Floating high o'er vales and hills

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
--Wordsworth

Oh, William! How very true. One does grow weary of books and documents. Or, should I say, of internet and Kindle? But to wander in green fields -- during March around Seattle -- is to risk drowning in rain or, as grandma would have put it, catching your blessed death of cold.

But if I can't gambol over the hills and fields right now, I can at least plan for the future, looking forward to different climes and different months. After two consecutive years of hiking in Britain, I'll be returning in July for a third.

This time around, my 14-year-old niece Maya and I are planning a weeklong hike in Wordsworth's own Lake District in northwest England. We will be hiking seventy miles from the town of Ulverston in the south, near the Irish Sea, to Carlisle on the Scottish border, walking through the very heart of the Lake District. Although the total distance hiked will be shorter than on either my Hadrian's Wall or West Highland Way walks, the elevation gain will be significantly higher, ascending about 2,300 feet in one day alone.

The path leads through several small towns, tucked into valleys and lying beside lakes, and climbs at times over what are called the "high fells" -- which essentially means the higher mountainous areas.

Although, at Wordsworth's advice, I'll be escaping books, somehow my enjoyment of these hikes is enhanced by the magic of words. Fells, for example, and crags, moors, bracken, tarns, pikes and lanes -- words that were all used in a guide's brief description of the route. And proper names: Coniston Water, Village of Elterwater, Langdale Pikes, Cat Bells, Derwentwater, and Skiddaw Forest. We speak the same language and can encounter the same words in America, of course. But not in such concentrated effusion, a tangle of Saxon and Celtic that casts a glow of mystic antiquity over the entire region.

The hike ends in the border city of Carlisle, a pleasant town through which I passed near the end of my Hadrian's Wall hike, so I'll be ending up on familiar terrain. We'll also spend a couple of days sightseeing in London before the hike begins, letting our bodies catch up with the eight hour time difference.

Our hike is still four months away, but the anticipation allows me to brush aside thought of the Seattle drizzle, and to inhabit, mentally, for at least a few minutes at a time, a more exciting and fascinating world.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.