The cobblestone  and brick-laid roads were the first thing I noticed that gave me the feeling I was now participating in an adventure. They felt real, not like some easily distinguishable recreated town in Disneyland but a real tangibility felt in the chilled air and my disorientation. Tattoo parlors, record stores, and bars seemed to be the only establishments harboring life inside, apparently each with their own dress code. Google Maps seemed only to get me more lost in these hills, through damp alleys and sharp hairpin turns. Getting to the bus station was proving more difficult than my phone could communicate.

Had I been there in the daytime, the cold, consumer-industrial façade of this place would not have been able to hide under the cover of darkness; I would not have been so enchanted that my excitement drove me past my fear. (I would later come to see this town for what it was with its highway overpasses and immense interior shopping centers that actually served as named roads and a throughway for pedestrians.) Fortunately I was shielded from those concrete images and able to maintain my magical air and wide-eyed ardor.

“Do you know where the 538 bus comes?” I asked a unassociated (dissociated) string of locals, one after another as each one in the shuffling procession left me with no more than a shrug as they disappeared into a smoke cloud pluming from their own blue mouths.

I had made it, after navigating throngs of these northern denizens on one of the microcosmic road-malls with many quadruplets of suzzball teens, finally to the station. But I was too late and had missed the last and only bus to my country-road destination. In a moment of divine deliberation I was just able to board the second-best that would at least (or really, at most) take me halfway to where I needed to go.

I got off at the correct stop after more than a few moments of apprehensive uncertainty regarding my location. I knew not where I was, but my direction was clear: eight miles down the road. Boots were made for walking.

Winter time in England is the land of lonesome darkness, or just a four o’clock sunset, depending on your mood. Though it was only six-thirty, I might as well have been paused in a void of night. Down the road I walked, with its muddy banks and thorny trees with eyelevel branches waiting for a union. My dinky headlight set to flash when I saw the faraway country drivers careening over the hills of this hair-width country road. Otherwise: lost in the stillness, the darkness, the stars, the chills, and the thought. Found in the land unknown.