This might be a good time to point out something about Lynne and myself. We were not so much a mixed marriage as a marriage of two rather mixed individuals. After a proper Catholic education at Ursuline Academy in New Orleans, she took a bus to New York, where she fell in with a crowd of artists. I was by no means the first nice Jewish boy in her life.
For my part, after my first marriage ended I found myself seeking out the church around the corner as a source of peace and quiet amid the Manhattan hubbub. In the books I wrote about ex-cop Matthew Scudder, I had him do much the same thing, and light memorial candles there for departed friends.
By the time we began keeping company, it would be fair to say that each of us was a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. And the extent of our religious cross-pollination had become evident to us two years earlier, when some moron cut us off on an icy stretch of highway in northern New Mexico.
“Oy, gottenu!” cried the pride of St. Elizabeth’s. While the boy from Beth Zion said not a word while making the sign of the cross.
Well, it worked, didn’t it? We didn’t crash the car. And it happened just that way, swear to God. Whatever God you want…
Still, I figured Potok’s history would be a good choice, and I’d have to say it was, but it made for some curious moments. Everything was fine until I got up to the fifteenth century, and suddenly we couldn’t walk through a town without my reading that night how it had figured prominently in the Spanish Inquisition, with its synagogues sacked and its Jewish population burned alive.
Oh, well. All that aside, the book was good company. I was talking about it with Lynne, and we agreed that Potok was a good writer, and that we’d both enjoyed his novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, about a young artist from an ultra-Orthodox family. “And there was a sequel,” I said, “but I can’t remember what he called it.”
“Now My Name Is Allen Lewis,” said Lynne, without a moment’s hesitation.
WALKING
There were lots of good times, as I hope I’ve managed to suggest, and even the worst moments weren’t so bad once we’d had a day to walk away from them. And we didn’t lack for interesting ways to pass the time. But what we mostly did, and what was certainly the central feature of those months in Spain, was walk.
There are, as I’ve mentioned, people who make the trip on a bike. There are paths that you can’t negotiate on a bike, but there were always roads the bicycle pilgrims could take to get from one refugio to the next.
One contingent of Spanish equestrians covered a portion of the route—from León to Santiago, as I recall—mounted on horseback, and a fine figure they cut. If it had been up to me, I’d have cheerfully given them plenary indulgences, along with grain and water for their steeds.
There are also a certain number of sightseers every year who cover the route in a car, winding up in Santiago de Compostela in time for the festival. (I don’t suppose they call themselves peregrinos, or expect to cut short their time in Purgatory for having made the trip, but what do I know?) And some of the adventure travel companies have taken to offering escorted trips along the Camino, with a support vehicle to carry the luggage and a wuss wagon for those whose feet can’t take it, along with an abbreviated itinerary and some bus transportation over parts of the route.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
But here’s the thing. If you’re not going to walk, really, what’s the point?
There was something transformational in covering vast distances, true geographic expanses, on foot. Who looks at the map of Spain and sees a country it would be possible to walk across? And yet by the time we were done we had done precisely that, one day at a time, one precious step at a time.
I don’t think there was ever a day when we covered more than twenty miles, and that long stretch came in Castile, where there was an empty expanse of flat land through which the Camino headed north, toward León. We knew it was coming, and we made a point of getting an early start that day and carrying the requisite food and water. It was a long day’s walk—we generally seemed to average around three miles an hour, less over difficult terrain—but we got to the end of it without difficulty, and there was a refugio waiting for us.
As the miles piled up, they brought us a great sense of empowerment. For all our lives we’d had to rely on something other than ourselves in order to get from one place to another. Whether our transportation was public or private, whether we had to depend on a bus or a plane or were driving a car that we’d bought or rented, we were being moved around by something we didn’t really control. We weren’t going anywhere; the car or bus or plane was going somewhere, and we were hitching a ride in it.
