“Don’t you worry, lad. I wouldn’t have left you stranded,” the driver said as I showed him my ticket.
The bus was full. As passengers arranged their backpacks on the racks, I went to the back and found an empty seat. Behind me, a group of young people about my age were shouting and shifting in their seats as they made plans for the great night out ahead of them. In front of me, an elderly couple was heading home from La Boqueria market with all the purchases they were going to cook for their children and grandchildren who were coming to dinner. The bus drove off as my thoughts wandered from these contrasting conversations to the book I was eager to get out of my backpack and resume reading.
All of a sudden, the driver braked sharply. We had gone only a few yards and hadn’t gathered speed, but one of the boys behind me fell down in the aisle because he’d been standing. The doors opened and a fragile young woman got on looking very flustered. She was slim and not very tall, simply dressed in blue jeans and a green cotton T-shirt. She was carrying a gray backpack hanging by a single strap.
I confess that the first thing I looked at when she climbed on was her shoes. From what people say, I imagine that must be the consequence of professional tunnel vision. The shoes we wear say a lot about us: whether we like to walk, if we value comfort or style or something in the middle, if we like to feel tall, if we’re all-purpose or city slickers. She wore white sneakers.
Her face was what most surprised me, hidden as it was behind long brown hair. It was delicate, very gentle and pale, and I expect that’s why she seemed so fragile on first impression. Her eyes were dark blue and sparkled with life; she looked alert, but sad. As she made her way up the aisle, her slenderness and small stature emphasized her fragility, but her arms and the muscles that tensed under her jeans gave you an idea of her strength. She walked confidently but cautiously, as if she were out of place and not in her preferred environment.
She sat next to me—it was the only open seat—and as I bent down to take the book from my backpack, she exhaled and said to herself, “At last! I couldn’t stand a moment more in this city. Who would ever want to live like that?”
“Well, I imagine 6 million people do. Though I can’t really understand why either. Have you been in Barcelona for very long?” I responded.
She looked over in surprise, as if realizing she’d asked the question out loud instead of in her mind. Her eyes weren’t as dark as they had seemed at first.
“Four hours, give or take a few minutes,” came her reply. Her voice matched her build: gentle, and not at all shrill, more like a loud whisper.
“How many hours did you stand it?” she asked with a smile.
“Sorry, I have to say I beat you by a long stretch. It wasn’t easy. There were difficult moments, lots of suffering. I was on the point of giving up several times … but in the end I held out for seven hours!”
She burst out laughing, and neither of us opened our books for the rest of the journey.
As we made our way up through Llobregat, the bus emptied out and dropped all its passengers in the satellite towns around Barcelona. Our conversation was relaxed and pleasant, and we didn’t realize we were almost alone until the bus stopped and the driver stood up.
“Last stop! We’re in Puigcerdà!”
The five remaining passengers got off the bus. I am shy and have never been good at saying good-bye. The easy flow of words I had enjoyed over the three hours’ journey seemed to depart along with the empty bus.
“Well, it was a pleasure meeting you. I don’t know many people who think like you.”
“The pleasure was mine. I don’t know many people who hate the city either,” she said with a laugh. “I’m just passing through Puigcerdà. But I’ll be here for a while. I don’t know how long, a few days or a few months. … I have to see whether I like it here.” She stopped to take a breath. “If you come down to town, you’re in trouble if you don’t let me know!” She laughed again.
“Thanks. You’ll soon find you like it here. It’s a fantastic place. And if you come up to Font-Romeu, give me a ring. If you like skiing or hiking in the mountains, it is idyllic. …” It seemed as though our conversation wanted to mesh, wanted to find words and reasons to continue, but after a few minutes and a quick exchange of telephone numbers, we went our separate ways.
I picked up my car from the garage and drove up to Font-Romeu. I spent the entire drive thinking about the conversation and debating why I had said this and not that, why I hadn’t had the courage to tell her that I liked her, that I thought she was fantastic.
I arrived home. Like every autumn, it was almost time to rotate wardrobes, to put running and cycling gear in suitcases and get out my ski kit. However, it wasn’t yet cold enough to ski, and there were still hot days when I could go out for a bike ride and cold days when I had to wrap up well to go out for a run, so the house was piled high with kit. I lay on my bed and started to look at the results of the stress test, but my mind didn’t want to digest information about oxygen consumption, aerobic and anaerobic thresholds; it could only think about a slim girl with a delicate complexion. I couldn’t get her out of my head. And then it hit me: I didn’t know her name! We had been so absorbed in our conversation that she hadn’t told me her name. Now I had an excuse to call her; I grabbed the telephone.
“Hello?” I heard that same gentle voice and laughter I felt I’d not heard for days, though it had only been an hour ago.
“I’m sorry, you didn’t tell me your name! Don’t tell me now. What about telling me tonight over a drink or two?”
“Hey, great idea! Ten o’clock in the belfry square?”
