The Best Travel Writing

by James O'Reilly

  In proper tales things happen in threes. What choice did I have but to go back to the land? Three years after I left that New Hampshire park, by the time my foot had healed, I flew to Georgia and started walking north on the Appalachian Trail. Of all the reasons I had for going the simplest was this: I wanted, again, to be whooping and berserk and head over heels.

  And I was.

  The Trail winds some 2200 miles up the Appalachian range, Georgia to Maine; every year a couple thousand hikers aim to do the whole thing in a season. At best fifteen percent of them make it the whole way. I thought I’d be among the lucky. Doesn’t everyone?

  It wasn’t my knees that undid me, though it could have been. Four days and thirty miles in, my knees were launching a full-scale rebellion and I was picking my way painfully down every slope, popping Advil six at a time. But a fellow hiker, a Marine Corps vet who went by the name Weatherman, said he had a pair of high-end orthopedic knee braces he didn’t need anymore and did I want them? He could have his wife bring them with her to the next town up the trail. When they came I eyed them askance. They were massive things, hinged titanium, stretching from mid-calf to mid-thigh. Wearing them I looked like a cyborg. People who passed me hiking looked appalled, like: what is a cripple doing all the way out here, and with a pack that big? I didn’t care. The braces worked. They kept me walking.

  And yet, it turned out, to minister to one kind of harm was not enough to prevent others, nor to encourage me to pause, to think, to try to gently separate them, love and destruction. This spirit, this body, and all of these mountains: too tangled too tell top from talus. And so I pushed too hard and too far. I decided it would be a good idea to walk twenty-plus miles for days in a row, without stopping between to rest. Somewhere in there I twisted the same foot I’d injured years before; and then something tore; and then it was worse and worse and finally, eleven hundred miles in, I knew that if I did not stop walking I might not walk again.

  The doctor said it wasn’t broken. Just battered and torn and strained.

  “What do I do,” I said.

  “Wait,” he said. “You wait.”

  The clouds were hazy and heavy the day I went home. The doors were locked and I had no key so I climbed in a window, and not thirty seconds later the first thunderclap sounded, and the rain sheeted down. It was a closed parenthesis, and a pathos so obvious I felt absurd. But later I went for walks in my neighborhood, frowned at the concrete, wandered into the woods, stood on the verge of the valley and looked out over the summer trees. I thought about my season in the mountains, about my battered body, about how with every mile it had seemed that a story was unfolding, that it, and I, were becoming something vast and new. And I thought about how I’d been afraid that when I came back I’d decide the story wasn’t worth telling. And for a moment—for as long as the moment lasted—I wanted to tell a story as big as the sky.

  Instead I took a job at an outfitters’ where one state route crossed another; when they put me on the front cash registers, I watched from where I stood as the headlights grew brighter and the sun dimmed. I had a manager so enamored of corporate-speak he offered me ‘an exciting opportunity to interact with product as it enters the store!’ when what he wanted me to do was unload the truck.

  And here we are three years later. When they X-rayed my knees they said: Is there any chance you might be pregnant? I said no. That was true then. I don’t know whether it’s still true. What I mean is: my period is late.

  So: maybe a baby. If there is a baby it is Jonathan’s. I flew to San Francisco two weeks ago. Right after the phone call on the train platform. We are apart, we are together, we cannot figure how or whether to do this thing. I got a diaphragm. I didn’t want to go on the pill; I was afraid it would make me fat and crazy.

  I am afraid of what might in me be growing. I am afraid of what is shaking loose.

  A year earlier, when we still lived so close I could see his door from my window, before he left for a postdoc on the West Coast, before we broke up and slid back together in a joining with no clarity but some desperation, before all that:

  We lay together lazily. His hair tufted and twisted beneath my fingers. Skin to skin.

  “If we were Maasai,” he said, “I would pay many cows for you.”

  “If I were Margaret Thatcher,” I said, “and you were a republican prisoner in the IRA, I’d grant you political status in a heartbeat.”

  “If we were Yamomami,” he said, “I would start a war with a neighboring village to make you mine.”

  “If I were Rosie the Riveter,” I said, “and you survived the war, I’d let you have your job back. But I would probably still wear pants a lot of the time.”

  We kissed each other’s eyelids and slept in spoons. Now he is so much rocky terrain away. I am sitting in my room, reading through snarky e-cards online to keep myself from Googling bone cancer or thinking about fetuses. If you were pregnant, reads one card, I’d MapQuest directions to the abortion clinic for you. A wry smile. Unfunny.

  I cannot be pregnant and cancerous at once. The thing is too ridiculous. Ionesco in my living room, a rhinoceros in my uterus. Is a pregnancy panic a luxury? I’m twenty-six, after all. I’m no knocked-up sixteen year old. I sound like an aging rocker in denial, that empty protestation, too young. But what if I did and what if I didn’t and what if there isn’t and what if there is—

  Jaime comes over at the end of a Saturday in which I meant to do a thousand things and instead barely managed to get out of my pajamas. “I spent six hours today,” I say, “reading a medical blog.”

