided, as one Welsh tale claims, by his council of eunuch wizard advisors.

By the time Colin came along, the Welsh had fought off Romans, Vikings, and an endless succession of English nobles. The long centuries spent defending their homeland made the Welsh tough, tenacious, secretive, and often suspicious of outsiders. But a magic twinkle sometimes still shines in their eyes. As an adult, Fletcher was adamant that he was a Welshman, and corrected anyone who called him English.

Colin and Margaret were especially fond of a nearby forest called Bluebell Woods and often walked through its outer fringes. Margaret told him the names of the trees and the birds that flourished there. She made Fletcher understand that these trees on the woods’ edge were but small children compared with the great oaks—bigger than any boy could imagine—living deep in the forest. There’s magic in the heart of the woods, she told him once, which you can find if you walk far enough and then sit very quiet and still. Even out here near the edge you can hear the trees talking.

The trees talk? he asked, just to be sure.

Yes, lad. If you listen carefully, you can hear them talking to the wind.*

Sometimes Margaret packed a full lunch of boiled eggs, ham sandwiches, Stilton cheese, a bottle of beer (for herself), and a large thermos of hot black tea, which they drank in white china teacups. Fletcher toted these meals across the countryside in a rucksack (the earliest mention of his life in harness). She showed him that there was no nectar on earth that measured up to fresh cold spring water sipped from your hands. They took long walks almost every free weekend until the young Fletcher left for boarding school when he was eight. When he was old enough, Colin often rode his bicycle to Bluebell Woods, leaned it against a tree, and walked farther and farther into the dark forest.*

He reminds us in the dedication of every edition of his most popular book, The Complete Walker, that his mother ... understood that walking for fun is no crazier than most things in life ... Fortunately, she passed this information along to her son.

As a young boy he and his friends—Fletcher referred to them as fledgling terrorists—explored Cardiff ’s streets, alleyways, and the secret routes known only to kids. Even in these early years he began to understand that there are deeper levels lurking beneath the surface of things. He memorized the back ways through town, navigating as much by sound and scent, as by sight. Even when he was in his mid-sixties, Fletcher still recalled the sounds of his childhood. In The Man from the Cave he tells us:

... a short block down the street from the house in which I lived until I was eight stood two big gray doors with writing on them. And from the cavern behind these doors—a place we kids called ‘Knocksanwells’—there used to come, intermittently, a sound with a certain specific pitch and timbre and rhythm. It was an all-pervading sound—a sound you could hear vaguely, without really registering it, whether you were indoors or out, anywhere within our little universe. I know now that this high-pitched sound with its metallic timbre and irregular rising and falling rhythm, was a circular saw, cutting lumber. I am not sure whether I knew this, fully, when we lived down the road from Knox and Wells. But I know the sound is still there in my mind, faint yet sure. It is not a bad sound or a good sound. It is just a fact sound—a sound that gets triggered up into the open, to be greeted with a small inner nod of recognition, whenever I hear a circular saw cutting lumber.⁹

One day, in August of 1928, Margaret said, Colin, it’s time for you to start going to school. When the long-feared, distressing day arrived, he fought fiercely, but Margaret prevailed and dragged him kicking and screaming,¹⁰ into the kindergarten class at Marlborough Road Infant School. The other children were surprised and amused at the loud, pouting boy that had been thrust into their midst. But after a few weeks, he began to see that he rather enjoyed learning. He earned high marks in everything except art and music. Soon he became a stereotypical British schoolboy in cap and britches, toting his books home bound by a strap and slung over his shoulder.

As a single parent, Margaret was in charge of discipline. Once, on a dare, when he was about seven, Fletcher punctured the front tire of the new, bright green bicycle belonging to an older neighbor boy. For reasons known only to a child, he was dragging a large tack across the tread, feeling the texture—the ridges and valleys of the tire—when somebody said, Stick it, Fletcher jammed the tack deep into the rubber and heard the explosive pop-hiss of the air rushing out. The small group of excited, terrified kids made such a noise that it brought Margaret out to the street. When she saw what had happened she grabbed her son by an ear, sat down on the bottom step of the front stairwell, pulled his pants and knickers down to his knees, threw him across her lap, and spanked his bare butt with the back side of a Mason Pearson hairbrush. Then she locked me in the pitch-dark coal cellar, turned to the kids who were still standing there in awed silence, and told them she was sorry about the tire and to go home.¹¹

