The slippery slope of inertia

In a small coastal village that I know very well there is a mountain that rises steeply behind a house I often use. Is it really a mountain? Perhaps not when compared to other mountains, but compared to the house it is. It is grey and sheer and made of stone and has a trigonometric beacon on top, and for a very long time I didn't think there was any way to get to that beacon without scrambling and grappling and using your fingertips.

One winter's day several years ago my friend Evan looked up at the mountain and said: "There's a path up there."

I did not believe there was a path up there; it seemed perfectly precipitous and impenetrable. I thought it was entirely possible that the beacon was a strange phenomenon and that no human foot had ever fallen on that summit.

"No," said Evan, "there's a path."

Later that afternoon, holding almost empty bottles of winter red wine, we went ambling out for a closer look. I had no expectation of finding a path, and no real desire for one either: I do not care for climbing or clambering or even steep uphills. Table Mountain, for instance, is too high and too hard for me to enjoy it. When it comes to walking, I appreciate a good horizontal.

There did seem to be a kind of track and as we ambled along it seemed to rise in a diagonal across the base of the mountain, and then seemed to cut back again with the same gradual uphill angle. We zigged and we zagged and we slugged our wine and then suddenly we were looking out over the sea and below us were whales jumping in the broad blue bay and we were halfway up the mountain already.

"See?" said Evan. "It's a path."

It had been there all along. The sheer rock face that seemed so unscalable when seen from even a slight distance yielded itself up close in a series of gently angled switchbacks, rising with a stroll. All it took was taking ourselves to the mountain, and then taking a step at a time. In an hour we were on the top.

Since that day I've climbed the mountain dozens of times. I took my wife up, unveiling the path like a magic trick. When I stayed in the village for a couple of weeks to finish my last book, I would work an hour each morning then walk up the mountain before breakfast. Walking up that mountain taught me how to write a book. Each ascent seems easier, although I'm fully aware there'll come a day when it starts to get harder.

The last time I went up was several months ago, back in summer, and I noticed that some kids had created a kind of shortcut between two arms of the zig-zag, near the top. As you come down one zig, approaching the sharp arm to the zag, you can see the path five metres or so below you, and when you're a kid it must seem perfectly sensible to just veer vertically down those five metres. It probably saves 90 seconds or so, but to kids it seems a smart thing to do, to steal some time back from the walk, to cut one of the corners of the world.

The problem is that as more people see the shortcut and take it, they create a vertical track down which rainwater flows, deepening it and eroding the sides until it becomes a kind of gully, allowing each new rain to wash away a little more of the mountainside.

I had seen such shortcuts spring up before, but always some nameless guardian of the mountain, some unseen Samaritan, had blocked it up with boulders or strung a length of wire across it to discourage further shortcutting.

I wondered if I should do my bit and carry some branches and stones across to block it up, but then I thought that was someone else's job, and would I even know how to do it properly, and it would be fine because it had always been fine.

This week I wasn't staying in the village but I was driving past and the rain had stopped so I parked the car beside the road and walked up, and when I reached the shortcut I saw how it's a deep carved part of the mountain now, and how the mountain has crumbled around it.

I saw where the boulders have tumbled and where earth has slid, and I saw how something as simple and joy-giving and free as that path up a mountainside could be broken and torn not because people are evil or stupid but because other people, people like me, have done nothing about it.