I walked up and down the streets in the historic part of town, pretending to window-shop or watch Cerdanya by night from the Town Hall lookout point. I even read all the advertising magazines I could find, trying to make time fly by. However, time moved very slowly, almost as if it had stopped. Minutes passed like hours, and it became more and more difficult to ignore my thoughts, which were continually focusing on the moment when I’d meet her.
She was sitting on the terrace outside the bar, gazing at the illuminated belfry tower, her back to me. I watched her as I drew near. She was the only person on the street, and I could tell she was relaxed. Though it wasn’t quite cold, the autumn nights were beginning to get cooler in the Pyrenees and people preferred to be inside benefiting from the bar’s central heating.
I came up quietly behind her and leaned down to speak softly into her ear. “I’m Kilian,” I said. She got up slowly, still gazing at the belfry. She turned around and stepped closer to me. In the soft light in the square her blue eyes looked bigger against her white skin. She looked me straight in the eye; her gaze was calm and serene.
“Alba,” she said slowly and tenderly, inviting me to share in the stillness that her voice and gaze communicated. We stood and stared at each other, only a few inches apart. I don’t know whether that lasted seconds or several minutes. Time seemed to slip by around us but had stopped as far as I was concerned, hooked by the power of her gaze. My pulse beat faster and louder. I could feel each heartbeat in every part of my body: my head, my hands, my legs. I felt as though my strength was draining from me and I was tottering. My legs were stiff but shaking, as if they couldn’t bear my weight. If I had carried on like that for another second, I would have collapsed to the ground. For a thousandth of a second my pupils deserted her perfect eyes and centered on her pale pink lips. They looked so delicate as her cheeks broadened into a faint smile. I don’t know if time was still at a stop or suddenly accelerating wildly. Our faces slowly drew together, leading the way for our bodies. My lips separated to let air reach my lungs so that I could gather strength. I noticed the heat our bodies were giving off. Sweat began to dot my forehead, and I felt as if I needed to take off my shirt despite the cold invading the streets as night fell. Our gazes crossed from lips to eyes, and my strength faded even more. It wasn’t only my legs that were shaking now; my hands seemed heavy and awkward
, and even my lips were trembling. I began to worry that if no one came to prop me up, I actually would fall to the ground. She was the one who brought me that support with her lips, and then I wrapped my arms around her and lost track of who was supporting whom.
I will never understand how people can live surrounded by cement, concrete, asphalt, iron, and glass. It is difficult to find a single reflection of what the earth used to be like when years ago it followed its cycles without interference, safe from mankind. What happened to the water that ran free and cut its own paths between the rocks to find the best way to reach its destination, the sea? Or to the flowers that struggled to survive among trees and bushes, vying with other flowers to steal that ray of sun that would allow them to show off their magnificence? Animals can no longer move freely across the terrain, are caged in by the man-made borders that now bisect their once wide-open lands. They can no longer simply follow the instincts to find shelter, seek out their prey, create their own hiding places in order to elude their predators—they can no longer live as they were meant to. And what about us? Aren’t we basically just another animal? Like dogs, cats, and parrots, aren’t we also trapped inside four cement walls that prevent us from flying freely, from being able to feel the human essence within us, the animal sleeping within that is waiting for the moment when it can wake up and run through a space of its own?
Our parents took my sister, Naila, and me on a hike across the Pyrenees on foot when I was 10. In those 42 days we discovered that we knew nothing at all about the mountains where we had lived all our lives, and that we loved them—though we didn’t realize it at the time. When we made that trek as young kids, I didn’t know that a seed of an idea had been planted in my unconscious that would finally begin to sprout in the spring of 2010. Timidly but firmly opening a path through the snow, that idea kept growing robustly until it started to assume a shape. Initially, it was like a fragile snow flower that was at once vulnerable and accessible, but as the months passed and it seemed as if it would begin to bear fruit, it began to look more like a mighty sequoia that was at once imposing and inaccessible—it was the idea that I could run across the Pyrenees in seven days. It had taken root so strongly I couldn’t shake it off; night and day my thoughts were about my trans-Pyrenees run. There was no going back. The mountain ski season had finished a few months ago, and the peaks were still covered with a thick mantle of snow, but the desire driving me to the Basque Country to start this adventure was so powerful that rational reason hid behind blind desire and I couldn’t restrain my body, which was heading west, following its instincts.
DAY 1
Rains weep at the break of dawn on a Monday at the end of May, and I stand there, more fearful than confident as the giant waves of the Atlantic crash against the Cabo Higuer cliffs, ready to run until I can dip my feet in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Any disappointment or discouragement we might have felt at a dismal departure in a downpour is erased by the extra dose of motivation we get from imagining what we might see on a long day that will take us across the Basque mountains and what we might discover over the next seven days. This is how we will start, cheered on by the team and runners who, despite the rainstorm, have come to see the kickoff of this adventure: a run across the Pyrenees, along its valleys and across its peaks, following the frontier between France and Spain until, nearly 500 miles to our east, we are reunited with the salty water of the sea.
