The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

  The first arrow points to a second arrow which points to a third and they all point up. The entire Camino will be marked with yellow arrows, here to Santiago, painted on road signs and guardrails and rocks. So we drift, all of us, like seeds clumped and floating in the wind, through woods and along switchbacking roads that would be wide enough for cars to pass if there were any cars. The woods and the roads open at last into a vast and rolling expanse of sheep-scattered fields, under a hill-hemmed sky all shot with light.

  I shade my eyes and squint and try to see. I tell an Austrian carrying devil’s sticks that the dark patches far up a distant hilltop are sheep. He disagrees. He thinks they are rocks. We make a bet, but neither of us is willing to walk up the hill to settle it, so instead we sit companionably on the side of the road near a pile of boots and eat the omelet sandwiches Jacques’s wife packed us this morning. The sandwiches are good, soft egg and chewy bread, and there is the simple pleasure of using a body and then nourishing it. The pile of boots is also a pile of socks and trinkets, offerings heaped at the feet of a statue of Mary, the Virgin of Orisson. She is blue and white and crowned and holding Jesus, and she stands at the far end of a rock outcropping, silhouetted against the valley below.

  The vista is uncanny. Cypress-studded peaks and sweeping fields beneath a brilliant sky. All the clustered roofs of the small farms tiled red, each curving shingle like a flowerpot sliced lengthwise. We might as well have walked up the road and into a Chagall painting. In its way, it feels as imaginary as St. Jean. “My priest says to me that when I fly to St. Jean, my soul would take a few days to catch up,” says the Austrian, and as we sit and eat and talk in this borderland, the brown winter woods of Georgia ebb at last for a space of time. My camera case is affixed to the front of one shoulder strap. I let my fingers trail over it like water. There comes upon me a weird peace I do not wholly trust, though it occurs to me fleetingly that, rather, I might not wholly trust myself.

  “Yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery, and today a gift—that is why it is called the present!” chirps the Mystical Manual.

  I sigh and stuff the Manual in a side pocket.

  I am trying to pretend I haven’t been fighting memory all morning.

  There is a place in Georgia where another trail begins. A mountaintop where a metal plaque is set into stone “for those who seek fellowship with the wilderness.” Near it, a small swipe of white paint adorns a boulder. The first white blaze or the last, depending on your bearings or desires; one end of a long line of blazes inked onto stone, soaked into creviced bark, stretching from here to a mountain in Maine. Each end is as arbitrary as the other, the status of both mountains merely the byproduct of years of civic squabbling. Nevertheless, between them a seam of painted beacons lights the way, sending travelers up a root-stubbled trail narrow as shoulders, winding brown and bare through barer trees.

  Behind every yellow arrow, this is what I see.

  The open blueness of the summer sky turns branch-latticed and dark.

  Over these undulating hills false summits spread like nesting dolls un-nested.

  June is part March.

  Northern Georgia is here in southern France, and no one knows it but me.

  We rise, and walk, and pass a wayside cross, and the track turns to rough grass. Another set of footsteps falls in beside me. Another pilgrim, a blond Lithuanian who’s already been walking for weeks. Hello hello yes and where are you from and when did you start and why and nice to meet you.

  “I like scary things,” says the Lithuanian.

  “Oh?” I say.

  “It’s easy to scare people,” he says.

  “Ah,” I say.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” he says.

  “Probably not,” I say.

  “You should,” he says, sanguine.

  “Oh?” Why isn’t the Austrian saying anything.

  “If you believe in ghosts, you won’t be scared of them,” he says.

  I decide a logical analysis is best skirted at this juncture.

  “If you believe in ghosts, people will be scared of you and leave you alone,” he says.

  That would provide incentive.

  “My ex-wife, she sleep with me, she go to mental hospital,” says the Lithuanian. Apropos of nothing. “All women, they sleep with me, they go to mental hospital.”

  The Austrian is looking straight ahead. I school my expression placid.

  “You don’t believe me, you can try,” the Lithuanian adds, a smirk playing on his lips.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say.

  I reach the Spanish border ten or fifteen minutes later.

  In this moment, as I stand on the dividing line between what has happened and what has not yet happened, the things I do not know are legion.

  I do not know that I’ll see neither Dutch Mary nor the redhead again after today.

  Nor do I know that the tall Irish girl from last night, whom I haven’t been thinking much about, will turn out to be a central character.

  I don’t know that my old injury will flare five days from now, nor that for the rest of the journey the only way I will be able to walk without intense pain will be to hire a taxi each day to drive my bag up the road, and I will feel like I am cheating.

