What You Get From Far Away

At first, the aloneness is oppressive. The distance between here and Santiago, though a mere fraction of the total distance I have walked, stretches in front of me like an overworked muscle. It is the last third of this Camino. My friends and I had made it through the Basque Country and its abusively beautiful seaside cliffs, Cantabria and its thunderstorms over aquamarine lagoons, and Asturias, land of dry cider, rolling hills, and chewing cows. And now I am here, under a tree on the side of a gravel path, having crossed over two days ago into green, lush Galicia.

Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction

My shower curtain is a world map. A clear plastic thing with colorful blobs of continents. Tiny Europe, with its speckles of blue and green and pink. Expansive Russia, all one shade. The rainbow spray of islands in the Pacific.

When I take a shower, I see the world and its labels from behind. Spain becomes niapS. Argentina is anitnegrA. The tiny Netherlands, nearly all water, has a name too big to fit on its allotted plastic droplet, so it is abbreviated: hteN. It almost sounds like Dutch. I spell it forwards in my head, and back. I touch the tip of my index finger to the plastic, dragging it from Amsterdam, across right on the clear space of ocean, down over Newfoundland and Quebec, New York, soaring over my parents in my hometown at the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana tri-state, across the plains and corners and expansive lands to Arizona, where I am putting off grading, using too much hot water, and thinking about airplanes.

When I look at the line I just made, I have to hold my arms apart, fingers on either endpoint, to measure the distance. About a foot and a half. Such a profoundly tiny representation of those 8,496 kilometers.

I wipe the line away.

—

My mother is from Northern Kentucky, right across the Ohio river from Cincinnati, where she returned after marrying my father, and where I was later born and raised. My father is from Dunmore, Pennsylvania, near Scranton of The Office fame, deep in anthracite coal country. They met when they were students at Union College, a small Methodist school in a dry Kentucky county not far from the border of Tennessee. By then, my mother was a morally upright sophomore who had, for most of her life, planned to join the United Methodist ministry and was a member of a fellowship group nicknamed the “God Squad.” My father, on the other hand, was a senior studying biology, and was a member of a fraternity that existed primarily to protest other fraternities. (To hear my mother tell it, they were known for their drinking habits.) The distance between them has always been immense.

My mother tells the story of the day she first met my father. “He walked into that class with his long hippie hair, wearing no shoes,” she laughs. “And I thought, what a loser.”

My father finds this story equally funny.

“She’s right,” he says. “But then I realized I had to grow up and get a job. So I found some shoes and cut my hair.”

They started dating two weeks before my father graduated, and my mother was left to finish her studies. She thought she’d never see him again.

But then the letters started coming. And the phone calls. And the trips–sometimes weekly–that my father took from Pennsylvania back down to Kentucky on the weekends to visit her. She, at the other end of the highway, was worth the distance.

My mother is honest to a fault. My father is smooth on the surface. My mother is introspection tinged with a certain kind of heaviness. My father is dad jokes. My mother is making. My father is tinkering. My mother is faith. My father is a Sunday newspaper. My mother is Christmas, and repeated traditions. My father is electric vehicles.

Fifty years later, and there is still a distance between them.

—

There is a searing pain in my right achilles tendon. It’s been there for weeks now, bubbling behind the scenes, only now bursting into blossoms of unavoidable pain. I am on the Camino Primitivo, in the Spanish province of Galicia, and I am, for the time being, alone.

In the beginning of this hike, I had two companions: Monica, my best friend, who until recently was living in Spain, and Jasmine, the massage therapist from Saskatchewan we met on the first day, who had all of the best stories about friends who slept with celebrities and weddings in England gone horribly wrong. Her tales made the miles fly. But now Jasmine is gone, having left for a trip to Ireland. And Monica–having had a panic attack on the side of a claustrophobically foggy mountain–has left me too, and I am alone, and walking towards Santiago for the second time in three years.

