The art of escaping

Let me tell you how it starts, because it doesn't start in the mountains. It starts at home, weeks earlier, with a feeling I'd stopped even noticing: the low hum. The inbox that refills like a tide. The phone lighting up on the table like a small demanding pet. Three businesses, a content calendar, supplier messages, the doorbell, the admin, the endless scroll of everyone else's highlight reel. None of it bad, exactly. All of it noise. And the strange thing about noise is that you only hear how loud it was after it stops.

It stopped at the top of the Hourquette.

We'd driven north with the bikes in the back and a loose plan, the way we always do, and somewhere on that first evening, parked up high with the cowbells scattering their odd music across the hillside and no signal worth speaking of, I felt something in my chest physically change gear. I remember standing there thinking: oh. There you are. Like meeting an old version of yourself at a train station.

Now let me describe what our life actually looked like for those weeks, because on paper it reads like deprivation, and I want you to understand that it was the opposite.

We lived in a small van, a Citan, which is less a camper and more a hallway with a bed in it. The kitchen was one gas ring on a fold-out table, positioned each evening in front of whatever view we'd earned that day, which in the Pyrenees is a strong incentive to cook slowly. Coffee came from a moka pot that lived in a plastic crate. The wardrobe was a bag. The dress code was socks and Crocs, and I'd like to see anyone up there judge us for it, because our audience was mostly livestock. Dinner was one pan, eaten outside, usually with the sun going down behind a ridge somewhere and neither of us saying much because there wasn't much that needed saying.

We washed in rivers. I want to dwell on this one, because it became my favourite ritual of the whole trip. You find your spot, water straight off the mountains, turquoise-clear to the stones, and you walk in knowing exactly what's coming. The cold doesn't arrive gradually. It files a complaint on behalf of your entire body, all at once, and then, about thirty seconds later, something flips and you feel more awake than any shower has ever made you feel. We'd finish a big day, jump in the river next to the van, and come out new. Somewhere in the second week I realised I'd stopped thinking of it as a substitute for a real wash. It was the real wash. The thing at home is the substitute.

Nature was also, on more occasions than I'll detail, the toilet, with dignity preserved by a little pop-up tent that stood beside the van like a loyal sentry. I'm aware this is the point where a certain kind of reader closes the tab. That's fine. More mountains for the rest of us.

And then there were the neighbours. This is the part I didn't expect to love as much as I did. When you live outside for weeks, the wildlife stops being scenery and starts being company. A donkey wandered into camp one golden evening and presented its head for attention like it was collecting a toll. Wild horses grazed past the door at sunrise. Sheep commuted through in the mornings, unhurried, bells clanking, entirely certain of their right of way. At home the doorbell means a delivery or a decision. Up there, whatever arrives at your door has four legs and no agenda, and it turns out that's my preferred kind of visitor.

So that was the life. Water, food, riding, weather, sleep, and Eva. The whole list. And here's what I want to actually get at, the thing I touched on in one of the daily posts from the mountains and have been turning over ever since, because "nature is nice" doesn't cover what happened to my head up there. Everyone knows nature is nice. Something else was going on.

I think the escape has two halves, and we only ever talk about one of them.

The first half is what you connect to. The sunrise you're actually awake for, because the light wakes you rather than an alarm. Some mornings that meant standing on an empty col road, coffee in hand, with an entire valley of cloud lying below us like a second sea, watching the peaks catch fire one by one, and understanding with total clarity why people have always gone up mountains to think. The day shaped by weather and daylight instead of a calendar. Your body starts keeping mountain time within about three days, and there's a deep, old comfort in that, like remembering a language you didn't know you spoke. That's the half that gets the Instagram posts, and fair enough. It photographs well.

But the second half is the one I've become convinced does most of the work, and it's everything you disconnect from. And I don't just mean the phone, though the phone is part of it. I mean the entire scaffolding of normal life that quietly runs in the background of your head. When we talk about needing a social media break, I think this is what we're actually grasping at, and my honest conclusion from the van is that a social media break is the beginner version. The mountains offer the same thing at full strength, in real life. Not just logging off the feed. Logging off the noise entirely.

Because here's what I noticed, and I can almost place the moment, somewhere in the second week, on a climb, alone with my breathing. It wasn't just that I'd stopped checking things. It's that there was nothing to check. And when the list of a life gets that short, something unexpected happens: your thoughts finish. At home, thinking gets interrupted every few minutes and you live on a diet of half-thoughts, a hundred open tabs in your skull. Up there, a thought gets to run all the way to the end, sometimes over a whole climb, and it turns out some of those thoughts had been waiting years for the road space. Decisions I'd been circling for months quietly resolved themselves somewhere between the valley and the col, not because the mountains gave me new ideas, but because they finally gave my old ones room to land.

Peace, I've decided, isn't the absence of noise. It's the absence of unfinished business, and modern life is an unfinished business machine.

And I'd watch Eva reading in the back of the van at night, tucked in behind the pillows with the doors shut against the cold, both of us tired in that clean, earned way, asleep by an hour that would embarrass us at home, and I'd think: this is the most sophisticated wellness retreat on earth, and it's a second-hand van with 320,000 kilometres on it.

Now, the obvious objection, and I can hear it: easy to say with weeks in a van, and most people can't take weeks in a van. True. But I don't think the van is the point. The van is just the tool that forced the conditions. The conditions are the point: fewer inputs, fewer decisions, real water, real tiredness, a shorter list. You can build a small version of it in a weekend. Honestly, you can build a version of it in a morning, if you're willing to leave the phone in a drawer and let one thought run all the way to the end.

The art of escaping isn't running away from your life. It's stepping far enough back from it that you can finally see the thing properly, the way you have to step back from a big painting. Every time we come home from the mountains, I see ours more clearly: what's essential, what's decoration, what's just noise I'd stopped noticing. Then, slowly, normal life turns the volume back up. The inbox refills. The little pet on the table starts lighting up again. That's fine. That's the deal.

But now I know where the quiet lives.

It lives up a mountain, next to a cold river, behind a van door.

And it's always open.