Not Afraid of the Fall

by Kyle James

  “Nope,” I replied. “Good guess, though. You call it the Mona Pisa.”

  “Kyle, I am starving.”

  I saw the pitch and swung for the fences. “You want a piece of Pisa pizza?” I had plenty of time to think about that strikeout on my walk to McDonald’s to get some fries. When I returned, it was as if a chemical reaction had taken place. Not only was she smiling and talking again, she wasn’t mad at me anymore, either. It was like the fries had gotten her high off fatty acids and salt.

  Our next train arrived in Genoa, and my first thought when we set foot in the station was that it looked like an outdated version of Miami.

  Matteo, our next host, told us he would be waiting for us at the place, so we started the mile walk. The closer we got to our Airbnb, the cooler the city became. We became confused when Google Maps led us between two castle towers. After asking someone if this was the right place, they told us this was just the Old Town gate. I didn’t even realize we had booked our Airbnb in Old Town. Hell, I didn’t know anything about this Airbnb; Ash had booked it.

  Matteo was a nice Italian guy in his midthirties. He acted like we were old friends when he saw us approaching the building. Sometimes this sort of thing is annoying, but he did it in an endearing way. He led us up the stairs to his top-floor apartment, taking Ash’s backpack with him.

  It was a studio with a great bathroom, futon, fully equipped kitchen, and an abstract porch in the shape of a triangle overlooking Genoa. As soon as we entered the quaint little studio, Matteo opened up a bottle of wine, unwrapped some fresh focaccia, and showed us maps of the city. Once we finished the bottle, he headed out with a “Ciao,” and told us to e-mail him if we needed any help.

  What a great first impression. We were easily won over with the bread and wine. At the end of a long day of travel, arguing, screaming kids, and silent-Ash, wine and focaccia was exactly what I needed. We made ourselves at home and got some to-go pasta and more wine from the restaurant directly below our place. We were Genoans for the next week.

  8/12/15

  Genoa, Italy

  The futon, which took up the entire room when laid flat, was surprisingly comfortable. In the past, I would have frowned upon having to sleep on a small futon with Ash that I myself could barely fit on. However, my standards on sleeping conditions had dropped dramatically since we’d started our journey. From hot to cold bedrooms, hard beds to soft, my body was learning to treat sleep as a necessity rather than a luxury.

  With our coffee jitters in full force, we rappelled down the mountain of stairs, landed safely in the streets of the Old Town, and set off in search of focaccia. Ever since that little taste we’d gotten from Matteo, we couldn’t stop thinking about the herb-touched Italian bread.

  Twenty yards from Matteo’s place was a small focaccia shop equipped with a little woman and a large oven. We chatted with the woman, who turned out to be the owner. Her family had been making focaccia in that exact spot for 150 years.

  “Well, what do you suggest we get to eat?” Ash asked sweetly. This was her I’m trying to make friends voice.

  “Well,” the woman said, elongating the l. “Have you ever had focaccia before?”

  “Nope, and we just got to Genoa yesterday!” Ash replied, sneaking in a little white lie.

  The woman went on to suggest all her favorites, and we ordered three large slices: ham and cheese, tomato and mozzarella, and her personal favorite, onion and garlic. She threw them back in the oven to warm them up and took out a huge pan of regular focaccia she had just finished baking.

  Her focaccia had a texture that was a mix between pita bread and pizza dough, yet it was fluffy like a croissant but with fewer flakes and more consistency. We packed up the three breakfast treats and promised to see her tomorrow. It looked like we’d found our new local spot.

  Matteo recommended we visit Boccadasse, a small neighborhood on the eastern side of Genoa. He told us we could walk the three miles if wanted, but advised taking the city bus that left from Brignole station. We were getting burned out on long walking, and the obscene amounts of bread sitting in our stomachs made this decision easy.

  The Sarzano/Sant’Agostino metro was only a hundred yards away from our place. It looked like a wide phone booth that happened to have a stairwell inside. We began our descent, expecting to travel two flights at most. I felt my ears pop after the fifth flight. Why did this thing need to be in the lower mantle?

