The Long Walk Home

by Will North

  The cake was luscious. Alec learned that Brandith had expanded beyond her shop into catering.

  Alec pushed himself back from the table when he finished and accepted a coffee from Meaghan. “I had a thought in the bath earlier ...”

  The three others stopped what they were doing.

  “Given your obvious culinary talents, Meaghan, have you considered the possibility of offering not just bed-and-breakfast, but an evening meal as well? After all, there isn’t much choice in Dolgellau. You could offer a choice of perhaps three entrees. Maybe even offer wine at a fair price.”

  Meaghan and Fiona looked at each other.

  “We were just talking about that last week,” Meaghan said.

  “Well then,” Alec said, “I wonder if I might apply for the job of sous chef?”

  Meaghan looked at him, openmouthed. Then she thrust out her right hand and Alec grasped it.

  “Done!” she said. “When can you start?”

  “Hang on a bit,” Alec said seriously, “there’s the little matter of wages.”

  Fiona wrapped her arms around Alec’s shoulders. “It’s food, lodging, and all the comforts, just like before,” she said.

  Alec looked around him, at Meaghan, at Owen, and finally at Fiona. He made as if he was considering the offer carefully. Then he turned, pulled Fiona’s face toward his, kissed her firmly, and said, “You’ve got a deal!

  “Now,” he added, “where are the cigars and the brandy?”

  “Cigars?” Owen said with a laugh.

  Alec slumped in his chair. “I cannot believe the depths to which this establishment has sunk.”

  Then he sat up. “Fi, do you still keep sherry for your guests?”

  “Of course I do—or rather we do, since this is Meaghan’s business now, too.”

  “Would you be so kind as to bring some in?”

  “Why?”

  “Call me a traditionalist.”

  Meaghan and Owen cleared the table and Fiona returned carrying a tray with a decanter and four small glasses. Alec stood and filled them, splashing only a sip into Meaghan’s.

  “More toasts?” Fiona asked.

  “Perhaps,” Alec said with a shy smile.

  He stood by Fiona’s chair, reached into his pocket, and removed a small box, so small he could cradle it in his palm. It was old and covered in a faded, very pale blue velvet. Embossed in silver letters on top were the words Tiffany & Co. He kneeled where Fiona sat and placed the box in her hand.

  “This belonged to my mother,” he said, barely audibly. “Then it belonged to Gwynne. I’d like it to belong to you, Fiona, if you’ll have it.”

  Fiona lifted the small box and struggled to control her shaking hands. She eased open the hinged top. Inside, shimmering on a tiny silk pillow, was a fiery diamond set in a simple gold band.

  She stared at it a moment, then looked at Alec, smiling, eyes filling, her head cocked to one side.

  “You certainly don’t waste any time ...”

  “We don’t have many years left,” he whispered.

  “Yes, we do, Alec; we have the rest of our lives.”

  acknowledgments

  A READER WHO KNOWS ME WELL asked of the book you hold in your hands, “Is this a true story?” The answer is no. And yes.

  No: this is a work of fiction, which is to say of the imagination, and of the heart. The characters and events portrayed here are creations; they exist nowhere else but in these pages.

  Yes: the story is true—as true to the spirit of itself as I can make it, for it is a thing with its own life, and its own truths.

  In the telling of these truths, I have drawn upon the help of many generous advisers, to whom I offer my deepest thanks. On matters having to do with all things Welsh, I am in debt to Jane Evans, of the Gwynedd Council office in Dolgellau, North Wales; Helen Davies, of the Welsh regional office of the National Sheep Association; Nick Dawson, the ever-helpful duty manager at the Aberdovey Search and Rescue Team; Jessica Gould, National Botanic Garden of Wales; Kevin Owen, farm policy adviser, National Farmers’ Union of Wales; Andy Simpson, press officer, Mountain Rescue of England and Wales; David Williams, senior warden, Snowdonia National Park; and Dafydd Lewis on the Welsh language. On matters medical, my thanks go to Tom Hornbein, physician, mountaineer, and friend; William J. Powers and Maurizio Corbetta, neurology professors at Washington University Medical School, St. Louis; and the Pesticide Action Network UK for the details of sheep dip poisoning. If there are errors of fact or interpretation, they are mine alone.

  I am indebted as well to friends on both sides of the Atlantic who read the original manuscript and made it clear that they should be book reviewers in their next life, especially Cindy Buck, Claire Booth, Martin Mann, Hilary McCorry, Kate Pflaumer, and Lawrence Rosenfeld.

  Finally, and closer to home, thanks to the people who make life worth living: Susan, Baxter, Eric, Baker, Nancy and Tom: my small but beloved family.

  And I’m especially delighted to thank the principals at my new publishing house, Booktrope, Ken Shears and Katherine Sears, my project manager, Beth Bacon, cover designer Annie Brule, Victoria Wolffe, Adam Bodendieck and all the other members of my creative team. An author could not ask for more responsive and enthusiastic partners.

  author’s note

  AT READINGS IN BOOKSTORES and in letters from readers, perhaps the most frequent question I get asked is, “Where do your ideas come from?”