The sun stares down at me. I thought I would be in Lugo by now. Today is the first day that I haven’t seen a single other hiker on the trail. The only people I have talked to so far have been the woman on her balcony in Castroverde who told me the supermercado was straight ahead, and the cashier at said supermercado (which was not at all, as it turned out, straight ahead). But I like it this way, I am realizing. I have my peaches and my chocolate and my podcasts. I like the soft muddy paths running along stone fences marking the edges of farms, and the trails meandering through tall oaks, and even the gravel on the sides of the highways. I like this European version of solitude: signs of humanity; minimal humans.

But I’m getting tired now. I need to rest my leg. I pull out my guidebook and find the right map, tracing a fingertip to estimate the distance left from here to the city of Lugo, where I plan to take a much-needed rest day. I’m thinking in kilometers now. Measuring in Spanish and celsius now. Less than a 5K, I think. I eat a leftover granola bar. Massage my screaming heel. Stretch my calves. Look up at the sky.

Across the path and fence and farm, the cielo is a perfect open blue. There is one cloud, a marshmallowy wonder, sitting catlike atop the stand of trees a few hundred meters away. It is not the scenery of the Camino del Norte, which I had been hiking before dropping down to catch the Primitivo in Oviedo a few weeks ago. The Norte was belligerent. Every second of uphill coastline drifted near a shale cliff reaching a bony arm out to sea. Seagulls flew overhead and the winds whipped through grasses leaning out over the open space of ocean. This Primitivo beauty, though, this farmland moment outside of Lugo, is less dramatic. Less obviously different from home. As I watch it, something about the green fields, the cows and the fences, starts to remind me of sticky summer afternoons in Kentucky: meandering along creeks and licking melting orange popsicles off their plastic wrappers, tramping through pastures and fields to get back to the car at the trailhead. Maybe July is the same everywhere, I start to think, at least in the northern hemisphere. Maybe there is one line that runs through the seasons and across continents. The scene at this farm is not poetic or perfect or overtly foreign. But it stirs me. The summer heat sits like a shawl on my shoulders. A crow caws.

Lugo could be fifteen more kilometers, for all I care. I am here. I will get there.

—

For most of her life, my maternal grandmother stayed in one place. At nineteen she got married and moved into an apartment with her husband, my grandfather. They later relocated to a small house on a hill in Fort Thomas, Kentucky–across the driveway from the house my parents lived in until I was four. My grandmother lived there until my grandfather died a few years before I was born. She had four children, and as far as I know, she never regretted this fact. But part of me believes she became truly free when she was widowed.

Before my grandfather died, he and my grandmother started weathering the winter on the Gulf coast of Texas, in a community of snowbirds. Even after his death in 1989, she didn’t stop going. At first, it was just for the season. But the sunshine seeped into her, and soon she was only living in Northern Kentucky, with my parents and me, in the summers. She never learned how to drive, but she always found a way to get around: she married twice more after her first husband died, each time choosing a man with a driver’s license, his vehicle of choice usually being an ostentatious white barge of a car. When her driver wasn’t available, or perhaps when she wanted to go somewhere on her own, she unabashedly drove her red tricycle to the grocery store. Or, if she was having a particularly playful day, she roller-skated.

My grandmother was not the type to talk about her feelings, at least not to me, and by the time she died at 88 from complications of kidney surgery, I was a high school sophomore with my head too far in the clouds to give much thought to the fact that I couldn’t ask her to give me her memories anymore. Now, I can’t help but wonder what the freedom of a new place felt like on her featherweight frame. I wonder if, when she flew to Texas, or pedaled to the store, or walked barefoot along the beach, she felt the same kind of urgency I feel for the trail: a paradoxical calm and yearning, the desire to know what else is out there. The love of distance.

