The Other (8 page)

In August, I took a train over Brenner Pass and came down into the Alto Adige. I had a beard now, dark and dense, and a pair of used boots from a secondhand store in Innsbruck. They didn’t fit right, and I was reliant on moleskin, which I cut with a pair of dull tailoring scissors. With these same scissors I cut my hair one night, while sitting cross-legged in front of my cartridge stove waiting for some orzo to boil. I was ill-prepared for the August weather at night in northern Italy, and in San Vigilio bought a surplus Austrian military ragg sweater, a cap with padded earmuffs and a chin strap, and a pair of fingerless wool gloves. I was sitting beside a trail the next day with this getup on, as well as my glacier glasses with their sweat-stained leather side shields, taking my incessant and obligatory travel notes and comparing the Dolomites with the North Cascades, when I heard faint voices. There was a conversation going on in American English among the spruces and pines on the ridge below—I could pick out a few words and phrases of it coming toward me on the wind. While listening, I wrote about the view from there: San Vigilio in its valley with its larches, lindens, and broad Ladin roofs; immediately above it, hayfields and poppies; and above that, closer to me, white cows grazing on bits of grass growing between barren rock. The trails in the Alto Adige all look rutted by centuries of use and sometimes pass by rustic chapels, situated in the lee of the wind, in which are gathered pots, cans, nails, worn shoes, bits of wire, even lost handkerchiefs, and I was sitting beside one of these, which had in it, besides the usual debris, a number of rusted iron spikes and some small pharmaceutical vials of thick glass, with stoppers. I took notes on these things, too, of course. Then the loud hikers came into view against a backdrop of scree. Silent now, saving their breath and leaning forward under their packs, they came up the hill. They were still small, and mostly what I saw of them was the tops of their heads and some bright-red pack fabric. I hadn’t spoken in English to anybody for some time and was eager for that suddenly, after all the pidgin talk and hand signals with continentals. On the other hand, I also felt antagonized, because of all of the work I’d done to come to grips with lonely travel. However it was, my compatriots passed beneath striated rock faces, white rock ribbed or marbled with black, and, in making the ridge, began to walk more upright. I could see that they were women after that, two tall women in hiking shorts. This was early in the day, and because the sun was behind them on a bright, cloudless morning, I had to leave my glacier glasses on as they approached in order to see very much. Between the glasses, my chin-strapped cap with its padded earmuffs, my beard, and my fingerless gloves, I must have looked ridiculous to the two women coming up the trail. In fact, I know I did, because one is now my wife and she’s told me how I looked, how she made a ridge in the Dolomiti and found a guy there with a journal in his lap, suggesting, maybe, as she once put it, an explorer who’d stopped taking care of himself. Her name is Jamie Shaw. There was no love at first sight, a thing some people claim is real but, frankly, a concept foreign to both of us. I did think she was pretty, with her knobby knees and pointed elbows as she pulled on her wind pants, and I liked the look on her face right away, which was openly skeptical. She kept covering her mouth with her thin fingers and pushing a lock of hair behind an ear, and I was drawn to these gestures and to her outdoor-ish athleticism, but not especially drawn to them, not at first.

W
HILE
I
WAS WANDERING
in Europe, John William—according to aerogrammes I got in Avignon, Barcelona, Grenoble, and Brunico—was hiking in Oregon. His long-winded letters were scrawled in a cramped hand. He wrote to say that he’d hitchhiked to Portland and then walked toward the ocean on the south bank of the Columbia—on railroad right-of-ways, the verges of marsh, and trails used by anglers and goose hunters. He ate a dead carp washed up in a side water and got the runs and a fever. Curled up in a duck blind, sick but sheltered, he nearly abandoned his plan to hike to the salt water. But then, in a Dumpster behind a tavern, he found some fish and chips, and that got him going again. I was in Avignon eating a
pêche Melba
while reading about this, and it seemed, under those circumstances, more than a little hard to understand.