  If I’m feeling playful, I sometimes say, “Toledo.” I’ve never been to Toledo and I’m sure it is a splendid city. I just find the word funny.

  But the plain fact is that the book you hold in your hands is a work of fiction. That’s right, I made it up. That’s what novelists do. And I made it up as I went along. Some novelists create elaborate outlines of their stories before they actually begin writing. I envy them, in a sense, but I can’t emulate them. When I begin writing a story, I generally have only three things about which I am vaguely certain: the setting (typically a real place I know well), a couple of characters, and a larger theme I want to explore in that setting and with those characters. That’s it. What happens next is frankly a mystery to me: the story uncurls across the pages and the characters emerge and begin telling me what they want to do and say. I often feel more like I’m taking dictation than actually creating. And let me tell, you, some characters can be very bossy, indeed.

  The Long Walk Home is set in a very real and lovely valley in North Wales, at the foot of a very real and dangerous mountain, Cadair Idris. I know it well and have climbed it often. I’m not going to tell you what the underlying theme is; that’s for you to discover. But I will let you in on a secret: the setting isn’t the only thing in this story that’s true. The male protagonist, an American called Alec, arrives in Wales after a long walk. He is carrying the ashes of his ex-wife, Gwynne, who has died of breast cancer. They were divorced but devoted to each other to the end. The secret is this: everything in this book having to do with those two characters—absolutely everything—is true and my homage to my dear late wife.

  But that’s just the beginning of the story. What happens next is…well, the magic of fiction.

  —Will North

  the meaning of home

  It all depends on what you mean by home.

  —ROBERT FROST,

  THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN

  IN THE LONG WALK HOME, when Alec Hudson scatters his ex-wife Gwynne’s ashes at the summit of Cadair Idris, he shouts “Croeso!” into the wind. It’s the Welsh word for welcome. He is welcoming Gwynne’s spirit home.

  Gwynne was born in California. She’d lived in New York City and Washington, D.C. She died in Boston. Yet when it came time to choose where she would spend eternity, her ultimate resting place, she chose a mountain above a valley in Wales where once she had felt utterly at home.

  The idea of “home” has intrigued me for years. What do we mean when we say we feel “at home” somewhere? What is it about a particular place that makes us
feel we belong there and not somewhere else? Why do some places just seem right?

  The word home is one of the most frequently used words in every language known to man. Yet defining it is a bit like trying to grasp a greased pig; it’s remarkably slippery. Among other things, the word—in English at least—manages to suggest both a physical place and a condition of being. Is home where you live or where you came from? Is it the place that houses your belongings, or is it the place where you belong? Is it a place at all, or is it a state of mind?

  The poet T. S. Eliot once said home is “where one starts from.” The place where I started from, the place where I was born and spent the first eighteen years of my life, is called Yonkers. It is a large city in New York State that shares a border with, and is virtually indistinguishable from, the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough. For simplicity’s sake and because Yonkers, frankly, leaves a lot to be desired, I usually say I’m from New York. But it never felt like home.

  If you look up the word home in the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find four densely printed, three-column pages for the noun form of the word alone. But one definition seems to me to get to the very heart—literally, to the emotional core—of what we mean by home:

  A place, region, or state to which one properly belongs, in which one’s affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest, or satisfaction.

  The sleeper here is that phrase, “to which one properly belongs.” How would we know the place we belonged if we stumbled upon it? What would it look like?

  Almost forty years ago, I stumbled upon the place where I knew, deep in my bones, I belonged. It was England. Now, I’m not the sort of person who believes in past lives, and most of my ancestry is German and Irish. And still, I knew I’d come home. I knew the people I’d never met before and understood their quick-witted sense of humor, knew the landscape as intimately as if I had always lived there, knew the flat English ale I’d never tasted before and loved it, knew how to drive on “the wrong side” of the road without having to learn it. And so much more. Over the years, I’d been content simply to accept these feelings. But then, just a few years ago, it began haunting me. Maybe this is simply part of the process of aging, this needing to know where you belong and why.

  So late one spring, a couple of years ago, I shouldered a backpack and spent three-and-a-half months walking some 1,400 miles through most of southern England. I had this idea—no, I had this certainty—that if I slowed down to walking speed and paid very close attention as I loped along, I would be able to identify and understand what it was about this world that spoke to me.