In Spain, we were quite literally getting around under our own power, and that we could actually do so was something we found stunning during those infrequent moments when we stopped to think about it. Ten years earlier, when I’d decided against buying a bike in Oregon, it had never even occurred to me that I could walk. Some years later I’d sent my little band of fictional characters traipsing across the Cascades in Random Walk, and it worked just fine in a novel, but when Lynne and I traced the Random Walk route during our Buffalo-hunting days, we did it in a car. We could imagine ourselves doing something like that, but there’s a difference between imagination and action, no matter what the self-help gurus would like you to believe, and we never dreamed we could really get out there and do it.
We weren’t walking to gain fitness, or to lose weight, but both were almost inevitable consequences of our peregrination. I’d assured Lynne that walking would make her stronger, and thus able to go the distance, and even if she didn’t believe me, it damn well worked. We were both much stronger by the time we got to Santiago, and slimmer, and in better shape all around. And we were thoroughly sold on the virtues of walking, as an enjoyable activity in and of itself and as one that brought enormous benefits. It was, we assured each other, something we wanted to make an ongoing part of our lives.
There was no reason, we agreed, that we couldn’t walk in the city as we had been walking in Spain. What better way to spend a day than to ride the Number One train, say, to 242nd Street and Broadway, and walk home from there? Let’s see, twenty blocks to the mile, 242nd Street to West Thirteenth Street, comes to what? Ten, eleven miles? Hey, piece of cake. Nothing to it, and it would be a lot easier to find food and water on Broadway than it had been in some of the places we’d walked.
Lynne wondered if we should take backpacks. “Not that we’d need them,” she said, “but maybe it would be better exercise with our packs.”
“We could try it both ways,” I suggested, “and see which we prefer. Or you could try it with a shopping cart.”
“I ought to,” she said. “Just to drive you crazy.”
Besides exploring the city, we could figure out ways to take walking vacations. How hard would it be to pick out some state with towns every ten miles or so and just go out there and start walking? If we picked a flat state, it shouldn’t be that hard to walk clear across it.
And another thing—we’d walk the Camino again. Not next year, that would be too soon, but maybe the year after. We’d get the right sort of backpacks this time, and know what to put in them, and we’d start at Roncesvalles like everybody else. And maybe we’d time our trip to match the weather, and cross the Pyrenees in late summer so that it would be autumn by the time we hit the Castilian plains.
And maybe I’d try the route alone one year. Walking it with Lynne had been wonderful, and would be wonderful a second time, but it might be an interesting and entirely different experience to walk it alone. I’d go faster, of course, and I wouldn’t stay put for a few days of sightseeing, and I might sleep under the stars from time to time. More to the point, the solitary nature of it might turn my mind inward in a useful way.
Oh, we had no end of ideas. But one thing was clear. From here on in, we’d make sure walking was a regular part of our lives.
And so we spent a few pleasant days in San
tiago de Compostela, eating well, encountering pilgrims we’d met along the way and others, like the Holy Family, whom we knew only by reputation. Jack Hitt, whose conversation with Don and Abby Westlake started the whole thing, turned up; word had filtered down that he was somewhere behind us, walking the route a second time ten years after his first pilgrimage, and here he was in Santiago. He’d go on to write Off the Road, a very entertaining book about the Camino.
From Santiago we took the train to Lisbon, breaking the trip for a night in Vigo. It had figured prominently in the War of the Spanish Succession, back in Queen Anne’s reign, and in my numismatic days I’d acquired a contemporary silver medallion, a handsome thing that showed the bombardment of the French fleet in Vigo harbor. I’m sure that’s why I picked Vigo for an overnight stop. I’d long since ceased to own the medallion, but I remember it now far more clearly than I remember anything we may have seen during our visit to Vigo.
We were scheduled to spend a week in Lisbon, and liked the city well enough, but in our minds our trip ended the day we walked into Santiago, and all the churches and tile factories and fado music in Lisbon wasn’t enough to hold our attention. We stuck it out for four days, then changed our tickets and caught a flight back to New York.
