Step by Step

8

it was the spring of 1977, and i was living in a second-floor rear tenement apartment on Bleecker at Sullivan Street. I walked up Sullivan two blocks to Washington Square Park, stood on the sidewalk alongside the park facing east, and began to run.

I proceeded counterclockwise around the little park. It’s not microscopic, the circumference comes to just about five-eighths of a mile. (In other words, a kilometer, but I wasn’t thinking in metric terms. Later, when I ran races measured in kilometers, the word would have more meaning to me.)

I couldn’t run the whole way around. I ran as far as I could, until I had to walk and catch my breath. I walked until I felt I could run again, and ran until I had to walk again, and so on. I circled the park five times, which I figured came to three miles. Then I walked home, and took a shower that no one could have called premature.

I did this every morning.

My running wasn’t much more than a shuffle, and I’m not sure I even called it running. I may have used the term jogging, which was getting a lot of use at the time. I wouldn’t use it now. There is, it seems to me, something both patronizing and trivializing about the term. If you’re jogging, you’re taking it easy. You’re plugging away at it to keep in shape. It’s good exercise, it’ll help you keep your weight down, and if what they say is true, it’ll work wonders for your cardiovascular system.

But it’s not exactly athletic, is it?

Dr. George Sheehan, a distinguished runner, writer, and physician, was once asked the difference between a jogger and a runner. A race number, he replied.

Whatever it was, I did it every day. It wasn’t like learning to ride a bike, or even like learning to walk in the first place, because there was no falling down involved. I ran until I had to walk, walked until I was able to run.

The day came when I ran all the way around the park, a full five-eighths of a mile, before I had to walk.

And there was another day, not too long afterward, when I was able to run for the whole three miles. Five laps, three miles, running all the way.

Who’d have thought it?

In a word, nobody.

For almost thirty-nine years, if you saw me running you knew I had a bus to catch — and that I’d probably miss it. I was born overweight and out of breath, and by the time I slimmed down some I’d been smoking cigarettes for several years.

Back in seventh and eighth grades, they had a citywide running competition. At PS 66, the gym teacher, Mr. Geoghan, stood there with a stop watch and had us run the length of the playground. He timed us in the seventy-five-yard dash, and I wasn’t the very slowest in my class, but I came close.

(Remember Jack Dorfman? Captain of the renowned Wellington Tigers? Quarterback and star shortstop at Bennett High? In both seventh and eighth grades, Jack won the seventy-five-yard dash almost without effort. Then he went on each time to the district semifinals, which he also won. From there he went to the citywide finals, and three black kids sailed past him like he was standing still.)

My freshman year in high school, my friend Ronnie Benice announced that he and another fellow, Ron Feldman, were going to try out for the cross-country team. I didn’t even know what that was. “Come on along,” he suggested. He explained what cross-country was, and I thought he was out of his mind. Run? Over hill and dale? Me? You’re kidding, right?

Both Rons ran cross-country in the fall and track in the spring. I spoke with Ron Feldman at a reunion a couple of years ago, and he said he still ran on a regular basis. Ron Benice is living in Florida, but I haven’t been in touch with him in twenty-five years, so I have no idea if he’s still running.

And then, twenty-two years after high school graduation, I was running around Washington Square Park. How the hell did that come to pass?

It was in 1959 that I was sent down from Antioch. (That’s how the British would say it, and it sounds so much nicer than “expelled.”) I’d spent the next eighteen years getting married, siring daughters, writing books, moving around — back to Buffalo, out to Wisconsin, then to New Jersey. To say I drank my way into marriage isn’t much of an exaggeration, and it’s none at all to say I drank my way out of it. My first wife and I separated in 1973, and I moved to a studio apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street. A year later, when I began chronicling the fictional adventures of Matthew Scudder, his hotel room was just around the block from me. How’s that for coincidence?

He spent twenty years or so in that hotel room, but I was out of my apartment in two years. I moved back to Buffalo again, and that didn’t work, and I got the feeling I’d be better off without a fixed address, on the principle that a moving target is harder to hit.

I’ve mentioned the wanderjahr that took me to Florida and a reunion with my old scoutmaster. It would have been in December of 1975 that I tracked down Doc Marshall, and it was the following February by the time I got to Los Angeles. I lived there for six months at the Magic Hotel in Hollywood, and my kids flew out and spent the last month with me at the hotel. Then we piled into the Chevy Impala I’d bought when the Ford wagon died, and we spent a wonderful month seeing something of the country on the way back to New York.

I thought I’d turn around and drive right back to California, but instead I went to visit a friend in South Carolina, and stayed there long enough to finish the book I was working on. I called it Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, and it turned out to be the first of a long series about a light-fingered fellow named Bernie Rhodenbarr. I returned to New York, and I came very close to taking a room at Scudder’s hotel, but instead I wound up signing a lease on that little apartment on Bleecker Street.

I’d stopped smoking in September of 1974. I had stopped many times over the years, but this time it took. I never did go back to it.

And, after several months on Bleecker Street, during which I put in some long hours at the Village Corner and the Kettle of Fish, I stopped drinking.

I’M SURE THAT had a great deal to do with the running, although I never made the connection at the time. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks between my last drink and my first shuffling steps around the park, but when I was trying to work out the chronology the other day, I had trouble determining whether I was still drinking when I started running. Until then, I’d never thought of one thing as having led to the other.

But of course it did. All of a sudden I had all this nervous energy and nothing to do with it. I didn’t think in those terms, not at all. I just had the thought one day, out of the blue, that I’d like to try running around the block. I didn’t go to the park, just ran up Sullivan to West Third Street, turned left, went to MacDougal, turned left again... and so on. Running for as long as I could, then gasping as I walked, then running. Somewhere along the way I gave up on the running altogether and walked the rest of the way home.

I did this in street clothes — jeans, a long-sleeved sport shirt, a pair of leather dress shoes. God knows what I looked like. People probably thought I’d stolen something, or perhaps killed someone, and was trying to escape. But they left me alone. It was New York, after all, and why interfere?

After a day or two of this I picked up the phone and called my friend Philip Friedman. I’d met Philip through our mutual agent, and he seemed like an interesting guy, but the one extraordinary thing I knew about him was that he was a runner. He lived on the Upper West Side, and ran every day around the reservoir in Central Park. And he’d actually run a marathon. He was from Yonkers originally, and he’d run the Yonkers Marathon, and that impressed me.

(It would have impressed me even more if I’d known anything more about the event than its name. The Yonkers race is one of the country’s more difficult marathons, generally blessed with wilting heat and humidity, and boasting a couple of positively oedipal hills. I’ve never participated myself, and with any luck at all I never will.)

I told him I’d started running, and I wasn’t sure if I knew how to do it. He said there wasn’t all that much to it, aside from remembering to alternate feet. Did I have running shoes? I said I didn’t, and he recommended I go to a store that specialized in athletic footwear and let them sell me something.

I found the right sort of store and came home with a pair of shoes by Pony. I remember that they were blue and yellow, and the most comfortable things I ever put on my feet. I went out and circled Washington Square a couple of times, and when I came home I took off my new shoes and noticed that they had a couple of broken threads in the stitching.

So I went back to the shoe store, and they pointed out that the shoes were now used, they showed the effects of a few laps around the park, and they couldn’t take them back. And I threw a fit, and to get rid of me they let me exchange them for a pair of Adidas.

That’s a good brand, but the shoes I took home were singularly unsuitable. They were running flats, and offered about as much cushioning and support as a pair of paper slippers. They were also a little too small overall, and a whole lot too small in the toe box. It was months before it dawned on me that they were the wrong style of shoe and the wrong size, and that they consequently were so damned uncomfortable to wear. I just thought it was a matter of having to get used to them, and I wore the silly shoes for months, ran all over the place in them, and never failed to luxuriate in the feeling of sheer relief that came over me every time I took them off.

But I didn’t let them stop me. I got out every day for my five laps around Washington Square Park. When I went out of town for a couple of weeks in the summer, I found places to run — in parks, on highways, wherever I could get in a half hour to an hour of alternating feet. I never allowed myself to miss a day, because I had the feeling that once I did I’d give it up forever.

I must have missed days when it poured, or when there was ice underfoot. And I remember a snowy day around Christmas when I was sane enough to stay indoors, but nuts enough to lace up my Adidas and run in place in my living room.

I was a runner.

It astonished me that I could do this. It’s not as though I’d ever spent any time thinking of running as something I might do if I ever got around to it. I can’t say I thought much about running at all — for myself or for other people. I knew there were people who ran, I would see them out there doing it, but I also knew there were people who belonged to something called the Polar Bear Club, whose members went out to Coney Island in the middle of the winter and charged like lemmings into the freezing surf. There was no end of people who did no end of stupid things, and what did any of that have to do with me?

I remember standing on Bleecker Street one afternoon, a few doors from my apartment, when someone went tearing past me, running for his life, while someone else — a shopkeeper? — stood on the sidewalk shouting for him to stop. I realized that it was within my power to chase this fellow, that I could quite possibly run him down. After all, I was a conditioned runner. He’d gone by at a good clip, but how long could he keep it up? I could lope along for a half hour, and by then he’d pull up gasping.

Of course I didn’t run after the son of a bitch. I mean, suppose I caught him. Then what? But the realization that chasing him was something of which I was physically capable was remarkably empowering in and of itself. A couple of months ago I couldn’t have done it, and now I could, and that struck me as pretty amazing.

I suppose there were physical benefits. This was 1977, which was just about the time when the media were overflowing with the purported benefits of getting out there and jogging. If you put in half an hour three times a week, you were presumably guaranteed immunity from no end of unfortunate conditions, heart attacks foremost among them. Doctors with impressive credentials were going so far as to state that anyone who ran marathons (or, as someone phrased it, anyone who lived a marathoner’s lifestyle) never had to worry about coronary artery disease. He might not quite manage to live forever, but when he did die, it wouldn’t be a heart attack that killed him.

This sort of hyperbolic ranting lost some steam when Jim Fixx, a fine runner and a very prominent writer about running, did in fact suffer a myocardial infarction and die in early middle age. It was clear he had a genetic predisposition to coronary artery disease; he’d lost close male relatives to it. He’d lasted longer than the others, and one could argue (and several did) that running had in fact extended his lifespan.

Still, it was Fixx’s misfortune not merely to die young but to live on as an object lesson for antirunners. For years, any mention of the benefits of running was apt to be met by a raised eyebrow and an allusion to poor Jim. A couple of years ago, a good quarter century after the fellow sprinted off this mortal coil, I was one of several guest speakers at Mohonk Mountain House, in upstate New York. I put in an hour or so on the treadmill one morning, then joined the other speakers at breakfast. One of them, a forensic pathologist of some renown, had evidently noticed me on my way to the gym and began taking me to task for it.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Do you plan on living forever?”

“No,” I said, “though I’m hoping to make it to dinner. I understand there’s venison on the menu.”

“You people run because you think it’s good for you,” he went on. “Let me ask you something. Do you remember Jim Fixx?”

“Anyone who ran a marathon... or lived a marathoner’s lifestyle...”

When I was circumvolving Washington Square Park, or trotting along some country lane or suburban boulevard, I wasn’t trying to live forever. I appreciated the fact that running would take off weight, or at least enable me to eat more without gaining. Since those pounds I lost during my Florida summer had come and gone and come again many times over the years, this alone seemed reason enough to put on my shorts and shoes and get out there.

Still, the phrase echoed, and began to do its subtle damage. Not the promise so much as the premise. The one word, really.

Marathon.

To run a marathon. To be a marathoner.

I didn’t know much about the marathon. I knew it was 26.2 miles long, and I knew they held one every spring in Boston. I knew there was one in Yonkers, too, because my friend Philip had run it, and one in New York as well. I also knew that 26.2 miles was far longer than I could possibly run.

And what did I care about races, anyway? I was in this for the exercise, and for empowerment, and the attendant sense of accomplishment. Running was a pastime, certainly, but it wasn’t a sport for me. There was nothing competitive about it, nor was it something I sought to do in the company of others. At Washington Square, I shared the sidewalk with others, but I wasn’t trying to get around the park’s perimeter faster than anyone else. I might have considered us comrades in some collective endeavor, but I don’t really think I did. It seems to me I never paid much attention to anybody else.

Then I picked up a running magazine. Runner’s World, most likely, but it may have been Running Times. I soon became a regular reader of both magazines, eager for more information on this new pursuit of mine. Maybe I could become better at it, maybe I could feel more a part of it.

There was plenty of instructional material in both magazines, but from my point of view it didn’t add much to Philip’s initial advice to alternate feet. I learned a great deal about various methods of training for races of various lengths, along with tips on hydration and nutrition and supplementary exercise. And I read reports on the results of important races, and interviews with their winners, and profiles of prominent runners.

Gradually, my view of running began to shift. You didn’t just do this to be doing it, or for the good it was presumably doing you. You didn’t do it in a heroic effort to amass endorphins, either, despite the “runner’s high” both magazines nattered on about. (I’d spent the previous two decades ingesting various mood-altering substances, and I damn well knew what it was to be high, and that you couldn’t manage it by running around in circles.)

The daily running you did was training. You trained as preparation for racing. You trained, and then you raced, and after that you rested and trained again. To race again.

And why did you race? What was the point of it?

Well, if you were one of perhaps a dozen elite runners in a field of a few hundred or a few thousand, you raced in the hope of victory. You were out there trying to finish ahead of all of the other runners. If you actually won the race, you might get mentioned on the network news (if the race was, say, the Boston Marathon) or in your hometown newspaper (if your father was friendly with the editor). You wouldn’t get any prize money, not in the late 1970’s, and if you did it would jeopardize your amateur standing, and shut you out of the Olympics.

You’d get some glory, among the relative handful of people who paid attention to that sort of thing. But some elite runners didn’t even want the glory, and it wasn’t uncommon for a couple of lead runners to deliberately adjust their pace at the end and breast the tape hand in hand, demonstrating that this was a sport without winners and losers, that everyone who finished was victorious.

And that, of course, was what brought the vast majority of runners to the starting line, and carried them through to the finish. A race was by definition a competitive event. You might time your training runs, might try to go all out and cover the distance in the shortest time possible, but it was never the same as participating in a race with other runners. Even if it was what they called a fun run, even if no one was recording the times, when you were one of a group of runners, when they blew a whistle or fired a pistol to signal the start, when there was a finish line to be crossed, it was a race.

But you didn’t have to win it to be a winner. All you had to do was finish. You would try to do better than you’d done in your last race — and, as a way of delivering your best possible performance, you might make a special effort to overtake the fellow running a few steps ahead of you. But that didn’t really matter, and you’d forget him the moment you passed him, even as you’d forget the runners who ran past you.

You and the others were in this together, but your competition was not with them but with yourself. You pinned a race number on your singlet, repinned it a few times, tied your shoelaces, retied them a dozen times, peed and peed and peed again, and finally took your place at the start and waited for the race to begin.

Remember what George Sheehan named as distinguishing a runner from a jogger? A race number.

9

I read the magazines, Runner’s World and Running Times, and the message began to soak in. What I was doing every day was not an end in itself. It was preparation, and I was preparing to race.

I found the prospect very exhilarating, and I also found it terrifying. Looking back, I can understand the excitement, but what was I scared of? That others might finish ahead of me? I knew they would, virtually all of them, and so what?

That I would have a heart attack and die? That a bear would escape from the zoo and run me down and kill me? No, none of that.

I was afraid I’d embarrass myself.

Now I was realistic enough to realize that, if a few hundred people joined me in this race, every last one of them was going to be concentrating on his or her own performance, and paying no attention whatsoever to me. I could finish dead last, and the only person likely to be aware of this would be the person who finished immediately ahead of me. And how would he feel toward me? Would he hold me in contempt? Hell, no. He’d be grateful, hugely grateful, for wouldn’t I have just spared him the ignominy of a last-place finish?

I knew all this, and it didn’t help a whole hell of a lot. I was desperately afraid of failing at an event in which there was no such thing as failure.

It didn’t hold me back forever. There came a time when I had a trip to Buffalo coming up, and discovered that Running Times carried a listing for a race that very weekend in Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb. Here was a perfect opportunity; no one would know me, no one would recognize me, and no one back in New York would learn what I’d done. If I disgraced myself, it would be my little secret.

The real trick, it seemed to me, lay in finding Orchard Park. I borrowed my mother’s car and drove there, paid an entry fee of a couple of dollars, pinned a number on my shirt, and began worrying about my performance. I had two goals: to finish the race, and to get across the finish line ahead of at least one other person.

In due course they signaled the start and I took off. I’d read enough to know that neophytes all made the same mistake. They invariably started too fast, and did so without realizing it; the excitement of the race caught them up, and what felt to them like their usual easy pace was actually a good deal speedier. They kept this up as long as they could, and then they burned out, and wound up in trouble. But I knew this, see, and so I knew to guard against it.

And did it anyway.

The race was an odd distance, 6.55 miles. The course was an asphalt loop 1.31 miles long, and we were required to go around it five times. I ran along, establishing what felt like a brisk pace but certainly not pushing it, and by the time I was a little ways into the third lap my heart was pounding and I was gasping for breath.

I felt like someone who’d just failed a stress test. I also felt like a low-grade moron, because I realized instantly what had happened, and that it had all been my fault. I’d gone out too fast, and the result was just what I’d so often read in the books and magazines. I’d outrun my capacity, and I couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t continue at that pace, nor could I gear down and jog along more slowly. I could no longer do any running at all.

So I did what I’d done during those first circuits of Washington Square. I walked, feeling like an abject failure. It was a race for runners, for God’s sake, and that’s what I was, a runner, and what was I doing? I was walking.

But at least it would move me along toward the end of the race. And after I’d walked for a while I was able to run again. I didn’t run well, I’d done too good a job of exhausting myself, but I was running now instead of walking, and that seemed to matter to me. I kept going until I’d finished the fifth lap and completed the race, and then I watched as, remarkably, quite a few people came in behind me.

One of their number, not last but not far from it, was a fellow who looked to be about twenty-five or thirty, and who’d walked the entire race. I thought that was pretty curious — a walker in a race full of runners? — but at least I’d beaten him. As much as I’d sabotaged myself, as poorly as I’d run the race, at least I’d come in ahead of the walker.

How ignominious if I hadn’t!

My time in the Orchard Park 6.55-mile race was 59:33.

And how do I know that? Well, I wrote it down. In 1979 I bought a book called Run Farther, Run Faster by Joe Henderson. Sometime in 1980, when I started racing more frequently, I began logging the results of each race on the blank pages at the end of the book. I entered my eight 1980 races as they occurred, and then I found a space on another page and noted the four races I’d done the previous year, along with my official time in each. (For one, a fiercely hilly 10K in Upper Manhattan, I knew the minutes but not the seconds; my notation reads Heights-Inwood 10K—53:??)

I went on entering each race as I ran it, through late October of 1982. When I remembered, I included the date. Almost invariably, I noted my race number as well, though why I thought that information worth preserving is quite beyond me. Keeping track of my races was evidently important to me, and when I knocked around the country in the summer of ’81, toting a backpack that was as light as I could make it, I made room in that backpack for Joe Henderson’s book. I ran eight races in six states, and logged them all.

The last race in the book was an 8K in Central Park on Halloween in 1982. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, and I went home and entered the race in my book, noting my time and bib number. And then I put the book away and didn’t enter a race again until January 9, 2005.

It was a five-mile race, held on the same course as that Halloween race, and when I got back to my Greenwich Village apartment one of the first things I did was go to the bookshelf and take down the Joe Henderson book. It was the only running book I still owned, and I’d kept it only because it had my log in the back. I opened it up, found the final 1982 entry, and drew a line under it. Under the line I wrote “2005” and under that I entered all the data from the new race — the date, the name of the race, my race number, and my official time.

My second race in 1979 was the New Harlem 10K. It was sponsored by New York Road Runners, and held on the streets of Harlem, streets I ordinarily had no reason to visit. Someone — I believe it was Jimmy Breslin — wrote a day or two later about the bemused response of the neighborhood’s residents to the presence that Sunday morning of “a thousand skinny white guys running around in their underwear.”

I’d learned from Orchard Park, and when the race started I set out at a sane pace and had no trouble maintaining it all the way to the finish. My time was 51:49, and the number I wore was #2156, but what was really great was that I got to take something home besides my time and race bib. I got a shirt.

Well, so did everyone else who entered the race. This particular shirt was a cotton singlet, with the name of the race on its front. The shirt was white, the lettering red and blue. I wore it with pride.

I ran two more races that year, the Heights-Inwood 10K (with a steep and nasty downhill stretch in Fort Tryon Park; the uphills tire you, but the downhills wreck your knees) and a 7.6-mile race in Bennington, Vermont, about which I remember nothing beyond the fact that I combined it with a week’s vacation in that state. (And my time, of course: 1:08:18.) They didn’t give out shirts in Bennington, but I got a T-shirt at the Heights-Inwood race, and at most of the eight races I ran the following year.

All eight were in the late summer and fall. It must have been around that time that I joined New York Road Runners. Members paid a dollar or two less to enter races, and I’d reached a point where I was likely to save more than the cost of my membership. There were other activities offered to members as well, group training runs and various sorts of instruction, but they were all held on the east side of Central Park, at Ninetieth Street and Fifth Avenue, and I was then living on Greenwich Street in the Village, and getting from one point to the other was, well, not exactly a walk in the park. (Most of the NYRR races started there as well, but that struck me as worth it.)

The last race of 1980 was my longest to date, ten hilly miles in Central Park on December 14. And it was around that time that I started dreaming marathon dreams.

They’d held the New York Marathon in November, but of course I hadn’t even considered participating. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go the distance, but I also knew it was something I wanted to do eventually. And around that time I read in my running magazines that the first London Marathon would be held the end of March. I’d been to London a year or so earlier, it was a city I’d visited a few times over the years, and I thought it would be exciting to go back again, this time to participate in the first running of the marathon.

According to what I’d read, I had enough time to train for the distance. All I wanted was to be able to finish, and that seemed a reasonable goal.

And, happily enough, the NYRR race schedule would assist me toward that end. Along with a few shorter races, the club’s winter schedule included 15K and 20K races in consecutive weeks in January, and 25K and 20-mile races in February. That 20-mile race was held five weeks before the marathon, and would be a mere 6.2 miles less than I’d have to go in London. That made it a perfect steppingstone, and I figured I could get there, step by step, so I mailed in my registration for the race, booked my flight to London, and got down to the serious business of training.

I figured I could do it. And, like that first race in Orchard Park, it was a long way from New York, in a city where nobody knew me. If I screwed up, who’d know?