Now, memories of your mother paddling the living daylights out of you with a hairbrush, in front of your friends, are not soon forgotten. Often the mere threat of the hairbrush was enough to get Fletcher to stop misbehaving. I’m getting the Mason Pearson, was all Margaret needed to say to get Fletcher back in line. If I’d made some sort of terrible transgression, she spanked me with the Mason Pearson and then sent me to the coal cellar where I sat on my stinging bum.¹¹

You reached it from a smallish door beneath the outside stairs.¹² Behind the little door was a small windowless room at the bottom of six stone steps where the coal was stored. At first, young Fletcher was afraid of the dark. But after a while he realized that there was nothing to be feared in that tight, lightless place, and began to develop his other senses. He listened for the sounds of passers by on the street and tried to figure out who it was from the sound of their footfalls. Sometimes he ran his hands across the cold, smooth, coal-dust covered steps and registered the feeling deep in his mind. Best of all, he sang songs to himself. It was here in the coal cellar that he learned that singing to oneself was a great way to defuse fear and, in the end, could be rather entertaining.

During these years his best friend was a neighbor girl the young lad called Betty Nextdoor. They played nearly every day after school and spent a great amount of time together during holidays. Once, when asked if he and Betty were going to get married, he answered with perfect candor and sincerity, No, Betty and I are just going to live together.¹³

One afternoon in 1929 they were outside playing when Margaret came out, took Fletcher aside and whispered, Grampy has died. Would you like to come inside or would you rather stay out here playing with Betty? He decided to stay. After a little while Margaret came back out and suggested perhaps he’d better come in. A bit later he was taken upstairs to see the body. It is hard to know how a child will react to their first exposure to death, but his response was far from what Margaret expected, for as close as he and Grampy were, he seemed indifferent. He did not cry. Instead he went downstairs and quietly shut himself in the coal cellar and stayed there until his mother found him hours later.

Colin had lost his second father figure and may have been in the early stages of abandoning any hope of establishing warm and loving relationships. Later, he recalled thinking of his grandfather every time he saw dead soldiers during the war.

The funeral was a typical lower middle-class Anglican affair with droll readings, hymn singing, and a lengthy sermon extolling Grampy’s virtues. When you are seven years old it’s difficult to sit still on those cold, hard, wooden pews for any length of time. Colin began to fidget and squirm around but was relieved to learn that he could get up and walk over to the casket for a final look at Grampy. What he saw was an embalmed, fully made up corpse stretched out on a puffy, light blue satin pad. He cried out, interrupting the service, But that’s not Grampy! Thinking back on the experience he recalled, At that moment I began to regard coffins and all their properties as among the most barbarous acts we current humans perpetuate.¹⁴

His grandfather’s modest, quiet death was the lad’s first encounter with the world’s only truth—his passing was the source of Fletcher’s first grief. It was his nascent meeting with the reality that life vanishes leaving only the shreds of the dream to which there is no return.

Margaret believed strongly in the unimportance of money. There are far more important things to cherish in life, she taught her son, and he adopted her philosophy quite early in his life. What we have is plenty for us, son. There’s no need to chase after money or material things to be happy. If you believe this, when you grow up you will always be free from the heartache caused by financial desire.¹⁵

This Buddhist ideal stuck with Fletcher throughout his life. Sometimes he made a game out of Spartan living by seeing how far he could stretch a limited amount of cash. His legendary journey from England all the way to Vancouver, Canada while spending only $10, is a good example of winning the game. Before his tenth birthday, Colin knew—no matter how poor he was—he would always get by. Most importantly, he realized the balance in his checking account did not determine his personal happiness. He used to tell reporters who called in at his modest home for an interview that he loved his little house, that he didn’t need a bigger one, for this one was filled with windows that let in the beauty of the natural world. ‘What more does one require?’¹⁸

Margaret loved the seashore and often took Colin to watch the birds and jump the waves. After Grampy’s death she used her small inheritance to move from Cardiff to Sandbanks, a seashore resort that hosted a narrow spit of sand that jutted into the bay for two or three miles. Their house featured a large upstairs room that overlooked the water. By now, the lad hadn’t seen his father for three years.