  We finally came to an empty one-track station. Fifteen minutes later we were on the verge of leaving, when we felt a soft rumble beneath our feet. A gentle glow began to evolve in the tunnel, and eventually the train came rolling into the stop. I had a feeling there was only one train down here that continuously looped the eight stops.

  Two stops and five short minutes later, we were at the Brignole station. We headed aboveground and approached the number 31 bus. The driver was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the side of the bus.

  “Sir, how much is a bus ticket? I asked, expecting to pay a few dollars.

  He checked his watch and responded, “Un minuto,” and then walked away to put out his cigarette. We boarded the bus—we would just cross that bridge when we needed to pay. We jumped out at the closest stop to Boccadasse on our maps and walked into the village without paying. The bridge had never presented itself.

  Boccadasse was made up of brightly colored buildings that huddled around the water like cold campers around a fire. We walked through alleys and past restaurants we couldn’t afford, and to the rocks jutting out over the sea, only to join some locals sunbathing and swimming.

  The water was nowhere near as clear as in Croatia, but we were hot from all the walking and took turns taking dips. One of us had to watch our backpack. For some reason, as Ash backstroked in the water, a random rush of guilt/panic washed over me.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, and instead of advancing my career or doing something productive, I was watching my girlfriend frolic in the Mediterranean Sea in Italy. I could not shake this constant pull on my conscience. It was like the devil-horned Kyle on my right shoulder had shown up and said, “What are you doing here right now? It’s a fucking Wednesday, dude. You might as well start applying for jobs now, because it will be years before you will convince someone to hire your lazy ass ever again.”

  Then out popped the angel Kyle on my left shoulder: “Don’t listen to that asshole; why are you so worried about working? You think jobs are going anywhere? You are twenty-six, have great work experience, an education, and now a great story to tell. You are happy in this moment right now, and that is what life is all about—being happy, living in the moment, not working oneself to death. Nothing is promised in life.”

  You both make good points, I thought. Thanks for the advice, guys. Despite convincing myself in Croatia that we had made the right decision, I was still torn two and a half months into the trip. Well, there was nothing I could do about it right then; it was my turn to swim in the Mediterranean and Ash’s turn to watch our backpack.

  8/13/15

  Genoa, Italy

  The sunlight that ventured into our studio ran full speed into my vulnerable eyelids and woke me up around 8:30 a.m. I wanted to go back to sleep, but my stomach made an angry noise that sounded like “FAA-CAH-SHAAA.” I rolled carefully out of our futon so as not to wake Ash, with the intention of grabbing breakfast, but without a single movement, I heard a muffled pillow voice say, “Are you going to get focaccia?” She knew me all too well. I pulled my shorts up, and they felt tighter than usual.

  “Ash, did you shrink my shorts? They feel tight,” I asked, sure that was the case.

  “Kyle, we haven’t used a dryer since Rome,” she replied.

  “Yeah, but we have had washers?” I replied, and received a blank stare. This was the day I learned that drying clothes was how you shrunk them.

  We walked to the little woman’s focaccia shop and walked in eagerly to see her moving bread in and out of the oven. When she turned to see u
s enter, she lit up like a lightbulb and said, “You were right! I did see you tomorrow!”

  The reason we came to Genoa was not for focaccia or Boccadasse; we came here because we wanted to go to Cinque Terre. We couldn’t afford to stay in the places in the five villages, but Genoa was only a short train away. We ventured down to the popular Porto Antico area to find out firsthand when we could visit the colorful villages.

  When we got to the neighborhood by the port, it felt like we were in an Italian area of Berlin. The walls of every building were smothered with the graffiti of talented artists. We spent the first hour in Porto Antico walking around and taking pictures of our favorite graffiti. The art tour led us straight to the kiosks for whale watching. The tour guide told us to check the visitor center around the corner for ferry tickets. We found that taking a train to Cinque Terre would be far cheaper than a ferry, and we headed home.