  I don’t truly understand how many people I will talk to. I will see them walk, and I will see them invest their walks with meaning. They will be seeking some kind of clarity or epiphany or inspiration. They will be trying to get over deaths, betrayals, losses, addictions, neuroses, impossible standards, immeasurable sadness.

  In six weeks’ time I will reach the Praza do Obradoiro in Santiago.

  I will find no epiphanies waiting for me there.

  Yet I will have a momentary wave of a wholly unexpected sadness, not at the square itself but a moment earlier, as I am rounding the corner and I get my first glimpse of the cathedral, that ancient worn stone building with moss growing up its spires and its carvings weather-worn, that building so many people have spent so much time over so many centuries trying to reach. Something bittersweet.

  Perhaps this will be because first love always has a certain irreplicable quality. More likely, it will be because I will have come to question the entire notion of epiphany; or, at least, of imputing transformative capacities to particular places. I will have come to believe that to move on from our griefs, we’ve got no one to look to but ourselves. That miracles are always of our own making. Which will give me a spare and windy feeling, like some great northern wasteland, stones and snow and empty space. Something freeing, but lonely. And so I will be moved watching a young Italian couple walk into the square together holding hands, and knowing that whatever meaning their journeys held for them, they took those journeys together.

  This trip will not give me what I want of it, but it will give me something else.

  In this moment I know none of this.

  It’s the problem of inheriting a script but no cast list or stage directions. We’re left guessing at our costars, at the contours of our set. We never know where our attention should be focused. Or how to wrestle all the lurking ghosts of our former selves and our persistent loves. All of it: the problem and the blessing of the present tense.

  In this moment I am only standing on the border, which might better be called the frontière or the frontera depending on the direction you are facing and the landscape you are leaving behind, but 778 kilometers from Santiago regardless, distance being distance, howsoever named.

  In St. Jean half the signs were in Basque, full of Zs and Xes and Ks, so that merely reading them made the tongue tingle, as if with a mouthful of bees. When you do not speak Basque, to see all these signs written in a language isolate, a tongue with no familial connections, might lull you into false security: thinking that in your own idiom, you are never so alone. This comfort is illusory. Keep staring at the signs and they will, without changing, change before you. They will turn wry. As if we didn’t each in our way already speak a private isolate; a
s if we weren’t all forever failing to comprehend one another anyway. As if this failure weren’t the deepest source of a dream of uncommon understanding.

  Fall to silence, then, as you walk up through the mountains and out of France. Watch, instead, your own body. Your knees as they flex, your calves as they tighten. Your shoulders and hips where they bear the load of an unfamiliar and turtling weight. Adjust your gait to a newly centered gravity. Stop to tape the red beginnings of a blistered heel, that peculiar heated sting. Swallow water in long icy draughts, and feel the measured contractions of its cold slide from throat to belly. When you begin to walk again, notice the stretch of your stride. Try to re-inhabit yourself, muscle and shell and sinew, quick and red and alive.

  What is easily forgotten: that speech, too, is of the body. The rhythm of hard breath changes all the sounds on your lips. This is not so different from the moment when you move your body past a carved stone marker and Ronceveaux turns to Roncesvalles. Once, long ago, a roi and a rey drew lines on a map and said: here is where one land will become another. And a long line of barbed wire. And now basque turns to el basco. When the language you speak fades into the language you do not speak, even the words for what is strange are strange.

  El basco itself, however, lies calm across this bright high borderland, a changeless strangeness no matter on which side of the line your body falls. This is still Basque country. Zs and Xes and Ks will still buzz and swish and clack across shop signs for days, before they begin to fade.

  Who is to say where one story ends and another begins?

