When Christopher Rush's wife died suddenly of cancer, leaving him with two
young children, his world fell apart. He not only stopped writing, he also
lost faith in everything that had informed his existence: literature, the
arts, his role as teacher, his love of nature, the society of friends.
Nothing could cure his almost suicidal depression. At last he decided to
try to reclaim his sanity in the least expected of ways. A confirmed non-
traveller, he went to France, bought a donkey and disappeared into the
mountains of the Cevennes. Like a fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson, who
had made the same journey over a century before, he hoped to find a new
reason to live. To Travel Hopefully is a memoir of grief and recovery,
expressed in an intensely private but universal language, which records a
compelling journey of the spirit from defeat to victory. Anyone who has had
to confront bereavement will find in these pages an understanding,
experience and expression of the human predicament which go far beyond mere
sympathy.