As 1981 got under way, I increased my training mileage. By this time the city had closed the old West Side Highway, an elevated stretch of road that had begun to crumble and was scheduled for demolition. For now, though, there was a stretch of it in Lower Manhattan, extending from the Battery to Fourteenth Street, that was closed to cars but open to runners.

(And to roller skaters, too. One time I was up there on the empty highway, heading north and knocking off the miles, when two southbound skaters hove into view. As they came closer I saw they were a man and a woman, and as they drew abreast, so to speak, the woman’s face lit up with a blinding smile even as she opened her shirt wide to show me her breasts. Then they were gone, and I never saw them again, though I never entirely lost hope until the city knocked the highway down.)

I trained every day, upping my mileage each week, as recommended. And I raced every weekend, which was manifestly not recommended. But the club kept scheduling races and handing out T-shirts, and I couldn’t resist.

The longer races were probably a good idea, preparing me to go the distance in London. The shorter races, four and five and six miles, were probably not a good idea, but they didn’t seem to be hurting me. And I don’t know that they did me any damage, nor did the long miles of training.

I was averaging nine-minute miles in the shorter races, and my time wasn’t that much slower in the longer efforts. I logged 1:28 in a 15K race, 2:01 at 20K. On February 8, my log tells me, I covered 25 kilometers in two hours and forty-five minutes. I remember that race, and I recall that I was in pain during it, but I finished it. That may have been a mistake, but it was nothing compared to the mistake I made the following week during a training run.

I was on my way to the West Side Highway, and as I ran across West Street toward the ramp leading up to the elevated roadway, I put a foot wrong and did something bad to my right knee. It hurt — Christ, it hurt — and if I had it to do over again I’d stop then and there, walk slowly and carefully home, ice the knee, take the rest of the week off, and then start training again, slowly and carefully.

That’s not what I did.

Instead, I forced myself up the ramp and onto the highway, and I ran for a while. And by the end of that day’s workout my knee hurt a lot worse than it had before, and it still hurt when I got home and when I woke up the next morning. For a day or two I kept trying to run through it — because I had a marathon coming up, and I needed to get the miles in, didn’t I?

You know, you’d expect this sort of stupidity in a kid, but I was forty-two years old at the time. What the hell was I thinking?

Whatever i was thinking, after a couple of days I had to stop thinking it. My knee was really hurting, and every time I went out and ran I only managed to make it worse. It would fool me from time to time, because it only hurt when I ran. The impact of my weight coming down on a bent knee was extremely painful, but when I walked I experienced at worst a slight ache and, most of the time, no pain whatsoever.

At first all I could think of was that the London Marathon was a washout. The entry fee I’d paid was really the least of it. I don’t remember how much it was, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five dollars or so. The several hundred dollars I’d paid for a plane ticket represented a more substantial loss. But it too was less significant than the fact that I’d really been looking forward to this experience, and now my own ignorance and stupidity was going to deprive me of it.

Unless I just went and walked it.

At that first race in Orchard Park, my feelings toward the race’s single walker had hovered somewhere between puzzlement and contempt. Walking, after all, was what I’d done before I taught myself how to run. In a race, where the object was to get from the start to the finish as rapidly as possible, why would someone deliberately select a slower gait? What sense did that make?

Since then I’d learned to view walkers differently. There was a walker contingent in every NYRR race, and the first three across the finish line qualified for trophies. They were not just walkers, they were racewalkers, and when I watched them I had to admit they looked good. There was something amusing at first glance about that hip-wiggling form, but it didn’t take long to get used to it, and once you did you stopped seeing it as funny-looking.

More impressive, though, was how racewalkers looked at the end of a race. The slower and less well-conditioned runners tended to reach the finish line looking like the wreck of the Hesperus. Their backs would be curled in one direction, their necks bent the other way in a heroic attempt to hold their heads up. They held their limp hands up in front of them like dogs begging for a treat. Many of them really looked awful, and if those back-of-the-packers were the only runners a person ever saw, it would be hard to convince him that the enterprise was good for you.

The racewalkers, on the other hand, strode toward the tape with their heads held high, their posture impeccable, and their arms swinging resolutely at their sides. They might be finishing days behind the leading runners, but they’d cross the line ahead of many of the real schleppers, and they’d look damn good while they did so.

So I’d come to respect the racewalkers. I didn’t want to be one, but that didn’t mean there was anything wrong with them or what they were doing.

If i could racewalk, I could go on training over the next several weeks without further damaging my knee. I’d stay in condition, and if my knee mended quickly enough, I might be able to run London after all. Failing that, maybe I could walk it.

But first I had to learn how to racewalk.

I’d had to learn to run, too, during those early laps around Washington Square, but I hadn’t needed anybody to teach me. But racewalking was different. It involved a curious stiff-legged stride that never came naturally to anyone, except perhaps an early-stage robot.

Now some people might be capable of picking up the technique of racewalking by watching others and duplicating their movements, but I’d have been as likely to learn to fly by watching a bird. Did I mention that I was the only kid in my kindergarten class who couldn’t figure out how to skip? (I did learn, though, because my mother taught me. Years later, when Mrs. Goldfus shouldered me from fifth to seventh grade, my mother took a certain poetic satisfaction in the fact that the boy who couldn’t skip had managed to skip all of sixth grade.)

Fortunately, I didn’t have to pick up racewalking on my own. Every Saturday morning Howard Jacobson, the chief poo-bah of New York area racewalking, held an instructional class in Central Park, at the very East Side location where most NYRR races began. The classes were free, and all you had to do was show up, which is what I did on the Saturday after I wrecked my knee.

I showed up, along with twenty or thirty others. After a few minutes of basic instruction, we all set out on a six-mile circuit of the park, moving at whatever pace we chose. I wound up walking with a man and woman around my own age, both of whom had done this before. We walked at what the man estimated at a thirteen-minute-per-mile pace, and I pumped my arms and kept my knees locked and seemed to be doing pretty much what everybody else was doing.

I don’t know that it was easy. Compared to runners, racewalkers work harder, go slower, and create more amusement for onlookers in the process. I was putting too much effort into it for it to be easy, seeking to do it correctly, striving to keep up with my companions. By the time we’d got back to where we’d started, I certainly felt as though I’d had a decent workout. But I didn’t feel exhausted, or even as tired as I often did at the end of a brisk six-mile run.

And my knee felt fine.

From that point on, went I went out for my daily hour or two, I did so with my knees locked and my arms swinging. A week or two later, I got my first field test as a racewalker in the Mike Hannon Memorial, a twenty-mile race in Central Park. It would be my longest race to date, four and a half miles longer than that 25K, and it was by no means a foregone conclusion that I could complete it. Still, if I dropped out after one or two loops instead of going the distance, I’d still take the same bus home, so why not take a shot at it and honor the memory of Mike Hannon?

(Whoever he was. The club held a few memorial races, and never bothered to tell you anything about the person whose memory we were presumably perpetuating. All these years later, I still remember the name Mike Hannon, and I still don’t have a clue who the guy was.)

I don’t remember too much about the race. I remember it was cold and clear, and I remember the field was small, because not that many people found the prospect of twenty miles in February irresistible, especially with a course of the same old Central Park loops. They didn’t even give out shirts for this one. For the love of Mike.

We made four circuits of a five-mile loop — with various cutoff options, Central Park loops can be four or five or six miles — and somewhere toward the end of the third loop I realized that I was going to be able to finish the race. And I did, and without having to drag myself across the finish line, either. I finished in good form (or as good as my form was going to get) and did so, my records tell me, in 4:09:31. That works out to twelve and a half minutes a mile, and if I maintained the same pace in London I’d complete the marathon in something like five hours and twenty-five minutes.

I could do it.

It would take me more than twice as long as the person who won the thing, but what did that matter? Even if I ran the race, even if I somehow maintained for twenty-six miles my best five-mile pace, I’d still hit the finish line an hour and forty-five minutes behind the winner. When I got to London, I wouldn’t be competing with any of the other participants. I wouldn’t even be competing with myself. I would be battling the distance, and I now had reason to believe I’d be up to it.

I took a bus home from the park, and a few blocks from my apartment I ran into a fellow I knew. I must have looked jubilant, because he commented on my unaccustomed buoyancy. “I have found my sport,” I told him.

10

i had found my sport. And it was an odd one.

And how is one to discourse upon racewalking without acknowledging its undeniable oddness? It’s a genuine sport with a lengthy history, and has been an Olympic event since the early years of the twentieth century. Those of us who do it with even the slightest degree of seriousness don’t care to have what we do mislabeled as speedwalking or powerwalking. I’ve not been able to determine what either of those terms means, and as far as I can tell they’re catchalls for any form of rapid walking that doesn’t conform to racewalking’s rules.

And they certainly do seem to irritate me. I never correct anyone’s grammatical mistakes (though I’m not above noting them with a full measure of satisfaction) but I can’t seem to avoid calling people to account when they refer to what I’m doing as powerwalking. “Racewalking,” I say, though you’d think I might know better. They’re going to go on calling it what they will, and I’ll go on correcting them, and it makes about as much sense as trying to blow out a lightbulb.

The nomenclature’s simple enough, for all that some people have a hard time with it. It’s the sport itself that’s odd, not so much in appearance (you get used to that) or that it’s an unnatural gait (what, pray tell, is natural about the high hurdles?). The essential oddness lies more in its rules, and a quick look at its evolution will show how they came about, and why they are required, and how they doom the whole business to eternal quirkiness.

The business of walking substantial distances in competition with others has been with us for a long time, and in the nineteenth century, much as it may strain credulity, the six-day walking race was a spectator sport. There were races held from one city to another, and occasional races that spanned the entire country, and I can understand why residents of Hare’s Breath, Nebraska, might gather at the stop sign to see a walker passing through, but a more typical event was held in a stadium, with walkers circling a quarter-mile cinder track for 144 hours. (Keep in mind that this was around the same time that Victorian novelists were required by publishers to turn out three-volume novels; I think it’s fair to say that our forebears were desperate for diversion, and, God bless them, rather easily amused.)

Pedestrianism was a term devised for this sort of activity, and it wasn’t specifically confined to walking. More often than not, these races were go-as-you-please events, and a participant was free to run as much of the time as he chose.

I don’t know how much running the participants did. If television had existed back then, we could look at the tapes and find out — but then if they’d had television, pedestrianism wouldn’t have been able to command much of an audience. The closest thing nowadays to nineteenth-century pedestrianism would be the twenty-four-hour and multiday races (of which more, far more, later). In my experience, a small number of entrants will run all of a twenty-four-hour race, while the greater portion will be runners who mix in a certain amount of walking, less in the early hours, more toward the end. And, of course, there is generally a handful of ultrawalkers, who will walk the whole thing.

I’d guess they walked more and ran less back then, but because there was no distinction in the rules between one gait and another, a contemporary judge would probably deem some of their walking to be running.

And there’s the rub.

Because walking had become not merely a pastime but a competitive sport, the desire arose for events that would pit one walker against another without requiring either the participants or the spectators to invest six days in the business. Shorter races already existed, on a true go-as-you-please basis, but everyone ran them because running was so much faster. So couldn’t you simply bar running and have short events for walkers? Surely everyone could distinguish between walking and running, couldn’t they?

Well, no. It wasn’t that simple. First you had to come to agreement on just what constituted walking, and what crossed the line and could only be called running. I imagine the evolution of this distinction was a fairly complicated business, but I also imagine that most of you reading this are no more interested than I in how racewalking got to be what it is.

So let’s cut to the chase. Walking requires two elements to distinguish it from running. First, the leg must be straight at a certain point in the stride. Second, one foot must be in contact with the ground at all times.

The first requirement, the straight leg, has changed somewhat in the quarter-century since I learned to racewalk. I was taught that the knee of the advancing leg had to be locked when the heel made contact with the ground; now the rules have changed, and the knee has to be locked at the midpoint of the stride, when the body is directly above the foot. (Don’t knock yourself out trying to visualize this. It is, I must say, easier to do all of this than to explain it comprehensibly.)

If you break this rule in a judged racewalk, the judges will call it creeping.

The second rule — one foot in contact with the ground at all times — is much easier to understand and to explain. (And no, it doesn’t have to be the same foot all the time.) If you break this one, they’ll call it lifting.

If lifting is easier to understand, that doesn’t make it easier to avoid. The better you are at racewalking, the faster you go; the faster you go, the more likely you are to break the rule against lifting — without knowing that’s what you’re doing. That’s why Olympic racewalkers so often find themselves getting disqualified. It’s not because they’re cheating. There are judges all over the place, and you’d have to be out of your minds to cheat on purpose. But if you go fast enough there’s a good chance that one foot will leave the ground before the other foot returns to it. That’s lifting, and the judges will DQ you for it.

But only if they spot it. It’s not that easy to spot, and they have to be able to spot it with their naked eyes in order for it to count against you. Because, see, if you film elite racewalkers, and slow the film down and examine it frame by frame, you discover the unsettling fact that everybody lifts.

So they tweaked the rule accordingly, and lifting has to be visible to the unassisted eye in order to constitute a violation of the rules. (And that eye, let us note, need not be entirely unassisted. Eyeglasses or contact lenses, to correct myopia and astigmatism and the like, are acceptable. Binoculars are not.)

Most racewalkers don’t have a problem with the rules. Those who do tend to fall in one of three categories, which for convenience we could label the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

First, the Good. Every once in a while an Olympic racewalking event is marked by the disqualification of a country’s whole team. Some years ago that happened to the Mexicans; they were the fastest contingent, and they all got tossed for lifting. Around the same time, a team of Italian bridge players was disqualified for cheating in an international competition, but this was different. When you cheat at bridge, you know it. The Mexicans thought what they were doing was legal. The judges thought otherwise.

In hang gliding, as I understand it, the pastime becomes more dangerous the better you get at it. As you progress in the sport, you place yourself in increasingly precarious situations that a lesser participant would be unable to achieve. Then, if something goes wrong and an updraft suddenly vanishes, say, all you can do is fall to earth.

That’s a harsher penalty than a disqualification, to be sure.

Next, the Bad. Walkers who are new to racewalking, and who embraced the sport without adequate instruction, may be disqualified because they haven’t learned to walk in a way that the sport finds acceptable. More often than not, they’re bending their knees when they shouldn’t be. If such a walker draws a warning or a disqualification, it may encourage him to learn more and correct his technique.

Finally, the Ugly. Not everyone is physically capable of racewalking in proper form. One friend of mine, an enthusiastic participant in twenty-four-hour and multiday races, has a knee he can’t straighten completely. Another fellow I met in Texas is one of a handful of certified Centurions; he’s walked over a hundred miles within twenty-four hours in a judged race. He doesn’t racewalk anymore, he said, because he can’t maintain a straight knee for great distance. He walks, and nothing about his gait would lead you to call it running, but it’s not racewalking.

In the world of ultradistance walking, there’s general agreement that racewalking rules shouldn’t apply. In Europe and Australia, many ultrawalkers have never learned specific racewalking technique in the first place, and merely walk as rapidly as they can in a manner that comes naturally to them. In the U.S., most of us employ racewalking technique insofar as we can. Judges in Centurion events don’t worry about a soft knee, and the pace in these races is such that lifting is not an issue.

At one such event, my friend Ollie Nanyes was exhausted and in agony in the late hours of the race. “I wish you’d go ahead and disqualify me,” he told a judge. “I can’t,” the judge replied. “I could only DQ you for running, and right now you couldn’t run if you had a bear chasing you.”

11

with the twenty-mile Mike Hannon completed, the finish line of the London Marathon seemed like an eminently attainable goal. And so I went out every day and trained, and every weekend I entered a race. Ten kilometers and five miles in Central Park, five miles in the Bronx, a half-marathon in Brooklyn. My time in the Bronx race was 51:40, in Brooklyn 2:22:25.

But by the end of the Brooklyn race, my feet were a mess. All these years later, a glance at my race schedule is enough to confirm that I was overdoing it, but all I knew at the time was that my feet were in bad shape. Blisters, soreness, pain. My knee was fine, racewalking really did avoid stressing the knees, but my feet were taking a beating. I waited for them to get better, and they didn’t, and by the time I got on the plane for London I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to finish the race — and would probably be well advised not to start it.

I landed at Heathrow and found a bed-and-breakfast in Paddington. I went to race headquarters and picked up my number and souvenir T-shirt, which showed a feisty bulldog wearing the Union Jack. I took it back to my room and wondered if I’d ever get the chance to try it on.

Because I’d long since decided that one had to earn the right to wear a race shirt, and I never put one on until the race was over. This had never been a problem, as I’d so far finished every race I signed up for, but how could I expect to finish this one? And why would I even bother to start it?

I had a few days in London to think about it, and I spent them seeing the city. My museum visits included the Wallace Collection, a small museum devoted largely to the work of nineteenth-century French artists who painted idealized bucolic scenes. This was supposed to divert me from anxiety about the impending race, but I realized it wasn’t working when I found myself noticing that every last one of those barefoot shepherds and shepherdesses had second toes substantially longer than their big toes.

Which is to say that they all suffered from Morton’s Foot, a structural peculiarity well known to runners and their podiatrists.

My feet didn’t get any better in the days leading up to the marathon. It rained the night before the race and was still at it come race time.

The race started somewhere south of London — the halfway point would come at Tower Bridge — and I found my way there knowing it would be impossible for me to cover twenty-six miles, or anywhere close to it. I couldn’t even work up a good fantasy in which I managed to finish the race.

What got me to the start was a little bargain I made with myself. I figured I could manage three miles, and I decided that would entitle me to wear the goddamn shirt. My feet were wet already, and it hurt to walk, and I couldn’t see how walking would get a whole lot better in wet socks.

(Cotton socks, of course. There was widespread agreement at the time that natural fibers were universally preferable to artificial ones, and that real men didn’t wear polyester. There are a lot of good things about cotton, but most of them disappear in a hurry when you work up a sweat. Nowadays all athletic socks are either man-made fibers or wool, and runners favor “technical” shirts designed to wick perspiration away from the body. Cotton socks, a cotton shirt, ill-fitting shoes — oh, I was in great shape.)

Still, three miles. How hard could it be to walk three miles?

I walked the whole thing.

I don’t really know what kept me going. Some kind of stubborn determination, I suppose, but if so it was operating entirely on an unconscious level, because when the race started I had no intention of staying with it for more than three miles or so. I didn’t aspire to anything beyond that.

Nor did the pain suddenly abate, enabling me to change my mind. My feet were sore and they stayed that way.

The organizers of the race were well aware that not everyone would be able to go the distance, and they had a bus or two that swept the tail end of the field, picking up whatever stragglers had sensibly concluded that enough was enough. Once you were past the thirteen-mile mark, the midpoint of the race, you were on your own; if you wanted to drop out, you could hop on the Underground or hail a cab.

I kept walking, past the three-mile mark, past the five-mile mark, and on. I kept telling myself I’d drop out soon, and as I got closer and closer to Tower Bridge, I knew it was time to give up.

Then I saw the bridge, and realized I was halfway there. I kept going and crossed the bridge, and it struck me for the first time that I might actually be able to finish this thing. Because my feet didn’t feel any worse than they had at the start, and they couldn’t get any wetter than they already were, because even cotton can only hold so much water.

Two miles beyond Tower Bridge, we had a loop of about six miles around the Isle of Dogs. There weren’t any dogs to be seen, or much of anything else; it was in those days an unappetizing patch of urban wasteland. It was also the last part of the course that I can remember. The finish was at Constitution Hill — they changed that the following year — but I don’t know how we got there. I paid just enough attention to the route to stay on it.

There was one point very near the end where the course led across a vast intersection, and traffic controls at that stage of the race were somewhat lax. In the interest of self-preservation, I forced myself into a raggedy-ass run across that fifty-yard stretch of pavement, but with that exception I walked all the way.

A mile or so from the finish I heard my name called, and looked up to see my good friend Pat Trese; he was in town on business and showed up to cheer me on. That helped me pick up the pace, and I crossed the line with an official time of 5:22:37.

I was sore the next couple of days, but not terribly so, and on Wednesday I took a train and a bus to Glastonbury, where I spent a couple of days walking around and climbing the High Tor. Then I flew home and got back to the business of racing.

I must have done other things that year. I wrote a monthly column for Writers Digest and ghosted a first draft of a screenplay, I contributed four songs to an off-Broadway revue, and in the fall I wrote a long novel, Eight Million Ways to Die. I got out of one relationship and, after a brief interval, got into another. I flew to Europe and back twice, took a batch of westbound buses, and flew home from Los Angeles. It was, all things considered, a fairly busy year, but when I look at the record it seems to me that all I did was race.

In 1981 I took part in forty races, including five marathons and adding up to 374.5 miles.

One of the first things I did after returning from London was sign up for the Madrid Marathon. New York Road Runners was offering a package tour, including airfare, a week in a downtown hotel, and race registration. I entered, and took along my daughter Jill, who would turn eighteen a week or two after the race. There were eight or ten other members of the New York contingent, including two elite runners, Gillian Adams and Odis Sanders, whose entries were sponsored by NYRR.

I managed to fit in seven races between London and Madrid. I walked four of them and, because my knee seemed to have recovered, ran three. Walking, after all, was something I’d embraced out of need, and if the need no longer existed, why not run? It was certainly faster, by around three minutes a mile in a short race.

In Madrid I trained some in the Retiro, a well-landscaped park that smelled uncannily like a cat box. Jill, who’d run a few races in Central Park, had thought she might try running the marathon, but decided watching it was enough of a challenge, so Sunday morning she remained a spectator while I lined up with the other entrants.

My keenest memory of the race was the utter bafflement of the few Madrileños who actually got a glimpse of it. Madrid is a city where the bulk of the population sits down to dinner around midnight before partying until four or five in the morning. Consequently we ran through empty streets, lined not with crowds of cheering spectators but with essentially empty sidewalks. Now and then there’d be a few people on a corner waiting for the light to change, but all they did was stare at us. This was the fourth year of the Madrid Marathon, but it hadn’t yet caught on with the general public, and you could see these folks didn’t have a clue what we were doing, or why we were doing it.

That was okay with me. I wasn’t really any more interested in them than they were in me. I ran past some imposing public buildings, but I didn’t care about them, either. I just kept on running, and then my knee started to hurt.

So I ran for as long as I could, and somewhere around the sixteen-mile mark (though it would have been posted in kilometers) I switched to racewalking and wrapped up the final ten miles that way. My time was 4:43:23, which was thirty-nine minutes faster than London, but you couldn’t really compare the two times because one was pure walking and the other was a run-walk mix. Still, it was a faster time than I’d had before, and a second marathon completed, and I felt good about it.

Gillian and Odis were the marathon’s two winners, which was no huge surprise; they were the event’s world-class entrants, and fulfilled expectations. We all celebrated their victory and our collective triumph, and then Jill and I treated ourselves to two days in Barcelona before flying back to New York.

