My father did two things shortly thereafter. He started paying Carol to look after me, and he split between us the $10,000 from our mother’s life-insurance policy. He didn’t turn us over to our grandmothers or aunts for the same reason he didn’t remarry—to his way of thinking, the love we needed was just across death’s divide, and to try to replace it would be to adulterate our mother’s presence and prompt it to wane. That’s a sword with a double edge, of course, well intentioned but inherently dangerous, even for a man who didn’t believe in ghosts or an afterlife.
Mourning took me a while. I remember going to baseball practice early so I could sit in a plum tree before anyone else showed up. In this period of what probably looked like obtuseness, I felt there was something hallowed about my $5,000 in life-insurance money, which I left in a bank and didn’t touch. Five thousand dollars wasn’t much, but it was my version, if wan and proletariat, of John William’s muscular trust fund. When I told him about it, he asked if there were strings attached, because—he added—he had strings attached: he had to enroll at a college, he said, to get his first $50,000. Bowing to this, he was going to Reed, a liberal-arts school in Portland, Oregon, family-approved but not on the East Coast, home to Rhodes Scholars but not far from mountains. I was going to the University of Washington, about a mile from where I’d grown up, partly because you could get in with a 2.8, but mostly because the tuition there was $540.
We had different plans for the summer months, too, following our mineral-spa blood pact. My hand had healed pretty well, but there was a raised white scar across my palm that looked like a crescent moon. John William had one, too, but his was straighter. He was now bent on solo beach-hiking, in Oregon, whereas I was using my inheritance, or some of it, at least, to shift about in Europe among the horde of young Americans who descend on Europe every summer with Eurail Passes, guidebooks listing the addresses of hostels, and overstuffed, filthy backpacks. My aim was to have experiences. I had no other purpose in going. I thought that if I was to be a writer I would need to travel in foreign places and take notes on how things looked, sounded, and smelled. When I told John William this, he snorted. He said that my orientation was backward, and that if I felt so dire about seeing the world I should go to the Andes or Mongolia. I ignored that and told him to write me at some hostels I was set on inhabiting—Avignon, Barcelona, Grenoble, Brunico—Brunico because I was planning on soloing myself, in the high country of the Dolomites.
On my own, I flew to Amsterdam and spent my first night abroad at the Seamen’s House, a salty fleabag open to anyone with a few guilders. The next day, I sat by the Herengracht with a packet of frites in my hand, crying, because this is what had become of my mother. She’d been transmuted into an experience I was having—me beneath a patinaed lamp, looking at windows framed by pilasters and listening to bicyclists bumping over cobblestones while ringing their quaint little bells. I did the things you do when you are eighteen and alone in Amsterdam, which is to say I milled on the Damrak in a surfeit of melancholy, pinching my pennies and taking notes on the pigeons, distrustful of all comers. I found other streets more lived in, more personable, where the lights in the windows at dusk looked familial, but the canals, the cartouches, the towers, the churches, the black bicycles, the gilded shops—all of it only left me more lonely or, to put it a different way, exposed to myself. By those old and fetid European waters, black as they were with commerce and fever, I felt saddened and stripped. This kind of glum interiority is often the province of solitary travelers, but I was feeling plowed under by my mother’s presence wherever I went, and when parting with every guilder I spent. I was trading her for this—for the Oude Kerk and its carillon chimes and for herring sandwiches.
