The Myth of Silence at the Mountain Hut

On Saturday, August 15th, I walked from Medvedzie up to the Útulňa hut below Magurka. A laptop in my backpack, one goal in my head: to write a piece of the book somewhere other than my own desk.

On Wednesday I wrote here about the first time I ever sat down to write away from home — in a café, with tea and a laptop, while I waited for Hanka. The hut was the next step of the same experiment, just a bit higher up and a bit further from civilization.

The picture in my head was clear — mountain, silence, nobody around. Reality was completely different. On the way I met people from Žarnovica who asked what I was doing with a laptop in the middle of the forest. I told them the truth: the mountains changed my life, so I figured I'd get a bit of their atmosphere into the book. And they weren't the last. Over the whole day so many people passed through the hut that I felt like I'd sat down to write on a bench by the main road, not up in the mountains. I exchanged at least a few words with almost everyone — who are you, where are you from, where are you headed, what am I doing here.

It's something I'd never thought about before. When you imagine going to write a book somewhere like a mountain hut, you picture solitude. In reality it's one of the busiest places I know — and that surprised me more than anything else that day.

And yet — or maybe exactly because of it — by early afternoon, around one o'clock, I was done. The longest and rawest part of the book I've written so far. I won't reveal here what it's about; that belongs to the book, not to a writing journal. I'll just say it was a chapter I'd been carrying around for a long time, and writing it surrounded by strangers talking to me about completely ordinary things was a strange contrast. Maybe exactly the one I needed.

I packed up the laptop, took one last look back at the hut, and headed down. On the way I realized one thing: I'd imagined writing the book in silence. In the end it's taking shape among people — in a café, at a mountain hut, everywhere I thought I'd be alone, and wasn't.