  Exhausted from the hike back to the Old Town, we grabbed a table at a restaurant near our place and exhaled deeply. This was our idea of a hard day: a long walk down to the pier to find out how to take the ferry to Cinque Terre, and a long walk back. In our defense, it was ninety-seven degrees out, and the humidity was intense. But it was still embarrassing that we were this tired. I could sense Ash was getting restless, and the fact that we couldn’t go to Cinque Terre today had put her down in the dumps.

  I think the real problem with Ash was we were over halfway done with our trip and stuck in Genoa for four more days. We didn’t fly out of Rome until the twentieth, and could only afford a few days in Venice with the prices of their Airbnbs, so we had booked six days in Genoa to save money. This was our first big booking mistake. We both wished we were back in Siena, drinking wine in the Tuscan fields. With a lack of things to do here, our growing exhaustion from traveling, and the depressing fact that we were leaving Europe soon, Ash was not feeling good. I couldn’t blame her.

  8/14/15

  Genoa, Italy

  Matteo made us promise him that we would check out a view of Genoa from a lookout above the city. As we walked through alleys at sea level, I was trying to figure out how we were going to have a view of the city, in the city. When we were 0.3 miles away and still on flat ground, I was certain we had put the wrong place into Google Maps. That was until we spotted the incline ahead of us zigzagging up a massive hill in the middle of the city.

  By the time we climbed up and back down, Ash was not feeling good. It wasn’t that she was sick; she was ashamed by our conditioning.

  She turned to me, her face uneasy, and said, “Kyle, that hike this morning was a hell of a wake-up call.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I could have kept sleeping too. We can think about that for tomorrow,” I replied, clearly misinterpreting the idiom.

  “No, baby, I feel out of shape and have no energy.”

  This was probably the part where I was supposed to reassure her that we were not out of shape and that she looked great, but for some reason all that came out of my mouth was, “Yeah, baby, we are definitely out of shape.”

  We agreed to eat groceries tonight for the first time since Croatia. We had been so engulfed in the Italian food culture that we had been blowing up our budget and BMIs. As we walked to the market, a distant rumbling alerted us to an oncoming storm. An afternoon thunderstorm, a five-dollar bottle of Prosecco, a five-dollar bottle of Chianti, and healthy cereal sounded like our idea of the perfect evening.

  We spent the rest of the day indulging in the activities that most Millennials would during a rainstorm: perusing social media, chatting with friends, and drinking cheap wine. The Prosecco wasn’t bad, but the Chianti clearly showed her price. Tomorrow we were going to make Cinque Terre our bitch.

  8/15/15

  Genoa, Italy → Cinque Terre, Italy

  I was awakened by Ash rummaging through her toiletry bag. There was a distinct sound of makeup mirrors and lipstick cartridges colliding. Although she rarely wore makeup anymore, she kept the touch-up gear handy, just in case. I was blinking rapidly in an attempt to gain my morning vision and find my phone. My phone had become life support at this point in the trip; frankly, it was the only way of connecting to the world we once knew in America. Squinting to avoid the light of the blinding screen, I scrolled through the news of yesterday.

  As I finished reading the news on my phone, I noticed Ash was putting on her thermal leggings as if we were going snowboarding back in Denver. “Why the layers?” I asked through a cracked voice, my vocal cords still getting warmed up.

  “Cinque Terre only has a high of seventy degrees, with storms possible all day,” she proclaimed, a bit surprised I was awake. Cinque Terre was our destination, and quite honestly, it was the place Ash had been looking forward to most on this trip. I had followed a few travel blogs since our trip had begun to find ideas for places to visit, and this string of five multicolored villages on the rugged coast of Italy was a common top destination, especially for women. I don’t know if it’s from a chick-flick movie or if it just rolls off the tongue well, but Cinque Terre was the Pumpkin Spice Latte of Italian destinations, and suffice to say, Ash was pumped.