One cold, rainy day, upstairs in the room with a view he asked, Mummy, when will Daddy be coming back? She hesitated. Then suddenly somber, said, I’m afraid he won’t be coming back, son. He’s dead. At this Fletcher burst into tears and cried long and heavily. A little later on, Margaret said, Colin, I shouldn’t have told you that. You see, it’s not true. Your father isn’t dead. But he won’t be coming back. Ever. That’s because we’ve divorced.¹⁶

They hugged for a long time, and then Colin took a long walk through the rain, along the sand spit. He was numb and lonely, and missed his father tremendously. He let the wind and solitude wash over him while he walked and cried in great, heaving sobs. This day marked the beginning of a huge aching void he would feel in his heart for years to come. It’s an emptiness children feel when a parent has gone missing from their lives.

We can picture Fletcher’s early years as somewhat unhappy and unfulfilling. Not forlorn or woeful—he may not have even been aware of his discontent. He was a boy mystified by what he saw. A boy who probably looked around and said, There must be more to life than this. Perhaps he asked ... more and more often, less and less quietly—until at last, as he emerges from the chrysalis of childhood, he wanders off on his own to search for the answer.*¹⁷

The young Fletcher, fatherless and alone, with no siblings or extended family, was already on his way to becoming a loner. Margaret wrote to her friend, Marie, Colin’s walks out on the spit are growing longer each day. Yesterday he went so far I couldn’t see him for the better part of three hours. I was growing concerned. But then he reappeared at the door grinning that grin of his ...¹⁸ Sometimes he’d stand for hours watching the waves, feeling the wind in his hair and the saltwater spray on his cheeks. Already shy and socially clumsy, the coastal animals became his friends. He was happiest out there by himself where he could think and feel without any interference.

This was enough to open the gates of his imagination. The joys of the natural spectacle and the pure delight that exists away from mainstream life carried him beyond the fringes of childhood into a world of enchantment.

The summer in Sandbanks signals the beginning of his retreat to solitude. Young Fletcher was becoming self-centered and self-motivated. Even in these early days he tended to live—more than most people—inside a bubble. At eight he was already on his way to becoming someone better suited to an alternate niche in life. By taking his solitude out into the natural world, he was able to achieve a sense of unity with that wider world.

This period also marked a change in Margaret, who, to compensate for the missing Reggie, began to dote on him. She meant well, but soon Colin was spoiled rotten. This increased his self-centeredness and further enabled his retreat into his bubble whenever he felt uneasy about something. When, for example, his mother had a guest over for tea, he would hide in his bedroom and read until the guest departed. Sometimes Margaret tried to coax him out, "just to say hullo," but he remained firmly ensconced in his room even if it meant he would miss out on the tea and cakes she served.

The money from Grampy’s little nest egg didn’t last long. After a couple of months, they moved to Cambridge where Margaret took a job selling corsets. Unlike her standoffish son, she was gregarious and good at working with people. She made friends easily and, because of her friendly, easygoing nature, quickly gained the trust of her customers and was successful fitting ladies with various undergarments.

When Colin was eight she enrolled him at Parkstone Grammar School where he lived in the home of the headmaster, Reverend E. Stanley Moss, along with five other boys. The large gothic house stood directly across the road from the school.

Fletcher recalled a childhood episode of thievery from his Parkstone days. The boys who lived in the headmaster’s house had taken up stamp collecting. One day, a stamp showed up in Fletcher’s cubby. He knew it was someone else’s, but he took it as his own and stuck it in his collection book. Later, when the boy to whom the stamp belonged began crying over the loss, everyone went on a search for it, including Fletcher. Of course it didn’t turn up and worse, Fletcher would never again be able to show anyone his stamp collection. Apparently that stamp had meant much to the lad, for he seemed to be quite sad over the loss for a very long time, Fletcher tells us in his notes [I felt] a terrible guilt throughout the rest of my life about the theft.¹⁹ He remembered vowing to himself to be careful in his actions, and to live a life of honesty. He began to think of himself as Careful Colin.

While he was away at Parkstone, Margaret moved to Trumpington St. and shared a flat with two other women. The house belonged to an anatomy professor who kept his equipment and samples in the house. So when at home, Fletcher slept on a folding cot in the bone room, alone with the skulls, tibia, metatarsals, full human skeletons, and all sorts of other parts.²⁰ He said he felt like Ezekiel in the valley of the bones and had nightmares where they came back to life and attacked him.