One morning, I walked over to the train station with my pack, a bag of rolls, my journal, and Swann’s Way. I must have looked like hundreds of young travelers who pass through there each summer—all wearing intrepid expressions as shields against the world and, I would have to guess, pretending to an experience of life they don’t possess. I took a train that went through Antwerp and in Brussels transferred to a different train, antique and slower, with scarred wooden seats, and this one went to Liège and eventually to Trier, where I got off and walked around noticing things, stopping now and then to write down impressions of the Porta Nigra, Trier’s Basilica, the hue of the Moselle, and so on. I was face to face with my own vagrancy after that, and got more comfortable adrift. I became attached to train travel—to seeing the grimy backs of the buildings along train lines, the fenced industry and hung laundry. I slept in train seats. I learned to opt for the rear car, so that in long bends, in open country, I could look ahead and watch the engine pass particulars of the landscape. And in the interim between the engine’s passing of, say, a half-fallen brick pumping station and my own passing of it, happiness inhabited my journey. It was like the feeling I had on station platforms sometimes just after sunrise, when no one else was around and no train was expected for an hour or more, and an express had just gone through at high speed a minute or so before, the passengers in it flashing past like the kings, queens, and jacks in a thumbed deck of cards, ephemeral as thoughts. I put down my reading when that happened and enjoyed the absence of the train’s noise, the silence of a station in the countryside. To be awake in the cool of morning on a bench near train tracks, hungry, with a little breeze blowing, and whatever book you were reading open in your lap, was a little like listening for something you thought you might have heard a moment before. I suppose you could say I felt the sweetness, then, of being alive and in good health. At the same time, my romantic spells were curtailed by the sight of garbage near the rails, or by a wandering dog raising a leg at the corner of a building. I just didn’t have the psychic wherewithal to incorporate these images into my affection for living; I let them dispirit me, as the heat of the day and the crowds on the trains dispirited me, most days, during the afternoon. And then, for no reason, my interest in this brand of transience waned, and I took to foot travel. In San Sebastián I bought a tent, sleeping bag, ground pad, cartridge stove, and cooking pot, and set out toward the Pyrenees with a long French loaf strapped to my pack and an English-language edition of The Wings of the Dove stuffed in a side pocket alongside my journal. It was what I expected: the smell of goat dung desiccating in the dry heat of the plain, and the dust lifted even by the passage of a bicycle as someone rode toward me out of the mountains. I stopped frequently, in whatever cool, furtive place offered privacy. I spent half a day beneath a stone bridge reading James, until some sheep came down through the cork oaks behind me to drink from the stream there. I’m making my solitude and the liberty I had abroad sound pleasant and pastoral now, but the truth is, I felt abysmal most of the time, especially in my tent after dark. Once, in some Navarran village or another, I sat at an outdoor table writing postcards and reading the International Herald-Tribune, and just the act of putting down my home address agitated my loneliness.
In August, I took a train over Brenner Pass and came down into the Alto Adige. I had a beard now, dark and dense, and a pair of used boots from a secondhand store in Innsbruck. They didn’t fit right, and I was reliant on moleskin, which I cut with a pair of dull tailoring scissors. With these same scissors I cut my hair one night, while sitting cross-legged in front of my cartridge stove waiting for some orzo to boil. I was ill-prepared for the August weather at night in northern Italy, and in San Vigilio bought a surplus Austrian military ragg sweater, a cap with padded earmuffs and a chin strap, and a pair of fingerless wool gloves. I was sitting beside a trail the next day with this getup on, as well as my glacier glasses with their sweat-stained leather side shields, taking my incessant and obligatory travel notes and comparing the Dolomites with the North Cascades, when I heard faint voices. There was a conversation going on in American English among the spruces and pines on the ridge below—I could pick out a few words and phrases of it coming toward me on the wind. While listening, I wrote about the view from there: San Vigilio in