  Jessica Wilson is a native Northeasterner currently living in the Midwest while scheming ways to travel to the opposite side of the globe. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and is working on a memoir about landscape, performance, and long-distance walking trails. Her work has appeared in Alligator Juniper, the Daily Palette, Glimpse Magazine, the Seneca Review Online, and New Fairy Tales. Between St. Jean Pied de Port and Santiago, she also managed to a) accidentally flood a Spanish pilgrim hostel; b) become an unintentional model for a persistent Portuguese guy intent on photographing her feet; and c) meet a man on a horse who believed himself to be the last surviving Knight Templar.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Every book is a cooperative effort, but an anthology takes this premise to the next level. I literally couldn’t have done it alone. First and foremost, thanks to the several hundred women who submitted stories this year—you are truly the reason this book exists. My heartfelt gratitude goes to the Travelers’ Tales’ dream team: James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger, and Sean O’Reilly, for steadfast encouragement, guidance, perspicacity, and good humor. Natalie Baszile: you are uncommonly patient, infinitely supportive, and utterly marvelous, and I feel privileged to know you and work with you. For generous amounts of feedback and support, my love and gratitude go to Dan Prothero, Dolly Spalding, Erica Hilton, Lynn Bruni, Kimberley Lovato, Jen Castle, Elizabeth Barrett, and Anthony Weller. Thank you also to Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Don George, Phil Cousineau, Jim Benning, Rolf Potts, Jeffrey Tayler, Laura Deutsch, Lucy McCauley, and Jaime Clarke for spreading the word and recommending travel stories. Finally, thanks to all you readers out there. You mean the world to us.

  “Lost and Liberated” by Kimberley Lovato first appeared on Gadling.com, May 27, 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Kimberley Lovato.

  “The Runaway” by Ann Hood first appeared in MORE Magazine August 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Ann Hood.

  “Bridge on the Border” by Molly Beer published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Molly Beer.

  “Twenty Years and Counting” by Marcia DeSanctis first appeared in Town & Country Fall/Winter 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Marcia DeSanctis.

  “Learning to Pray” by Angie Chuang published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Angie Chuang.

  “Beneath the Surface” by Lucy McCauley published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Lucy McCauley.

  “Storming the Castles” by Susan Orlean first published in Bicycling magazine November, 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Susan Orlean.

  “Riverdance” by Laurie Weed published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Laurie Weed.

  “What We Do After Gunfire” by Jocelyn Edelstein published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Jocelyn Edelstein.

  “Sidecar Sally” by Carrie Visintainer published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Carrie Visintainer.

  “Taking the Oars” by Bridget Crocker published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Bridget Crocker.

  “Root-Bound” by Marcy Gordon published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Marcy Gordon.

  “Of Monarchs and Men in in Michoacán” by Meera Subramanian published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Meera Subramanian.

  “A Thousand Simple Steps” by Amber Kelly-Anderson published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Amber Kelly-Anderson.

  “The Kiwi Hunt” by Jennifer Rose Smith published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Rose Smith.

  “The Threadbare Rope” by Carol Reichert published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Carol Reichert.

  “Climbing Vaea” by Catherine Watson first appeared on World Hum, October 6, 2010. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2010 by Catherine Watson.

  “The International Expiration Date” by Sarah Katin published with permission from the author. Copyright 2012 by Sarah Katin.

  “Our Own Apocalypse Now” by Haley Sweetland Edwards first appeared on Wrold Hun, March 7, 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Haley Sweetland Edwards.

  “I Think I Must Be Beautiful” by Blair Braverman published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Blair Braverman.

  “Passion and Pizza” from the forthcoming title Driving Hungry, by Layne Mosler. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “Bones Surfacing in the Dirt” by Lauren Quinn first appeared on Matador.com, August 2, 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Lauren Quinn.

  “Mare’s Milk, Mountain Bikes, Meteors & Mammaries” by Kirsten Koza published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Kirsten Koza.

  “Letting Go on the Ganges” by Kristin Zibell published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Kristin Zibell.

  “Birthright” by Emily Matchar first appeared in Perceptive Travel, February 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Emily Matchar.

  “Spiral-Bound” by Kate McCahill first appeared on Numero Cinq 2010. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2010 by Kate McCahill.

  “Meat and Greet” by Abbie Kozolchyk published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Abbie Kozolchyk.

  “Death and Love in Kenya” by Anena Hansen published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Anena Hansen.

  “Dance of the Spider Women,” by Laura Fraser first appeared in AFAR Magazine July/August 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Laura Fraser

  “On the Macal” by Mary Jo McConahay published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Mary Jo McConahay.

  “Holiday Camp” by Martha Ezell published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Martha Ezell.

  “Tongues and Arrows” by Jessica Wilson published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Jessica Wilson.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, chosen one of the best travel books of 2009 by the Los Angeles Times, and coauthor of
With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant. She also edited The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011. A regular contributor to Yoga Journal, her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary and travel publications, including Sunset magazine, Gadling, World Hum, Post Road, and Inkwell.

  She lives in San Francisco and can always be found at www.laviniaspalding.com. Visit her there to see more of her work and to read interviews with the authors from The Best Women’s Travel Writing series.