The Best Women's Travel Writing (30 page)

I do not fill out the questionnaire.

What I know is this: I want something from this walk I don't believe it can give me.

At the end of town, beyond a stone bridge that caps the river in a neat curve, the yellow arrows begin. They begin without fanfare, recommencing after an in-town hiatus. St. Jean is only one of a thousand places to start walking the Camino, which despite its name is really a network of paths lacing over Europe, all meeting in the cathedral in Santiago just as the grooves in a scallop shell come to a single point at its base. The Camino has no beginning: only an end. Somehow, still, we begin.

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; as 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.