its valley with its larches, lindens, and broad Ladin roofs; immediately above it, hayfields and poppies; and above that, closer to me, white cows grazing on bits of grass growing between barren rock. The trails in the Alto Adige all look rutted by centuries of use and sometimes pass by rustic chapels, situated in the lee of the wind, in which are gathered pots, cans, nails, worn shoes, bits of wire, even lost handkerchiefs, and I was sitting beside one of these, which had in it, besides the usual debris, a number of rusted iron spikes and some small pharmaceutical vials of thick glass, with stoppers. I took notes on these things, too, of course. Then the loud hikers came into view against a backdrop of scree. Silent now, saving their breath and leaning forward under their packs, they came up the hill. They were still small, and mostly what I saw of them was the tops of their heads and some bright-red pack fabric. I hadn’t spoken in English to anybody for some time and was eager for that suddenly, after all the pidgin talk and hand signals with continentals. On the other hand, I also felt antagonized, because of all of the work I’d done to come to grips with lonely travel. However it was, my compatriots passed beneath striated rock faces, white rock ribbed or marbled with black, and, in making the ridge, began to walk more upright. I could see that they were women after that, two tall women in hiking shorts. This was early in the day, and because the sun was behind them on a bright, cloudless morning, I had to leave my glacier glasses on as they approached in order to see very much. Between the glasses, my chin-strapped cap with its padded earmuffs, my beard, and my fingerless gloves, I must have looked ridiculous to the two women coming up the trail. In fact, I know I did, because one is now my wife and she’s told me how I looked, how she made a ridge in the Dolomiti and found a guy there with a journal in his lap, suggesting, maybe, as she once put it, an explorer who’d stopped taking care of himself. Her name is Jamie Shaw. There was no love at first sight, a thing some people claim is real but, frankly, a concept foreign to both of us. I did think she was pretty, with her knobby knees and pointed elbows as she pulled on her wind pants, and I liked the look on her face right away, which was openly skeptical. She kept covering her mouth with her thin fingers and pushing a lock of hair behind an ear, and I was drawn to these gestures and to her outdoor-ish athleticism, but not especially drawn to them, not at first.
WHILE I WAS WANDERING in Europe, John William—according to aerogrammes I got in Avignon, Barcelona, Grenoble, and Brunico—was hiking in Oregon. His long-winded letters were scrawled in a cramped hand. He wrote to say that he’d hitchhiked to Portland and then walked toward the ocean on the south bank of the Columbia—on railroad right-of-ways, the verges of marsh, and trails used by anglers and goose hunters. He ate a dead carp washed up in a side water and got the runs and a fever. Curled up in a duck blind, sick but sheltered, he nearly abandoned his plan to hike to the salt water. But then, in a Dumpster behind a tavern, he found some fish and chips, and that got him going again. I was in Avignon eating a pêche Melba while reading about this, and it seemed, under those circumstances, more than a little hard to understand.
John William unsettled a trio of late-winter birders launching their skiff in a slough by walking past them at first light. He also came on two sturgeon-fishers, with their rod butts anchored between stones, who’d built a lean-to out of plastic and saplings and sat in it nursing a blaze while boozing. John William stayed in the woods downstream, hunting crawdads, until they reeled up and left, and then he occupied their lean-to for the night, encouraging the coals of their fire. The next day, he walked in rain and watched mew gulls. Eventually, the country became estuarial, and, beside the channels of the river, his boots filled with mud. At a boat launch, he found an oily sardine tin and a poorly cleaned salmon carcass in a garbage can, and at Astoria he gathered enough coins to buy, at a corner market, a banana and a day-old ham sandwich. Fortified, he walked through the night past Warrenton, and from there to the coast, where he slept in brush. There were gulls, he wrote, with their heads down.
John William walked to Seaside, where he stood outside the arcade collecting coins from late-night pinball addicts. Later, foraging in garbage bins, he found a lode of canned goods, and after smashing open cans with a rock, ate a lot of fruit cocktail. This was the first night of visible stars since he’d left Portland, and, walking under them with the beach well lit, he gathered driftwood, and, later, above some dunes, scraps of lumber from a development where view homes were going up. John William built a high-mounded blaze, and when it died to coals he spread them out, dressed them with sand, and slept.
His aerogramme read: “I was arrested at dawn and handcuffed. ‘Suspect is a vagrant, age 20, 6', 180 lbs., brown eyes, brown hair, carrying no ID but giving his name as Gempler, (nmn), Ivan’—that’s what they got from me. In jail I met this Pete Moss—like Gempler, supposedly an arsonist who’d crisped a beach house. They thought I was an ecoteur with a nom de guerre, like Moss, even though the handle I gave them sounded Amish. Fortunately, I was liberated the next day by a lawyer who came for Moss and two other hippies, so I got a ride to Eugene in a lawyer-Volvo. Maybe it’s another nom de guerre, but my pro-bono savior gave me his card, which I’m looking at right now—‘Mark Sides’—actually a smart guy, pissed about the right stuff. He got me some work, or got Ivan Gempler work—counting standing deadwood today and tomorrow. No pay, but I’m domiciled for nothing in this mail-order tepee with Moss and some other freaks. I showed these potheads what’s up with a fire drill. They think I’m God because I make fire with sticks and catch mice with my Paiute rock-fall trick. Even Mark Sides is impressed.”