—

The huge bag of ice is singing notes of relief into my tendon. I probably could have gone to a bar and asked them to give me some cubes, but tonight I am feeling extravagant. It’s my rest day, after all. I had spent the last fifteen hours drinking coffee, meandering the Roman walls and old churches of Lugo, and reading the rest of my book. Today I have surrounded myself with a blissful, intentional lack of motion for once. I decide that I am allowed to spend a euro on an oversized bag of ice, which I am now applying to my stretched-out heels on the floor of my hostel room. I am talking to another Camino pilgrim, whom I have just met.

He sits there across the room, shoes off, breathing out with a smile—the oceans-wide smile of the backpacker done with walking for the day. Knees up, arms circling them, one hand clasping the other wrist. He’s got blond hair, but of the same maybe-brown, maybe-red variety as mine, and facial hair that is not quite scruff and not quite a beard, and glasses that, when seen up close, are obviously corrective of myopia. He looks about thirty. He sits next to a black and green Osprey backpack which, for some reason, makes me assume he is American until I hear him speak.

“We walked a little too far yesterday and today, I think,” he says. “Over 40 kilometers yesterday and 35 today.” His slightly accented English lilts like shoe soles treading softly on mossy earth.

“That’s insane.” I can’t think of anything else to say. My achilles burns just thinking about that distance. But he doesn’t even look tired. He looks radiant. It is obvious that this is not his first hike. He is comfortable. At home. Alive.

“Yeah.” He laughs. “I love a good long day, but even that was too much.”

The next morning, I catch up with him and another hiker around 10 kilometers past Lugo. We start talking. We start walking. We talk for the next week. The next month. The next three months. Seven. An ocean and most of a country sits between us. Across the kilometers, for a little while, the Camino continues.

—

I am from a place that tends to hold people—or at least to bring them back. Perched at the very northern edge of Kentucky, within the Cincinnati Metro Area, home is a little collection of deciduous hills above the muddy Ohio River. If people leave this place, they tend to return, as if pulled by some inexorable force. They like to raise their children here, it seems. And it’s a beautiful place for the business of family-raising: close to Cincinnati, good schools, four fully different seasons, cute little houses with lawns, space to roam around and play sports and live.

It never felt right to me in my youth, though. Maybe it’s because I’ve never wanted children, or because I’ve always wanted to move away, or because American suburbia makes my feet itchy. That’s why I went to college out of state when not many people around here do: I just wanted to see what was out there. And yet I’ve always been close to my family. An only child of older parents, I was never a party-goer, nor was I particularly social. I have always appreciated a quiet evening more than most raucous gatherings. But I didn’t leave because my parents held me down. I left because they encouraged me to go. They recognized the educational power of distance: stepping out of what is known.

For whatever reason, I left. And then I wanted to see more. I started in Atlanta, and then discovered everywhere else. I met people: a mentor who pushed me to go west; backpackers and climbers and outdoorists who love rocks and vans; people who need trails and mountains. I always came back, like a migratory animal swooping farther away, then returning in a wide arc, then launching out again.

When I come back, I am home and safe and grateful for it, yes. But I am also floating on a claustrophobic sea. The world stretches, the confines of what is home grown larger, to encompass more space and more places. Going back is going to comfort. Going back is going to love. Going back is cookies and familiarity and memories of warm childhood. But it is also absence, doubt, and hunger for what I might be missing in the other places that are so far away. The places that call me quietly.

—

The Praza de Obradoiro is like a magnet. Though the old city of Santiago de Compostela contains many churches and monuments and winding whitewashed streets, something about this square, this ultimate, ancient destination, always seems to pull pilgrims right back. It’s easy to get lost in the city, stumbling into a park or over a bridge. The streets are narrow and polished, with imperceptible turns that play tricks on the mind. But I have discovered, from my two times in this city, that just when I think I am lost for good, and do not recognize where I came from or where I am going, I will round a corner, and find myself back on the plaza, with the great façade of the Catedral de Santiago de Compostela looming, a beckoning branch over a field of pilgrims. I feel drawn, like a lover, towards this center of the Camino universe.