John William unsettled a trio of late-winter birders launching their skiff in a slough by walking past them at first light. He also came on two sturgeon-fishers, with their rod butts anchored between stones, who’d built a lean-to out of plastic and saplings and sat in it nursing a blaze while boozing. John William stayed in the woods downstream, hunting crawdads, until they reeled up and left, and then he occupied their lean-to for the night, encouraging the coals of their fire. The next day, he walked in rain and watched mew gulls. Eventually, the country became estuarial, and, beside the channels of the river, his boots filled with mud. At a boat launch, he found an oily sardine tin and a poorly cleaned salmon carcass in a garbage can, and at Astoria he gathered enough coins to buy, at a corner market, a banana and a day-old ham sandwich. Fortified, he walked through the night past Warrenton, and from there to the coast, where he slept in brush. There were gulls, he wrote, with their heads down.

John William walked to Seaside, where he stood outside the arcade collecting coins from late-night pinball addicts. Later, foraging in garbage bins, he found a lode of canned goods, and after smashing open cans with a rock, ate a lot of fruit cocktail. This was the first night of visible stars since he’d left Portland, and, walking under them with the beach well lit, he gathered driftwood, and, later, above some dunes, scraps of lumber from a development where view homes were going up. John William built a high-mounded blaze, and when it died to coals he spread them out, dressed them with sand, and slept.

His aerogramme read: “I was arrested at dawn and handcuffed. ‘Suspect is a vagrant, age 20, 6', 180 lbs., brown eyes, brown hair, carrying no ID but giving his name as Gempler, (nmn), Ivan’—that’s what they got from me. In jail I met this Pete Moss—like Gempler, supposedly an arsonist who’d crisped a beach house. They thought I was an ecoteur with a
nom de guerre,
like Moss, even though the handle I gave them sounded Amish. Fortunately, I was liberated the next day by a lawyer who came for Moss and two other hippies, so I got a ride to Eugene in a lawyer-Volvo. Maybe it’s another
nom de guerre,
but my pro-bono savior gave me his card, which I’m looking at right now—‘Mark Sides’—actually a smart guy, pissed about the right stuff. He got me some work, or got Ivan Gempler work—counting standing deadwood today and tomorrow. No pay, but I’m domiciled for nothing in this mail-order tepee with Moss and some other freaks. I showed these potheads what’s up with a fire drill. They think I’m God because I make fire with sticks and catch mice with my Paiute rock-fall trick. Even Mark Sides is impressed.”

“Hey. Countryman,” John William wrote, at the end of his last aerogramme, “don’t forget to write me back. Drop me a line. Don’t be a stranger. And don’t get lost, blood brother.”

I
N THE
D
OLOMITI
, I sat by the chapel with the American women and brewed tea on my cartridge stove. They were sisters. They both had the look of collegiate basketball players, but the younger one, my wife’s sister—Erin—a little less so. She kept calling Jamie “James.” For example: “James.” Jamie looks up. “Toss me your water.” A little later, describing a chamois seen the day before, Erin thinks I’m dubious about sixteen-inch horns. “James.” Jamie took her hand from her mouth. “Back me up already on this.” We drank tea. I felt awkward. I’d been glad, until then, for the details of tea-making, but now there was nothing between myself and my reticence. Traveling, I suppose, I’d lost the hang of speech. Erin sat cross-legged and warmed her hands around her cup, but Jamie sat with her arms roped around her knees and watched me, I would have to say, with not-quite-completely concealed suspicion. Her front teeth were slightly gapped. There was something coercive in her manner of observation, I think, because, in the face of it, I took off my glacier glasses with their leather eyecups and my cap with its curled, weathered chin strap. I had that haircut, self-administered a few days before with the dull tailoring scissors, and the naked, convalescing look around the eyes you see in a lot of summer alpinists who, because they rarely remove their sunglasses, are tanned or sunburned and yet owlish. I must have looked like a pilot who has bailed out in mountains and wandered for a week across blinding snowfields, though this isn’t an image my wife has used in recalling my appearance. She remembers instead my formality—my getting the tea right—and how she decided, after twenty minutes, that my insecurity wasn’t cultivated. She remembers that the presence of my journal, really just a cheap spiral notebook, put her at ease. A person who takes notes, an observer who wants to turn the world into words—this is probably not someone inclined to steal your passport, in her way of seeing it. I stress “probably,” because Jamie has never been naïve about people. She looks at them the way she looks at herself, with the same full measure. She’s able to do this without being defensive, without assuming the worst, and without rose-colored glasses. I think she strikes a balance between curiosity and wariness that works in her favor, because she’s rarely intimidated. On the other hand, if you didn’t know her—as I didn’t know her yet in Italy—you could easily misread her quiet scrutiny. You could miss the fundamental neutrality in her watchfulness. There’s a strong element in Jamie of self-preservation, but she’s not averse to the occasional gamble when most of the signs look promising. Though you wouldn’t have known that, either, above San Vigilio, where we sat by the chapel with her sister.

