If I’m honest, I have to admit that this East Riding section of the journey was the one I’d least looked forward to, the one I was glad to be able to complete early before moving on to more fascinating places. This great long stretch of flat agricultural land which even on paper makes a mockery of Will Alsop’s proposed SuperCity (the idea of a continuous urban settlement across northern England with the M62 as its spine), in reality is indeed just mile after mile of dull and dirty ground.
There have been pleasant surprises: lovely canalside Newport, the incongrous majesty of Howden Minster, gentle industrious Goole. And the landscape has revealed sufficient icons to have led my eye onwards and upwards all the way: the Ouse Bridge, Goole’s steeple and tower, the monstrous chimneys of Drax.
But there have been enough encounters with the unattractive rural (farm dogs, stampeding cows, blocked footpaths) to give me a sense of relief that this long stretch is almost over.
I can’t even form a prayer for Junctions 36 and 35, because I found neither of them to be physically approachable on foot, or particularly connected to anything accessible: Ballardian nightmare traffic islands, real non-places. Except maybe what follows is a sort of prayer.
Taking up a few acres below Airmyn New Wood, J36 serves Goole traffic, and is close to an industrial park with a giant glassworks, a Tescos distribution shed and numerous smaller businesses. But unlike the neighbouring M62 Trading Estate nowhere on this park is accessible to anyone without a permit, pass or permission. This is presumably why its laybys and edge-roads are peppered with the vehicles of travelling reps and delivery drivers either on the phone (negotiating access) or checking paperwork (ready for the ritual at the security gates) or snacking (killing time before the regulated appointment).
It’s also why people like me (random cranks) don’t stand an earthly getting through any of these gates. I calculated that Tescos Distribution Centre security staff probably wouldn’t buy my purpose in accessing their site: ie, to enable the possible creation of spiritual connections between the salmon and cucumber sandwich I’d bought earlier at Boothferry Road Tescos, and the place from which it (probably, latterly) came.
J35 is connected to nowhere nearby – it serves no local roads. It forms an inverted triquetra pattern in the fields between Rawcliffe and the Aire and Calderdale Canal / Dutch River line, as the M18 drops southwards from here, linking the busy transPennine route to the Don Valley towns.
I got closer to the M18 than the M62 on this stretch, following the long, sludge-brown banks of the Dutch River out of Goole to its southwards turn just beyond the motorway, where (I think) it becomes the River Don. But my road led north from there, to a bed at the Brewer’s Arms, Snaith, which I’d expected to be a rough-and-ready room in a rough-and-ready town, in the massive smoking shadow of Drax. It turned out to be a clean and comfortable room in a friendly gastropub which serves beer brewed in the town itself – and whose youthful bar staff had a thing for The Smiths.
Most evenings on this trail through the agricultural outlands of the East Riding I’d booked in my accommodation covered head to foot in a powdering of dirt from the miles of wide, open and desperately dry fields through which I’d walked, looking (I guess) and feeling (without doubt) like a character from Steinbeck – a gap-toothed hobo seeking something elusive in a dustbowl. Most evenings I seemed to fit in just fine that way, with many of my fellow-lodgers being itinerant labourers on the fields or at flood-damage repair jobs. Here in Snaith, though, with only one more dusty day to go, I smartened up quickly and ate a hearty meal, moved by the emotionally truthful, harshly comforting songs of Morrissey and Marr:
You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does.