During his time at Parkstone School, Colin discovered fishing and quickly became a regular at Silver Street Bridge. He didn’t know anyone there, which suited him fine. It is here that he began to think the world was made for boys to fish in.²⁴ Nothing in his life motivated and pleased him so much as spending a day alone with rod and reel. Fishing, not camping, proved to be a major catalyst in getting Fletcher out into the natural world, and later, into professional writing.²¹

Fletcher’s first overnight camping trip took place when he was ten or eleven. It had to be aborted on account of rain. He wrote a short draft of the story for inclusion in a never-to-be published book, Walking with Colin, and later reconsidered using it in his unfinished autobiography:

Another boy, a nephew of a family friend, and I were thrown together one holiday. Because of his reputation as an earthy, outdoors type, he was known as Boysey— though to his credit he loathed the name. He was a few years older than me—about fourteen at a guess—and therefore looked down on me with contempt. I suppose I should have looked up to him, and maybe I did in some sort of way, but now I can only recall my dislike of his arrogant superiority. Anyway, one day we—which meant Boysey—decided that it would be fun if we camped out. We had a tent of some sort, and although I don’t remember sleeping bags of any kind, we had warm bedding of some sort. We must have been driven to the site. Because when it began to rain and the rain got heavier and heavier (and the tent less and less waterproof), at some point in the darkness, which I remember as the middle of a miserable night, grownups arrived in a car and said it was crazy to stay out there in such weather. I agreed without protest. But Boysey protested long and loud. Eventually, though, we struck the tent (or maybe we left it and went back in the morning to get it, I no longer know), and were driven home in comfort and ignominy. It was ignominy as far as Boysey was concerned, anyway. For I had been the weaker and guilty vessel, and his contempt for me increased a hefty notch.

Now I am aware that in telling this story I will, I’m afraid, have ensured thatcertain delvers into human deeps will already be nodding knowingly and saying, ‘Ah, yes. So that’s why he’s spent his whole life living out all this Boy Scout stuff.’ And although I know there is no way of stopping those sage noddings, I would, with some confidence, judge such judgments to be a load of crap.²²

A few years later an abominable scoutmaster expelled Colin from Boy Scouts for insubordination.

When he was 11, he began keeping lists of things. He catalogued every book he owned and kept it up-to-date for nearly 70 years, just as he did his piscatorial report—a tally of every fish he caught including species, weight, size, bait, weather, and fishing conditions. He drew up a roster of foods he disliked which remained, for the most part, on his taboo list throughout his life. A few of the foods he hated were, Tapioca (frog spawn), cauliflower with cheese, curry, and coffee. He tasted coffee only twice. The second time was by accident when he thought it was tea. When the coffee passed his lips, he spit it out and began to gag. From then on, merely the scent of coffee made him nauseous. Throughout his life, when offered a cup of coffee he’d decline, saying, Oh, I wish I could accept but I’m allergic to the stuff.²³

During the pre-war years, English boarding schools for teenage boys had a rather sordid reputation as hotbeds of homosexuality. As Fletcher approached his teens, his mother began consulting with some of her friends, hoping to find a suitable institution for her intelligent, quiet son. Many, it seemed, were staffed with pedophile teachers who preyed upon their students. Margaret was troubled by what she’d discovered about some of the most respected schools within her budget. However, in the end, she found what she was looking for and one unusually bright September morning, Fletcher was put on a train alone and steamed to Devon County, England. His destination was West Buckland School where he began what he called his Devonian Period.²⁴

Today the academy is a thriving, coed secondary school with an international reputation, which draws students from around the globe. Its setting is nothing short of spectacular, for it sits in the middle of a vast green moor known as Exmoor. It’s full of fields, streams, and covered with bracken, gorse, couch grass, heather, and such. There is an extensive wildlife population as well.

But in 1934 it was a strict country boarding school for boys located in the middle nowhere, in Devon. Its dark, gothic gray stone buildings make the place look like a stereotypical Greyfriar English boarding school. It could have been the model for the Harry Potter series’ Hogwarts School.*

From the moment he arrived there, Fletcher loathed the place and not without reason. His train dropped him at County School Station. From here his trunk was carted to the school by a horse-drawn wagon while he was forced to walk alone, two miles, over the steep, muddy, Leary Hill, carrying his overnight case. If you told him at this point in his life he was destined to become The Man Who Walked Through Time, he would have thought you daft, for he complained bitterly in a letter to his mother about the barbaric requirement of having to walk all the way to the school from the train station. Why couldn’t I have been driven? he asked Margaret. But as a matter of fact, in 1934 the school owned one car and one telephone. The importance of its location deep in the countryside is not to be underestimated—there were few amenities of city life. But the remote, rural countryside would have a profound effect on Fletcher’s future ramblings, and in the end, influence his world view.