  We strapped on our boots, packed our rain jackets, journal, and snacks, and hit the streets of Genoa in search of one of the city’s eight subway stations. We wanted to arrive by 9:00 a.m., but the Italian railway websites tended to be—how should I put this?—ambiguous. The trains very rarely arrived at the time the website proclaimed. We had no itinerary today other than to hike between the five villages, so we took the metro to the train station and asked the clerk when the next train left for Cinque Terre. “One hour,” the clerk replied, handing us our tickets. We headed to platform 9 to wait.

  As we sat there, I noticed menacing clouds approaching. The cumulonimbus cotton candy heading our way was worrisome. I stated to Ash, who was behind me, “Looks like a tornado is coming.” I turned around to see she was busy making friends with a nice Italian woman and her five-year-old daughter, and that she had not heard me.

  I am obsessed with storms and admittedly had become the “boy who cried funnel cloud” a bit too frequently. Every time I saw dark clouds, I convinced myself (and those around me) that a tornado was on the verge of dropping out of the sky.

  This obsession began when I was a young boy in Michigan, a place where tornadoes are fairly common. I will never forget the eerie sound of the citywide siren that warned the residents of Ann Arbor to seek shelter or risk being taken to Oz. When the alarm sounded, my mom would rush my brother, my sister, and me to the basement, and then run upstairs and outside to see if she could see the tornado. It was rather traumatizing at the time, because as a child, you assume every tornado is going to pass right on top of your house, but as I grew up, I realized she was just as intrigued by the weather phenomenon as I was.

  Our train arrived, and we took our seats on the right side of the cabin so we would have a view of the coast as we headed south. These are things we had learned to think about: there is nothing worse than missing the Italian coastal scenery because you sat on the side of the train that stares into the dirt on a hill. I sat and watched the calm water as the storm’s clouds now covered the sea like a dark-blue blanket. I noticed a small spiral dipping down from the thin strip of cloud working across the water. Suddenly, there was some sort of twirling splash coming from the sea directly below the funneling cloud. I am no tornado expert (don’t tell Ash), but I believe this is how a dangerous storm begins. No one else on the train seemed to notice, as everyone was entranced by the screens in front of them. I continued to watch, on the edge of my seat, until at last the moment I had been waiting for my whole life happened: the top and bottom swirls combined, and the tornado formed. I suppose it is technically a waterspout, but tomato, tornado.

  I frantically awoke Ash and pointed at the beautiful funnel cloud dancing across the Mediterranean. The rest of the train’s passengers must have heard my excitement when I woke her up because the cabin erupted in gasps as everyone noticed the cyclone. We watched
as the waterspout matured and went through waterspout puberty, quickly picking up water and stumbling over its new feet. Soon it had become rather large, and a few passengers were growing visibly concerned. Our train passed through a tunnel, and I waited eagerly for us to emerge, my face glued to the window. I had the equivalent of a runner’s high at this point.

  We flew out of the tunnel, and the cute little waterspout had become a massive tornado. I didn’t care if it was scientifically referred to as a waterspout; this was a full-blown tornado, and it looked ready to demolish anything in its path. It had grown four times as large, and the entire train erupted in cries of both excitement and fear at the sight of the twirling beast. With my personal storm-chasing expertise, I concluded that we had gone from an F1 to an F2 storm. I assume that scale simply means we were twice as effed as before.

  A large ferry sat in the Mediterranean, directly in the path of the oncoming twister. People started murmuring in Italian, and although my Italian was a bit rusty, I thought they were saying something along the lines of: “Go faster, boat. Go faster!” I was staring at the boat, fearing for the crew’s safety. Suddenly I realized I had tunnel vision. No, not on the ferry—we literally were in another tunnel, and I was staring into blackness. When we emerged, we had no view of the storm. We had turned around a peninsula and had lost sight of the boat and the tornado. We would never know what happened to that boat or that storm, but my day—hell, rather my trip—had been made.

  I had forgotten the tornado was not why we’d boarded the train, and we arrived in the southernmost of the five villages, Riomaggiore. We stepped off the train, my hands still shaking with adrenaline. We, along with everyone else, were looking for some sort of direction. We knew we wanted to hike, but first we had to find the trail. I walked into the info center and asked the woman there how to hike to the next village, Manarola.