We arrive at the plaza on one last cloudy August morning, the destination we have been walking towards for hundreds of miles. We stand there and look up at the catedral. There are tears in my eyes, which I did not expect. The first time, maybe, but not the second one, too. My brain will never learn what to do with the end of the walk and the beginning of the rest.

We go to the pilgrim mass and see the swinging of the botafumeiro again—that enormous incense censer for which the cathedral is famous. Our eyes lock on the massive silver canister, swinging back and forth through the transept. It trails plumes of incense that waft up towards the vaulted ceiling. The voices of pilgrims, singing in many languages, fill the building.

Early the next morning, a group of pilgrims he had lost in his 70-kilometer two-day push rolls into the city. Though I have only met one of them before, in Lugo, the entire group welcomes me in, absorbing me in the automatic way that is second nature to long-distance hikers. We walk through the streets and drink wine at As Crechas, and later that night, we visit bar after bar while we get to know each other and talk about life. We are an odd amalgamation of personalities: the carefree, introspective Swedish girl who shares my love of sci-fi; the spirited middle-aged woman from Montana; the kind multilingual Polish man who wholeheartedly believed his ex-girlfriend would be waiting for him in Santiago (she was not); the snarky English teacher, of Polish origin, who lives in France. And the Dutch guy. And the American girl.

That night, drinking wine, laughing, prowling around the streets, we stitch ourselves into this city, into the campus stellae–the field of stars from which Santiago de Compostela derives its name. We drink and ebb and dance, until the city is almost sleeping. And then the Camino takes us once more to the square.

The cathedral façade is proudly lit. Its recent renovations glow in the black hours of the very early morning. It is raining slightly, and the cobblestones are damp as I sit, cross-legged, in the middle of the Praza de Obradoiro, looking up. I have let myself be drawn here again into its weighty orbit.

He comes and sits by me, and puts his arms around me, and we sigh into the darkness. I am drunk and sobbing, feeling the peace of the trail and the impending doom of having to leave it. It settles into my spine like a metal rod connecting me to the earth. My achilles still burns, and my shoes are worn down, and I do not know what is coming next. But I am here, in a place so far away from where I came from, as comfortable and as hungry for the world as I can ever remember being.

—

Kentucky. Georgia. Arizona. Ohio. Kentucky. I keep leaving for new places. Keep drawing new lines. Going and coming back, always. Parabolic. Gravitational. Home pulls me into an embrace, and flings me out again.

When I was getting ready to move to Flagstaff, some people at home looked aghast that I would go so far, knowing no one. I didn’t feel afraid before I left. All I could think of was the mountains, the rocks, the sunsets waiting for me.

When I arrived, though, a weight of unexpected fear set in. The day my mother was supposed to go back home, a sunny day in late August, I had a breakdown while we were eating lunch at a restaurant downtown.

“I know no one,” I choked out. “I’m alone. What am I doing?” Tears flooded out of me. I shook visibly over my spicy fried chicken and stared out the window into the sunny little Northern Arizona town, my vision glazed over and my heart racing out of control. Was it possible that I had chosen too rashly? Was I so obsessed with distance that I was making a decision that I would regret? What is the harm in being close to home, anyway?

My mother held my hand across the table, her eyes filling, mirroring mine. “I know,” she said. “But you will know people. You’ll be alright.” More than anything, I know part of her wants to hold me tight and never let me go. But a larger part of her understands, and wants me to go and see. Her choosing the latter, even feeling my fear, is a gift.

Flagstaff filled me completely. I did meet people, and I did meet the mountains. Arizona held me in such an embrace. It grew me and loved me and set me right. The sun beat down, the rocks shone in their light, words floated through me, aspens filled my field of vision.

