Wordsmit h
www.kevreynolds.co.uk
the man with the world’s best job
Kev Reynolds finds the world in an envelope...
L
etters are as rare these days as four-legged hens.
Should an envelope drop through your door, if
it doesn’t contain a demand from HMRC, it’ll
probably be a heart-aching plea from one charity or
another. If it has a postage stamp on the right-hand
corner and the address has been hand-written, it’ll be
from an old aunt with news that a distant relative you’ve
never heard of has just died. Any other messages are
likely to arrive by text, email or (heaven help us) via a
tweet.
My friend Jörg is even more of a Luddite than I am.
He doesn’t own a computer, a smart phone or even a
landline, he writes letters instead. Real letters, sent in
white envelopes with stamps on them. They arrive once
every four or five weeks as they have for more than
fifty years. Sometimes they’ll extend to seven or eight
and it was there that his letters began to arrive with
a frequency that continues to this day. From them
Jörg’s dreams invaded my own. But he was living his
in the gaps between seasons, walking here, there and
anywhere that took his fancy. Then he decided to save
hard and take a year off, and before the trekking boom
began, he wandered alone through the Hindu Kush with
a compass, entered Pakistan and saw Nanga Parbat, then
went on to Nepal where he had the Khumbu virtually to
himself before being sucked into India’s vibrant scents,
sounds and colours. His letters were full of wonders, the
envelopes decorated with exotic stamps; sometimes two
or three arriving together looking as though they’d been
trampled by elephants.
Before returning to a Swiss kitchen he would suddenly
appear at our door, shake the dust from his clothes,
engage us with his stories, then scurry off
to the mountain resort he’d be working
in for the next few months. Later, when I
was writing for a living and researching
guidebooks to the Alps, he’d wrangle a day
off and we’d tackle a summit, cross a pass or spend a
night in an alpine hut where he’d regale me with tales of
his latest adventure.
His year among the mountains of Asia whetted his
appetite for more long journeys, so he spent ten months
in South America where he travelled up the Amazon and
nearly had his tent blown apart in Patagonia. Another
year he journeyed through Africa from top to bottom,
begging a ride on trucks, getting caught in a coup and
losing several kilos through dysentery. He took fourteen
months to travel round Australia, went to China, the
Pacific islands, Alaska and Greenland.
And still the letters kept coming; full of places and
faces and dodgy doings; envelopes smelling of exotic
lands, spilling the world in all its rich diversity into my
hands. By comparison my own travels must have seemed
to him as exciting as a weekend in Bognor.
Before the trekking boom began, he
wandered alone through the Hindu Kush
A4 sheets, written on both sides, his oh-so-familiar
handwriting with its swirls and loops reminding me
of the crocheted samplers my granny used to make.
Sometimes he’ll run out of space at the end of a line and
continue the word – even if it’s just a single letter –
onto the next one. On occasion it’ll take me ten minutes
to decipher what he’s trying to say, but once I’ve
untangled his prose, the story he’s relating will hold me
in its spell.
Jörg is a great story-teller, and he has plenty of
stories to tell.
We first met in the winter of 1966 when I was working
in a youth hostel in the Swiss Alps, and he was the chef
at a neighbouring hotel. We’d go tobogganing some
nights when our work was done, or we’d share a fondue
or a bottle of wine or two with a multi-national group of
waiters, waitresses and ski bums dossing down nearby.
On occasion we’d go to a nightclub if there was
a band we wanted to hear, and stagger back
home on icy pavements at 3am. We both had a
few hours free in the afternoons. I’d go skiing,
but Jörg reckoned he couldn’t risk an accident
that would stop him working and force a return to his
parents’ gasthof in the Black Forest. The following
summer it took ages to entice him to come walking
with Min and me, to see more of the mountains we were
living amongst. But at last he gave in, so we took a rope,
found some convenient crags and taught him to climb.
Suddenly he woke to the beauty all around him. And
that was it.
He worked from season to season. A winter here, a
summer there, always in the Swiss Alps, and until we
encouraged him out he’d spend the ‘between weeks’
visiting his parents. But once he’d had his eyes open,
he took off. That first autumn he walked alone round
Iceland and discovered an abandoned car with a corpse
in it. The following spring he managed five weeks in
Sardinia before dashing back to a Swiss kitchen with
dreams of even longer journeys.
Min and I were married by now and living in Kent,
He’d spend a few winter weeks in Corfu
where he’d rent a room above a bar...
The years sped by. Jörg retired, and with a good Swiss
pension, another from Germany and a small inheritance
from his parents, he put his belongings in a rucksack,
went back to the old Black Forest gasthof (now closed)
where he kept two rooms for his books and photographs,
then went travelling. He’d spend a few winter weeks
in Corfu where he’d rent a room above a bar and live
like a character from a Graham Greene novel, then go
home for a few days before disappearing to Jordan,
Kyrgyzstan, the Baltic states or wherever the fancy led
him.
He’s slowed down now, and some of his journeys are
arranged by a travel agent. But the bug remains within
him and his appetite for knowledge of what’s beyond
the horizon is as strong as ever. Over five hundred
handwritten letters testify to that. I haven’t kept them
all, of course, but each one has brought me the world in
an envelope, and that’s even better than an atlas.
spring 2020 | Outdoor focus 5