He lived in a frigid, dark, one-room dormitory along with 33 other boys. The place was so cold that in winter the boys had to chop ice from the sink each morning before they were able to wash up or brush their teeth.* The food was bad. Breakfast porridge and toast tasted like camel shit and bus tickets.²⁵

As a pre-teen, Colin was a rather soft, pretty lad with bright blue eyes and blondish brown hair. Sometimes he wore glasses. When teenage boys are confined together, sometimes mild homosexuality takes place. West Buckland School was no exception, for minor homosexuality was practiced among some of the kids—nothing serious, just a little locker room groping here and there. But early on, an upper classman kissed Fletcher on the lips in front of a large group of boys—and Fletcher smiled. From that moment on he was known throughout the school as "the boy who liked to be kissed." He tried to live this unwelcome reputation down but wondered, as late as 2001, if he ever succeeded in doing so.²⁶

During his early days at school, he was singled out, along with another boy, by a junior prefect who was in charge of his dorm. Each night Fletcher was ordered to get the prefect’s slippers and bring them to his bed. Then the prefect made him drop his pants and whipped Fletcher and the other boy mercilessly. This went on for several weeks. Eventually, someone spilled the beans. Or it could have been that the red welts the two lads were sporting on their butts raised questions. In any event, the two boys were summoned to watch as the prefect was called up by the seniors in charge and given a severe caning. This helped put an end to Fletcher’s miserable start at West Buckland.

In 1938, Margaret married a bank teller named Frank Forster Williams. Colin called him Dad. They became friends almost immediately and spent the rest of their lives in a fairly tight relationship.

During his middle years at school things began to look up, and Fletcher became more self-confident. Most importantly, he began his solitary camping adventures. On free weekends he stole away from the campus and roamed the moorlands—camping alone—while searching for good fishing holes. He often escaped to these green, leafy sanctuaries: magical places that would, in springtime, provide shade, birdsong, and peace. At night he’d stand smiling, transfixed by the fireflies’ ephemeral glow.

While walking out on the moors he became enchanted by the natural world, and at the age of 16, set the pattern that would define his adult years. Alone in the Devonian countryside, he planted seeds that would flourish 20 years later. Fletcher soon discovered that he was more attracted to those locations that held solitude and beauty than he was to the hot fishing spots. He learned you could create a lean-to shelter if you strung one side of a tarp to low-hanging branches and piled rocks along the lower edge to hold it down. When it was cold or rainy he slept in his rain overcoat—he had no sleeping bag. If he caught fish he’d cook them over a little open fire. He quickly discovered that if he took more fish than he could eat during the weekend, they would go to waste, and began to catch and release all but the biggest fish.

Sometimes he did not make a camp and spent the nights fishing and wading through streams and bogs. After recording every fish caught in his piscatorial report, he often released his catch back into the creeks and small rivers crossing Exmoor. His happiest hours were those when he was free from all other company—he was now his own best friend.

Fletcher had to sneak out from the school in secret on these forays because the boys were supposed to leave campus only with their parents. So as not to attract too much attention, and for convenience, he developed a compact fly-fishing kit that he could easily carry, or hide. Over the years he perfected this kit and wrote an article about it in Outdoor Life in 1956.²⁷ It was one of his earliest published pieces.

In September 1938 Margaret drove Fletcher to the train station for the trip back to West Buckland for his senior year. As they were saying goodbye she asked him if he would like to have a younger sibling. No, definitely not, he replied. Regrettably, he admitted years later, I was unwilling to share her.²⁸ She was already pregnant, but in an odd and sad coincidence, she miscarried that same evening.

In 1939 he passed all his examinations with very high marks. He’d played on the junior and senior rugby teams and was noted for his prowess in cricket and tennis. Two classmates interviewed in 2010 remembered him more for his rugby and tennis skills than for anything else. He earned his colors for running, and came in second in the most grueling of all the cross-country races in the school’s athletic calendar, The Exmoor.

