Rolling up that hill #2: Butser Hill
This hill is a beautiful beast. 271 metres and an incline of 12.5% considered strenuous for people who can walk competently and ‘are you kidding me?!’ for someone using a wheelchair.
I want to emphasise that I can walk for a few hundred metres without assistance, but after a thousand metres my usually dextrous legs make the steady decline from walking a runway Fall collection to stumbling a runaway fall collection.
And those thousand good metres are on the flat. Force them to climb an incline and my legs will quickly deflate like a punctured bouncy castle, with urgent final bounces decaying slowly into sadness and disappointment.
I calculated this incline at 4.5%. I calculated wrong. This hill is easily twice the height of my last climb, nearly three times the height. Any higher and I'd need an oxygen mask and to take a break at the local ski resort.
At the base of this hill I sat in my wheelchair looking up at the height I would need to travel. I laughed a little. My heart thudded. This was not going to be easy.
The rolling green of Butser Hill taken from the base of the hill.
I stood, helmed the Rocinante's handles, and began.
Half way up I had to stop for a break. My heart thundered, my body focussed and ready, but my legs felt increasingly weak. Uphill, strength is needed to both lift the leg and to drive the Rocinante upwards and mine were moving with all the structural stability of an underbaked souffle.
With my legs spent for the moment I slid to the ground, locking her wheels in place and resting my back against the Rocinante. And it was here that Luna found me. A woman approached to say hi. She let me know that she had been a wheelchair user some years prior and that she was now an athlete, and that indeed this climb was the fourth time she had reached this hill’s summit… today. She told me about her journey, about her family, and most critically about her evolving spirituality. This was a woman who credited her recovery to divine intervention.
After our little conversation ended we waved each other farewell as I sat resting against my chair wheel. A few moments later I saw her approach again, a touch more cautiously. She told me that she considered her own recovery as due to her faith and she asked whether she could pray for me there and then.
I have experienced people offering to pray for me before. I’m usually frosty in my reception to such an invitation. I’m deeply, unhelpfully, beligerantly independent. My life isn’t one that requires the assistance of any caretaker, much less one of divine origin. And I don’t super enjoy the image of myself reflected back in the eyes of the worshipper. Motivating the offer is a view of me as suffering, a victim of circumstance, bound to fate’s providence as much as to my wheelchair. I know there is some truth to it. This monster will never stop hunting me. And maybe my defensiveness is borne of this same defiance. But I don’t see myself as the victim of its attacks so much as the blade that meets its advance.
This woman’s approach was different, though. She was so cautious and careful and her request came clearly from someone recovering from her own disability. She was a warrior, and if I aspire to become a shieldmaiden she approached me as a paladin. I was warmed by her presence. Today, I felt happy to consent.
She placed a hand on my bare shoulder. And she prayed.
I didn't feel a deific surge of strength, or sudden spiritual power. My legs didn't jolt to life. No angels visited to carry me. And I didn't mind that I wasn't so moved. The journey I am on is not one where I am looking to be fixed. Save the divine intervention for those seeking it. I am happy, nay overjoyed with who and what I am. But I nonetheless appreciated the moment of connection between us, however veiled in religiosity.
Luna kindly kept me company on the last of the incline and we met up with her adult children and husband at the top of the hill. I spent some time with them before they went off to trek somewhere to find food. I sat in the sunshine to take in the outstanding views.
The long green of Butser hill taken from the peak, a motorway sweeping through the hills in the background and the red frame and wheels of a manual wheelchair, the Rocinante, in the foreground
Butser Hill surmounted I wheeled myself recklessly down the hill, holding my arms out and flying for the last 50 metres, whooping and laughing to the bemusement of nearby walkers.
As I reached the car park I flew downhill past Luna and her family. I had beaten them back to the carpark. I mean it was no race and if it had been I'd have lost but maybe divine winds had filled my sails after all. Though it was downhill so gravity might have had something to do with it.
Where next, then, dear reader? I thought that Butser Hill was the highest peak around. But there is one yet higher. Pilot Hill stands at a height of 286 metres and is the very highest natural point in Hampshire.