On May 31, I took the subway to Queens and ran a 10K race in Forest Park. Then I went home and packed my suitcase, and shortly after midnight I showed up at the main post office at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street and dropped an envelope in the slot. It contained my entry for the New York City Marathon, which had to be postmarked on or after June 1. Entry was by lottery, and having the earliest June postmark didn’t do anything to assure acceptance, but as soon as I mailed my application I was free to leave town.

I went directly from the post office to the Greyhound station, sat on a bench for two hours, and then boarded a bus for Columbus, Ohio.

I’d been living with a woman since the fall of 1977, and after three and a half years it was pretty clear that we were done with each other. In New York City, however, it’s easy to postpone the final break in a relationship, especially when there’s a rent-stabilized apartment involved. A kind of inertia comes into play, with each party perfectly willing to have the other move out, but neither much inclined to move on one’s own.

That spring we received a notice that our building was going co-op, and that we would have the opportunity to either buy our apartment or stay on as statutory tenants. I couldn’t afford to buy anything, and it seemed like the right time to make a break, so we agreed that she would stay on in the apartment while I would leave my worldly goods there until the fall, when I would remove them to whatever new lodgings I’d manage to find.

As of the first of June, I’d no longer have a place to live, or rent to pay. Nor would I have any pressing reason to hunt for a new apartment for the next three months or so. What a perfect opportunity, then, to go see something of the country — and, while I was at it, run across as much of it as possible.

Running Times was quick to assure me that there were races every weekend all over America, including those parts of it I’d not yet managed to visit. I didn’t have a car, but neither did I need one. I was perfectly happy to leave the driving to Greyhound, as their commercials suggested I do, and I even used the line in a song:

The song was one of four I contributed to a revue called Applesauce, and together they earned me $58 the following year when the show had a string of off-off-Broadway performances. But I wrote it without dreams of wealth or glory. It was, like all my songs, just something to sing to myself, off-key and out of tune, while I rode around the country.

Aside from Alaska and Hawaii, both of them off Greyhound’s route, there were four states I’d managed to miss over the years — Iowa, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. I sat down with Running Times and a map and worked things out, and once I’d mailed in my marathon application, I was on my way.

My first bus took me to Columbus, Ohio, where I fit in a run before boarding a connecting bus to Chicago. I got a room at the Y and ran an 8.9-mile race in Lincoln Park. (For some reason I ate nothing but fruit for the week before the race, and this particular nutritional experiment turned out to be a disaster; I ran utterly out of gas during the race, and realized afterward I’d probably been perilously close to collapse.) My time running was no better than I might have managed on a good day racewalking, 1:35, and I was lucky to finish at all. (On the other hand, that’s my PR for the distance, and will likely remain so until another 8.9-mile race comes along.)

I went from Chicago to Iowa City, where I stayed a few days in some sort of hostel. I met a fellow there around my age who was also working things out after a relationship had failed. “These things take time,” he said. “You can’t rush them. I’m not ready to get back into things yet, but I can tell I’m making real progress.” And when exactly had his relationship fallen apart? A little over five years ago, he said, and my heart sank.

I hitchhiked to Des Moines, where I stayed overnight with my old friend Ken Bressett. In 1964 he’d hired me as an editor in the coin supply division at Western Publishing, and I spent an enjoyable year and a half in Racine, Wisconsin, until it dawned on me that I had other things I’d rather do in my life. Now, seventeen years later, Ken had relocated to Des Moines, where he was working for a major coin dealer, and he surprised me with a job offer. That was heartening, but there were still other things I’d rather do with my life, and after breakfast I went to the bus station to do them.

My next stop was Fort Dodge, where I ran a five-mile race, then caught a bus to Sioux City. I tried for a room at the Y but the front desk was closed, and a fellow outside pointed me toward the downtown hotels. “But you don’t want the Swan or the Bus,” he said, “because there’s nothing but drunken Indians there.” I went straight to the Hotel Swan, and when they proved to be full I tried the Bus Hotel, where my room cost me $6 for the night. If there were any Indians there, they must have already been passed out. I didn’t see them, or anybody else, and in the morning I went out for a look at the Missouri River and then got on a bus to South Dakota.

I stayed a couple of days in Brookings, spent a memorable afternoon with the Harvey Dunn paintings in the South Dakota State collection, then thumbed a couple of rides to Clark, where their centennial celebration was to include a 10K race. The little town was packed, every living graduate of the local high school had evidently returned for the occasion, and there were no rooms to be had. I slept the night before the race on the big lawn in the center of town, and still turned in a decent performance in the race.

A few years later I got to know Harold Adams, a Minneapolis resident who wrote a fine series of mystery novels set in Clark in the 1930’s (although he called it something else in the books). I mentioned my own connection to Clark, and later on he reported that he’d checked, and the locals still remembered me.

“There were hundreds of people there,” I said, “and I didn’t do anything remarkable. Why would they remember me?”

“Well,” he said, “as far as they could make out, you were the only person there who showed up for no discernible reason.”

My next stop, for no discernible reason, was Fargo, where I managed to find a room for $7 a night — or $20 a week. Years later I read a scrap of Internet flotsam that told of some poor fool who’d subsisted on a diet of nothing but beans and cabbage; he lived in a room without windows, and allegedly farted himself to death. The Snopes Urban Legends site assures me that this never happened, but when I read it all I could think of was my room in Fargo. It was tiny, and it didn’t have a window, and a person wouldn’t need too much in the way of beans and cabbage to replace all the room’s oxygen with methane.

Windows or no windows, I couldn’t resist a bargain, and took the room for a week. I stayed for five days, and spent most of each day on the streets of Fargo, preparing myself for the upcoming marathon an hour or two north of there in Grand Forks. I ran through attractive residential neighborhoods for as long as I could, then went back to my bargain paradise and rested up.

The North Dakota Marathon was to be my long race that summer. All I knew about North Dakota was that it was flat, and I figured that made it the perfect place to run a marathon. The course turned out to be as flat as I could possibly have hoped. It was an out-and-back race; we ran out on a two-lane blacktop highway for around ten miles, turned left and kept going to the 13.1-mile halfway point, then turned around and retraced our steps to the finish. Every last bit of it was straight as a die and flat as a fritter. There may have been a wind blowing, there almost always is in that part of the country, but I can’t say I remember it. Nor do I recall anything you could classify as scenery, beyond the endless fields filled with what must have been amber waves of grain. (No purple mountains’ majesty, however, not even off in the distance.)

While I’m sure many runners would decry the course as monotonous, I was too busy running it to miss uphills and downhills and glorious vistas — or cheering spectators, for that matter. I was able to run for twenty miles before my knee forced me to change my gait, whereupon I switched to racewalking and pushed through the remaining six miles. My time was my best yet, 4:26:23, seventeen minutes faster than Madrid and fifty-six minutes better than London.

I went straight from the finish line to the local Y, where shower facilities were made available to marathoners, and from there to the bus station; I just had time for a meal before boarding a bus to Fargo, where I switched to another heading west. I positioned myself so that my legs were as comfortable as possible, and I looked out the window at a huge purple cigar-shaped cloud that I remember more vividly than anything about the race itself. I watched it until darkness rendered it invisible, and then I fell asleep and didn’t wake up until we rolled into Billings, Montana, early the next morning.

Iowa, North Dakota, Montana. I’d now been to three of my four missing states, and had only Idaho to go. I took a room at the Hotel Nevada and trained for three days on the roads north of Billings, in the shadow of the rimrocks. I went to Great Falls, where the race listed in Running Times turned out to have been canceled. From there I went to Missoula, and that’s where I spent the Fourth of July, with some new friends who invited me to a picnic.

I checked off Idaho without quite setting foot in it; my bus passed through the panhandle, on a trip that ultimately let me off in Coos Bay, Oregon. I ran a 4.8-mile race there, spent a couple of nights on a mattress on the floor of a Presbyterian church there — it was listed as a youth hostel, but what it was, really, was a floor — and then switched to a $25-a-week room downtown. This one had windows, and was actually quite spacious.

I toured a sawmill in nearby North Bend, then rode a bus to Cottage Grove, where they were hosting the Bohemian Mining Days Half-Marathon. I signed up for it, and when I asked about budget accommodations, the race director and his wife insisted I stay at their house. I did, and ran in an absolutely idyllic race the next morning. It was cool, with a misty runner’s rain falling intermittently, and the course was point-to-point and perceptibly downhill, and it was a pleasure from the start to the finish, and I notched 1:54:46 for 13.1 miles. Afterward I got to talking with another runner, and he turned out to be from Coos Bay and on his way home, and I got a ride with him.

What a perfect weekend.

And so on.

In Great Falls, I’d come close to teaming up with another fellow and continuing my trip in a car. We’d met on the bus to Great Falls, and bumped into each other a couple of times in the few days I spent in that town. (While the race had been canceled, they had a wonderful rubberized track in a public park, an ideal running surface.) I forget what had brought my new friend to Great Falls, but it hadn’t been the promise of a footrace, and whatever it was proved insufficient to hold him. He was ready to head west, and wanted me to join him.

In a car. He went shopping and bought one and showed it to me with pride. It was his idea that we would split the driving and share the expenses and see something of the country together. The idea was not entirely without appeal, and in the end there were just two things that stopped me.

First was the car. It looked okay, and the engine sounded all right to my untrained ear, but it was hard to overlook the fact that the door on the passenger side was held shut by a few loops of wire. It wasn’t hard to imagine scenarios in which that could prove problematic.

That was the bad thing about the car. The good thing was that it was equipped with automatic transmission, which would come in handy during my friend’s stints behind the wheel. Because, see, he had only one arm.

That I gave serious consideration to climbing into this rolling death trap tells me more about my state of mind than I’d prefer to know. And how could I disappoint my new friend? Suppose, like that brave chap in the Iowa City youth hostel, it wound up taking him five years to get over it?

In the end, though, I found a way to break the news to him that I’d go on leaving the driving to Greyhound.

In Coos Bay, I found myself considering not a car but a bicycle. I had encountered cyclists in the hostel there, catching a few hours of sack time on the floor before resuming their two-wheeled journey south. It seemed I was on the very route favored by bicyclists seeking to cross the country north to south, the direction of choice because of the net decline in elevation. I wouldn’t start at Washington’s border with British Columbia, nor would I keep going all the way to Tijuana, but I was on Route 101 already anyway, so why not hop on a bicycle and share the route?

A couple of things helped dissuade me from this course. One was the appearance of the cyclists — the ones I met at the hostel, and those I saw zipping by on the highway. They all looked exhausted, and if they were having a good time they were careful not to let it show.

It struck me, too, that it wouldn’t be all that relaxing to have a constant stream of cars and trucks coming up behind me. Bicycles, unlike pedestrians, were required to go with the flow of traffic, keeping on or near the shoulder and relying on motorized traffic to avoid running them down. I wasn’t that happy with the thought of trusting the good judgment and quick reflexes of a driver I couldn’t even see. Suppose he was drunk, or wired on amphetamines? Hell, suppose the poor sonofabitch only had one arm?

If I went ahead, though, I’d have to buy a bike. And that brought to mind the last time I’d done so.

It was back in the early spring of 1967, and I was in Ireland. I’d been married, and living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the marriage was starting to fall apart, so I flew to Dublin to Think Things Over. (Does a subtle pattern begin to emerge? Oh, shut up.)

I spent a month in Dublin, finishing a book I’d brought with me. (My third book about Evan Tanner, it was set in Eastern Europe, with a pivotal sequence taking place in Latvia, and in a bookstore on O’Connell Street I managed to buy a copy of Teach Yourself Latvian. The bookseller must have been astonished to see that one walk out of his store.) I lived and worked in a bed-and-breakfast in Amiens Street, where I learned as much about chilblains as I did about the Latvian language, and then I left Dublin with the intention of getting to West Cork and Kerry.

I hitchhiked, with very poor results; just a week or so earlier a hitchhiker had pulled a knife on a motorist and forced him to drive out of his way, and that was enough to constitute front-page news in Ireland. So for a week or two drivers were stifling their more generous impulses, and it took me forever to get to Wexford Town, where I bought a bicycle.

What a mistake that turned out to be. There wasn’t a level patch of highway anywhere around, and I was always either walking the bike up a hill or clinging to it, terrified, as it sped downhill out of control. I was lumbered with a heavy backpack, which didn’t help, and the skies, while all of this was going on, were dealing out a seemingly inexhaustible supply of rain.

I did this for a few days, and wound up in Enniscorthy, a nice enough village but one whose charms wore thin by the third day. The only thing that kept me there was a reluctance to get back on the bike. I tried to sell it to my landlady, whose son greatly admired it, but she was canny enough to wait me out, and finally I told her she could have it outright in exchange for the lodging debt I’d already incurred. She agreed, and I left there feeling I’d pulled a fast one.

And here I was actually contemplating the purchase of another bicycle. Coastal Oregon wasn’t as hilly as County Wexford, but neither was it as pancake-flat as the North Dakota Marathon. Nor was its climate anything you could label Saharan. Rain, when it came, was never a great surprise.

Buy a bike? No, I don’t think so.

I wonder why it never occurred to me to walk.

Not in races, I was doing fine running them, and in the shorter ones I could get from the start to the finish without hearing from my knee. But why, when I had reached a point where risking my life on a bicycle in highway traffic, or with the one-armed man from The Fugitive, seemed like a viable alternative to Greyhound, did I never even consider the notion of getting from one place to another on foot?

You’d think I might have tried it for a day or two. Looking back, I can’t imagine I’d have walked from Coos Bay all the way to San Francisco, let alone Los Angeles. But I might have walked to Bandon, a coastal village twenty miles or so south of Coos Bay. I had to stop there to pick up my mail, and it would have been no great challenge to spend a day walking there. If I liked it, I could walk some more the next day, and the day after that.

But it never even entered my mind. When I left Coos Bay it was on a bus, and when I left Bandon a day or two later it was on another bus.

I spent a week or so in San Francisco; my cousin Jeffrey, who was living north of the city in Santa Rosa, kept a pied-à-terre on the edge of the Tenderloin, and he let me stay there. It was a chance for me to find out what Mark Twain meant when he said the coldest winter he’d ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

I kept warm by running in the Gay Run, a 5K race in Golden Gate Park, and the souvenir orange tank top would become a treasured possession, albeit one I couldn’t wear just anywhere. A couple of days later I got on another bus and got off in Los Angeles.

I participated in one race while I was in L.A., another 5K, this one in aid of St. Joseph’s Medical Center. I’d notched a time of 23:51 in San Francisco, and trimmed that to 23:50 in L.A. I figured I’d stay a week or so — I had friends to visit in the area — and then I’d head east.

The idea of another three thousand miles on buses was not very appealing. I didn’t want the ordeal of a nonstop bus ride across the continent, nor did I feel like breaking it up and taking two or three weeks to get back to New York. I’d been traveling a long time, and I was ready to be home. What I really wanted to do was fly, but I couldn’t really afford the airfare.

And then a friend of mine, a film and TV writer, popped up with a proposition. He’d managed to take on more work than he could get done on time, and proposed that he hire me to write the first draft of a made-for-television film. It was a project he was pretty sure wouldn’t get greenlighted anyway, and he’d get paid for delivering the first draft, even as I’d get paid for delivering it to him. He’d be guilty of a gross infraction of Writers Guild’s work rules, but I wasn’t a member, so that wasn’t really a problem for me. And, as long as we both kept our mouths shut, it wouldn’t be a problem for him, either.

So I took a suite for two weeks at the Magic Hotel, where I’d lived for six months on an earlier sojourn in L.A., and I hammered out the screenplay, and got paid enough so that I could forget about Greyhound and fly back to New York, with enough money left over to find myself a place to live.

12

the apartment i found was on Jane street, in the basement of a back house — i.e., a house situated immediately behind another house that actually fronted on the street. You had to go through a narrow little passage to get to it, and then you went down a flight of steps, and then you were there, and God help you. It was as Bohemian and romantic as any dewy-eyed arrival from Oshkosh could possibly have wanted, and it was dark and smelled of mold and mildew, and it managed to make me nostalgic for that windowless $20-a-week palace I’d had in Fargo.

I stuck it out for two months there, then moved in with a girlfriend in Washington Heights. I entered four NYRR races, the 10K New Harlem I’d run back in 1979 and a trip of five-milers, two in Queens and one in Central Park. My times in the five-mile races were remarkably consistent, ranging from 39:22 to 39:50.

When I wasn’t racing, or working on a book, I was in the park bordering the Hudson, running down to Seventy-second Street and back. Because one of the first things I’d found out on returning to New York was that my 1981 New York Marathon entry had been accepted, and on the last Sunday in October I’d be participating in my fourth marathon of the year.

The course then was essentially the same as it is now, with the start on the Staten Island side of the Verrazano Bridge. I started out running, and I was still running at the halfway point, in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, when I heard my name called and looked up to see Pat Trese and his girlfriend of the moment; he had once again showed up to cheer me on.

My knee would have been hurting by then, but not enough yet to make me change my gait. I’m not sure just when I switched to racewalking, but it seems to me I must have made the switch around fifteen or sixteen miles, shortly before crossing the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan. I walked the rest of the way, except for the last hundred yards, when I forced myself into a run — not to get to the finish line faster, but to keep any of the scorers from listing me as a walker. The marathon had a special division for walkers, with prizes awarded; my time of 4:39:38 wasn’t anywhere near good enough to put me in contention for a prize, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

4:39:38.

My time was four minutes faster than Madrid, thirteen minutes slower than North Dakota. You couldn’t really compare one performance with another, New York was certainly a much more difficult course than Grand Forks, but it was even harder for me to compare the three races because the most important element, it seemed to me, was how much running I was able to do. The more I ran, the less time it took me to cover the distance.

It seemed unlikely that I’d ever be able to run the entire 26.2 miles of a marathon. I could run shorter races — sometimes with pain, sometimes without — but sooner or later in the course of a marathon my knee would announce that it was having no more of this, thanks all the same. The more I pushed it, the more I was risking doing lasting damage.

Nowadays a whole host of marathoners combine walking and running, and one running maven, Jeff Galloway, prescribes a regular routine of walking breaks, not only to enable new runners to reach the finish line of a marathon, but as a way for more experienced runners to increase their overall speed. He swears it works, and there are plenty of run/walk racers who swear by Galloway, while other runners and walkers swear at him, irritated by all those Galloweenies who rush to edge in front of them only to switch abruptly to a walk.

Back in 1981, though, it seemed to me that one was either a walker or a runner. Walking breaks had got me around Washington Square at the beginning, but the day I knew I was a runner was the day I didn’t have to take them anymore.

So what was I now? If I was a runner, I ought to be able to run the whole race. And if I couldn’t, then maybe I ought to walk the whole race.

I had one more marathon on my schedule for the year. It was the Jersey Shore Marathon, coming up on the first Sunday in December. I thought about it, and I decided to walk it. All of it, start to finish, and I wouldn’t even cheat and run fifty yards across an intersection, as I’d been forced to do in London.

The course, from what I’d read, was not appreciably hillier than the one in North Dakota, and the weather figured to be ideal for racing. There was only one problem. I was going to have to finish in under five hours.

See, that was the cutoff time if you wanted a jacket.

Virtually every race gave you a T-shirt, and all you generally had to do to get one was enter. They handed it to you when you picked up your number, and nobody cared if you finished the race, or even started it.

But Jersey Shore gave out these jackets. Windbreakers, I guess you’d call them, and they were pretty nice, handsome blue jackets of some sort of shiny material, with the race logo on it. I’d seen people wearing last year’s jackets, and of course I wanted one.

But they gave them to you when you finished, and you had to do so in under five hours to qualify. (It has since occurred to me that this was probably not the strict requirement it seemed at the time, that the reasoning was that the finish line might shut down at the five-hour mark, or not long after it, and that they thus couldn’t guarantee you a jacket if you didn’t make it home under the wire. If they were still hanging out at the finish line fifteen minutes past the hour, and if some poor bastard came limping across the line, and they still had jackets left, do you suppose they’d tell him he was out of luck? Probably not — but all I knew back then was that I damn well had to make it in five hours if I was going to get that fucking jacket.)

Well, how hard could that be? I’d done four marathons already, and three of them had beaten that five-hour cutoff with plenty of time to spare.

But I ran more than half of each of those races. And the one marathon I’d walked, in London, I’d gone over the five-hour mark by almost a full minute per mile.

This wasn’t going to be a walk on the beach.

In order to qualify for the jacket, I’d have to walk the Jersey Shore at a pace a little faster than 11:30 per mile. Did I have a shot at it?

A week after the New York Marathon, I entered an 8K Halloween race in Central Park. It was the same race I’d run the previous year, in 46:50, and this time I walked it in 55:47. Eight kilometers is about as close as you can get to five miles, so my pace was roughly 11:10 minutes per mile, which would bring me across the Jersey finish line with a few minutes to spare.

But that assumed I could sustain my five-mile pace for a whole marathon. The thing about a marathon is that it’s long enough for its sheer distance to be a factor. I wasn’t worried about hitting the wall. Unless you’re an elite runner, stacking up five-minute miles, there’s no wall out there for you to hit; that only happens to runners who move fast enough to deplete their glycogen stores, while the rest of us are burning a certain amount of stored fat in our less highly tuned engines. But you don’t have to hit a wall to slow down some over the course of that long a race.

The longest race I’d walked start to finish was the Mike Hannon Memorial, that twenty-mile effort that had been my first race as a walker. My time of 4:09 worked out to a little over twelve minutes a mile, a pace that would get me across the finish line twenty minutes too late for a jacket.

Hmmm.

Well, that had been my first race as a walker. A month later I’d walked from Coney Island to Prospect Park in the Brooklyn Half-Marathon, and my time had been a brisk 2:22:25. I didn’t have to calculate the pace; all I had to do was double the time, and I’d knock off the marathon in 4:44:50.

Suddenly it was all looking very achievable. On the other hand, my best time running a half marathon was 1:54 in Oregon, and did that mean I could run a full marathon in under four hours?

Not too likely. What it boiled down to, really, was that I didn’t know how long it would take me to walk the marathon, and wouldn’t know until I did it. I’d have to push all the way, I’d have to maintain for the entire distance a pace not much slower than I could manage in a short race. All I could do was try, and five hours after the race began I’d find out whether or not it worked.

I had two more races coming up before the Jersey Shore, a 10K in Buffalo’s Delaware Park and a five-mile Turkey Trot Thanksgiving weekend in Washington, D.C. Most of my training all that month consisted of racewalking along the Hudson, but I ran in both of those races, and in the Turkey Trot my time was 39:05. That was the fastest I’d ever run at that distance.