Berwick Coates, school archivist wrote, "The School is on the edge of some pretty wild open moorland. As a means of using up boys’ surplus energy, it became an early tradition for The School to organize a series of cross-country races every winter. This culminates in The Exmoor in March. The senior boys walk six miles to the start, and then run nine miles back ..." across some of the wildest moorland in England.

... to come in second is quite something.²⁹

Fletcher won prizes in science, English, and mathematics. In the end, he won the school’s highest award, The Fortescue Medal, for excellence in combined athletics and academics—the only student to do so in 1939.

West Buckland was the only formal education Fletcher received, but luckily he studied English with a master teacher named Sam Howells who taught writing skills, poetry, and literature. He was an extremely strict teacher, but held in high regard, even revered, by his more intelligent students. In spite of the fact that he had trouble pronouncing his Rs—the impediment made him sound like Elmer Fudd and was a liability that would have crippled a lesser teacher—Howells controlled the classroom like a drillmaster. One day he called Fletcher "A wetched little spawwow," just as he did all the classes of boys.³⁰ Fletcher dared not crack a smile.

It was Sam Howells who turned Fletcher into a voracious reader and inspired him to dig deep into the hidden meanings of things. In Howells’s classes he discovered Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wadsworth, Wordsworth, Dickens, and the canon of English masters, and the works of the American rebels, Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman. He would come to understand what Thoreau meant when he wrote, The man who goes alone can start today. His love of reading later translated into one of the added beauties of Fletcher’s books, for he often cited his sources and recommended other writers. This inspired his readers to go out and read what he read.

For most of his life, reading, along with listening to music, walking, fishing,* and tennis were of paramount importance.

West Buckland School provided Fletcher with one more bit of education without which he might not have lived long enough to write The Thousand-Mile Summer. The school possessed a recognized Officer Training Corps. He was a lance corporal and had a rifleman’s certificate by the end of his final year in 1939. It was this training that enabled him to enter the Royal Marines, three years later, as an officer candidate.

When Fletcher left the school he was equipped with a decent education, many awards and prizes and something rather less tangible: he’d fallen in love with learning, and most of all, with solitude. He’d glimpsed the beauty of what he would come to call The Green World. He now understood that intangible things such as the colors at sunrise or crystal water droplets hanging on a gossamer spider web were priceless treasures more valuable than any amount of money.

Of course he understood this with an adolescent mind so the ideas were tucked away, waiting for the processes of time to make their meanings clear. But he knew now, and understood, deep in his gut, that true riches were supplied by nature alone. The groundwork had been laid, a metamorphosis begun. The traces carved on his psyche during his formative years, marks of culture and genetics, were complete. The boy who would become Colin Fletcher was breaking out, emerging from his chrysalis.

Colin Fletcher entered the grownup world seriously and rather solemnly—the way he tended to approach such things. He moved to London, landed a job as a clerk in the accounting department of the Admiralty and worked for a petty supervisor, a certain Miss Finch, for whom he developed a strong instant dislike. He took a room with an amiable family, the Randalls, and made a conscious effort at grownup-ness [sic] by reading the Daily Telegraph every day. But he was still soaking wet behind the ears.

He was fishing the day the war began. It was a Sunday and war was declared at 11:00 A.M. He had his line in the water by 11:20. At 11:30 the first air raid sirens went off. One fisherman cried out, I’m getting out of here, and all the other fishermen fled leaving the place for Fletcher to fish alone. His attitude toward the war was that if the military wanted him, they could come and get him.³¹

After the war started, his job at the Admiralty was to convey messages and letters to various offices around the city. This was boring work at first but grew more difficult after the Battle of Britain because the Germans began bombing London. Over time, the bombing grew into a nightly terror. Fletcher never knew which route he’d be taking to make his deliveries until he started out. A street he’d used the day before might be closed off by a giant bomb crater, or filled with debris from a collapsed building, or blocked by ambulances carting off corpses. For a run of, say, one mile, he might be gone three or four hours. Creative route-finding was the rule of the day. Sometimes he worked nights. One evening, while cycling through London’s quiet panic, pedaling softly through the fog with only the limited light of a carefully hooded lamp to guide him, he accidently hit a man walking down the street. When he went to check on the poor fellow, the man was amiable and apologetic. Just came from my pub. Must be drunk, he said. No harm done.³²