  I don’t tell her about my period being late. I don’t tell anyone, except Jonathan, and I toss it off casually to him: “How are you,” he asks, and I say I’m okay, will be glad when this MRI nonsense is over, would be better if my period would come, but you know, not bad. “It’s late?” he says, and I hear the perking concern.

  “Oh, well, not very late,” I say. “I’m sure it’ll come in the next few days. No need to panic.”

  “Okay,” he says, and even though I cannot see him I know exactly how his brow is smoothing.

  The strongest longing comes from a distance. See also: absence, and heart; grass, greener; wanting, and what you don’t have. I have been living in the city for three years. It is likely that I’m being ungrateful. The Charles is beautiful; I walk the bank in loopy miles, lulled by the grassless voice of the river, willing my foot to stop aching. Still, I feel hemmed in by the buildings, by the cars, by the noise that never abates.

  I find myself resisting my own claustrophobia. I love the Common, the dogs and babies and geese and grass of it all, the toddlers squatting over brass ducklings and the wedding parades. Why shouldn’t it be enough? I am inclined, on glum days, to see it as a moral failure, or at least a failure of imagination. I’m a shitty naturalist so it’s not like I even have that as an excuse. I wouldn’t know bloodroot if they sold it at Whole Foods.

  In the meantime I am still limping, and that’s on paved roads and carrying nothing. Probably, I think, I ought to forget about the mountains. I ought to stay away. Because how else can you build a life in which you can stand to be elsewhere? You cannot be always in the mountains.

  I do not know what to do with this most material longing. I try to talk around it, to think it into behaving. That is the sort of thing I do. But that does not stop it organically rising. I might as well try and theorize breathing. Now there is this fear that I have waited too long to go back to the mountains, that this my only body will never carry me there. That there will be no children. I am young but no longer quite so young. It all runs together. The rich brown of duff, the million shades of earth. A sunset. One. Many. Here is what I know: if you thump a sapling with your palm, its leaves will shudder like rain. And spiders with bellies the colors of pumpkins, and fallen crumbs a stone an ant a world—

  Two weeks later the waiting room is lit patchily in fluorescent pools. The lights in the hospital corridors aren’t on yet, so the few off
ices that are open are small scattered islands of half-light, and everything is shot with dim. It is too early and I am so tired and the other woman in the waiting room, who in a rumpled sweatshirt looks frail and scared for all that she must be sixty and three times heavier than me, is trying to get answers from the desk attendant, who is terse and brusque with her. Probably the attendant, who has circles under her eyes, is as tired as the rest of us, but still I hear her snapping at the older woman—telling her she can’t have the MRI yet, she has to get approval or pretesting from somebody-or-other, and the older woman saying, But I’m supposed to get a breast biopsy in four hours, and they need the MRI in order to do it, and the attendant saying, Well you’ll just have to reschedule the biopsy then, and the older woman with confusion in her eyes saying But—and I ache in a way I cannot pinpoint, part anger and part grief and part fear. The older woman’s head and shoulders have rolled forward, slowly, by a bare few degrees, as if pressed by a great heaviness, and suddenly I see my grandmother and her sister and my three aunts who have all had breast cancer in the last ten years and then I think about the bracelet I am wearing, which was my grandmother’s grandmother’s once. It is large and metal and I should never have worn it here, I was dressing for work, I have to go to work after the scan is over, they told me no jewelry, what was I thinking? I take off the bracelet, and take off my earrings, find a pocket in my bag, zip them up, tuck them away.

  Twenty minutes later I am still sitting there. I let fall my copy of Under the Devil’s Thumb, which I’ve been pretending to read. I can’t read. But Gessner is distracting, which I am and am not thankful for. My eyes drop back down to my lap. Fall on a paragraph. Being outdoors, he says. It does more than it has any reasonable right to, or something thereabouts.

  That landscape. I think of my New England and I think of walking through Virginia, those last weeks before the pain got bad. I think of it because it was beautiful, and because I was happy, and because it was before I tore apart my foot, before three years of undiagnosed plantar fasciitis, before the doctors who didn’t disbelieve me when I said my knees wouldn’t take pounding but suggested maybe I should come back in after abusing them again for a little while, before the German-accented orthopedist who barked “CHUMP! CHUMP! You’re fine!” like some kind of orthofascist as I hopped and flailed about his office with my quick-dry pants hiked up, before the bone tumor edged its way in on the knee X-ray like it wanted to join the party. But mostly I think of Virginia because that whole time was haloed with the conviction of walking home. The scree on the mountain, the sun over the broads, some kind of immanent holiness, God help me. Fall on your knees. Don’t mind if I do.

  When they call my name at last they ask me if I’ve ever been around welding. “No,” I say, “unless you count some soldering in eighth grade jewelry-making.” They ignore this. They do not ask me if I’m pregnant. I do not think they ask me if I’m pregnant. I don’t think I’d lie, and I don’t think I’d forget having to say—maybe. But I do not remember their asking, even though later, when I carry out a post-facto internet search, I will learn that it’s a standard question. Instead they make me take off my bra so that the underwire won’t go flying toward the magnet. I change into a flimsy paper gown and walk the hallway to the scanning room with a paper-filled fist clenched shut at my lower back. On the way I make eye contact with the older woman, who in the meantime has changed into her own ridiculous gown. She must have talked the attendant into letting her have the scan after all. We look at each other, in our twin Kleenex caftans, and I recognize her rueful expression, like she realizes it is a lost cause to try to look dignified wearing one of these things, but one must keep up appearances.