I didn’t ask for their names or their story. But we did look at a map they carried, which Erin unfolded and spread on the ground, and which Jamie held down with her fingers and some stones, and so I heard about their travels. They’d come up from Rome. They’d come because it was too hot in Rome, and too hot to go to Venice, as they’d intended, and because they’d been told, by some Romans, that in the Dolomiti their money would go far if they traveled on foot and stayed in
rifugi.
In Rome the heat and the crowds got to them—the long lines, underneath the sun, in order to get into the famous basilicas—and so they’d taken trains to Bolzano and from there caught the bus to Cortina d’Ampezzo, which was in the east on the map they held open. That map was well creased; along some of its folds, it had been rubbed white until its symbols disappeared; it had been abraded by damp weather and constant reference. Yet they were still able to show me, both of them using their little fingers and keeping the bulk of their hands out of the way, the trails they’d followed, the valleys they’d descended into, the
rifugi
they’d passed nights in, the chairlifts and funiculars they’d used between Cortina and the Tofana di Mezzo, and the places where they’d gained or lost elevation on old ladders, left over from the Great War, bolted to rock faces.

I remember the look on Erin’s face when it became clear that I was abroad without a map of my own—I think she saw me as foolhardy after that, as romantic to the point of a dangerous narcissism. I recall that while I was putting things away—my journal and my stove—and while Erin deliberated over landmarks and trails, Jamie made a survey of the chapel’s dirt floor, picking up the spikes and the stoppered vials, turning them around meditatively in her hands, and putting them back exactly where she’d found them, all without making any noise. She knelt there, scrunching her hair behind an ear, and wiped her nose on the inside of her shirtsleeve.

W
E LEFT FROM THERE
together because it was unavoidable—because we were going in the same direction, and because we were part of the same generation, and because we were Americans hiking in Italy—and because we all wanted to, finally. Of course, I might have gone on sitting on my rock when they began to gather up their things—I could have stayed by myself, since all that took was inertia—but instead I rose when they did, and the three of us went on, with no discussion of this arrangement. We passed some hikers so well dressed that Erin surmised they were Romans on vacation. We passed some Ladins with long-handled scythes who Erin proposed had been paid to be there by the Associazione Turistica. I suppose it was an element of my European mood to avoid replying with a witticism of my own, even while mulling some, but I can see now how Jamie was prominently responsible for my general muteness that day. I didn’t want her to disapprove of how I saw the world, though I knew there was an equal jeopardy in remaining tongue-tied. We stopped once and stepped off the trail to let eight cows come up, their bells tinkling, and because I was so self-conscious suddenly, I didn’t get out my journal. I’d been keeping it handy up to that juncture, walking with it in my left hand and my pencil in my right, but not now. I asked Jamie, that night, at a table in the bar at the Rifugio Lavarella, how many cows there’d been, because by then I was more comfortable around her, but at the moment, on the trail, I didn’t write or say anything. It had grown cold again, and windy, and while we waited there for the cows to pass I took mental notes on the languor in their progress, on how obliviously they shat, on the ivory complexion of their late-summer hides, on their bovine odor, their lowing, the action of their tails, but this relentless, even obstinate, gathering of impressions, to date so central to my continental travels, was now not only left unrecorded but undertaken in the context of the Shaw sisters. The Shaw sisters were robust walkers, though without forced enthusiasm, and with the white dust of the region in the leather of their boots, and both wore red wool socks. There was a gash in the knee of Jamie’s wind pants, and her palms looked wind-chafed. All this is what I noticed now, and also that I felt ancillary to them during their sisterly exchanges, a male third wheel and not a Shaw, instead of noticing the water in the streams, the carpeted meadows, and the crags.