At this stage in his life, Fletcher had what might be called telephobia. There’d been no phone in any house he’d lived in, at West Buckland School there was only one, so he had a dislike, going on horror, of speaking on the phone. He slowly overcame it, but with reluctance. But after a while he began to spend much time on the phone with naval bases all over the UK and forgot his fear. Throughout the rest of his life he thought his telephobia was ridiculous. Late in his life Fletcher wrote, Today, this seems almost unbelievable, but recently, a friend of my age shared with me that she had the same fear of telephones, for which she too had to overcome as soon as the war started and she became a nurse.³³

During this time, when the scent of catastrophe was in the air and Europe was wildly readying itself for the spectacle of the bloody disaster that was beginning to arrive, Fletcher caught his first extreme case of influenza. Fortunately, Margaret happened to be visiting at the time, and the doctor advised Fletcher to go home with her, which he did. This flu bout was the one item from this period that he recalled most vividly. It lingered. I was so weak that the family doctor wouldn’t let me fish for a month.³⁴ He remembered this particular illness down the years and often used it as an explanation of how he always had trouble recovering from flu. In the first chapter of River he tells us that the flu just about torpedoed the entire adventure.

By the time he was fit for work again, three months later, the Germans had invaded Norway and then marched on the Lowlands and France, and the British suffered the disaster at Dunkirk. This altered the whole face of British existence and Fletcher’s attitude to the war. When he returned to work, the Admiralty had been evacuated to Exeter, and somewhere about July or August he rejoined it there.

Fletcher, intelligent, athletic, competitive, certainly potential officer material, could no longer stand by and watch his country come under attack. He enlisted in the Royal Marines on November 27, 1940 and reported to Stonehouse Barracks in Plymouth where, on his first night, there was an air raid. They suffered heavy bombing with one salvo coming so close it hit the non-commissioned officers’ mess and killed a sergeant. After the usual inoculations, and feeling ghastly, he left his induction unit and reported to the Officer Candidate Training Unit. The next day that induction unit was bombed. There were no survivors.

The schooling Fletcher underwent as a Royal Marine officer candidate—the training that kept him alive during the war—served him for the rest of his life. It formed the foundations of his sagacious knowledge of the outdoor world. Over the years he passed on this hard-won information to his readers. Royal Marine training was, and still is, the most intense, ball busting, mind numbing instruction given to any military force on the planet. Today, only 25% of Royal Marine trainees survive the cut.

His training took him first to Tenby, then on to Belgrave, Carmarthen, and Llanelly. He reports feeling very young and raw, but he slowly overcame his callowness, and by the end of training, when he had a good sergeant, felt he had the best platoon in the unit and was genuinely sorry to see it break up and the end of the training period.

Margaret came around from time to time, and accompanied him on fishing trips taken during leaves. Once, at Pynes Corner, he caught 110 fish over a three-day period.*

Margaret died quite unexpectedly in 1942. She was only 46 years old and, like her father, Grampy, the victim of a massive stroke. Over the last few years, she’d had a few minor fainting spells while at work as a chiropod.** She’d studied for this specialty while Fletcher was finishing up school. During holiday time, the two of them often huddled together, studying. Fletcher helped Margaret with her tests while she made sure he was going to graduate.

She was certified and on the job for about three years at the time of her passing. Up to this point, no one thought her fainting spells serious. But they were transient ischemic attacks (TIAs). The news of her death devastated Fletcher and thrust him into an emotional tailspin. She was his entire family, the only one to whom he was close. She had been with him throughout his life and was the only person in the world he loved, trusted, and counted on.³⁵

He left his unit in the middle of the night and rushed to Bridgend. Dad—his stepfather—was there to meet him and recalled that Fletcher cried like a baby. Should we be surprised? Fathers are seen by their sons as a bulwark barricading them from their own death, and his was long gone. Now, with Margaret gone too, he was seized with an urgency to face his own death. He cried without false shame or displaced modesty. He didn’t like to display his feelings, preferring to be alone when giving free flow to his sorrow. But for once, we can set aside the image of the hardened outdoorsman bearing his suffering with a stoical stiff upper lip. Fletcher cried immediately and that’s all there is to it. "I was so upset, someone told me later, that for a while, I didn’t