  Afterwards the tech tells me he “uh, hopes it’ll be nothing.” By the way I have “really intense musculature.” Am I “an athlete or something?” Or something, I tell him, and again I am thinking of the mountains.

  They say mountains breathe. Daily, in long slow exhalations, in curling lifts of mist after a night’s airy intakes. I never noticed this myself. But on this morning, in this particular held breath, here is what I want: take me farther, farther, onward, backward, elseways, someplace, any place, no place, to the place where even the mountains are moved.

  The tumor ends in the airport parking lot. The Pennsylvania hills rise bluely in the distance. The day is misty and clammy and slate-grey. I’ve come off a plane. And the phone buzzes in my pocket, and I answer it, and again I’m fumbling for a pen, trying to solidify the words coming disembodied into my ear while the cars drive by, while my feet stand still. It is not so much that there is a delay over the phone lines as it is that there is a delay in my comprehension: words like solitary, words like benign. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” he says; “get a follow-up X-ray in a year,” he says. “To be sure.”

  So it is benign. A nothing on the wind. I am so deeply relieved a sort of strangled half-laugh bursts out from my throat, sounding for all the world like a sob. The taxi drivers look at me sideways. For a moment I turn my head and close my eyes fiercely into the wind, where the pricking behind my lids turns into the mizzling air. For the space of a breath I am embarrassed, too: like I should have known all along, like the worry that’s been pulsing through my days has been the grossest self-indulgence. I knew it though mixes with a very peculiar I did not know it at all; and like the mountain there is this beating-heart could have been, could have been, could have been. The laws of large numbers tell me never to put too much faith in chance. But for now I am holding fast to gratitude, to grace.

  Four days later my period comes, and I am, I estimate, ninety-six percent thankful.

  That summer I go West. I visit Jonathan. I drag him camping with me, out at King’s Canyon. He gets altitude sickness and we get lost for a good portion of the afternoon when we wander off-trail and mistake one lake for another. It seems, for a couple of hours, like we may be stranded out there, without our packs or food or shelter and night coming on fast at ten thousand feet. We find our way back, though. At the top of a mountain pass, here in these western mountains where I have never been, we set up camp, the brown stark bowls of snow-tipped peaks rising all around us.

  That night he sleeps. The moon casts crosshatched concentric rings through the netting of the tent door. The night is colder and windier than the night before. Still, I think—later, I’d like to look at the stars. A litany of private blessings. My foot does ache, a little. I worry about this. Like clockwork, the ache. But it’s mild yet. Protesting precisely as much as is called for and no more.

  I look at Jonathan. I watch his breath rise and fall. I’ll be damned if I think we’ve made any sense of whether we make any sense. Probably, I think, we don’t. But what the hell.

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  “The Offer that Refused Me” by Marcia DeSanctis published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Marcia DeSanctis.

  “Rabies” by John Calderazzo published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by John Calderazzo.

  “Vanishing Vienna” by Peter Wortsman first appeared in Grand Tour, The Journal of Travel Literature, Summer 1997, and thereafter in abridged form for his E-book The Urban Nomad-Vienna, published by New Word City 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by Peter Wortsman.

  “Mysterious Fast Mumble” by Bruce Beger published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Bruce Berger.

  “Spirals: Memoir of a Celtic Soul” by Erin Byrne published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Erin Byrne.

  “Chip off the Old Bloc” by David Farley first ap
peared in AFAR Magazine, May/June 2011. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2011 by David Farley.

  “Seal Seeking” by Anna Wexler published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Anna Wexler.

  “Precious Metal: Me and My Nobel” by Tom Miller published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Tom Miller.

  “The Babushkas of Chernobyl” by Holly Morris, originally published as “A Country of Women” in MORE Magazine, published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Holly Morris.

  “How I Got My Oh-la-la” by Colette O’Connor published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Colette O’Connor.

  “The Ghost of Alamos” by Lavinia Spalding published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Lavinia Spalding.

  “Engagement Ceremony” by Carol Severino published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Carol Severino.

  “My Black Boots” by Juliet Eastland published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Juliet Eastland.

  “Zombies on Kilimanjaro” by Tim Ward excerpted from the book Zombies on Kilimanjaro, published with permission of Changemaker Books. Copyright © 2012 by Tim Ward.

  “Traveling to Mary” by Amy Weldon published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Amy Weldon.

  “Hiking in Grizzly Country—Or Not” by John Flinn published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by John Flinn.

  “Escape” by Gary Buslik published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Gary Buslik.

  “Mahnmal” by Mardith Louisell first appreared in Redwood Coast Review, winter 2009. Published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2009 by Mardith Louisell.

  “Desert Convey” by Erika Connor published with permission from the author. Copyright © 2012 by Erika Connor.