Now, three and a half years later, I stare at my empty walls, room half packed up and boxes in various states of filled. Everything I own is scattered across the second floor of the house I have lived in since that first August. There is snow on the peaks now, the days are short now, and I am leaving soon to go back home for a little while.

Home. Northern Kentucky, in the loving cradle of the Cincinnati metro area. Again, again. Just for a while. Soft cloudy winter days, wet green fields and white fences. Quiet bookstores, families, churches on hills above the Ohio River.

I’ll go home for a while, and then I’ll leave. I’ll hike, I’ll get tired, I’ll come home and rest. Repeat. Repeat. The cycle continues: out, and back, out, and back again. Home comes with me whenever I go.

So Kentucky again. And then? I don’t know. Somewhere else. Somewhere good. Wherever. I have no plans, and I don’t need them. The way is made by walking.

—

The moonlight is so subtle, so slight, that the lines it casts on the walls might have been sketched with pencil. His fingers trace weightless up and down the length of my spine. We talk together quietly, not with the same speed and purpose as during the day. In the hushed darkness, the city waits and listens.

Our words wander, trail-like, yearning for the space of more path. Our words did not stop walking when our feet reached the cathedral. We cannot stop them from moving any more than we can stop ourselves. Any more than you can stop elephants from walking their ancestral paths. Any more than ants can stop following their scent trails. We are made of distance.

We talk about hiking. We talk about travel. We talk about this thing, this soft warm thing, happening now, and what we’re going to do about the ocean.

I say, the Netherlands is so far away. He says, so is America.

I say, Distance is so hard. I don’t know how this is going to work. He says nothing. He doesn’t have to. We realize: it doesn’t need to work out in the end. Not really. We know, without saying it, that an end is really something working.

He breathes. We wait. The next morning, we get on a bus. We go to stand at the edge of the ocean again, in ancient Muxía. Santiago is the official end of the pilgrimage, but this is the real destination: the blue expanse of sky and water, and the open, uncertain westward space. The yawning question mark of what will be.

We walk, and we get on two different airplanes, and we leave it to the wind. It would have been easy for the words to stop, but they don’t. They wander through sound waves and through screens and wires and across oceans and states and rivers and trails. They trace a line over the Atlantic and find us. Eventually, when the time comes, the words will dwindle and fade, sun-drenched and quietly laying to contented rest: an adventure taken, a path explored, now complete. But for a little while, they go on.

One day he says to me: In Dutch we have a saying. Wat je van ver haalt is lekker. What you get from far away is really good. What you get from far away is worth it.

—

I read somewhere that the Netherlands is roughly the size of Maryland. You could fit almost five Hollands into the space that Arizona occupies. There, two hours is a long journey, almost across the country. In the American west, two hours is nothing. At home, two hours is Cincinnati to Columbus. Two hours is country-to-country. Two hours: worlds unseen underfoot. Two hours: a second. A universe.

When I am not hiking every day, ten miles seems far. When I am walking across the north of Spain, ten miles is two-thirds of one day’s work. The flight from Phoenix to Amsterdam spans over nine hours, the distance of which is a fraction of a percent of the space between the earth and the sun. The system to which these two entities belong, in turn, is 2.5 million light years away from the nearest galaxy. Beyond these galaxies, there are more galaxies. And beyond that, more. I tried to find an estimate of how big the universe was, but no one seems to agree. I yearn to grasp the concept of so much space, and complete silence, and infinite alternatives, put my hand around it and measure it and understand it, but I cannot. If I let myself stay in that scale for too long, I have trouble coming back.

Coming back. The hot water flows across my skin, steam swirling around my face. I’m still tracing the countries. Netherlands. United States. Spain. United Kingdom. India. New Zealand. Australia. Japan. Ohio. Kentucky. Rainbow places with millions of stories, words, eternities. Places I have been, places I dream of, and places I will never go. Uncomprehending, I stare at the plastic map, unable–or perhaps unwilling–to fold the world and shrink its mighty distance.