“Hey. Countryman,” John William wrote, at the end of his last aerogramme, “don’t forget to write me back. Drop me a line. Don’t be a stranger. And don’t get lost, blood brother.”
IN THE DOLOMITI, I sat by the chapel with the American women and brewed tea on my cartridge stove. They were sisters. They both had the look of collegiate basketball players, but the younger one, my wife’s sister—Erin—a little less so. She kept calling Jamie “James.” For example: “James.” Jamie looks up. “Toss me your water.” A little later, describing a chamois seen the day before, Erin thinks I’m dubious about sixteen-inch horns. “James.” Jamie took her hand from her mouth. “Back me up already on this.” We drank tea. I felt awkward. I’d been glad, until then, for the details of tea-making, but now there was nothing between myself and my reticence. Traveling, I suppose, I’d lost the hang of speech. Erin sat cross-legged and warmed her hands around her cup, but Jamie sat with her arms roped around her knees and watched me, I would have to say, with not-quite-completely concealed suspicion. Her front teeth were slightly gapped. There was something coercive in her manner of observation, I think, because, in the face of it, I took off my glacier glasses with their leather eyecups and my cap with its curled, weathered chin strap. I had that haircut, self-administered a few days before with the dull tailoring scissors, and the naked, convalescing look around the eyes you see in a lot of summer alpinists who, because they rarely remove their sunglasses, are tanned or sunburned and yet owlish. I must have looked like a pilot who has bailed out in mountains and wandered for a week across blinding snowfields, though this isn’t an image my wife has used in recalling my appearance. She remembers instead my formality—my getting the tea right—and how she decided, after twenty minutes, that my insecurity wasn’t cultivated. She remembers that the presence of my journal, really just a cheap spiral notebook, put her at ease. A person who takes notes, an observer who wants to turn the world into words—this is probably not someone inclined to steal your passport, in her way of seeing it. I stress “probably,” because Jamie has never been naïve about people. She looks at them the way she looks at herself, with the same full measure. She’s able to do this without being defensive, without assuming the worst, and without rose-colored glasses. I think she strikes a balance between curiosity and wariness that works in her favor, because she’s rarely intimidated. On the other hand, if you didn’t know her—as I didn’t know her yet
in Italy—you could easily misread her quiet scrutiny. You could miss the fundamental neutrality in her watchfulness. There’s a strong element in Jamie of self-preservation, but she’s not averse to the occasional gamble when most of the signs look promising. Though you wouldn’t have known that, either, above San Vigilio, where we sat by the chapel with her sister.
I didn’t ask for their names or their story. But we did look at a map they carried, which Erin unfolded and spread on the ground, and which Jamie held down with her fingers and some stones, and so I heard about their travels. They’d come up from Rome. They’d come because it was too hot in Rome, and too hot to go to Venice, as they’d intended, and because they’d been told, by some Romans, that in the Dolomiti their money would go far if they traveled on foot and stayed in rifugi. In Rome the heat and the crowds got to them—the long lines, underneath the sun, in order to get into the famous basilicas—and so they’d taken trains to Bolzano and from there caught the bus to Cortina d’Ampezzo, which was in the east on the map they held open. That map was well creased; along some of its folds, it had been rubbed white until its symbols disappeared; it had been abraded by damp weather and constant reference. Yet they were still able to show me, both of them using their little fingers and keeping the bulk of their hands out of the way, the trails they’d followed, the valleys they’d descended into, the rifugi they’d passed nights in, the chairlifts and funiculars they’d used between Cortina and the Tofana di Mezzo, and the places where they’d gained or lost elevation on old ladders, left over from the Great War, bolted to rock faces.