And it was a mark that would stand up. Because, as it turned out, it was my final race as a runner.

Right up to the start of the Jersey Shore Marathon, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d run or walk. Common sense suggested that I play it safe. If I started out with ten or twelve miles of running, I could pretty much guarantee that I’d go home with a jacket. I’d been well under five hours in my last three marathons, and I could expect to do as well in this one.

First things first, I told myself. Just do what you have to do to get the jacket. There will be other marathons, other chances to prove yourself as a walker.

But I wanted to walk this race, wanted to respond to the challenge. Because that’s what it was — a challenge, a test. How could I fail to accept it?

So I took a bus to Red Bank, spent the night at a hotel, showed up at the start the next morning, and set out walking. I don’t remember much about the race. I pushed hard from the beginning, and there was a point where it seemed to me that I had a shot at finishing in under five hours, but it was never a foregone conclusion. I was under two and a half hours at the 13.1-mile point, but not by much.

I didn’t get faster toward the end of the race, but I didn’t get all that much slower, either. There were a few other walkers in the race, some of whom I recognized from Central Park, and one thing I remember vividly is passing one of them — a faster, stronger racewalker than I — with two or three miles to go. He gave me a wave and a thumbs-up, and I passed him and kept going and began to think I was actually going to make it.

I did, with an official time of 4:53:28. They handed me a jacket, and I put it on and took a bus back to the city.

I wonder whatever happened to that jacket. I don’t think I wore it more than three or four times over the years, but I liked having it, even during all those years when the only walking I did was down to the corner to mail a letter.

Now and then I’d come across it in a closet, and I’d recall the circumstances of earning it, the urgent push to the finish line, the sense of triumph that came of having done what I’d set out to do. So of course I kept the jacket, and I’m sure I own it now, although I’m damned if I know where it is.

It was around this time that I first became aware of the twenty-four-hour race.

I was beginning to realize that there were longer races than marathons, and that some runners actually put themselves through events of fifty or a hundred kilometers or fifty or a hundred miles. That seemed crazy to me, but no crazier than a marathon had seemed to me not all that long ago.

And then I read about a twenty-four-hour race, and how walkers who completed a hundred miles or more within twenty-four hours could achieve recognition as Centurions. Such a race, I learned, was held annually on a quarter-mile oval track. You circled it four hundred times and the prize was yours.

That prize, the article went on to report, was apt to go to an older competitor. Youth seemed to be less and less of a factor the greater the distance raced, with marathons frequently won by runners who’d be too old for top honors in a shorter race. This was even more pronounced in ultras, and the racewalker who then held the U.S. record in the twenty-four-hour event had taken up the sport in his late fifties, and was over sixty at the time of his record-setting performance.

In fact, the writer suggested, a younger person might be at a considerable psychological disadvantage. When you’re twenty years old, and when you’ve walked ten times around a track and realize you have 390 laps to go, it’s only natural to say the hell with it and figure you can always try again next year. But when you’re past sixty, you realize you’ve got a limited number of next years, and you’re by no means getting stronger by the minute. So you’re that much more inclined to stay with it while you’ve still got the chance.

It was appealing, I must say. I wasn’t fast and I wasn’t strong, but I did seem to be reasonably good at finishing what I set out to do. You’d have to average a little better than fifteen minutes a mile to cover the distance in the allotted time, and my cruising pace in marathons was a good deal faster than that. Of course this meant doing three marathons and most of a fourth, one right after the other, and somewhere in the course of doing all that, some alarmist might see fit to rush me to the hospital. But if I started training now, and built up the miles slowly but surely...

Well, i didn’t start training for a Centurion event. I figured I had plenty of time before I hit sixty. But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that my performance in the Jersey Shore race would have had me racing more than ever in the months that followed.

That’s not what happened. I did fit in a ten-mile race in Central Park later that month, and racewalked it, but in 1982 I didn’t enter a single race until the middle of June. I managed two races in July, three in August, and three in October, racewalking all of them — and I didn’t participate in a single race after that for over twenty years.

It’s funny, really, the way things happen, and the way they don’t. I’d done five marathons in the course of a year, and had ended on a high note, and I certainly expected to do as many marathons in 1982, if not more.

One thing I did, not long after the first of the year, was move from Washington Heights to Greenpoint. The apartment I found, a fourth-floor railroad flat, was on Manhattan Avenue, just a little ways past the midpoint of the New York City Marathon. I’d taken note of Greenpoint while running through it, and was impressed enough to choose it for the secret residence of Matthew Scudder’s client in Eight Million Ways to Die, and that’s where I looked when I decided to get a place of my own.

I liked living in Greenpoint. It’s become very trendy since then, though it doesn’t look all that different. While I was living there, I found the dated feel of the neighborhood very appealing. It was situated, I told friends, in a different time zone from the rest of the city. “When it’s eight-thirty in Manhattan,” I explained, “it’s 1948 in Greenpoint.”

It was an easy place to live, and it should have been a good place to train. McCarren Park was five or ten minutes from my apartment, and the oval asphalt path was ideal for racewalking.

Or it would have been, if it weren’t for the goddam kids.

There was a high school on Bedford Avenue across from the park, where a few hundred of Brooklyn’s finest young men were presumably engaged in studying auto or aviation mechanics. I could see where a knowledge of auto mechanics would come in handy when the little bastards went into business as car thieves and chop shop bandits, but the airplane portion of the curriculum struck me as impractical.

Evidently it struck some of them the same way, because a substantial portion of the student body spent much of their time outdoors, in or around the park. And they seemed to believe — not, I grant you, without some justification — that a middle-aged man racewalking was as funny a sight as you could see this side of the Cartoon Network.

I was sustained by the notion that, if you ignore people who are jeering at you, sooner or later they’ll stop. They, on the other hand, had figured out that if you make sport of some poor bastard long enough, sooner or later he’ll give up and go home — and the longer he lasts, the more amusement he’ll provide.

I’ll tell you, it took a lot of the joy out of my training.

Still, i could have managed. If it had been important to me, I could have found a way to get the miles in.

I joined the Greenpoint YMCA, just a block or two from my apartment, and went there a couple of times a week to work out with weights. I stopped using the sauna when some of the junior members discovered the lasting impact they could achieve by pissing on the hot rocks. It was enough to keep a person out of the sauna — and, before too long, out of the Y altogether.

They may have had a treadmill at the Y. I don’t recall one, and at the time cardiovascular equipment was by no means standard in neighborhood gyms. If they’d had one I doubt I’d have used it. Running and racewalking, as far as I was concerned, were things you did outside.

If you did them at all.

And it was becoming increasingly easy not to bother. The conventional wisdom held that running was addictive, but it seemed to me that not running was a good deal more addictive. It was an easy habit to acquire, and a hard one to break.

And so it wasn’t until June that I finally entered a race, and in October the 8K Halloween race was my ninth and last of the year. I walked all nine races, and my record book shows that I averaged eleven-minute miles. There were three four-mile events, a couple of 10Ks, and one half marathon. (There was also a six-mile race held right in Greenpoint, and my time of 1:04:03 would be more impressive but for the fact that the course measurement was off by a substantial distance.)

There was a five-mile race in Central Park on October 17; they called it a Computer Run, because they used the occasion to test the computerized scoring system that would be in use a week later at the NYC Marathon. I never even tried to register for the marathon, never even considered it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the training base for it. A week later was the Halloween 8K, and my time was a little over two minutes slower than the previous year, so a year of light training hadn’t cost me all that much. I could still do this.

But I didn’t, not for more than twenty-two years.

13

in July of 1982, I started spending time with a woman I’d met the previous fall, shortly after my return from California. We’d become friendly, but we were both involved with other people at the time; by July we had both found our way out of those relationships, and discovered one another.

One thing that was clear to both of us was that we were not interested in a relationship. Yeah, right. The following February we became engaged — engaged! — and in October of 1983 we were married, and we’ve been remarkably happy ever since.

It’s tempting to make the case that I’d taken up running (and eventually walking) out of discontent with my circumstances. Any dimestore Freud could nod sagely at my odyssey in the summer of ’81, stroke his beard, and pontificate: Ah, so. And what were you running away from, eh? And then, he’d point out, once Lynne and I began keeping company, I no longer had to run away from anything, and so I stopped.

Well, maybe. It’s hard to argue the point, but it seems to me there were other factors operating.

One was a matter of overload. I’d done far too much running and walking in 1981 — forty races, for God’s sake, and five of them full marathons. I was tired of it, mentally and emotionally, certainly, and very likely physically as well.

Just as important, I had a lot more demands on my time. Besides my writing workload, which picked up around then, I developed an interactive writing seminar, and for a couple of years Lynne and I were in the seminar business, flying around the country every weekend. (We called the seminar Write For Your Life, and what a mistake that turned out to be; a surprising number of venues thought it had something to do, pro or con, with abortion, and didn’t want to have anything to do with us.) The seminar was enormously satisfying in every respect but financially — I think the return on our time amounted to something like fifty cents an hour — and we put a lot of time and effort into it for about three years.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1985, we gave up our apartment in New York and moved to Florida. We bought a house right on the Gulf, and the first day I took a walk on the beach, heading north. The next day I did the same thing but headed in the opposite direction. The day after that I stayed home.

A couple of times during our Florida years I tried running on the beach. (Racewalking on the sand didn’t really work.) But it was too hot, and I was out of shape, and it didn’t take me long to abandon the enterprise. Running, or walking, or whatever you wanted to call it, seemed to be something I had embraced for a while, and something with which I was finished. Once in a while I would wear a race T-shirt and remember what I’d done to earn it. Now and then I would recall, in contemplation or conversation, that I had in fact run marathons, that I’d done five of them in the course of a single year. When I reported this to acquaintances, they seemed impressed; I was impressed as well, and a little wistful. All of that was a part of the past now, as impossible to recapture as any of the rest of it, and all of it, as the song had it, Gone, alas, like my youth, too soon.

I was sitting in the living room of our house in Fort Myers Beach when, out of nowhere, I envisioned a man walking eastward across America. As he walked, other people joined him.

It was the summer of 1987. We had been living in Florida for almost two years. I’d been writing regularly during that time — a book version of Write For Your Life, a film novelization that never got published because the publisher hadn’t cleared the rights sufficiently, a collaborative nonfiction venture that didn’t quite work out. I managed a couple of short stories, and I’d written the opening chapters of a couple of novels that were fated never to have second chapters, and it was past time for me to sit down and get a new novel written, and I couldn’t think what to write.

On an impulse, I’d contrived to book myself into a writers’ colony for the month of July. I’d never stayed at a colony before, but I’d read about them, and understood they provided room and board and a sort of communal solitude presumably conducive to creative effort. For years I’d been in the habit of going off somewhere when I was having trouble getting something written, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts struck me as a happier choice than a Motel 6 on the outskirts of Abilene, so I applied and was accepted. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, but I figured it couldn’t be less than I was doing at home in Florida.

Maybe I’d write a book about Bernie Rhodenbarr. I’d written five lighthearted books about the light-fingered fellow, and I really wanted to write a sixth, but the couple of attempts I’d made in that direction had gone nowhere. I liked the notion of a story about baseball cards — somebody could collect them, and Bernie could steal them — and I’d bought a couple of books and read up on the subject, but that didn’t mean I was ready to write the book, or even that there was a book to be written.

All that might come together, I decided, by the time I was settled in at VCCA. I’d be there for four weeks, and that ought to be time to get something started, if not finished. And that was all I needed, really — a good start on a book. If I managed that much, I could get the rest done back home in Florida.

Then, perhaps two weeks before I was to get started in Virginia, I got this vision of a guy walking across the country.

Over the next few days more and more of the story came to me. The fellow who started the whole thing was a bartender in Oregon, I decided — or realized, or whatever it was. And another character was a woman who was losing her eyesight. And she had a young son. And—

Bits and pieces. And, along with these folks, I sensed that there was another story line running alongside, involving a serial killer who was roaming the Midwest and murdering women. I couldn’t imagine what he had to do with this other story, or how the two plotlines might intersect, or if they even belonged on the same library shelf, let alone in the same book. But I sensed that what was happening to me was a rather extraordinary case of literary ferment, unlike anything in my prior experience, and the last thing I wanted to do was get in its way.

It was also very much evident that the book I was going to write was to be a very complicated affair, a large multiple-viewpoint novel, with a few dozen characters and a great body of incident. It would need considerable advance plotting, probably an elaborate outline, and it would be a long time before I’d be ready to write it. More than two weeks, certainly — which meant I’d better think of something else to work on at VCCA.

By the time I got in my car for the drive north, I realized I didn’t have any choice. There was only one book in my mind, and it wasn’t going to go away. I didn’t think I could actually start writing it, but maybe I could do some of the preliminary work on it, cobble up some sort of an outline that would serve me when I got back to Florida. Toward that end I took along a Rand McNally road atlas; it would help me with the geographical research, and might also keep me from getting irretrievably lost en route to Virginia.

I took two days to drive there, with a stop in Knoxville to attend a custom-made knife show. (I bought a nice little folding knife. I wonder whatever happened to it. Maybe it’s in the pocket of my Jersey Shore Marathon jacket.) On arrival at VCCA, I found my way to my dormitory room, and from there to my studio in the barn complex a quarter-mile away. I set up my typewriter, placed the road atlas to one side of it and a stack of blank paper to the other, and went to the dining room for dinner.

Come morning, I went to my studio, sat down at the typewriter, and wrote twenty pages. And I did the same thing every morning for twenty-three days, by which time I had completed a 460-page manuscript. I spent a day editing it, and another day getting it photocopied at Sweet Briar College, and then I got in the car and went home.

Writers sometimes say that a particular piece of work wrote itself, although in my experience nothing ever does. From a distance, though, Random Walk would seem to come close. An idea had come to me, apparently from out of nowhere, and two weeks later I’d sat down and begun writing, and three weeks and two days after that I was done. If the damn thing hadn’t written itself, then who, pray tell, was responsible for it?

Well, I guess that would be me. I was the one tapping the typewriter keys, and I was the one getting to my studio early each morning and emerging ten or twelve or fifteen hours later.

Nor was it a simple matter of taking down celestial dictation. I’ve read about people who’ve “channeled” books, and for whom the writing process consisted of little more than transcribing the sentences that unreeled in their brains. (If Mozart is to be believed — and God knows he’s always been reliable in the past — composition was rather like this for him. “There’s nothing to it,” he’s supposed to have said. “All I do is write down the music I hear in my head.”)

I’m not sure what channeling amounts to, for Mozart or for the woman who produced A Course in Miracles; I don’t know whether the actual source at such times is within or outside oneself. I’ll allow that my own experience had something in common with channeling, in that the initial idea came from no apparent source, and that ideas continued to come to me throughout the writing process, so that I was never at a loss for what turn in the narrative ought to happen next.

And that was no small gift. E. L. Doctorow has likened the process of writing a novel to driving at night — you can see only so far as the headlights reach, but you can get clear across the country that way. My characters, led by that bartender from Roseburg, Oregon, were walking by day, not driving by night, but each morning I went to my studio knowing just enough about their journey to carry them along for one more day.

I didn’t have an outline, of course, because I could never really see more than a day’s work into the book’s future. What I did have was my road atlas, and there wasn’t a day that I didn’t spend a substantial amount of time poring over it, working out the walkers’ route, determining what turns they would take and where they would stop. My serial killer, meanwhile, was driving all around the Midwest doing his evil deeds, and I was tracing his route in the atlas as well. Much of the book’s action was unfolding in places I had never been, but that didn’t bother me. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was writing, but I knew it wasn’t a travel book.

If one were to attribute such things as will to inanimate objects, one could say that Random Walk had shown an overwhelming desire to be written. It had virtually insisted on it.

Alas, it proved a good deal less eager to be read.

My regular publisher, William Morrow, was willing to bring out the book, but only if I cut it severely and reshaped it beyond recognition. I didn’t even consider complying, and my agent sent the book to two other publishers, both of whom wanted to do it. We went with Tor, and I made one small change to make the editor happy, adding a crystal that gets handed around among the walkers. (I’m not convinced it was a good idea, but I can’t see that it hurt anything.)

Then the book was published, whereupon it promptly vanished without a trace. No one knew what to make of it, and the line on the cover — “A New Novel for a New Age” — couldn’t have helped a whole lot. Nor did the cover art, which made the thing look like science fiction. Reviews tended to be negative, to the extent that the book got reviewed at all. Few copies found their way onto bookstore shelves, and fewer still found their way off those shelves.

A year or so after its hardcover publication, Random Walk had a second life in paperback — and that didn’t work, either. This time the cover managed to make the book look like some epic novel of the westward migration. Somehow prospective purchasers managed to find it within themselves to pick up something else instead.

It’s tempting to blame the publishers, and God knows I did at the time, but I don’t know that anyone could have made Random Walk work commercially. The experience of writing it had been extraordinary, and I was happy enough with the way the book had turned out, and if its destiny was to vanish without a trace, well, I wasn’t a twenty-two-year-old with a first book. I had written a lot of books, and many of them had vanished without a trace, and so what?

Well, not entirely without a trace.

One way or another, some copies must have found their way into readers’ hands. And over the years I heard from some of those readers.

“You know,” someone would say at a book signing, “I’ve read just about everything you’ve written, the light books and the dark ones, and I’ve pretty much liked all of them, but there was one book of yours I picked up a while back that I couldn’t make head or tail out of, and I can’t figure out what you were getting at or why you wrote it in the first place, and—”

And I’d know right away he was talking about Random Walk.

Or I might hear something along these lines: “I’ve read all your books, and I like them all, but there was one book of yours that I’ve read seventeen times, and I swear it changed the way I look at the world, and my life just hasn’t been the same since, and every year I read it again and get something else out of it, and—”

Random Walk.

The book went out of print quickly enough, and sometime in the mid-1990’s I was given the opportunity to make it available again through iUniverse, the print-on-demand publisher. They brought it out in trade paperback format, and for a while they had a relationship with Barnes & Noble that got the book on the store’s shelves. And it remains in print, and every six months or so I get a four-figure royalty check. Two of the four figures are after the decimal point, but at least the book is out there, and every once in a while somebody buys a copy.

One of these days I probably ought to persuade HarperCollins to publish the book, in mass-market or trade format, to give it a chance to find its audience. But when the thought occurs to me, I find myself thinking of an incident in Tom Robbins’s fine first novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

One of the book’s characters is upset over the fact that the life span of the butterfly is so short. So she goes into a trance to meditate on the phenomenon, and emerges therefrom with the insight that the life span of the butterfly is precisely as it ought to be, neither too long nor too short.

And so I wonder if one might not make a similar observation about Random Walk. Perhaps I don’t need to take any action so that the book might find its audience. Perhaps it has already found — and continues to find — as much of an audience as it deserves or requires. An audience that is neither too large nor too small, but precisely as it ought to be.

14

Random Walk didn’t have much impact on the world of American letters. And, notwithstanding the occasional hyperbole of the occasional fan, I don’t know that it changed many lives.

But it did change mine.

It was in the weeks immediately after my return from Virginia that Lynne and I realized our Florida experiment was a failure. Fort Myers Beach was a nice enough place, and the people we met were decent folks, but it just wasn’t where we belonged. We’d come, we now realized, because our life in New York had been an exhausting one; Lynne was running a demanding bookkeeping and accounting practice, I was writing books and a magazine column, and together we were flying around the country on weekends, putting on writing seminars. We were tired out, and one weekend back in 1985 we visited my aunt and uncle in Pompano Beach, Florida, and were struck by how much more relaxed their life was than ours.

Well, no kidding. My Uncle Hi was essentially retired, working maybe fifteen hours a week. My Aunt Mim was playing a lot of golf. We looked around and decided Florida was the answer, and the next thing you knew we were living there. But not in Pompano Beach. We picked the west coast, because we’d heard it was quieter there.

Right.

Two years later, we were pretty sure we didn’t want to stay. But where else would we go? Back to New York?

Maybe. But maybe not. We weren’t really ready to make that decision yet.

But suppose we were to close the Fort Myers Beach house and hit the road. Suppose we tried life without a fixed address, just breezing along with the breeze. It was a fantasy we’d both had for some years, and it looked as though we were now in a position to give it a whirl.

We set about packing things up, giving some of them away and putting the rest in storage. We planned our departure for early in 1988, but still didn’t know where we’d be heading. And I picked up that road atlas, and remembered the hours I’d spent with it in Virginia.

One thing I’d noted at the time was the great profusion of towns and villages named Buffalo. Growing up in that city, I’d been aware that it was not the only Buffalo in the nation. There was one in Wyoming, I knew, and it seemed to me there was one in Texas, and perhaps there were others.

While writing Random Walk, I learned that there were far more Buffalos than I’d ever suspected. The atlas’s index yielded quite a few, but I was soon to find out that there were far more places on the state maps than found their way into the index — and my list of Buffalos began to grow, including of course such permutations of the name as Buffalo Grove and Buffalo Gap and — eureka! — New Buffalo.

I reported all this to Lynne. “There’s something like twenty of these Buffalos,” I said, “and they’re mostly in the western part of the country, but there’s a batch in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and one in Alabama. What I was thinking, see, was when we’re driving around, with no place we absolutely have to get to, well, maybe just for the hell of it we could go to some of these Buffalos.”

“What a remarkably indulgent wife you have,” I’ve been told repeatedly. “To put up with your madness, and chase around the country after towns named Buffalo.”

It is, I suppose, a natural reaction for people to have. And mine is, to be sure, a remarkably indulgent wife in any number of respects. So I nod and smile and let it go.

But here, for the record, is my remarkably indulgent wife’s response to my tentative suggestion that we might, just might, try visiting some of those dots on the map:

“I think,” Lynne announced, standing up very straight, and speaking in a tone that brooked no argument, “we should go to all of them.”

Well, we certainly tried.

In the months before we left Florida, I spent some time at the library, where I happened upon what I took to calling an industrial-strength atlas. Consequently, by the time we hit the road, our list of Buffalos had grown from around twenty to just over forty.

Now, almost twenty years later, we’ve been to eighty-four of those towns, and know of about a dozen more.

You know, it reminds me of what they used to say about Rembrandt — that in the course of his life he produced three hundred canvases, of which four hundred are in Europe and the remaining five hundred in the United States. The analogy holds only so far. With the paintings, the implication would seem to be that there are a lot of counterfeit Rembrandts floating around, while it seems rather unlikely that anyone is producing bogus Buffalos.

So how to explain the numbers? The answer, I’ve come to believe, lies not in the realm of geography at all, but in the more unsettling world of modern physics. The best I can do is to theorize that, in accordance with Heisenberg’s principle, Buffalos are like subatomic particles; the mere act of looking for them causes new ones to spring into existence.

