5. Sixty Kilometers without Fear

As I look back over the quiet beneath the pulse of it all, I am taken over by a feeling of balance between loss and profit... a sense that in a complex persistence of sentiment and discovery, there is a sadness in the journey being part of the past, but a joy in its being part of my own lived experience.

As I look back over the times I recount here, I find I am probing the depths of my own character, assessing a competition between faith in permanence and faith in disappearance, and it appears that there is little that could be more difficult than guessing one's place on such a spectrum.

The hike would be long, and challenging, but it was ready-made for making memories that would last and would recover new scraps of meaning with every remembering. So in a way, we began our journey with a sense of romance about ourselves, about our place in the universe. Nostalgia was already there, replacing doubt, uttering perfect, unutterable lines to our group conscience, improving our initiative, corrupting our perception of fact, making some future corner of our memory sing with hope and gratitude and the strange indulgence of a gaze across time.

Fortunately, nostalgia has the unique effect of opening up the life of the present, even as it tempts us to make haystacks out of frozen honey, then challenges the mind to set fire to its construction, to melt it down and locate the past-perfect in the mess. In doing all of this inside the mind, nostalgia makes for unity among those seeking a common goal. And we had the basis for our method. We became a team, because ultimately, or principally, each of us was trying to make memories, and we wanted to succeed.

Descending the hill, we found the trail was heading for a source of light over the next hill... a town. We debated whether it would be best to go through the center of the town and wagered about whether the trail would go around the towns. After another hour or so of walking, we came upon a town, and the trail went straight through the center. There paint markings on curbs, on street signs, on the lowest cornerstones of corner buildings, but they were even better hidden than amid the trees of the forest and the grasses of the open fields.

Mary had taken the first step toward leadership, but she was clearly willing to let others decide. Kelly decided she would have to stop to use a restroom, and we might as well find a late-night bar. They might be closing soon, so the sooner the better. Renault thought maybe a beer would hit the spot, but we reminded him there would be another fourteen hours of walking, and he, like the rest of us, ordered water. Quick as we were, we lost fifteen minutes in an around that small bar, but now we hoped we could make it till morning without another bathroom break.

Landscape, Catalunya

Soon enough, we were out of town, but the traces of urbanization seemed to trickle on needlessly into the surrounding landscape. Just when we left the road and rejoined a beaten path across what seemed like unclaimed land, we came to a problematic bridge. The trail clearly went straight across this foot-bridge to the other side of a major highway, but there was a great deal of awkward chainlink fencing on both sides of the overgrown grass-covered path across the bridge. There was no way to get around the fences without risking a fall to the pavement below. Two went down to the street and took the safe route, to let us know what became of our one and only trail on the other side.

The trail went on as before, and from that side, the bridge didn't look as daunting. They suggested easing our way over the fences. One by one, we climbed, dashed and clambered back around the softened fence on the other side, only to find ourselves confronted by a huge metal box with an ominous growling inside. We tapped the dumpster and it quieted down... maybe a stray dog, or some large rodent; we sidled past and kept on in search of the painted markings.

We nearly lost the trail two more times, and once spent at least twenty minutes rummaging back and forth among a bare patch of rocks and weeds, till we found a marking on a rock beside an unmarked road. Once, before sunrise, we found ourselves atop another hill and decided to sit down, rest and nourish ourselves. At four a.m., eating oranges, figs, cheese sandwiches, and almonds, sipping our reserves of water and juice, we collected ourselves and hoped we really were at least a quarter of the way to our destination.

After setting out again, daylight broke, the air began to warm and we tramped liftedly across farmers' fields, edged with hedgerows, in the lush Catalán countryside. Crossing a dried river, climbing and descending five or six foothills, we followed a highway, dipped again into a secluded valley among small peaks, and made friends with a yellow mutt, while standing on a red-clay embankment to survey the landscape we had just traversed. We paused to revel in the beauty of the place and glorify ourselves for finding it in this way, in the unspoiled light of early morning.

Hillside View, Girona

From this cherished spot, we continued on, halfway up the verdant slopes, and onto an open land-bridge from one hill to another, and there, high in the sky we saw the Moon we had decided to follow, and below it, the elegant crested Montserrat, our destination. It was instantly recognizable, but seemed further away than we would have hoped, too far to see the base of the mountain itself. We knew there was a long day of walking ahead. We were still seven hours away from setting foot on the Mountain...

This was the easier part of the journey, over more or less straight paths, pulling us toward our destination. We passed by train stations, were we could find bottled water, and paths that followed railside roads, small villages, highways and a general sense of a terrain more elevated than sealevel, more in tune with the rugged than the rafting. After a long morning of ascending small hills, we found there was a lot of descending to do, and we took to racing in freestyle flail down each new segmented slope. This wasn't necessarily easy on the legs or the joints, but it kept our morale up, and we pushed on.

At the foot of Montserrat, we came to another village, and here decided, weekly, that we needed something to eat, a full meal, or a large snack. We had become accustomed to the large three course mid-day Spanish comida, and we felt our energies fading. So we stopped, took a table in the upstairs of a family-run bar, and ordered. Forty minutes later, we were all groggy and discouraged. Our bodies had shifted gears and were not interested in walking any more. But we still had to ascend the mountain! The food had been less than wonderful, and the particular couple in charge seemed not to like us; it seemed a local place, and foreigners or otherwise, our Spanish may have seemed an intrusion, nevermind our suspicious, tired eyes and our strange haste.

It was now 4 p.m., and the only thing that kept us going was the knowledge of how absurd it would be to fail now. For two hours, we walked up the winding footpaths that lead to the monastery hidden behind the jagged summit. We walked slowly, resolutely, chanting half-hearted encouragement at one another, often breaking into groups of two or three, shadowing the stragglers, trying to keep the group together. By the time we reached the tunnel at the top, we had disbanded, and were now in three small groups, about about five minutes apart. There was one more obstacle, a pitch-black tunnel, in which we could only follow the hint of a small flashlight someone was pointing at the ground.

Renault told us he made his way through by feeling the walls, seeing nothing, guessing. Once we emerged, the scene was more akin to a tourist spot, with visitors coming and going freely on the funicular trolley than ran up and down the back side of the mountain. We made it to the monastery and sat for as long as they would let us, on the edge of a plaza surrounded by a museum, a cloister, a restaurant, and the choir. It was refreshing to refrain from all the trappings of tourism, and just simmer in the mood of the sculptures that surrounded us, keeping us still, cooling our angry feet.

We descended by funicular (the last car of the day), and caught a train back to Barcelona, wiped out and victorious. I would do it again, if it weren't for the fact that we all pledged it would be the one and only time we would try it.

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