9: The USS Battleship Bonnie Lass

After the blowout, I said out loud that I needed to find some hippies or Druids to take the hex off The CashCow Quilt Car. Liz and Glenn laughed but saw that I was also more than halfway serious. I wasn’t messing around any more and called in the big guns — the Rock and Mineral Store in Hawes.

Armed with local crystals and the conscious, no-messing-around intention to be in harmony and rhythm with the traffic and roads and car, I persevered. Sure, you may think it’s nutty or woo-woo or even dumb to consider something like this would make a difference. But it works for me — the power of clear intention is mighty, as is the confidence I get from taking some sort of action to rectify or clarify a situation. So I bought some rocks and put them in the car and told the car problem juju to get lost. I took action. And sitting in the car getting ready to leave the Dales, I felt some confidence behind the wheel I hadn’t before. The CashCow Quilt Car, aka “Bonnie Lass,” had changed during her time in North Yorkshire and was leaving as a tested veteran of the Dales roads. On the trip back out of the Dales National Park, she became the U.S.S. Battleship Bonnie Lass (which included a road closure and detour down a perfectly diabolical lane called “Thornton Road” as well as bumper-to-bumper traffic on the A1 later) and gave me a safe journey back to Leeds. I, too, had become a tested veteran of the roads and am still quite proud of myself for collecting only minor damage and keeping my nerve. I told Glenn I thought there should be some sort of Badge of Honor or Courage for an American driving solo in a giant car on those roads. I would wear one with pride!

Our last day together was great. There was more visiting and Glenn helped me get my bookings sorted for my arrival in Manchester in a few days. Liz and I decided to make some TexMex tacos and margaritas for dinner that evening and had the best time together in her kitchen. Glenn was very happy with the TexMex, too. After we cleared up, Liz and I walked over to the Sheepdog Demonstration being held near Sedbusk. Richard Fawcett is a world-champion Sheepdog Trainer and travels around the world teaching and training. (http://www.sheepdogdemo.co.uk/) He’s getting older and isn’t competing anymore, but his daughter is and they hold these demos to get the dogs used to having audiences while they work. They had five beautiful dogs to show us that evening, out in the fields with a perfectly blue sky. There are no words to describe this event, other than this is a visual example of the ancient dependence of humans and dogs on one another. It’s magical and powerful to see it all in action. The dogs are fast like bullets across the fields but at a whistle will stop dead in their tracks and wait for the next instruction. They have to be assertive (sheep can be vicious) but not aggressive (dogs can kill, too), smart but not opinionated, strong but must know when to stop. The relationships they each had with Richard were different and he knew everything there was to know about each dog — where they were in their development, their health, their strengths and growth areas, their distinct likes and dislikes, and their personalities. Yorkshiremen are known for their stoicism and tough exteriors, but Richard dropped all that as he spoke about his dogs and how much love he has for them. I was blessed to share the evening with Liz and I suspect she will go back again during the summer. I hope she does. We had a stroll through the fields and past the river to get back home, the late evening sun still in the sky, and we lingered in it all a bit as my last day was coming to a close.

It was time to go. I really, really didn’t want to but had to be a grownup about it because the second stage of my trip wasn’t going to wait — and there were some important things I wanted to do. There were big hugs and laughs as I got in the car with a box lunch Liz made for me and I took off down the lane, my friends waving in the rearview mirror. I turned to leave Hawes but stopped one last time at the bridge over the River Ure and got out. It was a sunny early morning and the light on the river had the finish of pewter. I spent a few moments in gratitude and also remembered a young friend who loved water and fishing and conservation — a young friend who left us way too soon. I said his name to the river. I think he would have loved it there. His mom told me later that there is no doubt he would have.

I was also grateful for the times during the week I would come up over the brow of a hill or turn a corner and the view would quite literally take my breath away and make my chest ache with just how unbelievably beautiful it was. My eyes would scan the whole vista and when I would think it was going to come to an end, the easy beauty of it all would just keep going and going.

I cautiously drove out of the Dales and onto the A1 to Thirsk. I’ve been up in Northern England several times before but had never visited the James Herriot Museum in Thirsk. Herriot’s books, beginning with “All Creatures Great and Small,” started my love of the Dales. My mom put them in my hands when I was 10 years old and I made a ritual of reading all the books in sequence every summer while I was in school, through college. The museum was quite excellent and I left loads of gratitude from my family for all the laughs, sweet tears, and amazing memories from watching the videos and reading the books aloud to each other.

The roads from Thirsk to Leeds were a lot. Once I got off the farm roads and from behind the tractors and bicycles, I was in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I started trusting my GPS (“SatNav”) and took the detours. Not sure if they did me any favors and I’ll probably never know, and I ended up going into Leeds from the east, driving through the suburbs just as schools were letting out.

Nothing I could have ever done would have prepared me for the City Center of Leeds. “Mental” is the word the locals used. It was lots of big circles on one-way streets and I was, apparently, staying at an invisible hotel. Neither I nor my GPS could pin down exact directions to it. It almost defeated me, but finally made a bold move into an alley and found the place purely by accident. I am fairly certain that had I not defied the GPS, I would STILL be driving in circles in Leeds.