Our first Buffalo was in Alabama, and Rand McNally knew about it, so finding it was a simple matter of driving there. But it seemed to have gone out of business; there were no highway signs welcoming one, and the word buffalo hand-lettered on a wall was the only indication of where we were.

A local tradesman advised us that people still called the place Buffalo, and that the name had originally been Buffalo Wallow, because once upon a time there had been bison wallowing there. They were long gone, but then so was just about everything else.

We put on our Buffalo shirts — we had a batch of these, products of New Buffalo Graphics, our favorite showing the noble animal and the civic motto, Buffalo, City of No Illusions. Then, suitably attired, we took Polaroid photos of each other in front of the sign on the wall, and next to a sign we found at a half-acre lot next to a general store. The sign didn’t have a Buffalo reference, but what it did have was a message sternly advising one and all that the lot was a private club, restricted to members, and that trespassers would be prosecuted. It was, for God’s sake, a vacant lot, sprouting rank weeds and strewn with trash. Who would want to trespass? Who would care to be a member? And what was the point of the sign?

“It’s to keep out the Jews,” Lynne said.

Buffalo, Mississippi, was our second conquest. And it began to give us an indication of what lay ahead of us. Because it wasn’t on any of the maps, and it hadn’t shown up in any of the volumes I consulted, not even the industrial-strength atlas. In all the years since then, I’ve never seen a reference to the place anywhere. It was pure happenstance that we had any reason to look for it.

Or perhaps it was the agency of a Higher Power, operating in this instance through the medium of a CB radio. Lynne had insisted that we obtain this device, but when I was in the car I wouldn’t let her turn it on, because I couldn’t stand the thing. But after we’d logged our Alabama Buffalo we had moved on to Mobile, where I hung out for a day while Lynne tended to some family business over in George County, Mississippi.

I stayed in our motel room, writing my monthly Writer’s Digest column, and I’d just wrapped it up when she came in, telling me it was a damn good thing we’d bought the CB. “Because two truckers were talking,” she said, “and one of them mentioned Buffalo, Mississippi. I didn’t even know there was a Buffalo in Mississippi.”

“There isn’t,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “there is now. I got all excited, and I cut in and called ‘Breaker One-Nine,’ the way you do.”

“The way I do?”

“The way people do. The way CBers do. I asked about Buffalo, Mississippi, and how you get to it, and one of those old boys said it’s near McLain.”

In the morning we drove to McLain, which is on the road to Hattiesburg. A fellow at a gas station steered us toward the road to Buffalo. “There’s not much there,” he said. “Why do y’all want to go there?”

Why indeed? We followed his directions, and right where it was supposed to be we found an old graveyard, with a sign proclaiming it to be the Buffalo cemetery. That was the sole indication that there’d ever been a community here, but it was plenty. On with the Buffalo shirts, out with the Polaroid, and our Buffalo collection had doubled in size.

“That’s pretty amazing,” Lynne said. “How many people do you figure have ever been to Buffalo, Mississippi?”

“We’re not the only ones,” I said. “But all of the rest of them seem to be dead.”

The Buffalos were never the point. What they did was provide the illusion of purpose for an essentially purposeless odyssey. We’d left Florida with the intention of seeing something of the country, but if that’s all you’ve got in mind, it’s impossible to decide where to go next. The Buffalo hunt was always ready to tell us whether to turn left or right. We’d just head for the nearest Buffalo, and along the way we’d probably find something interesting.

The Buffalos themselves were sometimes interesting and sometimes not. Buffalo, Mississippi, was only the first of a whole slew of ghost Buffalos, towns that had once been actual communities but had failed to thrive. Buffalo Gap, Saskatchewan, was one of these, with only a cemetery to give proof of its former existence, while others lacked any population whatsoever, living or dead.

Buffalo, Texas, was situated at an Interstate exit, which made it one of the few Buffalos with a motel where we could stay overnight. The town also boasted a really good lunch place, the Rainbow Café. And Buffalo Gap, Texas, not too far south of Abilene, was home to Judy’s Gathering Place, where the food (and Judy’s company) was so good it was worth a detour on another drive across Texas.

But most of these towns were just there to be checked off the list, not much more than photo ops. Some of them were right where the map said they’d be, but others proved elusive. I remember spending half a day driving around looking for Buffalo Cove, North Carolina, and I’m not sure we ever did find it; we took a picture at some cove or other, and I don’t suppose anybody could prove it wasn’t the right spot, and I don’t suppose it matters, either.

And what did we do, while looking for Buffalo?

We drove around, and spent our nights in budget motels. The road atlas, and the prospect of one Buffalo or another, pointed us in a certain direction, and a set of Mobil travel guides let us know what diversions we might find along the way. We hit our share of national parks and monuments, including such big attractions as Yellowstone and Grand Canyon and Glacier, but also including Big Bend and Zion and Arches and Badlands and Crater Lake. We rode mules at the Grand Canyon and horses at Zion, but at most of the parks we hiked a few miles on the trails.

The Mobil guides pointed us to some interesting places we’d never have thought to look for. I remember a morning in western Kansas when we found our way to a house that had served as a hideout for the Dalton brothers, a place to hole up between bank robberies. There was, we were given to understand, an escape tunnel leading from the house to the barn in back, but we had to take that on faith. Still, it was an interesting stop.

From there we drove south into Oklahoma, where we picked up Buffalo, Oklahoma, before heading east through Ponca City and Bartlesville. There was a museum in Bartlesville, where an oilman’s collection of Western art was on display, and from there we drove north across the Kansas line once again, to Coffeyville, where a museum commemorated the day when those same Dalton brothers held up two banks at once.

It wasn’t the brightest move they ever made. The law was waiting for them, and pretty much riddled them with bullets. (Emmett Dalton survived his wounds, served his time in prison, and moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote a couple of films before building a successful career in real estate. You can’t make this stuff up — but if you drive aimlessly around the country, you can find out about it.)

Coffeyville would have been well worth a detour, but none was required. Because, after we’d seen all there was to see in the museum, and mused on bank robbery as a preparation for dabbling in Hollywood real estate, we just kept on going north on U.S. 169 to Chanute, turned west on State Highway 39, and a few miles down the road we were in Buffalo, Kansas.

We spent the night in a motel in Fort Scott, Kansas, that had more houseflies than we’d ever encountered anywhere. We changed our room, and the new room was just as bad. We swatted the little devils until our arms ached, and eventually we went to sleep, and in the morning we drove across into Missouri and passed through the towns of Nevada and Bolivar on our way to, yes, Buffalo.

Funny what you remember. I can trace our route — parts of it, anyway — because I highlighted it in yellow in that road atlas. And when I do, things come back to me that I haven’t thought of in years. Not those two Dalton sites, I’ve thought often enough of them, and Keller visited them both in Hit Parade. (On that same trip, Keller also managed a visit to a John Dillinger museum, in Nashville, Indiana. We went there, too, but in a different phase of the Buffalo hunt. It wasn’t when we crossed the northern part of the state to pick up Buffalo, Indiana, but on a later visit, after we’d paid a visit to Buffaloville, Indiana, a little ways east of Evansville.)

But I’d forgotten that fly-infested motel in Fort Scott, and the dim proprietor thereof, who seemed implausibly astonished to learn that our room was buzzing with them, but quick enough to offer us a flyswatter. All of that had slipped my mind, as well it might, but it came back to me as I studied the atlas and followed the yellow line toward the Missouri border.

Buffalo, Wyoming, was an obvious destination. With a population of almost four thousand, it was the largest Buffalo but for my birthplace, and one I’d been aware of since boyhood. It was large enough to offer us a choice of restaurants and motels, and after we’d eaten and slept we got back in the car and drove to Cody.

Where we stayed a week at the Hotel Irma, named for the daughter of the establishment’s founder and first owner, Buffalo Bill Cody. I’d been commissioned to write a lengthy autobiographical essay for a library reference work, and a week was time enough to do it, and Cody a pleasant venue for it, with several fine museums.

After Cody we visited Yellowstone, and continued north into Montana, first on 81 and then on 191. We were on the latter road because it would take us to Buffalo, Montana, but before we got there we came to the town of Harlowton, where we visited an unassuming little museum that, all things considered, had a lot to be unassuming about.

We spent a pleasant hour there, looking at stuff. Of all the wonders we saw, only one sticks in my mind, but it may be enough to give the flavor of the place. Some soft-drink manufacturer — Pepsi, I think it was, but it may have been 7-Up — had launched a promotion a few years back featuring a different commemorative can for each of the fifty states. The idea was that you could buy the cans, drink their contents (or pour the stuff down the sewer, as you preferred), and then you could collect the empties, displaying them proudly until the day came when your mother made you throw them out.

Well, one fellow had collected all fifty, and instead of throwing them out he’d donated them to the local museum, and there they were, all fifty of the little darlings, looking for all the world like, well, like empty aluminum soft-drink cans. There was something magnificently postmodern about them: They were a wonderful sight to behold, and the wonder lay in the fact that they were there. By themselves they were nothing; displayed as they were, they remained nothing, but nothing on a grand scale.

One could make fun of the museum in Harlowton — indeed, I seem to have done just that — but here’s something to ponder. I’ve been to no end of museums over the years, large ones and small ones, but over time they and their contents tend to merge in memory. Or drop out of memory altogether.

Not Harlowton, Montana. I’ll remember those empty cans forever.

After a peak experience of that sort, Buffalo, Montana, figured to be anticlimactic. Not so. It was a first-rate Buffalo, every bit as memorable as a row of empty cans.

It was, alas, pretty much out of business. There were still people living there, but the place they were living had largely ceased to be a town. Once, though, it had been able to support a school, and the imposing red-brick building (or red stone; red, at any rate) was still standing, although most of its windows were gone.

And the schoolyard was now given over to the grazing of sheep, and there stood the abandoned school, its front door gaping, with sheep wandering in and out of it. One had to think of Mary, and her little lamb. On with the Buffalo shirts, out with the Polaroid. Click!

Periodically we interrupted the Buffalo hunt to leave the trail altogether. At one point we flew to Cairo to join a group tour of Egypt, climaxing in a Nile cruise. In some English novel or other a Colonel Blimp type had complained of something he called Gyppo tummy, and by the time I got off that boat I knew what he meant.

Later that same year we combined two invitations, the first to an Italian film festival in Cattolica, the second to a Spanish crime festival in Gijón. We parked our car somewhere out west and flew first to New York and then to Milan. We got off there, and so did one of our three bags. When it became clear the others had plans of their own, we took a train and a bus and got to Cattolica, where we lived out of our remaining suitcase for a week. (Oddly, whichever one of us had done the packing had mixed things up, so our single bag contained something for each of us.)

At the week’s end we flew from Milan to Madrid and carried our bag on and off the plane. In Madrid we and forty or fifty other American and British crime writers boarded the Andalusian Express, a luxurious private train that took a full day to carry us a couple hundred miles north to the industrial port city of Gijón. The ride was quite wonderful, and somewhere in the course of it they served us lunch, and we shared a table with Don and Abby Westlake.

And Don, looking out the window at the Spanish countryside, told us about a friend of his named Jack Hitt, who had some years ago walked across all of this terrain to follow the course of an ancient pilgrimage over the Pyrenees to the city of Santiago de Compostela. There was this route, we learned, and pilgrims had walked it for over a thousand years, and they were still at it, schlepping from village to village in the sacred steps of St. Francis and St. Clare, and there were refuges for pilgrims where you could stay, and—

Lynne and I were sitting next to each other, with Don and Abby seated side by side opposite us. I remember this, because I remember that there was a point in the story where Don paused, for breath or wine or whatever, and just then Lynne and I turned as one, so that we were looking right at each other when we said, in a single breath, “We’ve got to do that.”

15

in the first week of May 1991, Lynne and I flew from New York to Toulouse, in the south of France. We stayed overnight at a hotel, and in the morning we hoisted our backpacks and started walking south. We were on our way to Santiago de Compostela, and intended to arrive there by the 25th of July, because we knew that pilgrims ideally reached the city by that date to celebrate the Feast of St. James.

We also knew that the traditional pilgrim route led through the French border town of St. Jean Pied-de-Port and its Spanish counterpart, Roncesvalles. But we’d decided to take a different route over the Pyrenees so that we could walk through Andorra. We’d never been to Andorra, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to add it to our list, even if there wasn’t a single Buffalo in it.

And so we walked, out of Toulouse and on toward Andorra. I don’t know how far we went the first day, or indeed on any of the days during that first week. We walked to a café, and got something to eat, and then we walked until we found a hotel, and took a room. And we got up the next morning and did it again.

We must have been out of our minds.

Before our Buffalo hunt, I’d spent hours in libraries, and more hours with Rand McNally. We’d be in familiar terrain, and within easy reach of friends and family.

Our preparation for the pilgrimage, in contrast, consisted of a single lunch with Jack Hitt, the fellow who’d told Don and Abby about the whole business in the first place. Jack turned out to be a splendid fellow, with a great supply of anecdotes and a fine sense of local color, but all that lunch really did was convince us to go.

And so we’d gone — without reading a single book about the pilgrimage, in modern or contemporary times, without doing a lick of research, and without undertaking any training for the physical ordeal we were about to undergo. We were living in New York now, we had moved back just over a year ago, on St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, and as New Yorkers we were of course in the habit of walking a couple of miles a day, because that’s how one gets from place to place. And I’d joined a gym upon our return, and got there two or three times a week, working with weights and dutifully slogging away on the StairMaster.

Lynne assumed walking would be no problem; after all, she’d been doing it all her life. I figured it might be slow going at first, but that we’d get stronger as we went along, and would eventually be able to take the physical side of the trip in stride, so to speak.

Some long city walks during the months before our departure probably would have been a good idea. They’d have been good practice, especially if we’d worn our backpacks. But we didn’t even have backpacks until a week or so before we set out.

We bought them in a rush one afternoon, along with a pair of sleeping bags and a tent. We took back the tent the following day, having realized it was just going to be too much to carry, and it’s a good thing, because otherwise we’d have thrown it overboard sometime during the first week in France. Because, even without it, our packs were too heavy.

I don’t know what they weighed. After the first day, mine was the heavier of the two, because we shifted much of the load from Lynne’s backpack to mine. That was essential, because I was stronger and better able to manage the weight, and because she’d brought more with her. We’d both kept clothing to a minimum, but she’d brought along her full complement of Erno Laszlo skin preparations, and those little jars weighed a ton.

So my backpack was the heavier of the two, but both of them were heavier than we’d have liked. The clerk at Paragon had tried to sell us aluminum-frame backpacks, and they’d struck us at the time as cumbersome; if we’d taken his advice, we’d have been better off. Our packs weren’t designed to distribute the weight, and the straps cut into our shoulders.

Before long, Lynne decided her backpack was the problem. It hurt, it tired you out, it slowed you down. There was, she realized, a far better way to transport one’s possessions.

“I want a shopping cart,” she announced.

I had the hardest time trying to explain to her why this wasn’t a good idea. It did no good to point out that people who did this sort of thing all the time always wore backpacks and never pushed shopping carts. All that meant to her was that she’d thought of something that hadn’t occurred to anyone else.

A loaded shopping cart, I told her, would be very difficult to push up a hill. And it would be at least as hard to hold on to on the downhills. And it would probably lose a wheel or fall apart altogether before too long, because those things were designed to move at a leisurely pace up and down supermarket aisles, with no surface under their tires more abrasive than a parking lot. They didn’t roll up a whole lot in the way of mileage, and none of it was apt to be on dirt roads or trails, and—

But I wasn’t getting anywhere. Several times a day she’d resume whining about the shopping cart.

Everything I’d told her was the truth, and what good did it do me? So I switched to fiction. Maybe a shopping cart wasn’t that bad an idea, I told her, but it just didn’t sit right with me. See, I’d be deeply embarrassed to be seen in the company of somebody pushing a shopping cart.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, okay.”

Because once it was a question of style, she could accept it.

Nowadays I’ll frequently see young parents trotting along while pushing an infant in a three-wheeled Baby Jogger. (Once, in perhaps the eighteenth hour of my first twenty-four-hour race in Wakefield, Massachusetts, I saw a woman jogging along behind a triple stroller, its three compartments filled with triplets. I’m still not entirely certain she wasn’t a hallucination.)

The Baby Jogger, I’ve since learned, is the vehicle of choice for a good number of solitary cross-country runners and walkers, those hardy souls who choose to cross a state or a region or the whole of America on foot, and without benefit of a support crew in a camper. The first time I saw footage of someone so engaged and so equipped, I was struck by his resourcefulness and ingenuity; then, when I’d had a chance to think about it, I realized what I’d just seen — Lynne’s shopping cart, God help us, reborn in its ideal form.

Of course the folks with the Baby Joggers didn’t have to deal with much in the way of hills, let alone the Pyrenees or the mountains of Galicia. And those joggers were built for the task at hand, and they weren’t boxy crates last seen in a checkout line at the local Safeway.

Still, credit where it’s due and all that. Maybe my bride was on to something.

The first day out of Toulouse it rained some, but after that the weather was pleasant, and the days were not without their satisfactions. Each night found us at a two-or three-star inn, and the rooms were comfortable and the meals more than acceptable. The walking gave us an appetite, and afterward we didn’t have trouble sleeping.

In the morning we’d have breakfast, and then we’d reclaim our passports from the desk and set off again. One morning, after a night in a very nice inn in the town of Foix, we omitted the reclaim-our-passports step. That was my job, and we’d walked the better part of an hour before I realized my error. I left Lynne at the side of the road, shucked my backpack, hurried back to Foix, collected the passports, and hurried back to Lynne.

She sympathized with me, having to do all that extra walking, and I told her it hadn’t been so bad. It was a nuisance having to cover the same ground again, but at least I hadn’t had all that weight on my back. And, before she could put in another word for shopping carts, I sympathized with her, having to stand around all that time.

“It was okay,” she said. “I didn’t have the backpack on, and I didn’t have to walk anywhere. I could just sit in the shade. It was very pleasant, actually.”

The route got worse as we went along. Because we were getting into the Pyrenees, and while they are not right up there with the Himalayas, they are nevertheless mountains, and that meant that the road we were walking was going forever uphill.

It was on a Sunday, our sixth day on the road, that the elevation became most pronounced. The terrain was steep enough that the road had been built with switchbacks, to make the angle of ascent more manageable. From a physical standpoint the switchbacks were essential — otherwise we really would have felt as though we were climbing a mountain — but this was somewhat offset by the psychological effect; we would walk south for fifteen minutes, then turn and walk north for fifteen minutes, and it felt as though we were working very hard and getting nowhere.

It was also getting colder, because we’d gone far enough into the mountains so that there was still snow on the ground, and from time to time there’d be an avalanche off to the side. It would have been nice to stop somewhere and get something to eat, but that was never an option, because in each of the few villages we passed, everything was closed up tight. Which is why I happen to remember that it was a Sunday.

I don’t know what time it was when we finally came upon an inn, but it was already getting dark. The proprietor had enough English to assure us that she did indeed have a room for us, and could provide an evening meal. And where had we parked our car? Because she hadn’t heard us drive up.

We said we’d walked. She looked at us. “We’ve been walking all the way from Toulouse,” Lynne told her, “and we’re going to walk over the mountains, and then we’ll walk all the way across Spain.”

“Ah,” said the woman, eyebrow arched. “Très sportif.”

Sportif indeed.

It’s been sixteen years since we walked across Spain, and what strikes me now as most remarkable about the experience is not so much the physical demands of the ordeal, or the sights we saw and the people we met along the way, or even the spiritual results of such a pilgrimage, whatever they may have been. All of that somehow pales beside the astonishing fact that we dropped out of our lives entirely and spent a little over three months in total isolation. Our whole world during that stretch of time was the world of our immediate environment, the world of the Camino.

In today’s world of cell phones and Internet cafés, it’s hard to grasp the extent to which we were cut off from our lives back home. No one had any way of getting in touch with us, and we had made the decision before our departure that we would not even try to contact anyone. We could probably have made phone calls from several points along the way, but to what purpose? To establish that the people we’d left behind were alive and well?

If anything was wrong, there was precious little we’d be able to do about it. Even if some family emergency were to call for an abrupt return, abruptness wouldn’t come easy to a pair of pedestrians in a remote area of rural Spain. Wasn’t it simpler to assume everything was all right back home?

Simpler, but by no means certain. Because the last time we’d been in Spain, we’d received a call from the States that put us on the next plane home.

Let’s return to the Andalusian Express, where we first heard about the pilgrimage and knew at once that it was something we had to do. In our own minds, we had signed on for it then and there. But it took us almost three years to start walking.

In Gijón, our contingent of international crime writers spent a week as window dressing at Semana Negra, a Spanish festival with dark film and literature as its theme but simple revelry as its clear purpose. We participated in a couple of panel discussions, where we took turns bloviating on literary and political topics, with a couple of harried translators waiting to turn what we said into something the audience might possibly comprehend. This works best when one speaks in sound bites, so the translator can take in and process a couple of sentences at a time rather than have to hold long paragraphs in his mind; few of us were adept at this, however, and it wasn’t hard to guess why the audience looked puzzled most of the time.

At one point Don Westlake quoted some Russian who’d observed that he and his colleagues were all mice in the pocket of Gogol’s overcoat. I thought the poor translator was going to kill herself.

Lynne and I were having a fine time, dining late (though rarely by Spanish standards) at fine restaurants, with Don and Abby Westlake or Ross and Rosalie Thomas or Em and Martin Cruz Smith for company. And the week was drawing to a close, when we got word that my mother had been in a serious auto accident. (My cousin David Nathan managed somehow to track us down, a neat trick given that no one on earth knew where on earth we were.)

We flew home the following morning, with no way of knowing whether we’d find her alive or dead. She was alive, but just barely, and shortly after we got there she slipped into a coma and remained unconscious in Intensive Care for a full month. We moved into her apartment and spent our days at the hospital, until it became clear that her condition had stabilized and there was nothing we could do for her.

We drove west, and picked up a Buffalo in Ohio, and visited friends in Yellow Springs. And came back, and were there when she came out of the coma and was transferred to another ward.

Her return to consciousness was very disconcerting, though no more so for us than for her. At some point, unconscious, she had decided to live, and now, conscious, she was clearly not entirely happy about that decision. She didn’t much want to be here.

All I could think of, spending time at her side, was a novel of Stephen King’s called Pet Sematary. In the book’s titular graveyard, those interred can return to life, but they’re not really the same as they used to be. And it seemed for a while there as though my mother had come back from just such a place, with a different personality than she’d had before — and not a very nice one, either. She snapped at her nurses, and was altogether unpleasant to be around.