We unpacked and showered and dealt with jet lag, and did all the things you do after a long absence, and we knew it was just a matter of time before we resumed our new career as long-distance walkers.
Funny thing: It never happened.
I GUESS IT’S often that way. An activity is particularly gratifying, and one wants to hang on to it and make it an ongoing part of one’s life. It’s been so important, so essential, that it’s impossible to believe it won’t stay that way.
That’s why visitors to a foreign country come home with cookbooks, convinced they’ll want to be able to prepare all those dishes they’ve enjoyed in Bangladesh or Togo or the Trobriand Islands. And maybe some of them do, but I have a feeling a lot of them do what Lynne and I would do, which would be to give the cookbook an honored place on our shelves, and never look at it again.
That, after all, is what we used to do with photographs, before we quit weighing ourselves down with a camera. We took no end of pictures in West Africa, and had them developed and printed, and they sat unexamined in a box for a couple of years. Then one day Lynne got inspired and bought an album and mounted all of them, and she put the album on the shelf, and neither one of us has looked at it yet.
A photograph is an attempt to hang on to an experience, to freeze a moment in time and have it forever. And is walking home from 242nd Street all that different? We’d have been trying to hang on to an experience, one less of seeing than of doing, but it wouldn’t really work. You can take pictures, even as you can take long walks, but in either case the experience is a transitory thing, and when it’s done, well, it’s done. Trying to keep it alive is like trying to keep the high school band together after graduation.
So we came home and went back to our lives.
PART III
16
LIFE, IT’S BEEN SAID, IS A SERIES OF CHOICES, and to choose one action is to choose not to undertake another. For every road taken, one leaves no end of roads untraveled.
I’ve known a few people who realized early on precisely what life they were destined to lead, and who followed a single clear-cut path to the end of their days. One of my closest friends was endowed with this sort of self-knowledge, and he’ll be the first to tell you that he hasn’t changed much over the years. He hasn’t lived in New York for twenty-five years, but still roots passionately for the Knicks and the Giants. He still gets his hair cut the same way he did fifty years ago, still wears the same sort of clothes, still listens with devotion to the same music, and still holds pretty much the same political views. You might think this would make him dull company, or at the very least that he’d have had a routine and predictable life. You’d be mistaken; he’s a great companion, and enjoys a rich and satisfying life.
My life, too, has been rich and satisfying, but it hasn’t stayed the same over the years. Enthusiasms have come and gone, passions have waxed and waned.
You’ll recall that I’d completed five marathons in 1981, along with thirty-five shorter races, and that within a year I’d quit racing entirely. And, while we never deliberately abandoned the Buffalo hunt, it had pretty much stalled out by the time we moved back to New York in 1990. Our lives had changed, we weren’t driving around much and in fact no longer owned a car, and after the Spanish walk we found ourselves more interested in adding new countries than unearthing new Buffalos. We had just picked up Andorra and Portugal, and in the years that followed we spent a good deal of time traveling, and reached some fairly remote parts of the planet.
Sometimes walking was involved. We spent two weeks with my three daughters on an escorted walking tour of Tuscany, with our bags transported from inn to inn and each day’s walk interrupted by a splendid picnic lunch that would materialize magically in front of us when we rounded a bend in the path. Another walking tour on another summer, with a daughter and a granddaughter in tow, consisted of more rigorous hiking in the Alps, and added Switzerland and Liechtenstein to our country list.
A couple of years before that, in 1993, I was thinking about taking another crack at the Camino. I’d go by myself, and I’d cross the Pyrenees in September, and I figured I could cover the route in five or six weeks. But I had time to mull it over, and before I booked a flight or went shopping for a better backpack, I realized with a mixture of relief and regret that I didn’t really want to go. I didn’t much like the idea of being away from Lynne for that long, and the more I pictured myself sleeping in refugios and foraging for bocadillos de queso, the less appealing the prospect became. And, dammit, I’d been there and I’d done that, and maybe once was enough. Either it wouldn’t be as I remembered it, in which case I’d resent the changes, or it would be exactly the same—so why go through it all over again?