  Along the way, I had one or two little epiphanies. You know how magazine articles and self-help books, not to mention Zen masters, tell you that the secret to happiness is to “live in the present”? Well, I don’t know about you, but this has always been mystifying to me. But about a week into my walk I realized that “the present” had always seemed to me to be the briefest moment between grief about the past and anxiety about the future. But when you have no fixed itinerary, and no place you have to be at the end of the day, you live—from the instant you open your eyes in the morning to that blissful second when you close them at night—in the shimmering present. You see, hear, smell, savor every single experience as it happens: the fragrance of wildflowers as you pass, the music of a blackbird in a hedge in the morning, the helpless joy of lambs leaping in meadows, the mystery of a footpath curving through a dark wood, the sweetness of fresh water when you are thirsty, the satisfaction of a pub lunch when you are hungry, the warmth of welcome from people you encounter along the way—and people are always warm to walkers.

  And as I walked, I began to recognize other things that made me feel “at home” in this particular place, in a way I never have been in the country of my birth. I noticed that in the market towns and villages through which I passed buildings were never more than three stories high, so the scale isn’t dehumanizing, the way it is in most American cities. And shops and houses tend to be clustered together companionably, with breathing spaces provided by small squares, greens, and plazas. They also have what I like to call “public living rooms.” In England, it’s the venerable institution of the pub. But coffee shops and sidewalk cafés have the same function elsewhere: they’re places where people gather to chat or simply watch the world go by. And the places that appealed to me, that made me feel I could fit in, were composed of buildings constructed of local materials—stone, wood, earth. It’s as if they’d grown organically from the ground, rather than having been imposed on it.

  Places like these seem to have been designed with people—not traffic management—in mind. That was an essential part of feeling at home, and something completely missing in so many American neighborhoods, subdivisions, and entire communities, which feel cold and strangely “placeless.”

  I was transformed by my walk through southern England, and it won’t surprise you to know that, to a very great extent, Alec Hudson’s sense of the rightness, of the power of place in the lush, green Welsh valley in North Wales that cradles Fiona’s farm, comes from my own experience.

  Alec feels that power in the town of Dolgellau, in the valley, and in his love for Fiona. But Alec also understands that he does not yet belong. The earth will need to make a few more cycles around the sun before Alec, like Gwynne, can “come home.”

  And, in time, it does.

  a reader’s guide

  Alec and Gwynne have been divorced for years, yet when she becomes ill he cares for her. Do you know of someone who has been called upon to care for a dying former spouse? Can you imagine yourself in such a situation?

  When Alec decides to walk to Wales with Gwynne’s ashes, what do you think he’s trying to accomplish? Have you ever done anything for similar motives? Can you see yourself ever doing something extreme like that?

  When Alec arrives at Fiona’s farm, he is a man of few words. What is it about Fiona that changes him? What is it about Alec that changes Fiona—unlocking her own pain and her own capacity to love fully?

  Fiona and Alec share a central emotional characteristic: they are both caretakers by nature and upbringing. Because of this, what do they bring to, and bring out of, each other?

  Fiona and Alec both lost a parent when they were young: Fiona’s father drowned, Alec’s father drank himself to death. How has each of them been affected?

  British-born novelist Jonathan Raban has said of The Long Walk Home that it is the mountain, “capricious Cadair Idris,” to which the reader must look “for the story’s deeper implications.” What do you think he means by that? Is the mountain itself a character in the story?

  Will North admits to being, well ... a guy. Do you think he succeeds in understanding and revealing Fiona’s head and heart?

  Ultimately, despite the fact that she is married, Fiona and Alec become lovers. Both of them understand that this is wrong ... and yet believe it is also utterly right. How can that be? And why do we find ourselves rooting for them?

  Fiona has been caring for her ailing husband for three years. Do you think she should have anticipated his attempted suicide?

  When Alec discovers David dying on the mountain, he knows that one option is to do nothing. There must be a moment, a fraction of a second, when Alec sees how life would be made simpler by David’s death. Given what happens to David—given what happens to Fiona and Alec—do you think he made the right decision?

  Fiona’s daughter, Meaghan, is so close to and protective of her father that she sometimes behaves as if she believes she would be a better caretaker for him than his own wife. Does that ring true to you? How well do you think Fiona handles Meaghan’s possessiveness?

  The Long Walk Home is a book about fidelity. Beyond its most obvious form—fidelity to a spouse—what other issues of fidelity do these characters wrestle with? If you were Alec, how would you choose? If you were Fiona, what would you do?

  an invitation to readers’ groups and book clubs

  ONE OF T
HE REAL JOYS of being an author is meeting and chatting with readers in book groups. Sometimes I think I learn as much from them as they do from me!

  I’d be delighted to come to your next meeting. Here’s how we can do it:

  IN PERSON: If your group is in the Seattle area, or in a town I’m visiting (see my website for events), I’d love to spend an evening with you.

  BY PHONE: If someone in your group has a speakerphone, we can spend an hour or so together wherever you are.

  VIA THE INTERNET: If it’s easier for you, we can meet virtually. Have your group members compile questions, and I promise I’ll answer them immediately.

  So let’s get together. Getting started is simple: just go to my website, www.willnorthonline.com, and send me an e-mail. We’ll work it into your group’s schedule.

  I’m looking forward to hearing from you,

  —Will

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