Return to consciousness, I came to see, wasn’t just a matter of flicking a light switch. It was a more gradual process, and in fact constituted not only a return to consciousness but a return to oneself. As the days passed, she did in fact become increasingly herself. Her intellect returned, and her personality, and even her humor.

In respect to that last element, I made an awful mistake. I went to a bookstore in search of something that might amuse her, preferably something that wouldn’t involve a whole lot of reading. I picked up a collection of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons, and after I gave it to her I came to realize what a bad choice that was for someone who’d just spent a month with her brain on lockdown. Cartoons that would have been catnip for the woman were now incomprehensible; they didn’t strike her as amusing, and she couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be funny about them.

Nor could I do much to explain them. Larson’s offbeat humor wasn’t going to work for her, not until she was a good deal better, and I wanted to take the book away from her so that she could stop using it to make herself crazy. But she didn’t want to give it up, because she was afraid her inability to get what the rest of the world regarded as funny was a sign that her deepest fear had come true, and that her mind was not working properly.

Well, it wasn’t, not entirely, but it was getting there. The improvement was evident on a daily basis, even if The Far Side was still murky. And it wasn’t long before she picked up a book of Double-Crostic puzzles and knocked one off in her usual twenty minutes. Once that happened, we all relaxed; it was evident that she was going to be fine.

Three years later, when we were preparing for the pilgrimage, I could hardly avoid recalling what had happened on our last trip to Spain. This time around, not even a chap as resourceful as my cousin David could be expected to find a way to reach us.

I was concerned that something would go wrong, and that Lynne and I would be powerless to do anything about it, that we wouldn’t even know about it until it was far too late for us to take any useful action. My mother’s health was good, although she would never get around as well as she did before the accident. But she was almost eighty years old, and so was Lynne’s mother, and—

I talked it over with a friend, who asked what specifically I was afraid of.

“Well,” I said, reluctant to give voice to my fear, “well, uh, that one of them might die.”

“It’s a possibility,” he or she said. (And I’m not being coy; I remember the conversation vividly, but not with whom I had it.) “But there’s one thing you should keep in mind.”

“Oh?”

“If one of them dies, she’ll still be dead when you get back.”

I found the logic of that observation unassailable, and was quick to report it to Lynne, who liked it as much as I did. And so we set out for Spain, and bade our everyday lives — well, if not goodbye, then certainly hasta luego.

Being out of touch, giving up the need to be in touch, may have been the most important lesson of the walk. I think what we let go of was the illusion of control. We couldn’t control what went on in our absence, and that would have been no less true were we to call home five times a day. There are people who believe contact gives them a measure of control, just as there are those for whom reading the newspaper is a way of playing a role in international politics.

And, when we reached our destination on July 23rd, the first thing I did was call home from our hotel in Santiago de Compostela. Nothing much was new, I learned. Everybody was fine.

We could never do it again. The Camino is still there, it’s been going strong for over a thousand years, and I don’t imagine people will quit walking it. Even if the Church should disappear, pilgrims would go on making their way to Compostela. (While some of the walkers we encountered were religious, most were not; many were there for the sheer adventure of the thing, while a substantial number didn’t seem to know why they were on their way to Santiago, but, like us, just felt it was something they wanted to do.)

So the road’s still there, and there are still pilgrims on it, and refugios to accommodate them. So you’d think we could do it again readily enough, if we felt so inclined. If anything, it ought to be simpler for us. Our mothers are both gone, and our daughters older and more self-sufficient than ever. We’re in better shape financially, and readily able to afford three months without doing any income-producing work. We’re older, and discernibly less energetic, but that’s offset to a degree by the physical training each of us has been doing, I walking and racing, Lynne working out regularly at the gym. We’d treat ourselves to better backpacks, and be more sensibly outfitted overall. If the hills took a toll at first, well, we’d toughen up as we went along, just as we did sixteen years ago.

Then why couldn’t we do it?

Because we could never manage the isolation. Oh, we could endure it. But we couldn’t sustain it, because of the way the world has changed.

It would be easy enough to leave our cell phones home. I rarely bother to carry mine, unless I’m going out of town, and ours wouldn’t work in Spain anyway. Of course there’d be cell phones for sale over there, in every town we walked through, but maybe we could discipline ourselves sufficiently to pass them by.

But each of those towns would have an Internet café, too, and how long would I be able to go without checking my email? It wasn’t until three or four years after we got back from Spain that I even had email, and now it’s hard to believe that there was ever a time when I got along without it.

If the world has changed, well, so have I. I’m used to being in more or less constant touch with a slew of friends and acquaintances. I’m accustomed to being able to find out almost anything — and locate almost anyone — via Google. I’m not crazy about the idea that I’m so dependent upon the cyber world that I couldn’t stand three months away from it, but I’m afraid it might be true.

Oh, I suppose we could do it if we had to. But the fact of the matter is that we don’t have to, and that we already did it back in 1991.

I’m glad we went when we had the chance.

I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s difficult for me to write about the Spanish walk.

This is not the first time I’ve tried. I was commissioned to report on the experience for the travel section of the New York Times, and produced an article not long after our return. It was more work than I’d thought it would be, and the editors weren’t crazy about it. They wanted photos, and of course we hadn’t taken any; we’d decided our packs were quite heavy enough without adding on film and a camera. (And we’d actually quit carrying a camera years ago, having decided we got a better look at the world without squinting at it through a viewfinder. The sole exception we made was the Polaroid that served to document our triumphs during the Buffalo hunt.)

So could I suggest photos they might seek to obtain? And talk about places to stay and sights to see? And, uh, maybe do something to make it more of a travel piece?

I thought about it and decided I couldn’t do any of that. I felt they were well within their rights to ask for changes of that sort, and had to admit that the piece as they envisioned it might better serve the interests of their readers than what I had provided. But our pilgrimage, I was discovering, was very much a personal matter. I barely wanted to write about it at all, and I certainly didn’t want to write about those aspects of the experience that hadn’t greatly concerned us.

One nice thing about writing for newspapers is that the money’s so small to begin with that it won’t change your life to give it up. I forget what I was supposed to get, but I took a kill fee of 20 or 25 percent instead, and we let it go at that. No harm, no foul, and no hard feelings.

Now, of course, I can write about it however I want, and that ought to make it easier. (I could even splice in what I wrote for the Times, and work from that, but it was written a couple of years before I got my first computer, so it’s not hanging out somewhere on my hard drive. There’s almost certainly a hard copy somewhere in the Stygian swamp I call an office, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking, and I’m not sure I really want to find it.)

Writing about it, I suspect, may be like the walk itself, or like any walk, random or otherwise. If I can just stay pointed in the right direction and keep putting one foot in front of the other, I should get there. I may lose my way from time to time, but that’s nothing new; it happened more than a few times en route to Compostela.

Where were we? Oh, right. In the French Pyrenees, at an inn run by a woman who was just a shade too well bred to say that we were out of our minds.

She fed us well, or at least as well as a Frenchwoman could be expected to feed a pair of sportif vegetarians. I believe she served us cauliflower, and I remember that it was good, but we were hungry enough by then to savor Styrofoam.

Here’s a thought. A chronological account of our journey seems beyond my abilities, and I’m not sure what purpose it would serve. Since I’m evidently going to digress, let me make digression my structure, and organize my narrative, if that’s what it is, by topics. If that’s what they are.

In one respect, we’d have an easier time on the walk today than we did back then. Lynne and I both stopped eating meat and fish back in the late 1970’s, and didn’t resume until shortly after the turn of the century. It was occasionally a nuisance, and never more so than on the pilgrimage. If the French regarded vegetarians as pitiable lunatics, the residents of rural northern Spain didn’t even have a frame of reference for us, much less anything to feed us.

Somewhere along the way we found out that bocadillos de queso were cheese sandwiches, and it’s hard to imagine the relief we felt when they were available. It’s not as though there was anything particularly good about them — the cheese was pretty ordinary, the rolls plain white bread, and stale as often as not. But they were, thanks be to God, something we could eat. Add a salad — iceberg lettuce, inevitably — and we called it a balanced meal.

We learned to pick up provisions at stores along the way. Nuts and olives were both tasty and portable, and delivered a good nutritional payload. Bakery-fresh bread ranged from pretty good to excellent, and we learned to point at the whole wheat loaves until we learned what they were called. Lynne remembered that Hemingway had somewhere observed that you could always tell a poor country, that the whores were young and the bread was still good. Permutations of that line became a part of our argot; a street scene might prompt one of us to remark that the bread in this particular village was sure to be wonderful, while the occasional loaf of compressed sawdust would call up a vision of geriatric working girls.

There were times when good food was available. Some cafés had soup, and it didn’t much matter to us if the base was a meat stock. Our vegetarianism was never religious in nature. (In fact it’s impossible to say what the basis of it might have been. It wasn’t PETA-style ethical vegetarianism, as neither of us stopped wearing leather, and, while we both thought it was probably good for us physically, I can’t say it stemmed primarily from health concerns. It just intuitively seemed right for us at the time — and, some years later, it seemed to be time to give it up.)

In the city of Burgos I remember eating a rich stew, after carefully picking out and setting aside the larger pieces of meat. More recently I spent some time on the Atkins diet, and if I’d then been presented with that very same bowl of stew, I’d have limited my consumption to the very portions I rejected the first time around.

Pizza was always a good choice, when we could find it. It was abundant in France, but we only encountered one pizzeria on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, and that was in Catalonia. The fellow who owned it was fluent in English, and we got to talking with him; he’d learned the language in England, where he’d also learned to make pizza. He met an English girl there, married her, and brought her back to Catalonia, where they’d opened a pizzeria.

In Huesca, we had a hell of a time finding a place to eat. There were a couple of restaurants that were priced beyond our budget, and if there was anything cheaper, it was well hidden. Then we found this large restaurant housed in what seemed to be some sort of inn, and we had a decent lunch there at a reasonable price. Something was odd about the place, and somewhere in the course of our meal we noticed that Lynne was the only woman in the place, and not because we’d somehow wandered into a monastery.

It was, we realized, some sort of gay house of assignation. It was also the best place to eat in Huesca, and we took all our meals there for the rest of our stay. Now and then we’d see a youth we recognized, leaning on a fence and looking flagrantly available. Lynne called out a cheerful greeting to one such lad, and the poor son of a bitch turned scarlet, as embarrassed as if his mother had caught him in a men’s room with a senator from Idaho.

In Galicia, the province where Santiago de Compostela is located, we encountered a local pub specialty called Pimientos de Padrón. These were little green peppers, perhaps an inch long, roasted with garlic and salt, and I ate plate after plate of them.

Early on, the route was very much our own creation. After we left Mme. Très Sportif, we continued on toward the Andorran border as far as the town of Aix-les-Thermes, where we had to wait for three days because the road ahead was closed by an avalanche. When they opened it, we walked on to and through Andorra, and there’s something special about walking in one end of a country and out the other end a day or two later.

The little country has long been jointly administered by France and Spain, and this had the effect of turning much of it into a shopping mall for tax-free cameras and electronic gear. While the shopping held no attraction for us, the views were pretty spectacular.

It was during our transit of Andorra that Lynne first began to believe that she’d actually be able to go the distance. Up until then she figured that what she was going through was only going to get worse, and that eventually she’d have to quit and go home; the only thing that was keeping her going was that she couldn’t figure out how to break the news to me.

I knew she was having a tough time, but I’d anticipated as much. I was having a difficult time myself, contending with the weight of the backpack and the steepness of the terrain and the sheer burden of mile after mile after mile. What kept me going was the certainty that it would become easier once my body had conditioned itself to meet the challenge. I could recall those laborious circuits of Washington Square Park, by means of which I had gradually turned myself into a runner. In much the same fashion I was now transforming myself into a hiker, and so was Lynne.

Except she didn’t know it. And, when I told her, she didn’t believe me.

As far as she was concerned, I was just shining her on, dangling the notion of improved physical conditioning like a carrot while I kept in reserve the stick of disapproval. She didn’t believe me for a moment. It was just a nice story I was telling her, something to lure her into continuing this impossible journey, and if I could make up such a story she could pretend to believe it. But she wasn’t buying it, not for a minute.

So she soldiered on, knowing it was hopeless, and sustaining herself by holding imaginary conversations with her girlfriends, in which she pointed out my obduracy while lamenting the fact that she couldn’t go on and didn’t know how to tell me.

I wish she’d had some of those conversations with me, because as it was I really had no idea what she was going through. Then again, what if she had? All I could do was offer the same assurance I’d been extending all along, and all she could do in turn was nod and smile and know in her heart that I was full of crap. So on we walked, and I wondered why this game and good-hearted companion had morphed into a whiner, while she wondered why she’d ever been persuaded that marrying me was a good idea.

And then, somewhere in Andorra, things changed.

I don’t suppose it hurt that we had crested the Pyrenees, and that we were now going down instead of up. But more important was the fact that the walking we’d been doing had made us discernibly stronger. I think, too, that this strengthening process was mental as well as physical, that we were both getting used to the idea of spending our days walking substantial distances.

When Lynne told me that she was indeed stronger, that shouldering her pack and walking for an hour or two, while still challenging, was no longer the horror it had been, I was relieved but not surprised. “That’s great,” I said. “I told you that would happen.”

“I know,” she replied. “I didn’t believe you.”

And, after we’d batted that one back and forth, I frowned, puzzled. “If you honestly didn’t believe me,” I said, “and if you were convinced it was never going to get better, what kept you going?”

She gave me a look. And, a mile or so down the road, she found us a shortcut.

We were approaching Andorra La Vella, the principality’s capital and largest city, and the road into town consisted of an elaborate series of descending switchbacks. From where we stood, we could see the town way down below, and the way the road resembled a meandering river, or perhaps a snake. Lynne pointed to our right, where a steep and little-used footpath plunged straight down toward the center of town.

“Come on,” she urged. “We can go straight down and save all that walking.”

And so we did. Staying upright was no mean task, given the declivity of the path and the heft of our packs, and it was almost as hard to keep from running as it was to keep from falling, but we managed somehow. And it was exhilarating, dashing down that mountainside, crossing and recrossing that winding ribbon of road, and finishing up, flushed and breathless, in the very center of town, surrounded by no end of establishments eager to sell us cigarettes and stereo components.

“See?” she said. “It was a shortcut. Wasn’t that great?”

“The best part,” I said, “is that we’re still alive.”

“That was fun! And look at all the walking we saved. It was a shortcut.”

“A rabbit shortcut,” I agreed.

It was not our last rabbit shortcut, though it was certainly the most dramatic. Lynne, who as you might gather is not a slave to convention, would often choose a direct if untried route rather than walk in the footsteps of others. Sometimes we saved a few steps. Sometimes we had to turn around and walk back, persuaded of the wisdom of those who had gone before us. But whenever my companion fixed her sights on a rabbit shortcut, we always gave it a shot.

Early on, we stayed in hotels. The refuges for pilgrims — refugios — were only to be found along the traditional route. Each little village had a few hotels, the more reasonable labeled hostal. A room was generally ten to twelve dollars, and while I don’t suppose you’d mistake any of them for the Sherry-Netherland, they were generally clean enough and comfortable enough for a pair of Americans who’d spent the whole day walking dusty roads.

The villages were rarely more than ten miles apart, and my map was reliable when it came to letting us know where the next village was likely to be, so it wasn’t hard to walk far enough to find lodging for the night. The whole system worked fine, until the day it didn’t.

That must have been a day, or maybe two, after we left Huesca and its charming gay restaurant. We were walking in Aragon, heading west, and for the first time we were unable to find a place to stay. The one hostal we managed to locate was fully occupied; a construction crew, temporarily employed in the area, had booked all its rooms for the next two weeks.

The proprietor couldn’t offer a suggestion; as far as she knew, there were no rooms to be found for twenty miles or more. It was far too late in the day for us to cover another twenty miles, and we’d be doing so with no guarantee of a room at the end of the day.

We could sleep in a field, we did have sleeping bags, and I might have given that a shot if I’d been on my own, but I didn’t want to put Lynne through a night under the stars. The sky was clear, so rain wasn’t likely, but it would be uncomfortably cold, and I wasn’t entirely convinced it was safe.

So we hitched a ride. If we’d passed a hostal I might have asked the driver to drop us off, but we didn’t, and he took us clear into Zaragoza. We hadn’t planned to swing this far south, but it was supposed to be a pretty interesting city, with a famous pillar where the Blessed Virgin had made a miraculous appearance on one of her whirlwind retirement tours, so we figured it was worth a look. And it sure beat wandering around all night with no place to stay.

We found a room right away, and we kept it for four days while we had a look around Zaragoza. The room seemed perfectly fine, but as one day led seamlessly into the next, we began to notice, bit by bit, just how filthy that particular room was. The place was a sty, and it took us all that time to realize it, at which point we got the hell out of Zaragoza.

By the time we left Zaragoza — a perfectly pleasant city, our accommodations notwithstanding — we had come to realize the wisdom of hooking up with the traditional route, the famous Camino de Santiago. While we didn’t regret crossing Andorra or walking through Catalonia, it was time for us to get with the program.

So we cheated.

And not for the first time. You’ll recall that we hitched a ride into Zaragoza. And I’ve neglected to mention another ride we took, just a couple of miles, en route from Aix-les-Thermes to the Andorran border. (That was before Lynne was able to believe that walking would get easier; when a car pulled up and the driver offered us a ride, it would have taken a harder man than I to wave him off.)

This time what we did was catch a northbound train out of Zaragoza. I’d worked it out that our best bet was to join the Camino at Puente la Reina, in Navarre, and we could take the train to a town along the way that boasted a parador, one of a group of inns housed in historic properties and operated by the Spanish government. After that pigpen in Zaragoza, we were ready for something a little nicer.

But we were riding a train, and that was cheating.

When I thought about it, it struck me that the whole idea of cheating on a pilgrimage by choosing a faster or easier form of locomotion than walking was wildly anachronistic. A thousand years earlier, when pilgrims from all parts of Europe made their way to Compostela, they didn’t choose a deliberately slow and antiquated method of getting there. On the contrary, they covered the ground as quickly and as comfortably as they could. Most of them walked, not because it was good for the soul but for lack of a horse to ride or a carriage to ride in. The object, after all, was to arrive at the sacred destination and get their sins expunged, not to wear out as many pairs of sandals as possible in the process.

But that was then, alas, and things were different by the time we took off on foot. You could still go to any holy site and call your journey a pilgrimage, and how you get there doesn’t necessarily enter into the equation. The hadjis who make their way to Mecca every year don’t walk there from Indonesia or Pakistan or Dubai. They don’t even ride camels. They take airplanes instead.

For us, though, and for every peregrino we encountered along the route, the destination was the least of it. Santiago de Compostela is a beautiful city, and well worth a visit. But subtract the ordeal, take the long walk out of the picture, and we’d have had no reason to go. Getting there wasn’t just half the fun; for us, it was the whole point.

The train made sense; if we walked from Zaragoza, we’d have a long walk through uninteresting terrain and be unable to find places to stay along the way. Still, it wasn’t what we’d set out to do. It was, well, cheating.

And, from the time we got off that train, we never went anywhere other than on foot until our pilgrimage was complete. Then and only then did we board another train that carried us south from Santiago de Compostela, first to Vigo and then, a day later, to Lisbon.

When the Camino led us to Logrono, for example, we walked in one end of that town and out the other. When we stayed in a city for a few days, as we did in Burgos and León, we passed up cabs and local buses and toured the place on foot. When we were ready to move on, we picked up our packs and walked. Trains, buses, cars, trucks, ox carts — we saw them all, and waved, and kept on walking.

And we never mentioned the cars or the train, not to our fellow peregrinos, nor to our friends and family back home. “You walked all the way?” they’d marvel. “On foot? All the way?”

“Every step of the way,” we agreed.

It was just simpler that way. Why launch into a tedious story of our passage into and out of Zaragoza? All in all, we covered more miles on foot than we would have if we’d started out at Roncesvalles, as most people do, and walked right on through to Compostela. We had all those extra miles from Toulouse, and the great detour through Andorra and Catalonia. All told, we covered something like 650 pedestrian miles. That was plenty, so why bother putting an asterisk in the record book?

But it must have bothered us. Otherwise why would I be writing about it now?

The cathedrals at Burgos and León were quite spectacular, though I can’t begin to remember anything specific about them. We gave them a long look at the time, and spent at least a few minutes in virtually all of the churches we encountered along the way.

Early on, every village church had a stork’s nest on its top. Sometimes we’d see the birds visiting the nests, but at the very least we’d spot the big nest, crowning the steeple. All through Catalonia and Aragon, all through Navarre—

And then, somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing either the birds or their nests. And we never could figure out why.

Had the storks, for presumably sound reasons of their own, never nested atop the churches of Castile and León? Or had some human agency contrived to drive them away? Had the municipal or ecclesiastic authorities dispatched men with brooms to sweep the nests away? Were chemical pesticides at the root of the problem? Or — and here’s a thought that never occurred to us at the time, but seems inescapable now — could it be global warming?

The birth rate in Spain, as in much of Western Europe, has been declining in recent years. But that has to be a coincidence, don’t you think?

I’m sure the trip would have been a birder’s delight, not least because we did so much of our walking in the early morning hours when early birds are loading up on tardy worms. But we didn’t pay much attention to the birds, except when they were impossible to miss. Like the storks, which we saw all the time until we stopped seeing them at all, and like the eagles.

We only saw eagles once, but they made an impression. We were walking on a road through a field, somewhere in Navarre, when we saw a flight of enormous birds hovering over a flock of sheep. The Basque shepherd was scurrying around, brandishing his staff, flailing at the birds with it. They were eagles, though it took us a moment to realize that; they lacked the white heads of the American Bald Eagle, and they looked too large to be eagles, although they could hardly have been anything else. We didn’t count them, but their number clearly ran to more than a dozen, and there may have been as many as twenty of them, all swooping around in a manner that was so graceful it took you a minute to realize how menacing they were.

They wanted a lamb or two, and the poor shepherd clearly wanted an AK-47. All he had was his shepherd’s crook, and all he could do was wave it around while his dog did all it could do, which was bark. It seemed to work, at least for the moment; the eagles soared off, leaving him with his sheep. And we walked on, by no means convinced he and the sheep had seen the last of those birds.

We had, however. Never spotted them again. More recently, we saw quite a few bald eagles in the Aleutians, and they’re spectacular birds. But I think the species we encountered in Spain ran larger.

It was poppy season when we began our walk, and the fields of Catalonia and Aragon were a vast sea of scarlet. They took us entirely by surprise. I knew they had poppies in Europe, and specifically in Belgium. I remembered the John McCrae poem:

So I knew there were poppies in World War I cemeteries, but I guess I figured someone planted them there. And when we saw the poppy fields in Spain, I assumed someone must have planted them, too — but why? As far as I knew, there was no large-scale cultivation of opium in Spain.