IT’S NOT AS though I let my legs atrophy after we flew home from Lisbon. A New Yorker typically walks a couple of miles a day without giving it much thought. That’s how one gets around, and it’s why Lynne, without any advance preparation, was able to acquit herself capably as a peregrino.
I continued to go to the gym, though my attendance was inconsistent; sometimes I got there three times a week, and sometimes it was more like three times a month. Gyms come and go, and when mine closed it sometimes took me a while to find another and join it.
At one point Lynne responded to some pretty broad hints and bought me a stair climber. We installed it in my office, an apartment two flights up from our residence, and I used it daily at first, the way everybody does who gets one, and then I stopped—like everybody else. When I tried to get back to it, the machine sputtered and quit working, and it was easier to use it as an extra clothes rack than to find somebody who’d make a house call and fix it. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a garage, or it would be there to this day, but instead we found a building employee who was willing to take it off our hands. I suppose he fixed it up and sold it, or else it’s in his garage, because I haven’t noticed that he looks any fitter for owning it.
At the gym, I mostly worked with weights, but now and then I’d hop on a treadmill and work up a sweat for twenty minutes or so. I would walk, to save my knees, and my gait was a racewalker’s, with my arms swinging at my sides. I couldn’t do this without being reminded of the year when I’d been a marathoner, but I never gave any thought to returning to those golden days.
If I’d thought about it, I probably would have told you it was impossible. I’d been having a little trouble with my feet lately, and my right foot in particular tended to go partially numb now and then, and to ache from time to time. Sometimes I’d be walking along on the street and I’d get sharp pains in my foot; they’d bother me for a while, and then they’d go away.
A doctor told me it probably had something to do with my sciatic nerve, and that I should try stretchin
g. That’s not what it was, and while stretching didn’t do me any harm, neither did it do any good. I didn’t know what was wrong, and didn’t really want to find out. I got on the Internet and read about intermittent claudication and diabetic neuropathy, and the symptoms sounded about right, but I didn’t think either of those was what I had.
And it wasn’t that bad. My foot would feel a little numb and tingly in the morning, but that passed as the day wore on. And I was still doing what I always did, and getting around as much as ever. All it really meant was that my marathoning days were over, but they’d been over for years, and I didn’t really miss them. And it probably meant, too, that I wouldn’t be able to walk the Camino again, but I’d already decided I didn’t want to do that, either.
Well, hell, I was getting older. I was past sixty. Pretty soon I’d be lucky if I could walk at all. Or remember how to find my way home.
MY ELDEST GRANDDAUGHTER, Sara Reichel, has a pronounced and longstanding affinity for penguins. Accordingly, in December of 2001 Lynne and I celebrated Sara’s bat mitzvah by taking her and her Aunt Jill to Antarctica, to see her totem animal in its natural habitat.
Then in the spring of 2004 I was scanning the Earthwatch catalog. That worthy organization provides opportunities for volunteer travel in aid of some environmental goal; for a not-too-steep fee, one might join an expedition to count the endangered red pandas in the Trobriand Islands, or distribute free flyswatters in a malarial swamp, or build a dam somewhere to take the burden off the beavers. Lynne and I had been getting their catalogs for years, and had reluctantly begun to conclude that we just weren’t sufficiently high-minded to sign up for one of their trips; if only we were better human beings, we’d be eager to inoculate villagers in the Cameroun against dengue fever instead of, say, knocking back on a cruise of the South Pacific. But I always made myself take a quick look through the catalog before throwing it out—I felt it was the least I could do—and the next thing I knew I’d signed up Sara and myself to rescue penguins in South Africa.
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