A Way to Get Back Home

In a Guardian interview published yesterday, Simon Hattenstone meets Karl Bushby, a former British paratrooper who left his mother’s house in Hull on 1 November 1998, flew to the southern tip of South America, and has been walking back ever since.¹

»Bushby didn’t set out to make art – he was just trying to get home – but a simple rule, sustained for decades against everything that threatened to dissolve it, gave his life something of an aesthetic structure all the same«

Bushby made two rules before setting out: no transport was allowed to advance the journey, and if circumstances ever forced him off his route, he had to return and continue from the exact point where he’d stopped. He expected to be away for twelve years. It has taken twenty-eight. He’s crossed the thin ice of the Bering Strait, swum the Caspian Sea, survived kidnappings and near-starvation, lost years to borders and visa offices, and put 58,000 kilometres on foot behind him. He just swam across the English Channel, and is now walking the final stretch home.

In the Atacama Desert, a stranger named Michael Bier gave him $100 and asked a favour in return: deliver a postcard to a friend in Vienna. Bushby carried it for twenty-seven years before handing it over in person. He could have posted it within a week. Instead, the errand took nearly three decades. That postcard is a miniature version of the whole journey: an ordinary promise made extraordinary by refusing to take the easy way out.

Artists often use constraint to find the unexpected. Richard Long turned a walk into a line drawn across the landscape.² Matthew Barney made the struggle to make a mark under physical restraint the idea of the work itself.³ Bushby didn’t set out to make art – he was just trying to get home – but a simple rule, sustained for decades against everything that threatened to dissolve it, gave his life something of an aesthetic structure all the same. Not a sculpture or a film, but the relationship between a rule and a life. What exactly did the experiment establish – that persistence can beat almost any obstacle? That’s true enough, but it hardly accounts for twenty-eight years. He could have stopped, he could have changed the rules, he could have hopped on a plane back home. He was free to give up, but also free to push on.

That freedom came at a real cost. He left a son behind, and missed his childhood. He has yet to meet his twelve-year-old granddaughter. Bushby calls his undertaking »totally self-centred«, and tells himself that finishing it might mean more to his son than being there for him would have. He doesn’t sound fully convinced by his own argument, Hattenstone notes. A purpose can give a life its shape while making it harder to live.

The premise suggests this was a solitary feat. Not quite. Bushby depended on strangers for food, money, and care when he was ill; he reckons 99.999 per cent of the people he met were the best of humanity, and calls the walk a »we« project. The rule was his. The means of keeping it were often supplied by others.

A documentary film is already in the works. Werner Herzog has spent much of his career pointing a camera at people who impose an extravagant law on themselves and then refuse to break it: opera lover Fitzcarraldo hauling a steamship over a mountain is perhaps the clearest case.⁴ But the man Herzog’s camera is following into Hull isn’t quite the man whose promise the film is about – it will tell the story of someone who, according to Bushby himself, no longer exists.

Bushby says he’s a different person from the one who left: softer, more open to the world, less narrowly British. He doggedly stuck to the promise made by his former self, but he didn’t remain that person. The destination stayed fixed but the traveller changed completely, and so the promise has outlived its own author. The undertaking that organised so many years of his life is about to end; his purpose for living, he says, is about to disappear. He knows how to walk. What comes next is the part he doesn’t know how to do.

The experiment is finished, but it hasn’t produced a solution. Whether keeping a promise to someone he no longer is counts as fidelity, a kind of self-imposed sentence, or both, may not be answerable from the outside. Once there was a way to get back home. Now a different person has returned.

References