Well, duh, nobody plants those poppies. They plant themselves, self-seeding year after year, like dandelions in the United States, but if there are places back home where dandelions turn a whole hillside blindingly yellow, I’ve never seen them.

I’d never seen anything like those poppy fields. I wonder if the people who live among them pay any attention to them. Probably not. When something’s always there, you stop noticing it.

And what other sights did we see? One that made an indelible impression upon me was, in a sense, nothing at all remarkable. It was, in point of fact, something that happens everywhere, every day of the year. Yet it was fair to say we’d never seen anything like it.

I don’t remember the name of the town, but I happen to know the date when it occurred. It was June 25th, and I know that because the night before we were walking back to the refugio after our evening meal when we fell into conversation with a trio of teenage Spanish girls. They heard us talking and initiated the conversation, thinking it would be a fine opportunity for them to practice their English. And indeed it might have been, if they’d had any English to practice. Alas, they didn’t, so I seized the opportunity to practice my Spanish, and groped around for something to say.

“Hoy es mi cumpleaños,” I managed. How I remembered cumpleaños, which is Spanish for birthday, is beyond me; I’m pretty sure I’d never even spoken the word aloud before. The three little maids from school — las tres niñas de la escuela? — thought this was a wonderful thing — that it was my birthday, not that I’d managed to come up with the word for it — and they wished me well, and we wished them well, and that was about as far as either language would take us, so we left it at that.

They were in town, and speaking with strangers, because it was indeed a feast day, St. John’s Day, the festival of John the Baptist, who was the patron saint of the village. Back at the refugio, we went to sleep while the party was just getting started, and it was still dark, and some of the revelers still partying, when we woke up and got dressed and on our way.

We found our way out of town and resumed walking the Camino, and we hadn’t gone too far before we found ourselves with a mountain to climb. It wasn’t a mountain the way Kilimanjaro is a mountain, and I suppose I might more properly refer to it as a big hill, but there was a lot of it and it was fairly steep, and it took an effort to scale it, especially with heavy packs on our backs.

But we kept going, and eventually we stood at the top, and something prompted us to turn around and look back toward where we’d been. And just at that moment the sun broke the horizon, and we stood on that mountain peak — okay, hilltop — and watched it come all the way up.

As I said, it’s the sort of thing that happens all over the world, every day of the year. But right then and right there, it was one of the most wonderful sights either of us had ever seen.

The Boy Scout Jamboree in 1953 had got me interested in Spanish, and I’d taken to it in high school like a pato to agua. Given the opportunity, I’d have continued with it in college, but Antioch had ceased to offer it by the time I got there, and that was that.

Two years of high school Spanish had penetrated more deeply than one might have supposed, and all it ever took was a week or two in a Spanish-speaking country for much of my Spanish to return to me. I was a long way from fluent, however. My vocabulary was limited — though it amazed me how words would keep coming back to me like golondrinas to Capistrano, just popping back into my consciousness from some chamber of memory. I was pretty much confined to the present tense, if I’d ever learned the other tenses they hadn’t stayed with me, but you can conduct whole conversations in the present tense. Or write whole books, if you’re Damon Runyon, say, or some poseur from Iowa City.

From time to time I would get the urge to improve my Spanish, and now and then I would buy some book in Spanish, pick up an English-Spanish dictionary, and try to work my way through the thing. I could browse Garcia Lorca’s poetry with some enjoyment, but I never got anywhere with the fiction I attempted, possibly because I didn’t stay with it long enough. I’d give it up, and then a few days in Mexico or Spain would bring back a flood of half-remembered vocabulary, and stir up old longings.

I always assumed that a few weeks or a month in a Spanish-speaking country would leave me with a command of the language, and so I took it pretty much for granted that I’d achieve that in the course of three months spent walking through Spain. Nor would I have the option of retreating into English, as I might in the more cosmopolitan areas of Madrid and Barcelona. The folks living along the route of the pilgrimage hadn’t been spending a lot of time studying English as a second language. They had one language, and that’s all they needed to talk with one another, and they evidently figured that was plenty.

No problem. I’d do just fine in the old Español. Right?

Well, not exactly.

The first problem was that nobody was speaking the sort of Spanish I’d been taught. I should have realized I was in trouble three years earlier in Gijón, where all of the locals sounded to me as though they were speaking through a mouthful of broken teeth. The one person I could almost understand was the Russian writer (and putative ex-KGB agent) Julian Semyonov, who addressed the assembly one afternoon in my idea of perfect Spanish. He was speaking Castilian, and I established later that he’d been taught by an American woman from the Midwest. That’s why he sounded just like Miss Sherman back at Bennett High.

That’s not the way they talked in Catalonia or Aragon or La Rioja or Navarre. In Catalonia they didn’t even use the same words, in that they were speaking not Spanish but Catalan. Some of the words were almost the same, and others weren’t even close. Open is abierto in Spanish, obert in Catalan. It’s not hard to work that one out. Closed, on the other hand, is cerrado in Spanish and tancat in Catalan.

Tancat became a part of our working vocabulary, and remains the one word of Catalan we know. I’m not sure how it’s pronounced, because we never heard anyone say it, but we read it often enough for it to be deeply imprinted upon us. A sign bearing that single word hung in the door of one shop after another as we made our way through Catalonia. It didn’t take us long to work out its meaning.

And, all these years later, we’ll still find ourselves using the word now and then. “Did you pick up the Sunday Times?” “No, I’ll get it tomorrow. The fucking deli was tancat.”

In the Basque areas they speak Basque, understandably enough. (Well, it’s understandable that they speak it, but what they speak is understandable to no one but another Basque. And, from what I know about the language, it’s remarkable that they can understand one another.) And in each region where Spanish is nominally the language, the vowels and consonants do things very different from the Castilian Spanish I was taught.

Even if they’d spoken what I was used to, I’d have been in trouble. See, I could speak the language (after a fashion, and only in the present tense). But I couldn’t understand it. I could formulate a question and phrase it rather neatly, especially if I had a minute or two to go over it in my mind first. And, regional accents aside, the person to whom I addressed my question was almost invariably able to understand it.

Then he’d answer me, and I wouldn’t have a clue what he was saying.

Well, I could work it out if he said sí or no. And if I asked where the men’s room was, there was almost always a gesture to accompany the reply. But if he came back with a whole sentence, I would stand there trying to recall what he’d just said and trying to puzzle out what the words meant.

By the time I began to get used to a particular accent, we would have walked far enough to reach a place where people were speaking something discernibly different — though discernibly may not be quite le mot juste here. We managed to make do, we bought what we needed and found our way to the bathroom, but I was not finding the ease with the language for which I’d hoped.

In Castile, finally, they spoke something I was used to, if not with the clear Western New York accent of Miss Sherman. But all that really meant was that they had a little less trouble understanding me. I still couldn’t catch what they were saying, because my ears, alas, were far slower than my lips. I could speak Spanish okay. I just couldn’t understand it.

Lynne was the reverse. She had a sort of cavalier attitude toward languages other than her own, feeling that a close approximation of the requisite word damn well ought to suffice. Mark Twain, you’ll recall, once observed that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, to which Lynne would likely reply that the person you were addressing ought to be able to make out what you were getting at. “‘Oh, look, thunder and lightning bugs!’ Yeah, right.”

At the same time, she was sufficiently intuitive so that she could generally get the sense of a sentence spoken to her, whether or not she knew what the individual words meant. Consequently the two of us together almost amounted to a person capable of carrying on a conversation. I could cobble together a sentence and fling it out there, and she could translate the response for me.

This system worked best if we didn’t switch roles. If I tried to work out what somebody was saying, well, the worst thing that might happen was that I’d miss it. But when Lynne tried to talk, strange things could happen.

I’m reminded of a beastly hot day when we walked for hours under a relentless sun. I’m not sure where we were, but it was probably in León. (One problem with the pilgrim route was that it hadn’t been designed with climate in mind. In order to arrive in Santiago de Compostela in time for the Saint’s Day celebration on July 25th, you had to cross the Pyrenees while they were still snow-covered — viz., the avalanche that had delayed us. And by the time you got to the central plains, it was summer, and the heat was hard to bear. There was something to be said for starting in Santiago in the spring and traversing the route in the opposite direction, and I’d heard of people who did it that way, but not many of them. It was just too weird.)

On this particular occasion we’d walked a long way on a hot day, and when a café turned up it seemed heaven sent. We got a couple of coffees and went to a table, and I dropped my pack on the floor and collapsed into a chair. Lynne asked if there was anything she could get me.

More days than not, I’d buy a Spanish newspaper, generally El País, sometime in the afternoon, and read it over a cup of coffee. My eyes were okay with the language, it was my ears that had all the trouble, and with the aid of a pocket dictionary I could at least get the gist of most of the news stories. So what I told her was that I’d love it if she could rustle up a paper.

And how should she ask for it? “¿Tiene usted un periódico?” I said. She repeated the sentence a couple of times to make sure she had it down, and then she went over to the bar, and a moment or two later she came back, looking very troubled.

“I think I said something wrong,” she reported. “He got all flustered and blushed and everything.”

“What on earth did you say?”

“What you told me to say.”

“Say it,” I said, and she did, and I sighed. “I can’t be entirely sure,” I said, “but it sounds to me as though you asked him if he was having his period.”

“Oh, God. I’ll bet that’s why he turned red.”

“I imagine it is.”

“I feel terrible,” she said, and left the table, only to return a moment later looking even more disconcerted. “I went to apologize,” she said, “and I think I just made it worse, and I can’t understand it.”

“What did you say?”

“Just, you know, that I was sorry if I embarrassed him.”

“You said that whole sentence?”

“Well, no,” she said. “Of course not. I just pointed at him, you know, and said ‘Embarazada.’ What’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“First you asked him if he was having his period,” I told her, “and then you told him he was pregnant. Drink your coffee, will you? I think we’d better get out of here.”

The real reason our Spanish never improved was we only used it when we had to. We saw a lot of it on signs, and got reasonably good at making out what they said. And I developed a certain proficiency at reading El País, or at least those articles on subjects with which I had some familiarity. (I couldn’t have made sense of the financial reportage or the essays on Spanish politics if they’d been written in English, so how could I expect to grasp them in Spanish?)

But as far as the spoken Spanish language was concerned, we weren’t that much more adept at the trip’s end than at its onset. And that’s because we rarely had occasion to speak Spanish. We used it to order food, to secure a room for the night, to determine whether to go left or right, and, one memorable afternoon, to get directions to a pharmacy. (After a night in one of the less salubrious refugios, I’d acquired head lice. I didn’t know what to call the little bastards, so I made do with pantomime, which I’ll leave to your imagination. Worked like a charm — and so, thank God, did the stuff they sold me.)

All of that rarely amounted to more than a few sentences per day, and they tended to be the same sentences over and over. The rest of the time, when we weren’t getting a room or ordering a meal, we were walking with only each other for company. We did a lot of talking while we walked, but, curiously enough, the lingo we employed was English.

And when we talked with other pilgrims, other peregrinos walking the Way of St. James, we spoke English with them, as well.

After we left the train we’d taken from Zaragoza, and after a night of unaccustomed luxury at the parador, we walked on toward Puente la Reina, where we could connect with the traditional pilgrimage route. Halfway there, we stopped for the evening at a roadside inn, after a long and arduous morning on the road. There was a TV in the dining room. We walked in on a news bulletin on the most recent ETA bombing, which threw an eloquent hush over the room there in the Basque country, and then the feature resumed, and we gazed up at the screen, where Jeff Bridges seemed to be speaking Spanish.

It was a dubbed version of Eight Million Ways to Die, the lamentable film made from a book of mine and released in the States (as into a sea of popular and critical indifference) five years earlier. Around us, people resumed their conversations and paid no attention to the movie. I can’t say I blamed them.

At Puente la Reina the next day, we officially became peregrinos, and found out what we’d been missing. Someone steered us to an office where we were supplied with official peregrino passports, yellow cardboard affairs designed to be stamped at the various refugios we’d pass through along our way. When we reached our destination, this would serve as proof to the church officials that we had in fact traversed the route from point to point, and thus deserved the promised plenary indulgence.

(That, back in the day, had been a major selling point of the Camino de Santiago. Get there and all your sins would be washed away. You’d have a clean slate — which, given the history of human behavior along the pilgrim route, would very likely be covered with fresh celestial chalk marks by the time you were back home.)

Our particular party, composed as it was of a lapsed Catholic and a secular Jew, hadn’t made the trip in fear of hell or hope of heaven. All the same, we shared a pragmatic view of the prospect of a plenary indulgence — to wit, Nu? What could it hurt?

If any of our fellow pilgrims had come seeking a remission of sins, they kept their hopes to themselves. We met a good many of them over the next two months, and had brief or lengthy conversations with a fair number of them, and I can’t recall a single one whose motivation was traditionally religious. Typically, our fellows felt impelled to walk the walk, and did so without talking the talk; they were only occasionally Catholic by birth or upbringing, attended any church infrequently if at all, and had become peregrinos in response to some inner prompting which they were hard put to define.

Still, one did hear of pilgrims whose motivation was religious, and who were seeking something in the nature of absolution. We were told more than once of a priest who walked all the way from his church in Germany, crossing the Alps en route to the Pyrenees, and then continuing all the way to Santiago — barefoot. I couldn’t begin to guess what he’d done to justify imposing such penance upon himself, but I suspect there’s a whole generation of altar boys who could shed light on the subject.

I can’t say we got to know any of the peregrinos terribly well, and I find it difficult to summon up any names or faces. I remember a pair of Englishmen who were covering the route by bicycle. They were in no great hurry, which explains how we were able to keep up with them for a while, but eventually they got a day or two ahead of us, and after that we never saw them again. I think they were the ones who first told us that a special church council had established that bicycle pilgrims would receive absolution for half of their sins.

There were quite a few Dutch heading for Santiago, and of course they were all fluent in English, as well as French and German. (And, I would have to suppose, Dutch.) Dutch pilgrims didn’t fly anywhere, or begin the trek with a train ride. They just packed up their things, walked out the front door and down the well-scrubbed stoop, and kept on walking.

As did the two Swiss priests, two brothers who might even have been twins, who had walked all the way from Switzerland. They were well up in their sixties, tall and thin and enviably fit, striding confidently over hill and dale. We never spoke with them, but we had heard tell of them a few days before they caught up with us, most likely from the English cyclists. Then one day we saw the two of them, and then that day or the next they passed us, and we never ran into them again.

Lynne likes to characterize our great stream of pilgrims as a sort of fluid community, flowing toward Compostela. In many of the refugios we’d find a guest book, not unlike what one finds in, say, a twee bed-and-breakfast in Bucks County, where visitors could inscribe their names (“Henry and Claudine Thorpe”) along with their addresses (“Pratt, Kansas”) and their comments (“Loved the chintz bedspread — and oh, those cranberry muffins at breakfast!!!”). There were precious few chintz spreads or breakfast muffins at the refugios, but the guest ledgers were to us as fire hydrants to dogs, affording the opportunity to sniff out the spoor of those who’d preceded us while we in turn left our own calling card for those following in our wake.

In addition, a form of bush telegraph kept us current on other fellow travelers. Before we’d passed the central plains of Castile, we began to hear about a Welsh family, a couple and their two children, who would have been remarkable enough in any event — they were, as far as we knew, the only pilgrims brave enough to bring their kids along — but who became genuinely famous, in an admittedly limited circle, because their party included a donkey. They’d bought the poor creature when they crossed the border, and reports indicated it was doing a fine job of toting their gear, and occasionally their children. Sort of like a shopping cart, Lynne observed, but one that ate grass.

Inevitably, the rest of us called them the Holy Family.

The Welsh turned up in Santiago de Compostela a few days after we arrived there, and it didn’t take us long to run into them, or any time at all to dope out who they were, as they still had the donkey. We told them we’d heard a lot about them, and they confided that they’d read our entries in the refugio ledgers; if their fame had preceded them, ours had evidently trailed along behind us.

Like everyone else, we asked if they’d be able to bring the little donkey home with them, and they said it was probably going to be impossible. The UK had rather draconian regulations regarding the importation of livestock, and pet dogs and cats were subject to something like a six-month quarantine to prevent the introduction of rabies, so what chance did a donkey have?

So they’d probably have to sell it, the man said, or find a home for it. And it would be a wrench for the kids, the woman added, but she didn’t see how it could be helped.

“You can always buy another donkey once you get home,” Lynne suggested. And the two of them stared at her as if she had lost her mind.

Life became a good deal more collegial from Puente la Reina on. We ran into other peregrinos on the trail, at roadside cafés, and in the villages where we’d end the day’s walking. We spent even more time with them at the refugios, where sleeping accommodations were often dormitory-style, and a shared wait for the shower gave people a chance to talk — and, if the wait was long enough, something to talk about.

But most of the time Lynne and I had each other for company. We didn’t walk side by side every step of the way; my natural pace was faster, and sometimes I’d wander off ahead while she trailed along behind me, until I’d drop my pack and sit down and wait for her to catch up with me. For the most part, though, we walked together, and it was generally just the two of us on the trail. When a larger group chanced to form, it didn’t stay together very long.

As a result, the trip became a remarkable bonding experience for the two of us. We’d already evidenced a curious ability to tolerate each other’s company in close quarters, all those months driving around in search of Buffalo made that abundantly clear, but this was an exponentially more intense phenomenon. There we were, cut off from everything, with yesterday ten or fifteen miles to our rear and tomorrow as many miles in front of us, and both of them well out of sight. We weren’t always chattering away, and the shared silences were as intimate as the continuing dialog.

I can’t remember what we talked about, but neither can I point to anything we didn’t talk about. From its beginnings, our relationship had been characterized by a degree of candor far removed from our prior experience, so we’d been talking intimately for years. Still, this was different, because there was so much of it, and so little of anything else.

And we didn’t just have conversations. Every once in a while we had a meeting.

In 1977, as I mentioned earlier, I stopped drinking. Lynne underwent the same life change four years later, and in fact we first became acquainted at a meeting of a group of people who had all stopped drinking and using drugs, and who convened regularly to share a dark little room in the West Village, along with their experience, strength, and hope.

Attending such meetings had become a regular part of our lives. We went to them separately or together, and we went often — on average, several times a week. Meetings of this sort are held all the time throughout the world, and we’d gone to them during our sojourn in Florida, and during our years of driving back and forth across America. We’d even sought out meetings during trips abroad.

They wouldn’t be available to us in Spain. There are meetings held in Spain, and I’d even been to English-speaking meetings in Madrid and Barcelona when I’d come over for the Madrid Marathon. But we weren’t going to be in either of those cities, we were going to be in hamlets and villages strung across rural Northern Spain, where no one spoke English, and where it would be virtually impossible (and profoundly inconvenient) to find a meeting. And even if we did find one, we wouldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. (And what could we say? “Me llamo Lorenzo, y soy un puerco borracho.” “Hola, Lorenzo!” Terrific.)

It’s not that we were worried we wouldn’t remain sober. We felt reasonably confident of our ability to stay away from a drink at that stage in our lives. But while the primary purpose of the meetings is to help members maintain their sobriety, that’s not their only function. In a way I don’t entirely understand, they make it easier to maintain one’s emotional equilibrium, to be comfortable in one’s sobriety.

But all it takes to have a meeting is two members gathered together for that purpose. And so we established what we wound up calling the Peregrino Group, and either of us could call a meeting simply by declaring one to be in session, reading the designated preamble, and calling on the other to give a talk.

Meetings back home typically consisted of a speaker who talked for twenty minutes or so, telling what his life used to be like, what had happened, and what it was like now. We’d heard each other many times over the years, but at our Peregrino Group meetings we wound up exploring parts of our past we’d never gotten around to recounting before, in a meeting or in our private conversation. Aspects of childhood, of family history. Incidents from our drinking years that might have seemed inappropriate in a larger assemblage. Anything, really.

These sessions were not just intimate conversations, because we maintained the formality that prevailed at a meeting. The speaker talked, and there was no back and forth; the other person listened without interrupting. When the speaker was done, the other would talk for a while — about what the speaker had said, or about anything else that came to mind. And then we’d recite the Serenity Prayer and conclude the meeting.

The cumulative effect of these two-person meetings was quite extraordinary. They helped remind us of our commitment to sobriety, not a bad idea given the amount of time we were spending in bars and cafés. (In one refugio, the chap in charge was buzzing around the place the night we were there, brandishing a bottle of colorless liquid which he identified as aguardiente and offering it to all comers. All the efforts of the Peregrino Group notwithstanding, that bottle was not entirely unappealing.)

Beyond that, the meetings did what meetings at home did. They made us more comfortable, and improved our dispositions. Calmed us. Settled us down.

And this was particularly useful the day we got seriously lost.

Everybody got lost now and then. I don’t know that it’s an inevitable part of any pilgrimage, although I can see where it might be. I do know it was part of ours.

We’d picked up a guidebook in Puente la Reina, with a pretty decent map of the route. But here’s the thing about the Camino — much of it is an off-road event, with marked paths inaccessible to wheeled vehicles.

This enhanced the whole experience beyond measure. Walking on a two-lane highway isn’t unpleasant, in the ordinary course of things, but there were stretches in Catalonia where we had to share narrow roads with large trucks. Sometimes the roads had no shoulders, and sometimes there was a sheer drop-off at the side of the road, and that wasn’t much fun.

When you were on a path through the fields, you didn’t have to dodge trucks or inhale carbon monoxide. And it was a lot easier to forget you were still in the twentieth century. The hills and the trees and the sky were, after all, not that different from what peregrinos might have seen ages ago.

(And, thanks to the Fascist dictatorship that had kept Spain backward and impoverished for decades, the villages hadn’t changed that much, either. We walked through some of them — in Galicia, especially — just as they were beginning to change; we would see farmers plowing with oxen, and then a mile away we’d spot Japanese cars parked in a village that still hadn’t been wired for electricity. If we’d walked the Camino a few years earlier, those cars wouldn’t have been there; if we walked it today, I expect we’d find tractors had replaced the oxen.)

The Camino, steering clear of roads and wending its way on ancient paths, was a great improvement, but it wasn’t always a simple matter to stay on course. It’s in the nature of paths to wander around, crossing one another more or less at will, and unless a trail’s well marked, a hapless peregrino can zig when he should have zagged.

Various local bodies were charged with the responsibility of maintaining the trails, and some of them were more diligent than others. The first time we got lost, however, it wasn’t the fault of the locals. They’d done a good enough job of posting the trail, if only we’d known what to look for.

The trail had led us to and through a village, but once we were out of it we couldn’t figure out where to go next. There were no signs to help us out, and a woman eventually noticed us wandering to and fro and asked us a question, which of course we couldn’t understand.

