Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [29]
One hundred seventy-five years before us, Charles Darwin stood somewhere near here and took in his last mountaintop view of Great Britain for five years. Even on a moderately blustery August day, he would have seen a beautiful panorama of jagged rocks sawing through saturated turf, deep blue mountain lakes pooled under soaring crags, and pastoral stone fences crisscrossing verdant pastureland.
“I can picture Darwin at the top,” Nathan continued. “He would have stood here and said, ‘I can’t see shit.’”
Nathan Cooper was an old friend and, more importantly for my Darwin-studying purposes, an old friend from suburban Worcester with a taste for adventure. My trip up the River Santa Cruz had given me the idea that to really dig into South America I’d need a better understanding of England. Somehow this notion did not sound so crazy when repeated to someone like Nathan. I liked bouncing ideas off of Nathan because he’d say the first thing that came to mind and, usually, it was hilarious.
“Darwin,” Nathan said, the first time I asked. “He’s the guy with the beard, right?”
“Um,” I said. “What else?”
“Golden Hind,” he said, referencing an English exploring ship, albeit one that belonged to Sir Francis Drake and thus predated Darwin by about three hundred years. “And a man who is pathologically obsessed with worms.” (This is true, by the way.)
He paused to collect more thoughts. “Also,” he said, “they had a poll a while ago about who was the greatest Briton, and Charles Darwin was number two. Behind Churchill.”
Nathan’s wild speculation was not limited to Darwin. He had literally emerged from the mists and into my life several years earlier, on a frigid morning in Cusco, Peru, as I sat in a van with several other language school students on our way to backpack in the high Andes. While the rest of us had stuffed our packs for an icy adventure and were now huddled for warmth, Nathan strolled down the street—twenty minutes late, as the van was just about to leave—in a light fleece jacket, carrying an uncharged digital camera and an iPod in a backpack just large enough to fit a water bottle. Fortunately, he didn’t have a water bottle, so there was plenty of room. Two days later, while wearing my extra jacket and watching me cut up food to share, he looked up at me and remarked, “Mate, you do come well-equipped on these trips.”
I struggled for a moment for an adequate response (“umm”), failed to find one, and then, as often happened with Nathan, just laughed. He laughed right back at me, and I promptly decided that here was most definitely a friend worth keeping around.
For a few years, Nathan’s job consisted of playing the FTSE—the English stock market—via Internet trading, so he wasn’t required to be in any one location, which he took to mean he might as well be anywhere. Since our meeting and subsequent two weeks of traveling together in Peru, he had kept in touch through a series of hilarious emails that described chess matches with drug dealers in small-town Andean bars, sheep impressions from street touts in Bolivia (a particular hobby of his, trying to get people to imitate sheep), and a triumphant ride on the shoulders of the citizenry through the streets of Holland. My personal favorite was his citizenship in a self-declared new country in Western Australia. Apparently, he’d stumbled across some sort of Aussie tax-revolt and decided on the spur of the moment that he’d always wanted a second passport. (“I’d like you to meet his Excellency sometime,” he told me. “If you become a citizen too, maybe next year we can have a soccer team.”) A disaster of a planner who was relentlessly cheerful, Nathan lived by the motto, “Cheeky Not To,” which he’d recite happily each time some bizarre challenge stared him down.
Nathan had now settled down in western England and worked, frighteningly, as a driving instructor. (Even more frightening, he appeared to be really good at it.) And it was only here, about an hour from the spot where Darwin grew up, that I began to understand why it really was cheeky not to.
Darwin was