It seems as if the sea doesn’t want to let go of us when we emerge from the rocks of Cabo Higuer. We meet strong winds and rain, and I can’t decide whether the water wetting our faces is thrown up by the waves when they crash against the rocks or is pouring down gleefully from the sky. All the same, we are here to run; no one said this would be easy, and we knew we would encounter problems. Indeed, as our odyssey begins, the rain apparently wants to remind us that nature and the mountains will be the ones to decide if we will reach the Mediterranean.
The clock moves toward 8 a.m., and the heavy clouds spreading across the sky convince me it would be pointless to wait for them to disappear before we start our run. I feel sure it’s better to start with these difficulties and to hope that, as the days go by, nature will take pity on us and send a little good weather.
“You all ready?” I shout, hoping to make myself heard over the wind and crashing waves. Two local runners I have only just met have offered to share the soaking and accompany us on the first 6 miles before they go to work. The weather may be opposed to the challenge we are about to take on, but the runners are ready to give their all to help me pull it off.
“Of course!” I barely hear their answer through the storm, and I reply with a determined “Pues entonces, vamos!”
We cover the first miles and are quickly sopping wet. The waves of the sea are replaced by the streams of water that cars splash over us as we negotiate the Irati motorway and penetrate the mountains. We chat, and the miles seem to fly by as the rain turns into a steady drizzle that slips easily off our wet bodies. Greg and Yon accompany me on the first stretch of trail. The soft terrain, fresh legs, and high spirits make it easy to set a good pace.
All of a sudden as we are descending the ridge separating Ibardin from the Lizuniaga Col, the trail drops us into a grass field with no way out. We look at each other. For the first time since we left the ocean, we take the map from our backpack. Until now, we had let ourselves be led by intuition and had followed the wind eastward, but when there are small valleys with a thousand paths, intuition sometimes takes you to a dead end.
As a result of Greg’s good navigation skills from his years of adventure racing, and Yon’s knowledge of the terrain, we work out that we are south of the main trail that was taking us to the Lizuniaga Col. We have two options: We can either retrace our steps for 3 or 4 miles to get back on the right track or try to cut through the middle of the woods to the north. We are afraid the extra miles will take their toll at the end of an anticipated day’s haul of 80, so we decide on the second option, convinced that we will find the right track in a few minutes.
We don’t take into account the fact that the vegetation on the Atlantic Pyrenees is totally different from what we find back home. We immediately realize the shorter option won’t be the quickest as we start on a steep descent where the undergrowth is so dense we can’t see where we are putting our feet. We are in a kind of bog between large boulders and grassy thickets. Our feet are soaked, but apart from the odd thorn from wild rose bushes, the ferns and grasses caressing our legs is a pleasant feeling. We keep close together as we descend so as not to get lost in this jungle. The vegetation gets denser and denser as we draw closer to the river, which, like a cup of coffee, gathers all the dregs at the bottom of the valley.
With more pain than glory, we reach the river and decide that the best route out will be to climb back up the other side and follow the course of the river in the hope that at some point, nature will have forgotten to fill a gully that will take us 1,800 feet higher, to the path we are so desperate to find. Time has come to a halt, and I don’t think there can be more than 60 miles to go before we reach Orbaitzeta and, farther on, 50 to cross these mountains and be able to rest once more. We have only just set out, have gone about 12 miles, and are already lost and wasting minutes, precious hours of rest. If we continue at this rate …
But are we really lost? Don’t we in fact want to lose ourselves and, like when we were kids, melt into the forest and discover its plants, animals, and life close up as a way to probe our inner selves? At this moment, though, my mind is far from esoteric reflections. I have only one thought in my head: crossing the distance between us and the path we have been chasing in circles by the river for at least half an hour.
After going upstream for a good while, we finally leave the river when we find the gully we have been searching for. Our legs and bodies recover their energy in our elation over finding a path to lead us out of the insecurity of the natural wilds and return us to civilization, even though the latter only expres
ses itself in the shape of a track that is barely a few feet wide. It all seems very contradictory. When we started on this trek, our aim was to go far into the mountains and find their wildest, purest, most natural depths, to distance ourselves from all civilization, from what mankind has built or destroyed, turning our backs on the world we have constructed during our existence as a species. Yet here we are, stripped of artifice, cut loose from humanity, finally experiencing what we so craved, and we feel unprotected, defenseless, and vulnerable. Fear creeps into our veins like a kind of adrenaline, anticipating the feeling of a leap into the void, the loss of control over our emotions and body. And as this situation drags on, fear of being lost, of not finding a way out, of being suddenly attacked by a wolf, becomes real and scary. Irrationally, we look around at the slightest sound or movement we hear. We look for an exit, scared of dying defenseless, surrounded by nature.
I think it is fear of death that frightens us when we lose contact with what is man-made. Our family and friends accustom us to the safety of the rational world, where every element focuses on the protection of our own, and when we are cut off from that shelter, we feel vulnerable, as if the path our life is pursuing could be interrupted at any moment by unknown perils. It is irrational, but the love we feel for humanity takes over, makes us feel we belong there, cradled in its arms. That feeling accompanies us everywhere, keeping us safe, yet at the same time muting the instinct that allows us to explore beyond its frontiers.
Run or Die Page 7