I said or tried to say that we were pilgrims, and were looking for the Camino to Santiago. “Flechas!” the woman said.

“Fletchers?”

“Sí. Flechas!”

That didn’t help. We wandered some more, half-looking for a sign saying FLETCHER’S. You won’t be surprised to learn that we couldn’t find it. Another helpful local said the same curious thing, but chose to elaborate. “Flechas! Flechas amarillas!”

“Fletchers again,” I said, “but yellow ones this time. I wonder what the hell he was trying to tell me.”

“I don’t know. What’s a fletcher, anyway?”

“In Spanish? Beats me. In English it’s one of those old occupational surnames. I forget what a fletcher did. Fleisher means butcher in German, you know, as in flesh, but a fletcher’s something else. Oh, I remember. A fletcher is an arrowsmith.”

“It’s a rock band?”

“No, it’s a guy who makes arrows. I guess there used to be more call for that sort of thing, but — oh, fuck me with a stick.”

“Yellow arrows.”

“We’ve been seeing them all day,” I said. “Remember? We were trying to figure out if they were making some sort of political statement.”

“And what they were saying was, ‘Follow me.’”

Flechas amarillas.

So that was a new word for us, and a useful one. The yellow arrows didn’t entirely eliminate the possibility of a wrong turn; there were often more turns than arrows, and some of them were so arranged as to lend themselves to more than one interpretation. And before long we learned another new Spanish word, senda, which means path.

It was easier to remember the word than to avoid straying from it, or to find it once it had been lost. And more than once Lynne sang:

We got lost repeatedly, but most of the time it wasn’t too bad; we’d find our way back to where we’d gone wrong and pick up where we’d left off.

Until the day that prompted this entry, the Day from Hell.

It started out like any other day, and the weather was certainly favorable, the sun shining away in a cloudless sky. We were out of the hills now and entering the flat plains of central Spain, which made for easier walking. And so we walked, and kept on walking, until we realized we’d lost our way, and didn’t know where the hell we were.

It wasn’t entirely our fault. We’d crossed an invisible boundary from one province to another, and the Yellow Arrow Brigade in the new place turned out to be a bunch of slackers. The route wasn’t marked the way it was supposed to be, and we were by no means the first people to lose our way.

As we found out when a woman popped out of her front door and regarded us with some alarm. “¿Peregrinos?”

“Sí,” we said, proud of our command of the language.

“¡Ay! Perdido!”

Perdido was another word we knew. It means lost.

And she’d evidently had occasion to use it before. She clued us in on where we were and how to get back to where we ought to be, and we’d gone a good distance out of our way, and the sun was higher in the sky now, and there was no shade along our route, and if we were not exactly disgruntled, well, you couldn’t say we were gruntled, either.

It got worse. I don’t remember all the details, but one thing after another was going wrong. Our spirits were sagging, and it seemed like a good time for an emergency meeting of the Peregrino Group, so I recited the preamble and Lynne talked for a while and then I talked for a while and we said the prayer and walked on.

And, of course, things continued to go wrong. We’d skimped on breakfast and couldn’t find anyplace to have lunch, so we went without. And we’d missed an opportunity to fill our water bottles, and another opportunity had not come our way, and we were running out of water. That’s never a good idea, particularly when you’re walking in the heat of a blazing sun.

Earlier, on our way through Andorra, we’d discovered the importance of drinking enough water. If your water intake’s not sufficient, your mood turns nasty.

We found this out empirically, when we realized we were snarling and snapping at each other for no discernible reason. I couldn’t figure out why, and then it struck me that I hadn’t peed in hours, and neither had Lynne. So I drank some water, and suggested Lynne do the same, and our mood lifted and the snapping and snarling stopped. From there on in we made sure we had water, and made a point of drinking enough of it to keep from killing each other.

But now, on what was perhaps the hottest day thus far, we were running out of water. We’d be able to fill our water bottles at the next village, wherever it might be. As far as we could tell from our map, the next human settlement was a long ways off.

On a day like this, a little surliness was the least of our worries. I didn’t really think we were going to die for lack of water, but people did just that from time to time, and not only in the real world. Think of all the film actors you’ve seen crawling across the Sahara or the Mohave or the Gobi, crying out “Water!” through cracked lips, their tongues swollen, their makeup caked.

We thought of them, I’ll tell you. And, while we were thinking of them and other unpleasant prospects, we did what we were getting so good at doing in trying circumstances.

We got lost again.

I don’t know how it happened, but I can guess. The same swine who’d failed to provide flechas amarillas early on had failed once more. And we’d missed a turn, and here we were, hopelessly perdido.

At least we didn’t have to worry about walking around in circles. As long as we kept the sun in front of us, we’d be walking west. And it wasn’t hard to know where the sun was, because there it was, grinning furiously down on us, glaring right into our eyes, baking our brains.

The Spanish army saved us. We weren’t on anything resembling a road, just a path running across the center of a vast stretch of open ground, so we were not expecting to hear a car coming up behind us. We turned, and there were a couple of open jeeps filled with young men in uniform. We’d managed somehow to find our way onto a patch of land that the military used for maneuvers, and it was just our good fortune that their day’s agenda called for a lot of driving around and saluting, instead of, say, artillery and mortar practice.

We told them that we were peregrinos, which didn’t appear to surprise them, and they told us we were perdido, which was no news to us. And they gave us, God bless them for it, a full bottle of water, and explained in detail exactly where we had to go in order to be where we were supposed to be. There were smiles and handshakes all around, and then they drove off to continue their essentially pointless maneuvers in the middle of nowhere, while we set out to resume ours.

I can’t be sure exactly when the Peregrino Group held its unprecedented second meeting of the day. It may have been before the soldiers rescued us, or it may have been shortly after. We sat down for this meeting, instead of walking as we talked. We dropped our packs and sat on them, and one of us said the preamble, and we dove in. I couldn’t tell you what we said, but I’m pretty sure our sharing this time around was centered a lot less on personal history and a lot more on the present moment.

When we’d finished, we got up and resumed walking.

And the day went on and on and on, and the sun stayed in our eyes and went on frying our brains, and when we finally reached a village it was getting on for dinnertime, and there was no refugio in or near this particular village, and no chance we could reach the next one down the line before full dark. We looked around for an inn or hostal, and it didn’t look as though the village could boast of one, and then someone steered us to this very pretty little house, painted in vivid colors, where a handsome young man responded to our knock with a smile and a little welcome speech in English.

Astonishing. There were vases of flowers all through the house, and pastel walls, and the aroma of sandalwood candles. He ushered us to an immaculate and well-appointed bedroom, pointed out an equally immaculate bath down the hall, and told us to make ourselves at home. He didn’t have to tell us twice.

We took baths, and not a moment too soon, and back in the bedroom we remarked on the array of scented soaps our host had provided, and the deep-toned towels. “I can’t believe this place is here,” Lynne said. “Maybe we didn’t get water in time.”

“You think we’re hallucinating?”

“I think we died,” she said, “and they let us into heaven, even if we didn’t get our plenary indulgences yet. What on earth is that perfectly charming fellow doing running this perfectly charming inn out here in East Jesús, Spain?”

“All those flowers and candles. And did you happen to notice the scented soap?”

“How could I miss it? Little cakes of French-milled soap, all in different shapes and colors.”

“You don’t suppose—”

“No question. He’s wearing keys.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Pressed jeans, and he’s wearing keys.”

“Well, he’s in the hotel business,” I said. “There’s all those doors he has to be able to open. And maybe wearing keys means something different here than it does on Christopher Street.”

“Yeah, right.”

“But what on earth is he doing here?”

“Where should he be? Huesca?”

“Jesus,” I said, “how do we do it? I guess you can take us out of the West Village, but you can’t take the country out of Salem. I’ll tell you something. I don’t care how he got here, and I don’t care how we got here. I’m just glad he’s here and we’re here and this goddamned day is coming to an end, because I don’t think I could have taken another hour of it. What a miserable day! I was losing it, I was coming unglued—”

“Well, I can’t understand why,” Lynne said. “Don’t forget, you did get to two meetings today.”

REFUGIOS

If we hadn’t gotten lost time and time again on the Day from Hell, we probably would have missed spending the night in Gay Heaven. We’d have gone right on through that particular village and walked on to the next refugio.

The network of refugios all along the Camino certainly made it a lot easier to be a peregrino. The sort of no-room-at-the-inn debacle that led to our Zaragoza detour was no longer a concern. There was always room at the refugios, and all we had to do was follow the guidebook to be sure of a place to sleep.

While the level of creature comfort never rose to floral arrangements and scented soap, some of the refugios were more than acceptable. I remember the one at Santo Domingo de Calzado; everyone who’d been there pointed it out as an example of what a refugio could be. It was, I suppose, comparable to any better-than-average youth hostel, but on the road to Santiago it was outstanding.

The village where it was situated, I should point out, was renowned as the site of a chicken miracle. We heard several versions of the story, but the gist of it was that someone had appealed to some local potentate, who was sitting down to dinner at the time. The pooh-bah pointed to the roasted chicken on the platter in front of him and announced that he’d grant the supplicant’s wish “when that chicken hops off the table and crows.” Whereupon the headless bird contrived to do just that, as depicted in a mural in the local church.

I thought it was a pretty good story, and a terrific mural. Lynne agreed, but she went on to assume it was true. Lynne has never met a miracle she hasn’t been able to believe in — and, after our rescue by the Spanish Army and our eventual deliverance unto the Gay Guest House, I have to say I can understand her point of view.

Her enthusiasm for this particular legend didn’t diminish when someone pointed out that chicken miracles abound throughout Europe, that every country seems to have one or more of them, all featuring a bird, roasted a golden brown, who saves some blameless person’s life by rising from the platter and cock-a-doodle-doing its heart out. Didn’t she think it was unlikely that all of these miracles had taken place all over the continent?

“It just shows,” she said, “the awesome power of the chicken.”

Another refugio, the very one where aguardiente was on offer, had a feature that was both eco-and peregrino-friendly — rooftop water tanks, heated by solar power, provided a good supply of hot water for showers. Most of the refugios had showers of one sort or another, but few of them had enough hot water to go around, and a combination of luck and good timing was necessary if you wanted more than a deluge of cold water.

Once in a while a refugio had one or more private rooms, and as a couple we were apt to draw one on the rare occasion that one was available. More often I’d take an upper bunk and Lynne a lower in a room with a whole row or two of bunk beds.

And when we did have privacy, it brought no guarantee of a comfortable night’s lodging. One village was supposed to have a refugio, but we had to go to the church and hunt down the priest in order to find it. He gave us a key and a set of directions; the key let us into a room some twenty feet square, with assorted debris in its corners and incomprehensible graffiti on its cinder-block walls. The place had once been a garage, and now it was a refugio, though the only indication of its new status was a large bare mattress in the middle of the concrete floor. We got a better night’s sleep than we expected, but figured one night was plenty; in the morning we returned the key and hit the road.

With time, we found that two or three consecutive nights in refugios were about as much as we could take. Every third or fourth night we’d contrive to stop at a commercial establishment of some sort, where we’d be certain of a room to ourselves and access to a working shower. Sometimes, if the hotel and the room and the village were sufficiently attractive, we’d stay a couple of nights, but more often than not we were on our way in the morning.

ACTIVITIES

When we weren’t walking or eating or sleeping, how did we pass the time?

I can’t say we watched much television. The refugios didn’t have sets, and neither did the budget hotels. Sometimes, though, we’d eat in a café with a TV set. Once we walked into a convenience store, the local equivalent of a 7-Eleven, and were startled to hear Peter Jennings; the French station Canal-Plus was carrying the ABC Evening News in English, and we stood there transfixed. And I’ve mentioned watching Eight Million Ways to Die in Basque country, where the locals seemed to be inventing a new way of their own every week or so.

But the program that always seemed to be playing when we were around was The Flintstones. I was never a big fan of the show when I could understand what Fred and Wilma were saying, and I can’t say it gained a lot in translation. The only other program I can recall was the Spanish equivalent of America’s Funniest Home Videos. We’d never watched it back home, and I don’t know that we’d have been watching it over there, either, if we’d had any choice.

But I could be wrong, because the Spanish version had something you’d never see in the States. Along with all the usual Stupid Pet Tricks and Rotten Little Kid Antics, they elected to show us this astonishing video of — I’m sorry, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to search for a polite way to say this — of a rabbit fucking a chicken.

All conversation stopped around us. Everyone stared at the screen, and then everyone roared with laughter and offered up verbal encouragement that didn’t require translation. “I hope you were paying close attention,” I told Lynne, “because you’re not going to see anything like that ever again.”

But I was wrong. At the end of the program the audience votes for their favorite, and of course the rabbit and chicken won, whereupon they gave us another look at it. And the next time we found ourselves in a room with a TV set was precisely a week later, so what program do you suppose was playing? And of course last week’s winner was entered again this time around, and of course the damn thing won. If the show’s still on the air, I would have to assume it’s still winning.

I hate to admit it, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it again...

What else did we do? Well, we did a little sightseeing, when there was a sight to see. And we spent time reading. Along with my regular attempts at getting the gist of the stories in El País, we plugged away at the few books we’d brought with us. The couple of novels didn’t last; we’d read and discarded them before we were out of France. But I’d packed a Bible, and neither of us was in danger of knocking that one off in a night or two. Nor were we likely to get all caught up in it, but it somehow seemed like the right sort of thing to dip into in the course of a journey like ours.

I’d also packed Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews, figuring it might counterbalance the undeniably Christian nature of our adventure. If I was going to tag along after St. Francis and St. Clare, and treat myself to a dip of holy water in every church along the way, the least I could do while I was at it was refresh my memory of the history of my own people.

This might be a good time to point out something about Lynne and myself. We were not so much a mixed marriage as a marriage of two rather mixed individuals. After a proper Catholic education at Ursuline Academy in New Orleans, she took a bus to New York, where she fell in with a crowd of artists. I was by no means the first nice Jewish boy in her life.

For my part, after my first marriage ended I found myself seeking out the church around the corner as a source of peace and quiet amid the Manhattan hubbub. In the books I wrote about ex-cop Matthew Scudder, I had him do much the same thing, and light memorial candles there for departed friends.

By the time we began keeping company, it would be fair to say that each of us was a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll. And the extent of our religious cross-pollination had become evident to us two years earlier, when some moron cut us off on an icy stretch of highway in northern New Mexico.

“Oy, gottenu!” cried the pride of St. Elizabeth’s. While the boy from Beth Zion said not a word while making the sign of the cross.

Well, it worked, didn’t it? We didn’t crash the car. And it happened just that way, swear to God. Whatever God you want...

Still, I figured Potok’s history would be a good choice, and I’d have to say it was, but it made for some curious moments. Everything was fine until I got up to the fifteenth century, and suddenly we couldn’t walk through a town without my reading that night how it had figured prominently in the Spanish Inquisition, with its synagogues sacked and its Jewish population burned alive.

Oh, well. All that aside, the book was good company. I was talking about it with Lynne, and we agreed that Potok was a good writer, and that we’d both enjoyed his novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, about a young artist from an ultra-Orthodox family. “And there was a sequel,” I said, “but I can’t remember what he called it.”

“Now My Name Is Allen Lewis,” said Lynne, without a moment’s hesitation.

WALKING

There were lots of good times, as I hope I’ve managed to suggest, and even the worst moments weren’t so bad once we’d had a day to walk away from them. And we didn’t lack for interesting ways to pass the time. But what we mostly did, and what was certainly the central feature of those months in Spain, was walk.

There are, as I’ve mentioned, people who make the trip on a bike. There are paths that you can’t negotiate on a bike, but there were always roads the bicycle pilgrims could take to get from one refugio to the next.

One contingent of Spanish equestrians covered a portion of the route — from León to Santiago, as I recall — mounted on horseback, and a fine figure they cut. If it had been up to me, I’d have cheerfully given them plenary indulgences, along with grain and water for their steeds.

There are also a certain number of sightseers every year who cover the route in a car, winding up in Santiago de Compostela in time for the festival. (I don’t suppose they call themselves peregrinos, or expect to cut short their time in Purgatory for having made the trip, but what do I know?) And some of the adventure travel companies have taken to offering escorted trips along the Camino, with a support vehicle to carry the luggage and a wuss wagon for those whose feet can’t take it, along with an abbreviated itinerary and some bus transportation over parts of the route.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that...

But here’s the thing. If you’re not going to walk, really, what’s the point?

There was something transformational in covering vast distances, true geographic expanses, on foot. Who looks at the map of Spain and sees a country it would be possible to walk across? And yet by the time we were done we had done precisely that, one day at a time, one precious step at a time.

I don’t think there was ever a day when we covered more than twenty miles, and that long stretch came in Castile, where there was an empty expanse of flat land through which the Camino headed north, toward León. We knew it was coming, and we made a point of getting an early start that day and carrying the requisite food and water. It was a long day’s walk — we generally seemed to average around three miles an hour, less over difficult terrain — but we got to the end of it without difficulty, and there was a refugio waiting for us.

As the miles piled up, they brought us a great sense of empowerment. For all our lives we’d had to rely on something other than ourselves in order to get from one place to another. Whether our transportation was public or private, whether we had to depend on a bus or a plane or were driving a car that we’d bought or rented, we were being moved around by something we didn’t really control. We weren’t going anywhere; the car or bus or plane was going somewhere, and we were hitching a ride in it.

In Spain, we were quite literally getting around under our own power, and that we could actually do so was something we found stunning during those infrequent moments when we stopped to think about it. Ten years earlier, when I’d decided against buying a bike in Oregon, it had never even occurred to me that I could walk. Some years later I’d sent my little band of fictional characters traipsing across the Cascades in Random Walk, and it worked just fine in a novel, but when Lynne and I traced the Random Walk route during our Buffalo-hunting days, we did it in a car. We could imagine ourselves doing something like that, but there’s a difference between imagination and action, no matter what the self-help gurus would like you to believe, and we never dreamed we could really get out there and do it.

We weren’t walking to gain fitness, or to lose weight, but both were almost inevitable consequences of our peregrination. I’d assured Lynne that walking would make her stronger, and thus able to go the distance, and even if she didn’t believe me, it damn well worked. We were both much stronger by the time we got to Santiago, and slimmer, and in better shape all around. And we were thoroughly sold on the virtues of walking, as an enjoyable activity in and of itself and as one that brought enormous benefits. It was, we assured each other, something we wanted to make an ongoing part of our lives.

There was no reason, we agreed, that we couldn’t walk in the city as we had been walking in Spain. What better way to spend a day than to ride the Number One train, say, to 242nd Street and Broadway, and walk home from there? Let’s see, twenty blocks to the mile, 242nd Street to West Thirteenth Street, comes to what? Ten, eleven miles? Hey, piece of cake. Nothing to it, and it would be a lot easier to find food and water on Broadway than it had been in some of the places we’d walked.

Lynne wondered if we should take backpacks. “Not that we’d need them,” she said, “but maybe it would be better exercise with our packs.”

“We could try it both ways,” I suggested, “and see which we prefer. Or you could try it with a shopping cart.”

“I ought to,” she said. “Just to drive you crazy.”

Besides exploring the city, we could figure out ways to take walking vacations. How hard would it be to pick out some state with towns every ten miles or so and just go out there and start walking? If we picked a flat state, it shouldn’t be that hard to walk clear across it.

And another thing — we’d walk the Camino again. Not next year, that would be too soon, but maybe the year after. We’d get the right sort of backpacks this time, and know what to put in them, and we’d start at Roncesvalles like everybody else. And maybe we’d time our trip to match the weather, and cross the Pyrenees in late summer so that it would be autumn by the time we hit the Castilian plains.

And maybe I’d try the route alone one year. Walking it with Lynne had been wonderful, and would be wonderful a second time, but it might be an interesting and entirely different experience to walk it alone. I’d go faster, of course, and I wouldn’t stay put for a few days of sightseeing, and I might sleep under the stars from time to time. More to the point, the solitary nature of it might turn my mind inward in a useful way.

Oh, we had no end of ideas. But one thing was clear. From here on in, we’d make sure walking was a regular part of our lives.

And so we spent a few pleasant days in Santiago de Compostela, eating well, encountering pilgrims we’d met along the way and others, like the Holy Family, whom we knew only by reputation. Jack Hitt, whose conversation with Don and Abby Westlake started the whole thing, turned up; word had filtered down that he was somewhere behind us, walking the route a second time ten years after his first pilgrimage, and here he was in Santiago. He’d go on to write Off the Road, a very entertaining book about the Camino.

From Santiago we took the train to Lisbon, breaking the trip for a night in Vigo. It had figured prominently in the War of the Spanish Succession, back in Queen Anne’s reign, and in my numismatic days I’d acquired a contemporary silver medallion, a handsome thing that showed the bombardment of the French fleet in Vigo harbor. I’m sure that’s why I picked Vigo for an overnight stop. I’d long since ceased to own the medallion, but I remember it now far more clearly than I remember anything we may have seen during our visit to Vigo.

We were scheduled to spend a week in Lisbon, and liked the city well enough, but in our minds our trip ended the day we walked into Santiago, and all the churches and tile factories and fado music in Lisbon wasn’t enough to hold our attention. We stuck it out for four days, then changed our tickets and caught a flight back to New York.

We unpacked and showered and dealt with jet lag, and did all the things you do after a long absence, and we knew it was just a matter of time before we resumed our new career as long-distance walkers.

Funny thing: It never happened.

I guess it’s often that way. An activity is particularly gratifying, and one wants to hang on to it and make it an ongoing part of one’s life. It’s been so important, so essential, that it’s impossible to believe it won’t stay that way.

That’s why visitors to a foreign country come home with cookbooks, convinced they’ll want to be able to prepare all those dishes they’ve enjoyed in Bangladesh or Togo or the Trobriand Islands. And maybe some of them do, but I have a feeling a lot of them do what Lynne and I would do, which would be to give the cookbook an honored place on our shelves, and never look at it again.

That, after all, is what we used to do with photographs, before we quit weighing ourselves down with a camera. We took no end of pictures in West Africa, and had them developed and printed, and they sat unexamined in a box for a couple of years. Then one day Lynne got inspired and bought an album and mounted all of them, and she put the album on the shelf, and neither one of us has looked at it yet.

A photograph is an attempt to hang on to an experience, to freeze a moment in time and have it forever. And is walking home from 242nd Street all that different? We’d have been trying to hang on to an experience, one less of seeing than of doing, but it wouldn’t really work. You can take pictures, even as you can take long walks, but in either case the experience is a transitory thing, and when it’s done, well, it’s done. Trying to keep it alive is like trying to keep the high school band together after graduation.

So we came home and went back to our lives.