It’s been a month and a half since I stopped hiking. I traveled to Utah with Constanza and met up with Samson in Moab. We started the Hayduke on September 29th at the Arches National Park border.
Constanza sprained her ankle on the second day and somehow pushed through 80 more miles of hiking before she had to call it quits. The doctors couldn’t believe she’d walked 80 miles off trail on her ankle the way it was. Then, a week and a half or so into the hike I had a near-miss accident that was a couple of inches, or seconds, away from being a terrible thing. Samson and I were scrambling out of Salt Creek up the wall of a pretty steep canyon, and I put my full weight with backpack on a 150 pound boulder at about chest level. It slid off the sandy shelf it was resting on and fell backwards on top of me. By chance it fell onto some sand and trapped my right foot-but because the sand was soft, my foot simply got a little bruised. I would not have been able to free myself otherwise, or move the boulder.
I quit the trail 5 days later, and bought a flight to Amsterdam.
For a month I’ve wandered the winding narrow streets and canals of Holland’s cities, trying to wrap my mind and mouth around the lilting new language, being with new friends, being with Martijn. Sometimes, you realize that the journey you need to take, the one that requires true bravery and resilience, is inward. I think of the sunbathed sandstone, the wind, the yellows and browns and reds-the silence-the ache in my legs-and I’m done for now. This was enough. And I look at my life now, the future spreading out before us, and I know in my heart that there is truly nowhere I would rather be. We should all be so lucky.
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